Tag Archives: RWE

Welsh Government Backs Carbon Sequestration Plan

Source BBC

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Wales has some of the most expensive electricity in Britain, but the financial geniuses who run Wales have a plan which will push energy prices up even higher.

Climate change: Plan to capture, ship and bury power station’s CO2

By Steffan Messenger

BBC Wales environment correspondent

Plans have been proposed to lay new undersea pipes to carry carbon emissions from one of Europe’s largest gas power stations.

…

But it involves major building work across a protected marine habitat.

Environmental group Friends of the Earth called for the money to be spent on renewable energy rather than keeping a gas plant going.

…

Despite being one of Wales’ biggest emitters of CO2 it has an “essential role” in the country’s transition to a greener future, according to its operator RWE.

“This power station currently runs 80% of the time, in and around when there’s insufficient renewable power [such as wind or solar],” said Richard Little, who is leading the site’s transformation as director of the Pembroke Net Zero Centre.

“We need to build something that allows it to still operate at times when it’s needed without impacting the climate,” he said.

…Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-68296155

Even Friends of the Earth thinks this idea is dumb.

How could building CO2 storage facilities, building an undersea pipeline, and chartering ships to be on standby for when CO2 needs to be buried in the North Sea have anything other than a devastating impact on already sky high energy prices? And of course, let’s not forget the energy lost compressing the CO2 to the point it worth transporting, all of which will have to be paid for somehow.

I lived in Wales for a while. I met a lot of intelligent and talented people in Cardiff, people who run small businesses, who given a chance would transform Wales into an economic powerhouse. But the Welsh people keep electing politicians whose radical left economic incompetence sabotages the entrepreneurial efforts of Wales’ best and brightest.

Offshore Wind Demands £95/MWh

Warning from UK’s biggest energy generator comes after latest bidding round received no offers to build new farms. He said: “We need to see a materially higher price. 

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

So now we get an actual figure on it!!

From the Telegraph:

No new wind farms will be built off Britain’s shores unless the Government lets operators earn more money from the electricity they produce, the chief of the nation’s biggest generator has said.

Tom Glover, country chair of RWE’s UK arm, said the price offered by the Government to wind farm operators must rise by as much as 70pc to entice companies to build.

Developers must be offered between £65 and £75 per megawatt hour (MwH) for the power generated from wind farms, Mr Glover said.

That compares to the £44 offered in the most recent government-run auction.

His warning follows the disastrous result of the last offshore wind allocation round in September, which ended in a humiliation for ministers with not one company offering to build new offshore wind farms.

Mr Glover called the incident “clumsy” and said a failure to increase the price offered to developers risked a repeat.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/25/electricity-prices-rise-70pc-pay-wind-farms-energy/

A number of commentators have rightly criticised this article as being pro-renewables, putting the blame on government. All they did, of course, was to believe the wind industry’s own propaganda about rapidly falling costs.

In particular, the article fails to point out that the prices mentioned are at 2012 prices, which incidentally should be dropped entirely in future auctions, as they are of no relevance and are highly misleading.

£75/MWh, for instance, equates to £95/MWh at current prices. This is an important omission by the Telegraph, because one commenter pointed out that since the current market prices is £100/MWh, offshore wind must still be a bargain!!

The whining of the wind lobby about inflation is also not really valid.

At last year’s auction, offshore wind projects such as Dogger Bank won contracts at £39.65/MWh. This year the govt set the bar at £44/MWh, thus handing a 10% price increase straightaway. And in the year just gone, about another 10% has been added on via RPI indexation.

So RWE and co are already being offered 20% more than projects were signing up for last year.

It may be that some of their costs are rising faster than general inflation, but any competent business builds in contingencies for things like that.

Also with inflation seemingly remaining stubbornly high, the index linked price will be much higher still by the time these projects are commissioned in a few years time.

The undeniable reality is that offshore wind never was viable at the fanciful prices signed up for last year and before. The cheapest offshore wind being sold via CfD is from Triton Knoll, which is being paid £97.82/MWh.

There never was any intention trigger those contracts, instead wind farm owners always planned to sell at much higher prices on the open market.

In the latest auction, this loophole was closed by the govt, leaving the wind industry between a rock and a hard place, with their bluff having been well and truly called.

Germany begins dismantling wind farm for coal

German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm — to make way the expansion of its Garzweiler open-pit mine (Photo: Alle Dörfer bleiben)

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Dave Ward

German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.

One wind turbine has already been dismantled, with a further seven scheduled for removal to excavate an additional 15m to 20m tonnes of so-called ‘brown’ coal, the most polluting energy source.

The demolitions are part of a deal brokered last year between Robert Habeck, the Green party’s minister for economy and climate action and Mona Neubaur, who is the economy minister for North Rhine Westphalia, to allow the expansion of the mine.

In return, RWE had to agree to phase out coal in 2030, eight years before the previous deadline. “It’s a good day for climate protection,” Habeck said at the time.

But this week’s move has sparked sharp criticism from activists.

“The current climate emergency requires urgent and concerted efforts to accelerate the deployment of every single wind turbine, solar panel and heat pump that we can muster,” said Fabian Hübner, a senior campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, a German-based coalition of climate activists.

“Anything that diverts from this critical endeavour, especially the dismantling of renewable energy sources to extract more fossil fuels, must be unequivocally prohibited,” he added.

But RWE and Germany’s government have persistently justified the expansion of the so-called Garzweiler coal fields by pointing to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis.

According to RWE, the expansion is necessary “due to the energy crisis.” The government in Berlin follows this logic. Indeed, some of the leading advocates of RWE’s coal expansion plans come from the Green Party, one of three ruling parties in Germany’s current ‘traffic light’ coalition with centre-left SPD and business-friendly FPD-party.

Habeck has defended the expansion as the “right decision.” Green party politician Oliver Krischer has described the expansion and earlier phase-out as “one of the greatest advances we’ve made in recent years,”

But energy consultation firm Aurora has found that expanding the Garzweiler open-pit mine would cause the country to overshoot its climate pledges. Researchers also said lignite coal is likely to end in 2030 anyway because it is rapidly becoming uneconomical compared to other cheaper energy sources such as solar and wind.

https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157364