The Tories’ wind power delusion
A very strange parliamentary rebellion has been taking place with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and dozens of other Tory MPs demanding an end to the ban on onshore wind farms. Wind power is cheap and getting cheaper, they argue. And surely, if we’re engaged in an energy war with Russia, we need all the power we can get?
It’s an argument that is wrong several times over. There is no ban on wind farms – it is actually a bog-standard planning requirement that they be confined to areas designated for that purpose and with community support. Nor do they offer a cheap solution: the costs are high and rising. In fact, relying on the wind for power would guarantee that electricity is expensive for ever, because wind’s unreliability poisons the market, driving up the price of gas-fired power too.
This week the prices offered to anybody – anybody! – who could guarantee to supply power on the chilly, windless evening of 29 November shot up briefly to about £1,100 per megawatt-hour (MWh), more than ten times the normal rate. Demand was forecast to peak at 41.2 gigawatts, supply at 40.7. In the words of Mr Micawber: result, misery. At such a price, enough supply did indeed come out of the woodwork, but not from the wind industry, which can’t just turn on the wind when it wants. Growing reliance on unreliable wind has left Britain paying sky-high prices on still, cold days. Remember when the secretary of state for business used to pose for the cameras while blowing up old coal power stations? They would be handy this winter.
The Ukraine war has driven gas prices higher, but, says Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch, it would be daft to assume that this is a permanent state of affairs and design a policy on the assumption that wind will be cheaper than gas in the future.
Claims that onshore wind is cheap come thick and fast from politicians in thrall to the most well oiled of crony-capitalist industries, the wind merchants. The claims are not supported by the accounts of onshore wind farms, which indicate a breakeven cost of around £80/MWh for the very cheapest farms. And this, note, is for the efficient wind farms with 200-metre turbines (twice the typical height), located in the windiest sites and spaced at least 1,200 metres apart so they don’t they steal each other’s wind. The cost estimate doesn’t even count the need to carefully manage backup power generation for those times and places where the wind is not blowing hard enough, or blowing too hard. Nor does it count the cost of building and running transmission lines from remote wind farms to places where people actually live.
Wind farm accounts also show that this cost is rising, not falling, presumably due to such grid constraints, the fact that the best sites have gone, and the rising costs of steel, concrete, copper and neodymium making new machines pricier. Yet even £80/MWh is nearly double the cost of gas-fired power at the long-term average price of gas.
But that is if gas is allowed to supply electricity continuously without much interruption. If you keep telling gas power stations to switch off because the wind is blowing, as we do, then they will have to (and do) charge more to cover the inefficiency of heating up and cooling down the gas turbines. The more wind we add, the higher the price of gas-fired power. In this way, wind locks in high electricity prices, hastening the deindustrialisation of Britain, or what’s left of it.
And hey presto, wind farms can charge these same high prices as gas, delaying the start of the ‘contract for difference’ they signed to supply at lower prices. Why? Because this document is a thing of beauty for the wind farm operators: it’s not a contract to supply power at all, but an option to do so whenever the zephyrs of the gods play ball. The government, in its infinite stupidity when Lib Dems were in charge of energy, gave wind farms the right to supply power (with bonus payments if the grid cannot cope on a very windy day) but did not hold them to the price they quoted. At least not without a trivial penalty. Incredible? If only.
The ‘contracts for difference’ that were put in place not only transfer the costs and risks of all the uncertainty to the rest of the system, but are ditched at the first sign of a better deal. Hornsea 2, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, began operation this year. Orsted, the developer, signed a contract for difference in 2017 to sell its power at £57.50/MWh. In the event, it delayed the contract until next year and sold power at between four and ten times that, costing the consumer hundreds of millions of pounds a year. See what I mean about business plans based on spot prices?
The best thing about wind farms, as far as city spivs are concerned, is that they transfer money from poor to rich. The costs are borne by electricity bill payers – and power absorbs twice as much of the monthly budget of a poor person than a rich person. The rewards are trousered by the wealthy: landowners, private equity investors, lobbyists, Chinese mine owners.
Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University told me how the market could and should be reformed. If anyone wants to be serious about onshore wind, he says, let them sign guaranteed supply contracts to provide power on demand for at least 20 years – with serious penalties if they cannot deliver. So the wind farm would be combined with enough battery or other backup capacity to be as reliable as a gas power plant.
This would force the industry to build, say, a 100-megawatt wind farm, but only guarantee to deliver, say, 40 megawatts to the grid, storing the surplus in batteries for when the wind farm is producing less than 40. The true cost of wind would probably be more than £200 per megawatt hour.
Talking of batteries, wind energy’s fans (no pun intended) were excited on 21 November when Harmony Energy opened Europe’s largest battery farm near Hull. ‘But what happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine blah blah bl – oh right, we now have industrial-scale batteries,’ enthused David Shukman, former science editor of the BBC.
Consisting of about 50 container-lorry-sized Tesla megapacks parked on a site the size of a football field, the plant will be capable of storing enough electricity to keep just 1 per cent of Britain’s grid going for, er, four minutes. Electricity just isn’t like carrots or coal – storing it is immensely expensive.
But think how lucrative it will be to do so. When the wind drops on a cold November evening just as Harry Kane and co are kicking off, the grid (on your behalf) will pay well over the odds for stored electricity. This is why the high costs of wind are a bug, not a feature, as far as the industry is concerned. High prices are passed straight on to the consumer. The more problems wind farms cause, the more rewarding wind farms become. The bigger the projects are, the more attractive they are for ministers to cut their ribbons.
Notice these are purely economic arguments. I have not even started on the environmental drawbacks of wind farms. They need huge quantities of concrete and steel, both made with coal; they kill rare birds of prey, especially eagles; they slaughter bats; they obtrude on scenic landscapes; their magnets require rare earth minerals mined in China in hugely polluting ways.
Wind is a very low-density form of energy, so you need a very large number of wind farms to make any significant contribution to UK generation capacity: hundreds of square miles per gigawatt of capacity. A gigawatt of fossil fuel or nuclear power takes up a tiny fraction of the space and even less of the sky. In Scotland, where most onshore wind farms are proposed, this means turning almost all upland areas into what is called by planners a ‘wind farm landscape’. Enjoy the view.
Then there’s the question of how much carbon dioxide is really saved by wind farms. True, when spinning they don’t generate emissions, but in their construction they generate a lot: the mining, manufacture and transport of their concrete bases, steel towers, carbon fibre blades and metal-rich turbines. That means for the first few years of ‘green energy’ a wind farm is merely paying back what it has emitted. Meanwhile its sporadic power is destabilising the grid, destroying the economics of near zero-emission nuclear and requiring backup from less efficient sources such as open-cycle gas turbines, so add in some more years before you break even on carbon dioxide.
These are fiendishly difficult calculations to make, but it’s not impossible that some wind farms, sited in less windy areas, take ten years to save any carbon dioxide at all. How long do they last? Repairs start to get uneconomic at some point, maybe as little as 20 years into the lifetime of the wind farm. The thing has to be dismantled and disposed of. Now do the arithmetic: wind generated about 4 per cent of our total energy in 2020 (people find this number hard to believe, but it’s true: not electricity, note, energy). But only in the second half of its life is a wind farm saving emissions. So all the UK’s wind farms are reducing the nation’s emissions by just 2 per cent, or 0.02 per cent of global emissions.
If you think net zero matters – and even if you don’t – all this is crucial. Why don’t Tory MPs know this kind of stuff? The one thing the wind industry is really, really good at is selling itself. It never mentions intermittency and hides the scale of its contribution to decarbonisation by talking about ‘powering a thousand homes’, a meaningless metric. Somehow the wind farm has become the symbol of environmental virtue as potent as the crucifix. And we are all paying the price.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-tories-wind-power-delusion/
********************************************************France refires coal plant amid energy woes
The end of France’s coal era seemed so certain last year that the operator of one of the country’s last coal-burning plants posted an upbeat educational video on YouTube titled “Let’s visit a coal plant that's going to be destroyed!”
The plant in the northeastern town of Saint-Avold indeed halted coal production as scheduled earlier this year — but not for long. This week, its workers were back at the controls, transporting coal from storage heaps and refiring furnaces, as part of emergency efforts to keep the heat and electricity on this winter.
The energy crisis across Europe unleashed by Russia’s war in Ukraine has paved the way for coal’s comeback in some regions, to the dismay of politicians and activists who warn this endangers climate goals, the climate itself and public health.
“Working here we know the negative impact of the coal plant, but nonetheless we see it as a necessary evil," said shift supervisor Thomas About at the Emile-Huchet Power Plant in Saint-Avold.
“Given the current state of the electrical network, I nonetheless fear greatly that this production tool is necessary in the medium term," he told The Associated Press.
Nearby, wheel loaders scooped mounds of coal and dumped it onto conveyor belts, and gray fumes rose from the plant's smokestacks.
In France the return to coal is surprising because the country started phasing it out decades ago and relies heavily on nuclear power instead. But this year, on top of Russia largely cutting off natural gas to Europe, nearly half of France’s nuclear reactors shut down for maintenance or corrosion and other problems.
Facing a worst-case scenario of rolling power cuts to households, the government issued a decree in September to allow Saint-Avold to start again and continued activity at another coal plant in western France, citing the “exceptional” and “unforeseeable” context of energy supply challenges.
President Emmanuel Macron had initially vowed to close all coal-burning plants in the country by the end of this year due to climate-related concerns.
The impact of the backtrack will largely be felt locally, since coal plays only a minor role in France's energy mix nationwide. The two coal plants produced a maximum of 3% of France's electricity Tuesday, according to the national grid operator, compared to some 60% from nuclear plants.
The government has called on the French for a 10% reduction in energy use in the coming months, including by limiting heating, to avoid the risk of rationing and cuts this winter. Government spokesperson Olivier Veran said Wednesday that people reduced on average their electricity consumption by 5% in October.
The government insists the return to coal will be temporary.
The company that operates the Saint-Avold plant, GazelEnergie, is continuing its work to transition the site to the “post-coal” future, with projects for biomass and hydrogen-based energy.
Workers like About hope that future comes soon.
“This page will be turned one day," he said. “Let’s hope it will be turned quickly, so that this unit produces as little as possible.”
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/evil-france-refires-coal-plant-amid-energy-woes-94210436 ?
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Renewables have become the West's new blood diamonds
Wealth, with no ethical or moral standards for those of lesser means, can be dangerous and fatal to the cheap labor of disposable workforces.
We have seen the effects on the disposable workforce when Qatar “needed” to build seven stadiums in a decade to be ready for the 2022 World Cup. The World Cup in Qatar kicked off on Nov. 20 at Al Bayt Stadium, but the “acceptable” toll of more than 6,500 migrant laborers who died between 2011 and 2020, helping to build World Cup infrastructure with a cheap, disposable workforce, will provide viewers and participants with many lingering questions about our ethical and moral beliefs resulting from the grim toll.
Decades ago, it was sweatshops in the textile industry that grabbed the world’s humanitarian attention. Today it is the green movement, which is dominated by poorer developing countries mining the exotic minerals and metals that support the wealthy countries that are going green at a great cost to humanity.
The wealthy countries understand that developing countries have virtually no environmental laws or labor laws, which allows those locations unlimited opportunities to exploit people with yellow, brown and black skin and inflict environmental degradation on their landscapes.
Showing no moral or ethical concerns for the disposable workforce, wealthy countries continue to encourage subsidies to procure electric vehicles and build more wind and solar energy infrastructure. Those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those green materials to continue their exploitation of poor people and environmental degradation of their landscapes.
The 2021 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations” reveals the lack of transparency regarding the green movement’s impact on humanity. Exploitation is occurring in developing countries that are mining the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy.” In these developing countries, mining operations exploit child labor and are responsible for egregious human rights violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation.
Last month, President Biden provided validation to the book’s message when his administration declared that batteries from China may be tainted by child labor, a move that could upend the electric vehicle industry while giving fresh ammunition to critics of the White House’s bizarre climate policies.
The Department of Labor said it would add lithium-ion batteries to a list of goods made with materials known to be produced with child or forced labor under a 2006 human trafficking law. The decision was based on many batteries using cobalt, a mineral largely mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children have been found to work at some mining sites. The department released the list in the form of a report that excoriated “clean energy” supply chains for using forced labor. It grouped Chinese batteries together with polysilicon — a key material used in solar panel cells — made in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Whatever the plan to satisfy our sports entertainment values and “green” environmental policies, our political leaders best not forget that they have ethical and moral responsibilities to continue to address the quality-of-life needs of those 8 billion on this planet now.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/30/exploitation-of-green-energy/
**************************************************Australia: The Energy Minister's timetable for solar panel and giant wind turbine installation has collided with the roadblock of cold, hard reality
The good news is that the green jobs revolution we were promised in Labor’s Powering Australia plan has begun. The bad news is that most of the new jobs are in China, where a third of a million workers are employed manufacturing panels alone.
China controls 95 per cent of global photovoltaic panel production and its grip on the market is increasing. Manufacturing clean-energy units is a dirty business requiring a lot of energy, 60 per cent of which comes from coal. The International Energy Authority estimates that global production of solar panels is responsible for 51 mega tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year, some 60 per cent more than Australia’s entire industrial manufacturing sector.
Four out of 10 solar panels are manufactured in Xinjiang, the home of the Uighur ethnic minority, an estimated million of whom live in concentration camps. The US Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which came into force this year, creates a presumption that anything made in Xinjiang uses modern slave labour and cannot be imported into the US without clear and compelling evidence to the contrary.
That ugly debate has barely surfaced in Australia where the virtue of Labor’s legislated targets is simply assumed. Energy Minister Chris Bowen has faced next to no scrutiny from the gallery about his failure to deliver cheaper electricity or the wisdom of relying on brutish communist China for our future energy security.
Buried in the fine print of last week’s first annual progress report to parliament by the Climate Change Authority is a warning that our dependence on China for renewable energy infrastructure leaves us vulnerable to a geopolitical shock not unlike that European nations now face because of reliance on Russian gas and coal.
High commodity prices and supply chain challenges have increased the price of solar panels by 20 per cent in a year. There are similar rises in the price of batteries and, while Australia might benefit in the short term as one of the world’s largest sources of lithium, most of it is processed in China.
Bowen said last week that the Climate Change Authority’s warning will “need to be an ongoing focus”, which is some way short of saying he is taking it particularly seriously.
The authority’s statement to parliament exposes the modelling Labor relied upon for its Powering the Nation plan as worthless. A year ago, Anthony Albanese claimed the Reputex modelling was “the most comprehensive modelling ever done for any policy by any opposition in Australia’s history since Federation”. Now we learn its key objective, a 43 per cent emissions cut by 2030, won’t be achieved with the current settings.
The forecast of a $275 decrease in household energy bills in Labor’s first term went out the window long ago. Treasury forecasts energy bills will rise by 56 per cent in the next two years.
The promise of green jobs will be partly fulfilled, but it seems highly unlikely there will be anywhere near the 600,000 Labor promised or that many of them will continue beyond the construction phase.
Our reliance on the Saudi Arabia of solar panels is only one of the risks that makes the fulfilment of Labor’s grand plan highly improbable. The authority notes community acceptance, or social licence, cannot be taken for granted.
Australians may be in favour of clean energy in theory but they don’t want a wind or solar mega-plant in their backyard. Nor do they welcome the new transmission lines that connect them. Opposition is growing in regional and rural communities from Tasmania to Townsville.
In summary, Bowen’s timetable of installing 670,000 solar panels and 40 giant wind turbines every month from now until the end of the decade has collided with the roadblock of cold, hard reality. The only way to make the grid accommodate 82 per cent of greenish energy in the mix will be to hasten the exit of coal and gas and shut down heavy industry.
Rather than admit its pre-election modelling was wrong or bow to the economic reality that the huge capital investment in wind, solar, storage and transmission will push up the cost of energy, the government is resorting to coercion. If the markets won’t conform to the government’s perfect plan, they must be forced to do so.
Placing a ceiling on the price of coal and gas is one of the crudest forms of economic interventions known to humankind. Rather than address the shortage of supply, the government plans to add another disincentive to new investment.
Milton Friedman said the surest way to turn tomatoes into scarce commodities was to pass a law to prevent them being sold for more than two cents per pound. “Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage,” he said in 1978. “It’s the same with oil or gas.”
Rising coal and gas prices are not the fault of Vladimir Putin, greedy energy company boards or a shortage of investment in wind, solar and batteries. They are the predictable consequence of placing unreasonable financial and regulatory burdens on the investment of capital in new and expanded resource extraction.
The distortions are already apparent. Woodside Energy is threatening to withhold new gas investment on Australia’s east coast, where the shortage of gas is most keenly felt. Who can blame it if the size of the return on its capital will be determined by political decisions made in Canberra.
Bowen, sadly, is not the kind of person to reach for a plan B, even if he had one. Those who have dealt with the minister say he does not welcome contrary advice. Just ask Paul Broad, the former chief executive of Snowy Hydro, who resigned after falling out with Bowen over the technological readiness of so-called green hydrogen.
Friedrich Hayek could have been thinking of Bowen when he described the mindset of the central planner: “The man of system … so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.”
The Prime Minister would do well to use his Christmas break to consider an early cabinet reshuffle.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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