Nuclear Phaseouts Strike Again
One of the pivotal issues of last year’s Spanish election was whether the country would continue on course to phase out their nuclear fleet by 2035.
The 2023 election was not a clear-cut victory for any party. Both the country’s left- and right-wing parties were unable to immediately form a government. There were multiple attempts by the right-wing Popular Party, which won the most votes, to form a coalition, but they each failed.
Before the July 2023 election, leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo promised to reverse the country’s nuclear phaseout policy, stating that, “It will be a policy of my government to reverse the planned decommissioning and extend the life of our nuclear power plants.” Feijóo has acknowledged the difficulty of losing more than one fifth of the country’s generation capacity, and the electricity price impacts that such a change would be likely to create.
Following the failure of the Popular Party to form a coalition, Pedro Sánchez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, who was Prime Minister in 2019 when the nuclear phaseout initially passed, was able to successfully form a government on November 16th.
The Sánchez government has acted quickly to reaffirm its commitment to closing the country’s seven nuclear reactors.
On December 26th, the Council of Ministers (the main decision-making body of the Spanish government), approved the Seventh General Plan for Radioactive Waste. This plan contained the final schedule for the decommissioning process of the country’s reactors. The first closure will occur in 2027, with the final closure slated for 2035.
That same week, the Ministry for Ecological Transition announced 150 million euros in subsidies for 904 Megawatts (MW) of energy storage projects, which will be co-located at solar and wind facilities. This announcement is part of a broader commitment to build renewables and storage.
Closing nuclear plants and attempting to replace them with wind, solar, and storage is no way to run a grid, as Germany recently showed the world.
Germany’s nuclear phaseout has resulted in more expensive electricity. This gave pause to many countries planning phaseouts of their own, so why are Spanish leaders refusing to learn from the mistakes of their neighbor? The lesson of Germany’s nuclear phaseout is one that the Spanish government refuses to learn.
Spain must either maintain (and possibly expand) its electrical output or commit to a lower quality of life for its citizens. Spanish electricity consumption is expected to grow slightly in the coming years. Closing its nuclear power plants will result in rising prices, increased grid vulnerability, and the risk of blackouts.
Policymakers in the United States and globally should certainly not follow the Spanish example.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/01/15/nuclear-phaseouts-strike-again/
**************************************************Britain's Net Zero Disaster & The Wind Power Scam
Net zero was sold to Parliament and the British people on claims that wind-power costs were low and falling. This was untrue: Wind-power costs are high and have been rising. In the net-zero version of “crypto will make you rich,” official analyses produced by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility rely on the falsehood that wind power is cheap, that net zero would have minimal costs, and that it could boost productivity and economic growth. None of these has any basis in reality.
The push for net zero began in 2019, when the UK’s Climate Change Committee produced a report urging the government to adopt the policy. Part of the justification was historic climate guilt. In the words of committee chair Lord Deben, Britain had been “one of the largest historical contributors to climate change.” But the key economic justification for raising Britain’s decarbonization from 80 percent to 100 percent by 2050—i.e., net zero—was “rapid cost reductions during mass deployment for key technologies,” notably in offshore wind. These illusory cost reductions, the committee claimed, “have made tighter emission reduction targets achievable at the same costs as previous looser targets.” It was green snake oil.
During the subsequent 88-minute debate in the House of Commons to write net zero into law, the clean-energy minister, Chris Skidmore, also asserted that net zero’s cost would be the same as the previous 80 percent target, which Parliament had approved in 2008. Challenged by a Labour MP on the absence of a regulatory-impact assessment, Mr. Skidmore misled Parliament, saying that there had been no regulatory-impact assessment in respect of raising the initial 60 percent target to 80 percent.
The regulatory-impact assessment that Mr. Skidmore says doesn’t exist gave a range of £324 billion (about $412 billion) to £404 billion when the target was raised to 80 percent—an estimate that excluded transitional costs—and cautioned that costs could exceed this range. Unlike today’s political pronouncements, the assessment was honest about the consequences of Britain acting if the rest of the world didn't. “The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak,” it warned.
The Climate Change Act was passed to show Britain’s climate leadership and inspire the rest of the world to follow its example. How did that work out? In the 11 years that transpired from passing the Act to legislating net zero in 2019, Britain’s fossil fuel emissions fell by 180 million metric tons—a 33 percent reduction. Over the same period, the rest of the world’s emissions increased by 5,177 million metric tons—a rise of 16 percent. Put another way, 11 years of British emissions reduction were wiped out in about 140 days by increased emissions from the rest of the world.
Someone who claims that he’s a leader but who has no followers is typically regarded as a fool. It’s different with climate. Politicians parade their green virtue—Mr. Skidmore is to quit the House of Commons, and he teaches net-zero studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School—while voters get mugged with higher energy bills. Analysis of Britain’s Big Six energy companies’ regulatory filings reveals that fuel-input costs for gas- and coal-fired power stations were flat from 2009 to 2020. Still, the average price per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity paid by households rose 67 percent, driven by high environmental levies to subsidize renewable-energy investors. Yet, supposedly, the cost of renewable energy has plummeted.
During Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this year, Rishi Sunak claimed that the cost of offshore wind had fallen from £140 per megawatt hour (MWh) to £40 per MWh, numbers assiduously propagated by the wind lobby and the Climate Change Committee. His claim is flat-out false. The prime minister has been suckered by falling per MWh price bids made by wind investors in successive allocation-round bids for offshore wind subsidies.
The explanation for this is to be found not in falling costs but in a flawed bidding process that rewards opportunistic bidding by wind investors. The government was giving away valuable options that commit the government to honor the prices paid for winning bids but commit investors to nothing. Because investors don’t pay anything for these options, the only way they can get them is by cutting the price they offer—but aren't obliged to take—for their electricity unless they choose to exercise their options much later in the process.
Falling prices in successive allocation rounds are thus an artifact of moral hazard hardwired into the allocation mechanism; they reveal nothing about the trend in the costs of offshore wind. Analysis of audited financial data of wind farm companies undertaken by a handful of independent researchers comprehensively debunks the falling wind costs claim. The unavoidable move to deeper waters offset any cost reductions and operating costs per MWh of electricity for new offshore wind projects; the prices for the move are about double those assumed in the subsidy bids.
Preeminent among these researchers is Gordon Hughes, a former economics professor at the University of Edinburgh and adviser to the World Bank on power plant economics. Mr. Hughes’s analysis shows that by the 12th year of operation, rising per-MWh operating costs of deep-water wind turbines exceed their government-guaranteed prices, squeezing out their capacity to repay their capital and financing costs
The intermittency and variability of wind and solar led the government to create a capacity market to pay for standby generation. In any economic appraisal of renewables, the costs of running the capacity market should be allocated to wind and solar as their intermittency and variability create the need for it. Electricity procured from the capacity market isn't cheap. In 2020, German-owned Uniper’s thermal power stations obtained an average price of £224 per MWh, about four times the typical wholesale price.
Confirmation that offshore wind has huge, likely insuperable, cost and operating difficulties came in June, when Siemens Energy issued a shock profits warning and saw its shares plunge by 37 percent, in part because of higher-than-anticipated turbine failure rates. According to Mr. Hughes, the implication is that future wind operating costs will be higher, and output significantly lower, shortening the turbines’ economic lives. His conclusion is crushing:
“The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger wind turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified. ... It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe, and the United States are based on foundations of sand—naive optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.”
The British government has been conned into placing a massive bet on offshore wind and is forcing electricity consumers to spend billions of pounds on a dead-end technology.
The falling cost of wind deception contaminates official assessments of the macroeconomic consequences of net zero. The Office for Budget Responsibility claims that the cost of low-carbon generation has fallen so fast that it's now cheaper than fossil fuel generation. Similarly, the Treasury erroneously took falling prices in wind subsidy allocation rounds as an indication of falling wind costs. Both see the economy riddled with multiple layers of market failures, while not recognizing the real danger of government policy being captured by vested interests, as, indeed, it has been. Taken to its logical conclusion, theirs is an argument for switching to central planning and a command-and-control economy.
The Treasury argues that “other things being equal,” the added investment required by renewable energy “will translate into additional GDP growth.” Other things, of course, aren't equal. As recent history shows, there’s a world of difference between investors and politicians making capital-allocation decisions. The centrally planned economies of the former communist bloc squandered colossal amounts of capital, immiserating their populations. Few now believe that investment in those economies boosted growth.
We don’t need to hypothesize. Government data disprove the Treasury’s contention and demonstrate that increasing deployment of renewable capacity reduces the productivity of Britain’s grid. In 2009, 87.3 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity, including only 5.1 percent of wind and solar, generated 376.8 terrawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. In 2020, 100.9 GW of generating capacity, with wind and solar accounting for 37.6 percent of capacity, produced 312.3 TWh of electricity. Thanks to renewables, 13.6 GW (15.6 percent) more generating capacity produced 64.5 TWh (17.1 percent) less electricity.
Those numbers are damning for renewables and demonstrate why they make electricity more expensive and people poorer. Before mass deployment of renewables, 1 MW of capacity in 2009 produced 4,312 MWh of electricity. In 2020, 1 MW of capacity generated 3,094 MWh, a decline of 28.3 percent. It’s as clear as can be: Investment in renewables shrinks the economy’s productive potential. This is confirmed by the International Energy Agency’s net-zero modeling. Its net-zero pathway sees the global energy sector in 2030 employing nearly 25 million more people, using $16.5 trillion more capital, and taking an additional land area the combined size of California and Texas for wind and solar farms and the combined size of Mexico and France for bioenergy—all to produce 7 percent less energy.
Britain’s energy-policy disaster has lessons for the United States. The physics and economics of wind power aren't magically transformed when they cross the Atlantic. Whenever a politician or wind lobbyist touts wind as low-cost or says net zero will boost growth, they become accessories to the wind power scam. The data lead ineluctably to a decisive conclusion: Net zero is anti-growth. It's a formula for prolonged economic stagnation. Anyone who wants the truth about renewables should look at Britain and the sorry state of its economy. For the past decade and a half, it has been going through its worst period of growth since 1780.
Unlike in business and finance, there are no criminal or civil penalties for those who promote policies based on fraud and misrepresentation. Rather, net zero is similar to communism. Like net zero, communism was based on a lie: that it would outproduce capitalism. But it failed to produce, and belief in communism evaporated. When the collapse came, it was sudden and rapid. The truth couldn't be hidden. A similar fate awaits net zero.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/britains-net-zero-disaster-wind-power-scam
***********************************************************As Wind and Solar Power Falter, U.N. Climate Agreement Becomes Wishful Thinking
Despite the lip service that governments, nongovernmental organizations and the media continue to pay to wind and solar power, most notably at the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai—where some 200 countries signed a nonbinding agreement pledging their support for “transitioning away from fossil fuels”—some global leaders realize that wind and solar energy won’t do the trick and that fossil fuels will be here for a long, long time.
Sweden, for example, recently announced a major bet on nuclear energy and the United States and others have pledged to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.
Meanwhile, in the third quarter of 2023 alone, China permitted more coal-fired power plants than in all of 2021. Scores of solar and wind energy projects and investments have been canceled or put on hold as costs begin to catch up with reality, and production seems nowhere near where it should be to meet humanity’s needs.
Accepting reality has nothing to do with denying climate change or even that human activity plays a role alongside the natural climate cycle. It’s simply a question of understanding that political decrees and propaganda eventually collide with truth.
The truth is that (1) producing a unit of wind or solar energy requires a significant amount of energy, which defeats the purpose and makes for highly inefficient results, and (2) the declining cost of wind and solar power over the last decade was a function of artificially low interest rates and an abundance of cheap fossil fuels, thanks to the “fracking” revolution.
Regarding truth No. 1, to produce a unit of power output, wind requires three times as much and solar six times as much traditional energy as a combined-cycle natural gas plant. That’s because solar panels and wind turbines require lots of raw materials that depend on fossil fuels.
Regarding truth No. 2, green energy’s low-cost boom appears to be over. Clean energy is getting more expensive. Until recently, wind and solar advocates were touting the dramatic decline since 2010 in the cost of renewables, as measured in dollars per megawatt-hour. But that was a function of cheap capital and cheap energy.
The shale revolution that began 15 years ago turned the world’s biggest energy consumer, the United States, into its biggest energy producer, dramatically lowering energy prices. For example, North Dakota’s Bakken field increased its production sevenfold in the years leading up to 2020.
Other fields, including the Permian basin in west Texas and the Marcellus field in the Appalachian basin (Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York), experienced similar growth.
Unsurprisingly, the price of oil [West Texas Intermediate] declined from $196 per barrel in June 2008 to $73 per barrel in early 2020, pre-pandemic, while the price of natural gas [Henry Hub] fell from $18 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) to $2 per MMBtu.
Given that the wind and solar industries need energy-intensive materials such as steel, concrete and copper, the low price of oil and natural gas kept their production costs down. But that has changed, helping to drive up the cost of solar energy by 60% since 2021 and the cost of wind power by 30%.
Capital was also cheap. The Federal Reserve slashed the federal funds effective rate from 5.26% in mid-2007 to essentially 0% by the end of 2008 and basically kept it there until 2016, when it began to rise slightly, reaching 2.4% in 2019, well below its mid-2007 level, when it began to fall again. The fight against inflation brought things back to reality. The current rate is about 5.33%.
The double whammy of higher energy and borrowing costs that have hit renewables is unlikely to go away in the near future—though one should never underestimate the ability (and willingness) of politicians to do the same stupid thing again and again. Nevertheless, it seems improbable we’ll see trillions of dollars of zero-interest debt again anytime soon.
Given the decline of the shale fields’ output (with the exception of the Permian basin, but that too seems close to its peak) and the scant investment in traditional energy because of the environmental, social and governance-driven political environment, the dynamics of supply and demand do not point to a sustained return of the low energy prices that renewables ironically depend on.
That’s why we will see more green projects canceled, more countries betting on nuclear energy (forgetting their knee-jerk reactions to the Fukushima, Japan, reactor accident in 2011), and oil, natural gas and coal continuing to enjoy a long life.
According to the International Energy Agency, trillions of dollars have been invested in wind and solar power. This year alone, the figure is about $600 billion. Yet wind and solar represent only about 12% of total electricity generation.
Imagine what would have happened had they not benefited from ultra-cheap capital and energy, not to mention the generous taxpayer subsidies many governments provided. A sober rethinking is long overdue.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14776&omhide=true&trk=title
********************************************************Australia: Charity warns vulnerable households bearing brunt of green energy schemes
A leading charity has called for a major shake-up of green scheme costs and tariffs in the power market, saying they were currently disadvantaging poorer and vulnerable households.
St Vincent de Paul, in its latest report into the residential electricity market, found prices for both power and gas rocketed on average last year as part of the hangover from the energy crisis in 2022.
The report found costs across the board rose as turmoil in the wholesale markets collided with increased interest rates for poles-and-wires companies.
It also found that green scheme costs to encourage the uptake of clean energy were rising quickly as governments tried to fast-track the transition.
They now accounted for between nine and 12 per cent of a typical household energy bill, the charity found, and were highest in Victoria at $188 a year for a customer using 6,000-kilowatt hours.
Among the schemes were the federal government's large- and small-scale renewable energy targets, while Vinnies noted each state had its own policies that contributed to costs.
Central to the charity's concerns was the way the costs were recovered.
Costs not shared equitably
Vinnies manager of policy and research Gavin Dufty said these costs were typically moved on to the consumption charges of all customers.
Mr Dufty said variable consumption charges were still the main way power retailers recovered their costs, with fixed supply charges making up a much smaller portion of a household's bill.
He said households which were able to afford and install clean technology such as solar panels, batteries and heat pumps were able to avoid many of these charges by generating and storing much of their own electricity.
However, he said many other households, especially poorer and tenanted ones, did not have the same flexibility.
"I think it's the legacy of the old market," Mr Dufty said.
"We had an old vertically integrated market where households didn't have new technologies that they could bolt onto their homes like batteries and solar.
"So the costs were sort of shared evenly – if you consumed a little bit more, well you paid a little bit more.
"But now that households, through the types of appliances they have, can sort of make significant changes to their consumption, it does become quite regressive.
"The costs aren't shared."
According to Vinnies, the disparity in how green scheme costs were shared was a problem that "warrants a debate around how governments pass on the cost" of the policies.
The group said consolidated revenue and taxation would be more equitable but noted public balance sheets were already overstretched.
Another option, it said, would be "to only apply green scheme costs to usage above a set threshold".
Green gulf to get worse
Regardless, it said urgent changes were needed because the inequity would only get worse as more and more households that were able to added clean technology.
"We're not saying we shouldn't do that," Mr Dufty said of pursuing green energy schemes. "It's about how we allocate those costs."
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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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