Tag Archives: Wind power

When Will Politicians Accept That Wind and Solar Power Can’t Replace Fossil Fuels?

From The Daily Sceptic

BY RICHARD BURCIK

On Saturday March 2nd Northern California was hit by a major blizzard in its Sierra Nevada Mountain Range with 12 feet of snow and winds of 190 miles per hour. But during the following week America was hit with a blizzard of a different kind: a flurry of pro-renewable energy news reports which totally distorted the facts. The distortion of the truth has been going on for at least 15 years. In 2009 Scientific American published an article (citing a Stanford study) which predicted that renewables could become 100% of the world’s energy needs by 2030.

In March of 2021 Carbon Tracker posted a report errantly asserting that renewable energy was capable of meeting energy demand 100 times over. Two years later the World Economic Forum jumped on the bandwagon with a study that mistakenly claimed that we have “reached peak fossil fuels” and that we are now entering a “new era for power”. Yet the WEF’s own charts show that worldwide electricity production (WEF apparently forgot about the energy needs of the global transportation sector) in 2022 was less than 13%. The WEF also aberrantly suggested that global CO2 emissions might start to decline in the near future.

Making matters even worse, U.S. President Joe Biden touted renewable energy in his March 7th 2024 State of the Union speech, and two days later the Washington Post printed a story about the efforts by Dartmouth University to try and find some way to bring solar power to northern Greenland where the sun does not shine for six months every year: solar power for six months and fossil fuel power when darkness shrouds the landscape.

Because of this never ending deluge of renewables propaganda, most American progressives dutifully believe that humanity can obtain all of its energy needs from renewables almost for free. But energy has never been unchained from cost. And although the cost of renewables have been declining, existing fossil fuel (including coal and nuclear) sources remain the cheapest sources of energy. That is true both for electrical generation and transportation – not least because the Sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, making these intermittent sources of energy unreliable, as Germany discovered last winter.

Political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. has stated: “It is quite intuitive for people to understand that there is a lot of power in solar energy. We feel the wind. The idea that you can get something for nothing, people find enormously appealing.” But the Sun does not shine at night and the wind blows strongest at night in the winter when the electricity that it produces is not needed. Simply put, renewables are intermittent and they are far less concentrated than fossil fuels are.

In America, different states are following varied energy paths, providing us with an invaluable 50-part experiment. California is the most committed jurisdiction to the adoption of renewable energy and its citizens are being hit hard in their wallets. Take the U.S. West Coast as a comparison. Consumers in Washington state on average pay 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for the electricity they use. In Oregon, the average household pays 13 cents per kilowatt-hour used. Now look at California where people must endure an average cost of electricity of 30 cents per kilowatt-hour and they suffer from rolling blackouts and brownouts. The cost of their electricity has risen three times faster than the rest of the nation. Even California Governor, Gavin Newsom, has admitted that “we failed to predict and plan”. California’s recent spate of wildfires has been attributed by some to the state’s overloaded power grid.

The ‘lifting cost‘ of a land-based barrel of oil in the U.S. is under $40 for existing wells and about $60 for new wells. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review asserted that wind energy is now competitive with the cheapest fossil fuels even without Government subsidies – but this analysis did not consider the cost for each electric utility to keep a ‘spinning reserve‘ that burns natural gas as back-up in order to maintain grid integrity.

An article in One Finite Planet put its finger on the nub of the problem. “Solar and wind have proven to be successful partial cost-effective substitutes for fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are stored energy, and solar and wind are not.”

Richard Burcik is the author of two short books, The DNA Lottery and Anatomy of a Lie.

Germany Begins Felling 120,000 Trees From ‘Fairy Tale’ Forest to Make Way for Wind Turbines

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

The windmills are spinning golden subsidies in the central German ‘fairy tale’ forest of Reinhardswald, but the payment is the partial destruction of the 1,000 year-old ancient wood itself. Work has started on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the forest, the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm mythical stories, to provide access for an initial 18 giant wind turbines around the Sababurg ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle. Who is opposing this massive destruction of the ancient forest teeming with wildlife with trees over 200 years old? Certainly not the Green party, now in power at national and local level. In fact the project is being led by local Hesse Green Minister Priska Hinz who is reported to have said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and the preservation of nature. It is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.”

There is some local press interest in Germany about the destruction of part of the forest that covers a 200 square kilometre area. Nevertheless, the mainstream media generally keep well away from covering environmental destruction when the Greens are doing it in the claimed cause of saving the planet. The BBC did cover the story under the headline ‘Battle over wind turbines in the land of Sleeping Beauty‘, but that was in 2013 when plans for the industrial development were first announced. It seems that the state-reliant broadcaster is less interested now that the Big Bad Wolf has finally made a meal of Little Red Riding Hood.

Pierre Gosselin, who runs the German-based science site No Tricks Zone, has been covering the outrage felt in a number of German quarters at the plans to destroy some of the Reinhardswald forest in the interest of inferior green technology. He feels the affair shows what an inefficient and costly scam green energy is. “It’s not cost-free, it’s full of corrupt and unresponsive politicians who no longer care about democracy, and it certainly doesn’t make the environment better. It’s a nasty juggernaut of waste, fraud, corruption and ecological degradation – with dead birds, turbine vibration sickness, strobe dizziness and landscape pollution,” he adds.

The Guardian has been curiously silent over the clearing of woodland to build wind turbines in Hesse. In 2020 it was less reticent about reporting on the construction of a 3 km highway in another Hessian forest at Dannenroder. Thousands of climate activists gathered on the site north of Frankfurt, it reported. Dannenroder tree-felling would be a catastrophe, environmental campaigners are reported to have said. “Some parts of this forest are 250 years old,” noted Nicola Uhde of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (Bund), “and there is simply not much of this kind of woodland around anymore.” At the time, the Guardian noted the fate of Dannenroder was a “litmus test for the Green party” which governed the state as part of a coalition. It seems to have been remiss in not suggesting such a test with the Reinhardswald deforestation. But then it seems none of the usual climate activists have been protesting about the loss of trees and wildlife habitat on this occasion.

The Daily Sceptic has reported on numerous recent examples where the lack of interest in ecological damage is a feature of green industrial development. Last month, we noted that one of India’s iconic large birds, the great Indian bustard, was on the verge of extinction due to the growth of electric power lines in its home area of the Thar desert. To reach global Net Zero, it has been estimated that new power lines equivalent to circling the globe 2,000 times will need to be built in the next few years.

Last October, we reported that wind farms in Tasmania had reduced the population of the endangered local wedge-tailed eagle to around 1,000 individuals. Across the world, millions of bats are being chewed by giant wind blades. Any animal that relies on wind currents for flight such as a large raptor is at risk of being sucked into the whirling machines. In California, the Democrat-controlled state Government recently relaxed controls on wildlife protections to allow permits to kill previously fully protected species for renewable infrastructure projects. Despite an increased risk to America’s national bird, the bald eagle, barely a peep of protest was recorded. Off America’s eastern coast, massive industrial parks are being constructed for wind turbines. It might be a coincidence that hundreds of whales have beached along the shore in recent years, but a more likely explanation is the deafening sonar noise, constant pile driving, extensive ocean building works and heavy shipping movements.

None of the above are likely to feature when the magic mirror is asked: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the greenest one of all?”

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Revelation That U.K. Climate Target is Based on One Windy Year’s Data Threatens to Unravel Net Zero Credibility

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

In October the Daily Sceptic reported on a paper written for the Royal Society led by Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of Oxford University that concluded batteries were not the answer to the huge storage requirements of intermittent ‘green’ electricity power. Despite the prestigious academic fire power on parade, the paper died a death in the popular prints, presumably because of its unwelcome message about the much-touted battery solution. But recent revelations suggest the report could act as a loose thread that helps unravel the collectivist Net Zero agenda in the U.K. The Royal Society analysed decades of local wind speeds and found the electricity system needed the equivalent of at least a third of green energy to be stored as backup. Such a cost would be astronomical. Now it appears that the Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) fudged the issue by using just one year of high wind data in persuading Members of Parliament in 2019 to donkey-nod through Theresa May’s insane legislative rush to Net Zero by 2050.

Sir Chris’s report showed that wind could fall away for days at a time during periods of intense cold dominated by high atmospheric pressure. It also found wind speeds varied between years, all of which is in fact known and has been studied widely by other scientists. The Telegraph has reported on remarks made by Sir Chris after the paper was published in which he noted that the CCC has “conceded privately” that reliance on one year’s data was a “mistake”. It appears that the information given to MPs committing to 2050 Net Zero assumed there would be just seven days when wind turbines would produce less than 10% of their potential electricity output. According to Net Zero Watch that compares with 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018.

In reporting that the CCC has conceded the “mistake”, the Telegraph noted that Sir Chris said the committee was still saying it doesn’t differ much from Sir Chris’s calculations. “Well that’s not quite true,” observed the Oxford Emeritus Professor. Asked by the newspaper if it disputed the account of Sir Chris, a CCC spokesman said it had “nothing further to add”.

Of course the ‘Noble Lie’ that Net Zero must be foisted on an unwilling population whatever the economic and societal cost will need to be preserved. Nothing to see here, move along please, is likely to guide most mainstream media in covering these latest revelations. The investigative science and Net Zero writer Paul Homewood is less inclined to ignore the serious matter. “It is now clear that Parliament authorised Net Zero without any proper assessment, whether financial or energy, and the whole Net Zero legislation must now be suspended until a full independent assessment is carried out.” He goes further and states that current and past members of the CCC must be held to account, and “excluded from any further influence over the country’s energy policy, or indeed on any issue of public policy”.

In general, nobody wants to talk about the lack of wind and solar backup, so there is a widespread pretence that the problem will somehow be solved in the future. But having dismissed any role for batteries, the Royal Society suggested hydrogen as a solution, an idea, alas, only slightly less dumb than batteries. Highly explosive, low kinetic energy compared with hydrocarbons, expensive to produce, difficult to store and move around – the disadvantages are all too obvious. Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian saw the report as an “enormous improvement” on every other effort on the subject of large scale energy storage systems. But in the end, the authors still have a “quasi-religious commitment” to a fossil-free future, and this means that the report, despite containing much valuable information, “is actually useless for any public policy purpose”.

What is becoming clear is the level of statistical deception that is practised across climate science and the promotion of Net Zero. Surface temperature measurements are frequently adjusted upwards on a retrospective basis despite ignoring growing urban heat corruptions, activists use computer models to run up garbage-in, garbage-out scares on an almost daily basis, and bad weather is deliberately confused with long-term climate to suggest the latter is changing due to human caused carbon dioxide. All lapped up without a critical word between them by members of the mainstream media increasingly funded by elite billionaires.

The donkey-nodding politicians and the poodle media often hide behind the notion that they are just following the ‘science’. There is no such thing as the ‘science’, settled or otherwise, just the ongoing scientific process. The distinguished scientist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman captured the integrity of the process when he wrote: “If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it. … Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.”

Renewable energy is not a low-cost substitute for fossil fuels, notes a forward in Rupert Darwall’s recently published report on Net Zero and Britain’s “disastrous” energy policies. High and rising energy costs have locked Britain into economic decline, a suggestion given weight by last week’s savage destruction of the steel economy of Port Talbot. Renewables are not cheap, nor can they provide the reliability that modern societies expect and on which they depend. His report is said to convincingly demonstrate “how Britain was conned into Net Zero by deceptive and illusory promises of cheap wind power”.

The CCC is a dedicated green activist group that sits at the heart of U.K. Government. It is a pernicious, untrustworthy force in British politics giving cover to policies that will lead to de-industrialisation and massive changes in future lifestyle including restriction on diet, transport and personal freedoms.

Here’s hoping the wind scandal blows the damn thing away.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Wind Curtailment Costs To Rise To £3 Billion By 2030

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

It appears that the BBC will print any nonsense it is handed by the renewable/climate lobby:

Wasted wind power will add £40 to the average UK household’s electricity bill in 2023, according to a think tank.

That figure could increase to £150 in 2026, Carbon Tracker has estimated.

When it is very windy, the grid cannot handle the extra power generated. Wind farms are paid to switch off and gas-powered stations are paid to fire up. The cost is passed on to consumers.

The government said major reforms will halve the time it takes to build energy networks to cope with extra wind power.

Most of the UK’s offshore wind farms are in England – Dogger Bank off the coast of Yorkshire is the largest in the world. Meanwhile, around half of onshore wind farms are in Scotland but most electricity is used in south-east England.

Carbon Tracker said the main problem in getting electricity to where it is needed is a bottleneck in transmission between Scotland and England.

The practice of switching off wind farms and ramping up power stations is known as “wind curtailment” and the costs are passed on to consumers, it said.

Carbon Tracker researches the impact of climate change on financial markets. It said since the start of 2023, wind curtailment payments cost £590m, adding £40 to the average consumer bill.

It warned those costs were set to increase to add £180 per year to bills by 2030, due to wind farms being built faster than the power cabling needed to transmit the electricity.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67494082

For a start, they can’t even get their numbers right.

They say that wind constraint payments cost £590 million this year. Households however only use a third of electricity generated, so they are only directly paying about £196 million towards the bill. This equates to £7 per home, not £40.

They have also got their logic upside down. It is not “wasted wind power”, but the constraint payments that households are paying for. The answer is simple – refuse to pay them.

The problem, of course, is not “lack of infrastructure”, as they claim. It is that we ever built so many wind farms in Scotland, so far away from consumers, who will have to pay for all of this infrastructure as well. Yet we still have not learnt our lesson and are carrying on building even more. According to Carbon Tracker, constraint payments could rocket to over £3 billion by 2030.

Gone with the wind?

It’s like subsidising new factories in the middle of nowhere in the Scottish Highlands, but not building any road links.

As the BBC is suddenly concerned about energy bills, maybe it should remind its readers that they are already paying some £1.2 billion to subsidise Scotland’s onshore wind farms every year.

Living Off-Grid Has Shown Me That Modern Society Cannot Function on Renewable Energy

Both house systems are close to as optimised as we can get them and represent a total investment of around $160,000. Renewable energy systems should more honestly be called replaceable energy systems. None of the components can be expected to work for more than 25 years and often a much shorter time than that.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY PSEUDONAJA TEXTILIS

When we moved to our farm on the coast in Victoria Australia over 20 years ago our mains power was delivered by a single wire earth return (SWER) power line and we were the second to last house connected to it. This was just after the misguided privatisation of the power grid delivered this lifeline of civilised existence into the greedy hands of ‘competing’ power companies.

The previously state owned ‘Gold Plated’ system now had to turn a profit for investors so preventative maintenance services were cut.

We began to experience power outages, these were usually brief but occurred at least weekly. They would sometimes extend for hours and more than once for more than a day. With rainwater tanks and an electric pressure supply we couldn’t fill a kettle or flush a toilet. 

The first response to this was to install a 5,000 litre tank on a hill 15 metres above the house with a 40 mm pipe to the house. We kept it full and only used it when we had to. One problem solved, but we were still sometimes reduced to kerosene lamps and candles after dark and couldn’t reliably run a freezer to store the food we produced.

So we decided to go off grid. It was a few years before we were fully independent of mains power.

Our system grew over time as finances permitted, technology improved and our experience and knowledge grew.

Now we have two three-bedroom houses 800 metres apart. One is 35 years old and only moderately energy efficient the other is eight years old and optimised for passive solar with excellent insulation, double glazing etc.

Both homes have wood-burning kitchen stoves with boilers for hot water in winter and for hydronic heating. They also have bottled gas stoves and solar hot water with instantaneous gas boost, which is almost never required because the heat exchanger on-stove boiler keeps the tank hot all winter. When the stove is not in use the solar hot water system with its heat exchanger does the job.

We grow all our own firewood. Providing around 100 kg of seasoned hardwood per house per week for the colder months is labour intensive and requires petrol powered chainsaws and a wood splitter.

Each house has its own completely separate power system, each with 30 solar panels of 300-440W capacity, MPPT solar controllers and a 1 kW wind turbine on a 19 metre mast of 80 mm diameter steel tube, stabilised by about 100m of 10mm steel cables and 3.6 cubic metres of concrete.  

Running 24 hours a day the wind generators can sometimes equal the total daily solar input.

The power storage systems consist of a total of 60 German made lead acid gel 2V 600 amp hr batteries, shared between the houses (24 and 36). Each of these batteries weighs 48 kg and currently retails for $474 (AUD). They are rigged in series to provide 24 V power to a  computer controlled DC linked inverter/charger.  Each house also has an interconnected AC linked inverter/charger that sends 240 V AC power from part of the solar array directly to the house switchboard and also contributes DC charge to the battery bank.

In theory we have three to four days of zero input power supply if we were to flatten the batteries, but in practice we don’t let the batteries drop below 70% capacity in order to protect them and make them last as long as possible. So we are limited to about one day of stored capacity.

Both house systems are close to as optimised as we can get them and represent a total investment of around $160,000.

So how do they perform?

In summer perfectly. We don’t have to do much other than check in with the laptop once a week to monitor the system, and we often take the wind generators offline for extended periods.

In winter, when solar energy input per square metre drops to about 30% of peak summer level and then for only a few hours a day, the systems still work pretty well but require more monitoring involvement.

To some extent power usage can be matched to storage levels and fluctuating input from the wind generator. However, the total renewable input is just too patchy and unreliable so petrol or diesel powered generator backup is absolutely required.

It’s not just in winter, but in autumn especially and sometimes in springtime too. When cloudy skies and windless days persist we need to make recourse to our petrol generators, sometimes everyday for a week at a time to keep the batteries charged and provide peak load supply. The inverters are linked to auto-start the generators as required when the battery voltage drops below a set level or demand rises too high. They often come on in the evenings and have to be sited to minimise noise.

In the early days it was a case of dishwasher now, washing machine later, maybe tomorrow etc. and minimal use of electricity to heat things. Nowadays such restrictions on usage are limited to days when the generator starts to automatically kick in – we take that as a signal to check the system and ease off to save on fuel.

The generators have to be looked after and kept fuelled-up ready to go at all times. We have several of them, including a 70-year-old Lister JP 1/9 Startomatic – a 9 hp single cylinder water-cooled diesel running a 1,500 rpm 6.25 kVA generator that was retrieved from a sheep station in NSW. I recently substantially rebuilt it in my workshop with original spare parts. It is a magnificent 1.4 tonnes of the best of British engineering; it works perfectly and will soon be connected. The other repurposed diesel generator I’m working on is a solid old 1,500 rpm ST-6 designed for nonstop use in a commercial fishing boat. It will be driven by a 10hp air-cooled Yanmar L100N until I can find another auto-start Lister diesel for it. These will both soon take over from two two Honda 6kVA petrol gensets currently connected to the systems and will be about half the cost to run. Most years the annual generator run time is around 60-100 hours at each house but it’s as unpredictable as the weather.

After 20 years the first of our solar panels have started to fail and have been replaced. Rather than dump them into landfill because they can’t be recycled, I’m planning on using them to make north-facing sun traps for heat loving plants in our big vegetable garden.

Renewable energy systems should more honestly be called replaceable energy systems. None of the components can be expected to work for more than 25 years and often a much shorter time than that.

It is the journey as much as the destination. Producing our own power fits with our overall ethos of self reliance. We produce our own free range poultry and eggs and, in a good year, most of our fruit and vegetables. We breed Wiltshire sheep and buy in beef weaners, then we butcher, pack and freeze our own meat supply which we can supplement with hunting and offshore fishing.

Extrapolating from our renewable energy experience, anyone who thinks that a modern society can function with a power grid that runs on just solar and wind power without fossil fuel or nuclear backup that’s able to immediately provide up to 100% of power needs on cloudy, still days and dark, windless nights, is totally deluded! 

And getting grid-scale lithium ion battery storage to provide the sort of supply time that we have on our farm would cost trillions of dollars, deplete the planet’s non-renewable resources to the point of imminent exhaustion and then it would have to be done all over again in 10 years.

It matters nought that you have massive renewable generation capacity if you can’t store power for extended periods.

So you can have all the wind and solar farms you want, but without fossil fuel or nuclear back up you’ll need to buy a good supply of warm blankets and candles if you don’t want to be spending a lot of time shivering in the dark.

The author was a part-time specialist medical practitioner until he refused to be injected with the experimental gene-based Covid vaccines just over two years ago and was sacked. Now he’s a fulltime peasant farmer who values his privacy and prefers to remain anonymous.

The climate scaremongers: Cheap wind power myth is blown away

Cheap wind power is a green myth.

Conservative Woman UK

By Paul Homewood

THE myth that our energy bills would come tumbling down thanks to the abundance of cheap offshore wind power has finally been blown to smithereens by the failure of the latest auction for the Contracts for Difference subsidy scheme to attract any bidders. The government’s price cap of £44/MWh at 2012 prices (about £60 at current prices) was simply not economically viable.

This follows the Swedish energy firm Vattenfall’s recent decision to cancel its giant 1.4 GW Norfolk Boreas project before construction had begun. Boreas had been awarded a CfD in last year’s round.

For years we have been promised that ultra-cheap wind power was just around the corner. In 2020 Dr Malte Jansen of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London claimed: ‘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.’ Last year the Guardian bragged that the cost of offshore wind had fallen yet again, to just £37/MWh.

All these claims, of course, derived from the annual auctions for the Contracts for Difference subsidy scheme. What the cheerleaders had not realised was that the wind farms were under no legal obligation to honour these contracts. Instead those companies which bid low are now selling at the much higher market price.

In this latest auction round, however, this loophole was removed, and bidders would have been forced to honour their contracts. As a result, they have pulled out of the auction, and are now demanding much bigger subsidies.

There never was any evidence that the true cost of offshore wind was as low as the auction prices suggested. Independent analysis has long concluded that the real cost is between £80 and £100/MWh, and this does not take account of the wider system costs of integrating intermittent wind power, maybe as much as another £50/MWh. Gas-fired power is currently about £80/MWh.

It is not only the UK where the wind industry is struggling to match expectations. In the US developers such as Shell and Avangrid are pulling out of contracts to build offshore wind farms. The giant Danish wind company Oersted has lost a third of its market value since warning two weeks ago that it may be writing down its assets by up to $2.3billion on its US projects. European turbine makers are also in trouble, appearing to have woefully underestimated the costs and problems of building large turbines for operation offshore, where conditions are much more severe.

In stark contrast to the promises of the renewable lobby, subsidies for offshore wind are expected to add nearly £5billion to our energy bills this year.

In large part, the wind industry has been hoist by its own petard, with the government believing all of its propaganda about falling costs. Now, thanks to the government’s obsession with renewables and its closure of coal power capacity, it may have little choice but to cave into the industry’s demands for greater subsidies.

Meanwhile our energy bills will continue to rocket.

September heatwaves

IT WAS certainly exceptionally hot last week, but even with thermometers next to airport runways, main roads and in the middle of London, the highest temperature the Met Office could come up with was 33.2C (91.8F) at Kew.

It was much hotter in September 1906, when the temperature reached 96F at Bawtry in South Yorkshire, still a UK record for the month. That heatwave lasted five days from August 30 to September 3, and covered the whole country, from Scotland and Ireland to the south of England.

In contrast, temperatures last week did not appear to get above the mid 80s at most for much of the country. The Central England Temperature series, for example, peaked at only 84F.

Monthly Weather Report of the Meteorological Office

Maybe even more remarkable were the three September heatwaves in 1911, which were the culmination of an exceptionally hot summer.

Mean temperatures in July/August were a full 2C higher in 1911 than this year.

I have no doubt that in due course the Met Office will highlight this year’s heatwaves in June and this month, and claim they are evidence of climate change. I doubt that they will mention the summer of 1911, much less explain how it could happen in the absence of climate change.

Another day, another £65billion!

WHEN the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008, and upgraded to ‘Net Zero’ four years ago, there was no attempt to estimate the costs involved, nor any technical plan as to how the targets were going to be achieved.

Even now the government refuses to treat the matter of costs in any serious fashion, instead pretending that the country will end up being better off eventually, thanks to all those lovely green jobs and a booming, world-leading green economy.

What our economy will look like in 30 years is something nobody can know, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that we are all going to be much worse off in the foreseeable future, certainly the next decade or so. And we are finding more problems which were not anticipated at the start.

This week the Daily Telegraph reported that it could cost £65billion to decommission Britain’s gas grid, a 176,000-mile network of buried pipes. This is according to a draft National Infrastructure Report. It says that unused pipes must be removed or they risk decay and experts fear the potential collapse of roads. At the moment the network is properly maintained, with the cost included in our gas bills.

Quite who is expected to pay this bill which, knowing what we do about public infrastructure projects, is probably a gross underestimate, is another matter. It works out at £2,300 per household.

Logistically it will be a nightmare too, with districts being turned off one by one. I could mention the traffic chaos as roads are dug up in town after town, but I doubt whether many of us will be able to afford cars by then.

wind farm Holsworthy

No, Wind Power is Not Cheaper Than Gas

From The Daily Sceptic

BY ALEX KRIEL AND DUNCAN WHITE

Advocates of Net Zero policies repeatedly reassure the public that they are advancing cheap, green energy with the promise of vast numbers of lucrative green jobs and world leadership for the U.K. in selected green technologies.

Unfortunately for the hard pressed British electorate, ‘cheap, green energy’ is nothing more than an empty political slogan arrived at by a dishonest sleight of hand. Specifically, the politicians simply ignore the true costs of the ‘cheap, green energy’ which soon becomes very expensive when factoring in all costs.

The chart below is from the U.K. Government’s own Electricity Generation Costs 2023 report and forms the centrepiece of the green propaganda. It purportedly shows the ‘levelised cost of electricity’ (LCOE) for different generating technologies. The Government uses deceptive calculations to arrive at a distorted cost for electricity generated by wind-power over the lifetime of a plant, by which means the Government can falsely claim that offshore wind is 2.5 times cheaper than dirty old gas generation (CCGT).

The most outrageous trick in this ‘analysis’ is that the Government has treated completely reliable electricity generated by gas (‘dispatchable’, in the trade jargon) in exactly the same way as extraordinarily unreliable electricity generated by a wind farm. This is not even an apples and oranges comparison, this is an elephant and microchips comparison. As a simple thought experiment, how much of a discount would you require for a car, cooker or washing machine whose operation was controlled externally and is very hard to predict versus the same equipment where you decide when you use it? For most people the answer would be an enormous discount, indicating that the true utility of variable electricity supply is very, very low.

There is really no comparison between an inexpensive tried-and-tested reliable power source and an exceptionally unreliable megawatt hour. We really are being had for a patsy.

To make costs comparable, you would need to state them on a comparable dispatchable basis, which means combining a wind farm with a battery storage facility to produce stable supply. At the moment there are only a handful of battery projects, which are very costly and provide only a short period of supply for their catchment area. As an indicator of the scale of battery backup required to ‘plug the gap’ when wind and solar power falter due to weather conditions, the Australian city of Melbourne has installed a ‘battery farm’ at Hornsdale at a cost of A$90m, covering 2.5 acres that can provide 28 minutes of electricity if there is a total failure of ‘renewable’ energy supply.

For reference, calculations by Bjorn Lomborg, the President of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, indicate that the EU’s entire battery capacity is enough to cover one minute and 21 seconds of average demand. At this stage, it isn’t possible to calculate a cost per MWh (megawatt hour) for offshore wind farm plus battery installation, but it is clear that the resulting levelised cost would be very high and orders of magnitude (i.e., multiples of 10) higher than in the chart above (£44 per MWh).

In prior years, the Government at least made a half-hearted stab at acknowledging the enormous difference in utility between reliable and unreliable electricity by considering various downstream impacts of variable green electricity. The methodology was not fully disclosed, but it involved adding additional costs onto wind farms to adjust their levelised costs and then deducting costs from the levelised cost of combined cycle gas turbine plants, which have delivered uninterrupted, cheap energy for decades. That analysis resulted in a somewhat complex chart showing ‘enhanced levelised cost of electricity’, which we have simplified below.

It is plain to see that gas (CCGT) is the cheapest form of electricity generation on an enhanced levelised cost basis even when accounting only in this partial way for downstream network costs.

The Government has not included any such assessment of downstream impacts in the 2023 analysis because so called ‘balancing costs’ have been shifted on to the consumer. This is an arbitrary accounting convention and ignores the fact that the same costs will need to be incurred, regardless of whom they are charged to.

Note also that between 2020 and 2023 assessments, the Government massively and somewhat arbitrarily inflated the cost of gas (CCGT) based on a very much higher ‘carbon costs’ from £32 per MWh to £60 per MWh (the carbon costs are a somewhat arbitrary value that the Government places on the ‘social cost’ of carbon emissions). By moving this assumption up, or down, the Government can itself alter CCGT levelised costs and attractiveness relative to other forms of generation. This huge increase has distorted the 2023 outcomes to make gas appear much less attractive compared to wind. Ultimately though this is a policy assumption rather than a physical or market factor and is driven by value judgements rather than scientific reasons.

We have illustrated that for the 2023 assessment, by using the Government’s own earlier method of analysis we have gone from a position where offshore wind appears to be 2.5 times cheaper than gas to a position were gas is the cheapest form of generation when factoring in the system impacts as they were accounted for in the 2020 assessment.

There are a number of other questionable assumptions that unsurprisingly all work towards inflating the levelised costs of electricity from gas and reducing the levelised cost of wind. The main such assumption being a very high 61% load factor for offshore wind, which as far as we are aware has not ever been achieved anywhere in practice (the ‘load factor’ is the amount of electricity produced by a wind farm over a year as a proportion of how much it would produce if the wind was always favourable). The Government itself shows actual load factors for offshore wind farms were in the range of 39% to 47% up to 2017.

If you were to go a stage further and construct a truly representative scenario where gas power generation was replaced by wind, you would have to factor in the reality that you would need to effectively keep your old gas generation in reserve in order to have an uninterrupted supply of electricity. This leads to suboptimal operation of the gas plant and very high unit costs with lower output on the same fixed cost base.

In the scenarios that we looked at, any saving from ‘low cost’ wind, primarily lower due to carbon costs, would be more than offset by the very high unit cost of electricity from gas which would have to be purchased at enormous ‘standby’ costs to cover every period of low or excessive wind to prevent blackouts.

Real world data – the acid test

Observed data is always the acid test and in an excellent report by Mark P. Mills from the Manhattan Institute, he includes a chart of residential electricity prices versus wind and solar capacity per capita across European countries. Doubtless there may be some cofounding factors, but overall the trend is crystal clear: more ‘cheap’ renewable energy is directly linked to higher residential energy prices. Very much as we expected and the opposite outcome to that promised by the U.K. politicians.

The technocrats only real answer to the problem of unreliable renewables is to limit the ability of the consumer to use electricity. This is probably the main reason that smart meters and smart appliances are being rolled out to the end of 2025. Again the needs of the citizen will effectively be made subordinate to the needs of the system, itself dictated by ideology rather than supply problems or verifiable scientific reasons – a new and very unhealthy direction of travel.

Conclusions

You can see how easy it is to go from the fantasy of ‘cheap wind power’ promoted by the political class to the reality of very expensive wind, simply by including the real downstream costs. We have identified that the necessity of maintaining gas backup to wind power means that any savings from wind will often be more than negated by the costs of backup power. This proposition ties in with the observed reality that countries with higher levels of wind and solar capacity tend to have higher residential electricity prices.

The real problem though is the hell-for-leather dash for Net Zero and the accompanying plans produced by the unelected and unaccountable Climate Change Committee. This Soviet-style planning coupled with the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy arbitrating between different technologies and handing out billions in support of its favoured solution has all the characteristics of an accident waiting to happen. Bjorn Lomborg warned that “we are now going from wasting billions of dollars on ineffective policies to wasting trillions”.

The accelerated implementation of unreliable wind power will almost certainly lead to higher costs, lower living standards and the erosion of competitiveness and not to the green nirvana dishonestly promoted by Westminster politicians.

Alex Kriel is by training a physicist and was an early critic of the Imperial Covid model. He is a founder of the Thinking Coalition, which comprises a group of citizens who are concerned about Government overreach. Duncan White is a retired nurse with extensive experience of healthcare management and international health consultancy. He has researched Government carbon related policies for a number of years in cooperation with several U.K. groups representing the interests of motorists. This article was first published on the Thinking Coalition website. Sign up for updates here.

Horrendous Number of Eagle Deaths From Wind Farms

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Further devastating evidence of the toll that onshore wind turbines take on local eagle populations has emerged in Tasmania. The local Wedge-tailed eagle is thought to be down to just 1,000 individuals, but over the last 12 years at least 270 birds have been killed or injured in the vicinity of wind farms. According to a recent paper in Australian Field Ornithology, a further 49 vulnerable White-bellied sea eagles have also been killed in this period.

The scale of depredation is shocking but it could be much worse than reported. According to author Gregory Pullen, information about eagle deaths is not readily available, “nor readily made available”. His calculations arise from a number of primary sources including annual reports. He suggests that unrecorded casualties are higher since most are recorded anecdotally and are not the result of systematic survey. The Tasmanian sub-species of the Wedge-tailed eagle is listed as endangered under both federal and state threatened species legislation.

Large birds of prey such as eagles are at particular risk from giant wind turbine blades revolving at speed since they rely on air currents for sustained flight. The Daily Sceptic has covered this developing story, noting that few activists, bird conservation groups and writers seem able to rouse themselves to complain when the natural flight path of raptors stands in the way of green progress. The Australian climate journalist Jo Nova has stood out from the unquestioning crowd, noting that in Tasmania the greens are destroying nature – again. “It’s not about the environment is it,” she said. She went on to add that there are plans to build up to 10 wind turbine parks across Tasmania – “and if one tower misses, the next will get them”.

It’s not really about the environment over in California either, where America’s national bird, the bald eagle, and many other raptors face mass slaughter in the local wind farm avian graveyards. This follows the state Democrat-controlled legislature’s recent decision to relax controls on wildlife protections to allow permits to kill previously fully protected species for renewable energy and infrastructure projects. However, evidence continues to emerge that the slaughter has been going on for years. Last year, NextEra, one of America’s largest utility companies, was fined $8 million after 150 eagles were killed at its wind farms across eight states. According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, a wind farm complex in Altamont has been killing 75-100 golden eagles every year since the 1980s.

The animal slaughter does not stop at large birds of course. A number of scientific studies have point to the destruction of millions of bats and smaller birds every year by turbine blades capable of travelling at the tip at speeds approaching 150mph.

Alas, it is not as if the deaths of these wildlife green martyrs are helping to produce much worthwhile economic activity. In the U.K., the small number of jobs being produced by green technologies is starting to be noticed. Gary Smith, the leader of Britain’s largest trade union, recently said that communities along the North Sea can see wind farms, “but they can’t point to the jobs”. Possibly exaggerating to make his point, he added that much of the green work seems to be either London-based lobbying or clearing away the animal casualties of wind farm blades. “It’s usually a man in a rowing boat, sweeping up the dead birds,” he observed.

Green activists are increasingly being caught between a rock and a hard place on these impact issues. It is becoming obvious that many of the green technology solutions proposed to replace fossil fuels come with heavy environmental costs. Whether it be open cobalt mining with child labour, or digging up vast quantities of the Earth’s crust to help construct second-rate solutions such as windmills, the terrible impact is all too obvious. At the moment the typical stance seems to be that voiced by Audubon California Policy Director Mark Lynas, who said we need renewable energy resources, and he did not want to see the eagle deaths “being used to push against clean energy”.

Another area where ecology fights are breaking out is on the east coast of America, where whales are beaching on the shores of New Jersey and New York in alarming numbers. In the first half of this year over 40 whales have died in this way. Large areas of the local ocean are being turned into industrial wind parks, with particular concern arising over 24-hour sonar soundings. The veteran environment campaigner Michael Shellenberger has said the massive offshore works are wreaking environmental damage in previously pristine waters. “It’s the biggest environmental scandal in the world,” he charges.

The waters off the U.S. east coast are important feeding and breeding grounds for large mammals such as whales and dolphins, including the rare North Atlantic right whale. Shellenberger has recently produced a documentary called Thrown to the Wind which presents evidence of whales hit by ships, and high decibel sonar that is said to separate mothers from their calves, sending them into harm’s way. The film shows environmentalists checking the sonar which is said to measure 150 dBs at sea – equivalent to about 90 dBs on land. The noise is a relentless drum beat that is said to pound across the ocean throughout the day and night. On land, the sonar noise would be equivalent to a hairdryer. For humans, prolonged noise much above 70 dBs may start to damage hearing.

The film makes the point that serious pile-driving to secure the giant turbines to the sea floor has yet to start in earnest. Once built there is a danger that the huge back wash created by the giant blades will disturb and kill off plankton, destroying the food supply for the whales.

It must be noted that many interested parties dispute the claims currently being made about wildlife in the new oceanic industrial parks springing up with generous subsidies from the Biden Administration. Both sides can marshal their arguments and evidence. But at the moment, the deck is rigged in favour of the green lobby. Fracking for oil and gas was banned in the U.K. with Friends of the Earth presenting evidence of local earthquakes similar in force to someone falling off a chair. It is more than likely that multiple eagle deaths would be enough to stop the operation of any oil and gas installation. Seemingly, it will take more than a mere rowing boat full of protected but very dead birds to stop the new Green Barons.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Britain’s Wind Industry In Freefall: Rising Costs See More Major Projects Scrapped

From STOP THESE THINGS

The value of subsidies to wind power is falling, while the cost of erecting and operating these things has skyrocketed. The result is a complete collapse in wind power capacity investment in Britain, and elsewhere. The usual suspects are running a mile from projects that were (on paper) worth billions.

While the wind industry pretends not to worry about pedestrian matters such as profit margins, the bottom line is starting to bite back. To date – whenever the money looked like running out – the rent-seekers have simply dropped the begging bowl in front of the government concerned, scooped up another round of taxpayer-funded subsidies, and carried on.

The Brits under Boris Johnson went all in with wind power, at the expense of the reliable and affordable stuff. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, as Jeremy Warner explains below.

The real costs of wind power prove the sums don’t add up
The Telegraph
Jeremy Warner
30 August 2023

Someone get a grip. UK energy policy is once again coming apart at the seams, with growing doubts over whether net zero or even energy security goals can be met.

Only now are the true economic costs and practical difficulties of going carbon-free becoming fully evident, and it’s not a pretty sight. Yet still policymakers don’t seem to get it; either that or they are being deliberately misleading on the ease with which it can be delivered.

All pretence at “leading the world” in the application of renewables is meanwhile going up in smoke, as one-time champions pare back their ambitions for the UK market in the face of rising costs, more sensible planning laws, and better opportunities elsewhere. Rival jurisdictions, particularly the US and EU, are beginning to offer far superior incentives.

If you cannot beat them, do the opposite. Slowly, but surely, the Government is watering down its environmental agenda, which sadly but inevitably frequently clashes with the parallel goal of enhanced economic growth – the latest example being so-called “nutrient neutrality” water pollution rules which act as a barrier to more housebuilding.

Yet on paper at least, and indeed legally, the overarching environmental goal of net zero by 2050 – together with the staged targets set for getting there – remains sacrosanct, even though most practically minded people have long thought there is not a snowball’s chance in Hades of actually meeting it. A giant leap of faith in the transforming powers of technology is demanded to think it can be.

As if to confirm the gaping chasm between ambition and reality, the latest round of auctions for UK renewable energy licences, the outcome of which is due to be announced late next week, has plainly hit the rocks.

Having already abandoned a key UK offshore wind development because of rising costs, the Swedish utility Vattenfall has indicated that it won’t be participating in the Government’s so-called Auction Round Five.

Similarly with the UK energy group SSE, which has said it will not be entering its Seagreen offshore development into the auction, citing a low, officially set, strike price, and dramatically rising costs.

Under pressure from the renewables industry, the Government has announced a slight increase in the promised subsidy below strike prices, but it’s unlikely to make a difference.

Presumably there are at least some bidders still in the running; even so, officials will struggle to get the capacity hoped for, putting in jeopardy the target of 50GW of offshore wind by 2030. Current capacity stands at just 14GW, so there is a way to go.

This in turn raises doubts about the Government’s separate target of complete decarbonisation of the electricity network by 2035. This, too, looks unrealistic. British energy policy is once more in a chaotic mess. It was ever thus.

As it is, policymakers have set strike prices so low that investors are struggling to see how they might make a return. No surprise that prices should be forced down like this, for the green energy transition is not just about saving the planet. It is also meant to deliver much lower energy costs.

This, too, is turning out to be a pretence. It’s true that in the past seven or eight years, the notional cost of renewable energy has plummeted. The price of offshore wind output has, for instance, fallen by around two thirds, from £100 per megawatt hour to less than £40. There you go, say ministers in response to net zero sceptics; it’s cheaper than coal.

Would that it was, but the claim is in fact a statistical illusion. The manufacturing, installation and maintenance costs alone have been surging since long before the war in Ukraine. To these we must also add the costs of upgrading the National Grid to bring the new sources of electricity from where they are generated to where they are used.

Littering the countryside with pylons is understandably running into local opposition. Billions may have to be forked out to compensate affected communities, or in finding alternative, more expensive, transmission routes. It could make HS2 look cheap by comparison.

But to gain a proper understanding of the real costs of wind, and to a lesser extent, solar, we need to factor in another of their characteristics – that they are intermittent.

In order to function effectively, the grid needs a constant balance between supply and demand; if the wind isn’t blowing, or even if it is blowing too strongly, thereby overloading the grid, there is a problem.

Lots of conventional backup capacity is required to deal with the shortfalls that result from intermittency – capacity that can be brought online quickly at the flick of a switch when needs arise.

The upshot is likely to be a high degree of duplication in generating capacity. This will obviously very considerably add to the costs of the renewable element. It’s disingenuous to say wind is cheaper than fossil fuels.

Potentially, storage could provide a solution to the intermittency problem, yet for the moment it doesn’t exist at the scale needed to do the trick. If Britain cannot guarantee to keep the lights on, nobody is going to want to set up shop here.

What about batteries? This may seem unduly pessimistic, but it stretches credulity to believe that they can ever really be the solution. Is there even enough lithium in the world to provide the level of battery power needed to supply the National Grid when the wind stops blowing?

There are alternatives, nuclear being the most obvious, but many environmentalists are as opposed to it as they are to coal, gas and oil, and here in the UK, policy on new nuclear capacity, as on much else, falls woefully short.

It is as much as we can do even to get the money-eating leviathan of Hinkley Point C up and running. Next comes Sizewell C, which scarcely promises to be much better. As Britain’s ageing fleet of existing nuclear power stations reaches the end of its life, merely replacing what’s closing down seems to be beyond us.

And to phase out the 80pc of UK energy demand currently satisfied by fossil fuels, we would need far, far more. Yet the Government continues to procrastinate. Shamefully, it is still faffing around with an international competition to decide who gets to build Small Modular Reactors, never mind how to finance them.

The last two auction rounds lulled the Government into a false sense of security on the economics of renewables. Both were hugely successful in attracting bidders at apparently highly competitive prices.

But things have changed. Having been ahead, Britain is slipping behind. Next week’s announcement on the outcome of the fifth round auction threatens to be a rude awakening.
The Telegraph