From Climate Scepticism

By JIT

As we all know by now, wind is the cheapest form of electricity. There are many proofs of this – as an example, three years ago, the Good News Network was telling us how wind farms were soon even going to be paying negative subsidies.

“Offshore wind power will soon be so cheap to produce that it will undercut fossil-fuelled power stations and may be the cheapest form of energy for the UK,” said lead researcher Dr. Malte Jansen, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial. “Energy subsidies used to push up energy bills, but within a few years cheap renewable energy will see them brought down for the first time. This is an astonishing development.”Good News Network

Astonishing.

Last year wind power became so cheap it was nine times cheaper than gas, as Carbon Brief pointed out (eventually; when they started talking, wind was four times cheaper than gas, but by the time they had finished their sentence, they had to revise the stat upwards to nine times cheaper).

In January, it was announced that the penetration of wind was now over 25% in the UK, and had tipped over 80% at some point:

The UK hit a major energy milestone in 2022 as windfarms produced a record amount of the country’s electricity, according to National Grid. Wind-powered electricity made up 26.8 percent of electricity generation in 2022, up from 21.9 percent the year before, figures from National Grid ESO indicate. And earlier this week, National Grid announced the smashing of another record after the percentage of zero carbon electricity generated onto the grid hit a stunning new record of 87.6 percent.Express

You see? We can do it, guys. Deniers go to hell, this is no pipe dream. The plummeting cost of wind and our aggressive deployment of it explains why the UK now has the cheapest electricity among developed nations. Manufacturers are flocking to us to build their factories here, so that they can take advantage of cheap energy and the best-trained and most motivated workforce in the G20.

That’s why Labour’s plan to quintuple – er, quadruple – er, water down the quadrupling of offshore wind makes perfect sense. It’s not really even borrowing money because the loan pays for itself in next to no time. The Green Industrial Revolution will definitely work.*

THE SOUND OF A NEEDLE BEING SCRATCHED ACROSS A RECORD

Actually, of course, the notion that wind power brings cheap electricity is delusional. It is a “cheap way to produce expensive electricity” – a phrase I think I heard at the “Decouple” podcast and deployed on my green councillor when he knocked at the door for a chat. How so? Well, as has been pointed out in various fora over the years, wind brings with it a lot of baggage that is “off book.” A recent article by Willis outlines some of the issues that are conveniently forgotten by the likes of Carbon Brief. The parasitic role of wind on a previously stable grid comes about by its inherent instability. Plus, wind farms have to be established in far flung places, necessitating long cables to reach the “core” grid where people live. Means have to be employed to stabilise its frequency; supply backup power for lulls; pay for grid extensions; and for flipping between DC and AC or stabilising the AC [I’m not sure about this last, since the wind farm developer might be responsible some for that]. Then we have the old favourite, which is that – in the UK at least – the “astonishing” rock-bottom prices that wind farm developers promise to sell their power at in some far-off day turn out to be illusions, one-sided bets to get in the game, a ploy beloved of public contractors world-wide, e.g. aircraft carrier manufacturers, or railway line builders, but particularly destructive in this case.

But we don’t just have to rely on argumentation to settle this “argument,” do we? When Rossi produced his E-cat and promised room temperature fusion, it was very easy to use straightforward measurements to establish his veracity. Or it would have been, if the test conditions had been appropriate. But I digress. I decided to find out what effect wind power has on the cost of electricity directly, by collecting two sets of data for a range of countries: 1) the cost of electricity and 2) the penetration of wind. See how easy it is? I decided to avoid cherry-picking a list of countries by taking the top 20 countries by PPP GDP, a list in which the UK now ranks 10^th. This list came from Mr. Wiki. Next I got wind penetration stats from Our World in Data. Household electricity prices for September 2022 came from GlobalPetrolPrices.com. Then all I had to do is plot one against t’other, and prove, once and for all, just how stupid we deniers are.

Now before we go any further, we should note a few caveats. These are that some countries might subsidise their electricity. Others might tax it. Some countries might not even have universal connection yet, and that might artificially reduce the cost of electricity in those places. There might be corruption, incompetence, who knows what. And while I am implying – rather strongly implying, I admit – a causal link, correlation is not causation and both variables here might be strongly correlated with a third, some measure of societal decadence perhaps. Some countries might be connected to other countries with other grid characteristics. But with all that being said, what happens when you add wind power to your grid? Does your electricity get cheaper, or more expensive?

Well, there’s your answer. The more of your electricity you obtain by harvesting wind, the more expensive it gets. I have resisted putting a line through the graph, but I will tell you that if I did, it would have a positive slope.

Wind power is still popular – I think it might be the most popular electricity generator according to vox populi, although it is more popular in the abstract than the particular. I suppose this has something to do with an endless stream of stupid people crawling out of their burrows, each eager to make yet another asinine announcement about how cheap wind power is.

And don’t even get me started on the dead birds.

Note & Featured Image

*Don’t let this lead you to think I have any more respect for the other Westminster parties than I do for Labour. They all have a policy of national suicide, which I am against.

The featured image is from Dall.E, with a prompt something like „A Matisse paper cut-out of a dystopian wind farm with dead birds.“ This is an evolved version, which has become quite abstract; but I rather liked the emotional effect of all those spiky bits.