The electric car ‘revolution’ is a disaster before it’s begun
The electric car revolution is stalling, of that there can no longer be any doubt. It has left the big global carmakers floundering, uncertain of how to proceed in a race they reluctantly entered in the first place.
Electrification was initially met with fierce resistance. But once politicians held a gun to the heads of company bosses with a series of cliff-edge deadlines for phasing out the combustion engine, carmakers had little choice but to go all-in.
Century-old business models were declared dead and ambitious plans hurriedly drawn up to electrify entire portfolios from small city run-arounds to family saloons and SUVs, at astronomical cost. Even Ferrari has embraced the movement – much to the consternation of petrolheads everywhere.
But with electrification barely off the starting grid, one by one the big carmakers are already pulling back as demand badly falters.
Volkswagen is so concerned about flagging sales that it has taken the extraordinary decision of halting electric vehicle production at one of its biggest plants. Assembly lines for electric models will be paused for six weeks at the Emden factory in northwest Germany and 300 of its 1,500 staff laid off after sales fell 30pc short of forecasts.
This means production of the new VW ID.7 electric model, which had been due to commence in July will be pushed back until the end of the year. The ID.4 electric SUV and the upcoming ID.7 electric sedan will also be delayed.
“We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector,” plant boss Manfred Wulff said.
That is remarkably plain language from the largest car manufacturer on the planet, and a company that recently announced plans to invest €120bn (£103bn) over the next five years in “electrification and digitalisation”.
It comes months after Ford poured cold water on the shift to electric with thousands of job losses in Europe. Electric vehicle production is unable to support anything like the same number of jobs that petrol and diesel models are able to sustain, it said. Boss Jim Farley estimates that 40pc fewer staff will be needed to develop battery versions.
A generation of pure electric vehicle makers has hardly fared any better. On Tuesday, Lordstown Motors, the US electric truck specialist that Donald Trump once heralded as the saviour of a depressed Ohio town, filed for bankruptcy protection.
Even Elon Musk has been forced to repeatedly cut the price of Teslas in a desperate effort to prop up demand and protect market share.
But it’s the setback at VW that stands out, raising serious questions about whether politicians are making the catastrophic mistake of forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them. Indeed, the decision to impose strict deadlines for the phase out of petrol cars could turn out to be one of the most ruinous policy decisions of our lifetimes.
Think about it for a second: an entire industry not only forced to abandon a product that the vast majority of people still want and use, but also bullied into channelling all its resources into making something on a colossal level that there simply isn’t the market for – at least not within the horrendously short timeframe that is being imposed on car manufacturers.
It’s industrial self-sabotage and a commercial, economic and social catastrophe in the making. But what’s worse is that the damage risks being far greater in the UK than anywhere else in the Western world thanks to the Government’s myopic obsession with arbitrary net zero targets.
While the rest of the industrial world seems to have largely settled on a 2035 deadline for petrol and diesel phase out, ministers, for reasons destined to remain a mystery, have decided Britain needs to hit this milestone five years earlier than everyone else.
It makes no sense at all, and yet the ramifications threaten to be huge. By diverting capital into something that lots of people essentially don’t want, it risks inflicting massive losses on an already fragile UK car industry.
It is pure fantasy to imagine that Britain – with a dearth of battery factories (consultants Alix Partners estimates as much as a third of Britain’s battery requirements will need to be imported), a paucity of chargers and dramatically higher energy costs – will be in any position to go fully electric in the next seven years. And the Government simply isn’t capable of solving any of these challenges in time, if at all.
The UK risks becoming the unfortunate guinea pig in a costly and dangerous experiment that persuades the rest of the world to push their own deadlines out even further, turning this country into an example of how not to become a nation of electric car owners.
***************************************************
Wind turbine troubles have sent one stock tumbling. There are fears it could be a much wider issue
Siemens Energy stock plunged by around 37% on June 23, while other wind companies also saw shares retreat as investors worried that the problems at Gamesa might be a symptom of a wider issue for the industry.
“We have been aware for some time that turbine failure rates across the industry can — and should — be more widely understood,” Evgenia Golysheva, vice president of strategy and marketing at ONYX Insight, told CNBC.
Industry body WindEurope denied that industry-wide technical failures could be on the horizon, insisting that “the problems at Siemens Gamesa are limited to Siemens Gamesa.”
Costly failures at wind turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa last month sent shares of parent company Siemens Energy tumbling, and analysts are concerned about wider teething problems across the industry.
The German energy giant scrapped its profit guidance in late June, citing a “substantial increase in failure rates of wind turbine components” at its wind division Siemens Gamesa.
Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch told journalists on a call Friday that “too much had been swept under the carpet” at Siemens Gamesa and that the quality issues were “more severe than [he] thought possible.”
Siemens Energy stock plunged by around 37% on June 23, while other wind companies also saw shares retreat as investors worried that the problems at Gamesa might be a symptom of a wider issue for the industry.
Nicholas Green, head of EU capital goods and industrial technology at AllianceBernstein, told CNBC that the pace of expansion, and the fact that many components of larger turbines haven’t actually been in use for very long, means there could be inherent risks throughout the sector.
“We have to acknowledge that putting brand new machinery — whether it’s on-shore or even more difficult off-shore wind farms — and the pace of change in that machinery has put us into slightly uncharted territory,” he said.
“Although it’s hard to tell at the moment, my best guess is that this probably actually is an industry-wide issue. It wasn’t that Siemens Gamesa is a bad operator as such, it’s that actually some of the normal protocols and time in use, operational data in use, is relatively limited.”
Siemens Gamesa’s board is now due to conduct an “extended technical review” into the issue, which is expected to incur costs in excess of 1 billion euros ($1.09 billion). The company’s shares have recouped some losses, but remain down over 33% in the last month.
******************************************
As predicted, wind industry blackmails the UK – demands yet more subsidies
Net Zero Watch has urged the Government to stand up for consumers and businesses by rejecting the wind industry’s latest demands for more subsidies.
In a move that gives the lie to years of propaganda claiming falling costs, the wind industry’s leading lobbyists have written to the Government, threatening to abandon the UK unless there are hugely increased subsidies for their companies (see RenewableUK press release).
The industry is claiming that unforeseen rising costs now necessitate and justify three actions:
1) A vast increase in the budget for the fifth auction (AR5) of Contracts for Difference subsidies, with an increase of two and half times the current levels for non-floating offshore wind alone;
2) Special new targets and thus market shares for floating offshore wind, one of the most expensive of all forms of generation, and, most importantly of all,
3) a revision to the auction rules so that the winners are not determined by lowest bids but by an administrative decision that weights bids according to their “value” in contributing towards the Net Zero targets.
This would in effect not only increase total subsidy to an industry that was until recently claiming to be so cheap that it no longer needed public support, but also provide it with protected market shares, all but entirely de-risking investors at the expense of consumers.
It would also be an open invitation to graft and corruption.
The Government should reject these self-serving demands on three grounds:
1. The UK economy cannot be expected to continue to subsidise a sector that is still uneconomic after nearly twenty years of above-market prices and guaranteed market share. The wind experiment has failed and must be wound down.
2. UK consumers of all kinds, from households to businesses, are already experiencing extreme pressures on budgets, and a further burden on the energy bill simply cannot be tolerated. Government must recognise that households and businesses are unable to afford yet more subsidies to the wind industry.
3. The industry’s current cost difficulties are neither unforeseen nor unpredicted but have been obvious to careful observers for over a decade.
Dr John Constable, NZW’s energy director, said:
"It would be both absurd and counterproductive for government to bail out the wind industry in spite of the evident failure to reduce costs. A refusal to learn from mistakes will be disastrous."
**********************************************
No, Forbes, Climate Change is Not Behind the Sriracha Shortage
A recent Forbes article claims that the recent shortage of the popular hot sauce “Sriracha” is likely due to climate change. This is false. Natural weather patterns in the region of Mexico Sriracha’s chili peppers are grown are not due to the modest warming the earth has experienced over the past decades. Furthermore, a few years of poor production in one region is not evidence of a long-term impact.
The article, “Why Sriracha Prices Are Surging, And Why Climate Change Might Have Something To Do With It,” claims that a production shortage of the chili peppers used by the Hoy Fong company to make sriracha hot sauce is due to “an ongoing drought exacerbated by human-caused climate change,” as well as “back-to-back La Niña events that prolonged it in northern Mexico, where the chilis are grown.”
The recent drought in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico has been held up as proof of the impacts of climate change by many alarmists. The Forbes article repeats the claim that the drought, which has now abated according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, is part of the “the driest 22-year period in more than 1,200 years,” quoting a popularly cited study in Nature Climate Change.
The drought has been overhyped, however. This particular paper published in Nature Climate Change has been covered by Climate Realism writer and meteorologist Anthony Watts previously, in “Sorry, New York Times and NPR, Megadroughts Have Been Far, Far, Worse Than Today,” along with a similar study here.
In the first post, Watts explains that the study authors narrowly defined “megadrought” in order to compose the narrative that the recent 22-year dry spell was the worst in 1200 years.
Other studies that also use tree ring data, like the Nature Climate Change paper, show much longer and more intense dry periods in the southwest in the past, especially in the Middle Ages.
Since the recent drought is not outside of natural variability, what about the triple-dip La Niña events?
La Niña is also a natural event, not due to climate change. It is the cool-phase counterpart to the warming phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a naturally-occurring sea surface temperature pattern in the Pacific. La Niña involves cooler-than-normal water temperatures, and usually causes unusually dry weather in the southwestern United States and Mexico, and unusually wet weather in Western Pacific areas like Australia. While the three La Niña events in a row is a rare situation, it’s not unprecedented. La Niña is not getting more intense due to climate change, as covered by Climate Realism, here, for example.
The Huy Fong sriracha sauce got its start on a small scale in the mid-1980s, meaning the company should have been around for previous extended La Niña events, but it is unclear the company was producing such a volume of hot sauce, or even getting peppers from the same region, during that period.
On the agricultural side of the claim, publicly available data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for chilies and other peppers grown in Mexico show indeed there has been a recent decline in production, since about 2019 through 2021, and presumably into 2022, which corresponds with the recent La Niña events. (See figure below)
Chili pepper production in Mexico hit an all-time production record high as recently as 2018, and in fact saw production records broken fifteen times between 1990 and 2020, a timeframe which has supposedly seen warming which alarmists claim is “catastrophic.”
Fortunately, with the forecasted return of the warmer El Niño this year, the issues hindering Huy Fong’s chili source in northern Mexico should decline, if indeed La Niña conditions were to blame instead of some unmentioned agricultural issues.
Regional weather patterns and agricultural shortages are not proof of impacts from climate change, nor can climate change be blamed for those shortages.
Data does not indicate that the regional weather in Northern Mexico since 2019 is more extreme because of the modest warming of global average surface temperature, nor are chili pepper crops in general in any danger. If they were, one would expect evidence to show up in agricultural production data over time.
In fact, crop production woes of a single hot sauce company are not indicative of any kind of widespread climate chaos, or weather issues. Even if Huy Fong sriracha sauce is not currently on shelves, other companies’ similar sriracha chili sauces that have the same ingredients are still widely available, and Forbes would have been wise to point that out, instead of doom-peddling over a particular brand.
https://climaterealism.com/2023/06/no-forbes-climate-change-is-not-behind-the-sriracha-shortage/
***************************************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
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment