Eiffel power – France’s nuclear charge
As a consistent supporter of nuclear energy, it is encouraging to see a new French energy bill reaffirming the country’s commitment to nuclear power as ‘energy sovereignty’.
The draft bill omits setting targets for solar power, wind power, and other renewables, in favour of expanding ‘the sustainable choice of using nuclear energy as a competitive and carbon-free’ source of electricity.
This development follows a new wave of support for nuclear energy at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai last year. France’s President Emmanuel Macron led the pledge which signed up 21 world leaders to ‘triple nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050’. After signing he cheered: ‘Nuclear energy is back!’
Across the world, many countries are turning to atomic energy and rethinking their renewables targets.
In July 2023, the Swedish Parliament dumped its 100 per cent renewable target in order to build new nuclear plants claiming it needs a stable and reliable energy source.
South Africa, battling crippling energy blackouts, announced plans to add 2,500 megawatts of new nuclear generation within the next decade to resolve power shortages and secure long-term energy supply.
South Korea have reversed their phase-out of nuclear power acknowledging its efficiency in a time of rapid electrification of industry and everyday life.
Even after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, by 2015 the Japanese government had re-started the nuclear power industry with a target of reaching 20 per cent of the national electricity supply by 2030. Last year, Japan’s Cabinet approved the construction of new power plants and extended the lifespans of its existing reactors to 60 years.
While some nations are phasing out nuclear in favour of renewables, their dependency on importing electricity is growing. After Germany shut down the country’s last three nuclear power plants in April 2023, they have found themselves relying on imports from both France and Belgium’s nuclear-integrated power grids.
Nuclear energy remains a reliable, stable, and carbon-free energy source around the world, and Australia, as a world supplier of uranium, should embrace its energy opportunities too.
There are 60 nuclear power reactors currently under construction around the world and a further 110 are planned. There are 440 operating in 33 countries and an additional 30 countries considering, planning, and commencing nuclear power programs.
By contrast, Australia continues its Cold War reactionary approach, with outdated legislation blocking any true assessment of this alternative, internationally proven, carbon-free energy source.
In November 2023, the Victorian Labor government and Labor-allied crossbenchers voted down a private member’s bill seeking to repeal the state’s 1983 prohibition on nuclear energy-related activity. During debate, Labor dismissed the ‘fantasy being peddled now by the nuclear industry that somehow we have got new technology’ and described those favouring nuclear as the solution to our energy transition as ‘charlatans’.
If Labor can only resort to 40-year-old arguments and name-calling, they are clearly finding it difficult to come up with substantive reasons for their opposition.
In 2020, the Legislative Council’s Environment and Planning Committee inquiry into nuclear prohibition found that no detailed business case could be made without the moratorium being lifted.
The report found that ‘a number of submitters and witnesses have made the point that the necessary business case or firm proposals will not be attempted while a prohibition remains in place’. It concluded that ‘current estimates of the cost of nuclear energy in Australia are unreliable and accurately costing the full cost is not possible without a detailed business case being undertaken’.
Despite the evidence that banning the debate on nuclear energy stops assessment of its cost and efficacy, Labor continues to bury their heads in the sand.
We cannot forget Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, who put on a nationally embarrassing display at COP28 in Dubai.
While he attracted widespread derision for his extended Acknowledgement of Country, which now encompasses all the indigenous peoples of the world, it is perhaps fortunate less attention was paid to the detail of what he said.
Bowen claimed Australia was ‘within striking distance’ of the Albanese government’s target of a 43 per cent cut in emissions by 2030 while simultaneously tabling an ‘Annual Climate Change Statement’ in Parliament which showed Australian carbon emissions rose by 3.6 million tonnes the first six months of 2023.
Bowen’s virtue signalling knows no bounds as he jetted in on a fossil-fuelled plane to the UAE, the world’s eighth largest fossil fuel exporter, where the COP28 unanimously agreed to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’.
While leading nations provide a compelling and trailblazing example of how nuclear energy can provide safe, cheap, and carbon-free electricity, Labor’s ill-conceived excuses and dogmatic arguments now look embarrassingly outdated and parochial. The advent of Australian nuclear submarines should finally shatter them.
A non-nuclear Net Zero is fantasy, and for the good of Australia, it’s high time the state and federal Labor parties recognised that fact.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/eiffel-power-frances-nuclear-charge/
***************************************************UK: Decarbonisation is Labour’s next green policy disaster
Keir Starmer isn’t even in Downing Street yet already his government-in-waiting is in danger of being defined by its £28 billion green spending pledge, just as Tony Blair’s administration was defined by ‘45 minutes’ – the claimed deployment time of Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction.
First, Starmer promised to spend that sum on green initiatives in every year of the next parliament. Then it was revised down to spending £28 billion in the last year of the next parliament. Last week he dropped the pledge and said instead that £4.7 billion a year would be spent on green investment.
But in the melee a more rash policy has been overlooked: Labour’s pledge to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – which brings the present government’s target forward by five years. This is one of the five great ‘missions’ laid out in the party’s pre-manifesto pitch, along with the creation of a state-owned company, Great British Energy, to achieve it. Not only will it save carbon emissions, Labour claims (without any evidence or published workings) but it will also save us an enormous amount of money, taking ‘up to £1,400 off the annual household bill and £53 billion off energy bills for businesses’ within six years. This is quite a boast, considering the average household pays £1,928 a year in energy bills.
A large part of Labour’s decarbonisation plans are laid out in a document called ‘Make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower’. Labour says it wants to quadruple offshore wind and double onshore wind by 2030, as well as to triple solar capacity. But this is likely to be impossible, not least because the National Grid won’t be able to get hold of enough subsea cables to plug in the required number of extra offshore wind turbines. There are four suppliers of such cables in the world – all of them have full order books until 2030.
Would Labour’s plan be doable even if it could get the required kit – and would it really save households money? Labour’s case is based on the idea that wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of energy around. It repeats an often-quoted conceit that, at one point in 2022, ‘renewable energy was nine times cheaper than gas’ and asserts that it remains much cheaper.
But the ‘nine times’ claim was never true. It was made by CarbonBrief, a green energy advocacy website. They arrived at the figure by taking the prices paid for gas power at the very peak of the market in the summer of 2022 – £446 per megawatt-hour – as European countries rushed to fill their gas storage facilities ready for winter, following the loss of Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine. It then compared them with the long-term, guaranteed ‘strike prices’ offered to operators of wind and solar farms over a 15-year period. In an auction in 2022, wind and solar farms agreed to a strike price of £48 per megawatt–hour.
It was like comparing the cost of a bus journey using a season ticket to that of hailing an Uber in rush hour. If you take the average price of gas power over the past 15 years, it is considerably less than wind or solar power.
Since 2022, the economics have changed sharply again: the price of gas has come down, but the price of renewable energy has jumped. Last July, the Swedish energy company Vattenfall pulled out of a North Sea wind farm project, complaining that the strike price it had agreed to the previous year was no longer enough. When the government held another auction for wind and solar power two months later, setting a maximum strike price of £44 per megawatt-hour for offshore wind, it didn’t receive a single bid.
The price of wind energy was on a downward trend while commodity prices were falling and interest rates were near zero (most of the costs come upfront, so these projects are especially reliant on cheap credit). That trend has now been firmly reversed. No one knows what wind will cost in 2030. It’s impossible to predict if commodity prices or interest rates will return to levels that make it the cheapest form of energy. Any claim to save consumers money is therefore spurious.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/decarbonisation-is-labours-next-green-policy-disaster/
*************************************************The renewables bubble has burst
It wasn’t so long ago that Orsted was being held up as an example of how oil and gas companies should handle the transition to clean energy. In 2009 the then-DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas) announced that it was going to turn around it business so that instead of earning 85 per cent of its money from oil and gas it was going to earn 85 per cent of it from renewables. It was an early mover in offshore wind – and, at least for some years, shareholders were richly rewarded. The share price marched upwards from around £19 in 2014 to a peak at £100 in early 2021. Increasing your money fivefold and saving the planet at the same time – you can hardly argue with that.
The economics of building wind farms has changed
Except that the bubble in renewables didn’t last. Fast forward three years and Orsted has wiped out almost all its share price gains of the past decade. In the third quarter of 2023 it managed to lose £2.5 billion as its revenues halved on the same period in 2022. This week it suspended its dividend and announced the loss of 800 jobs. It also lowered its target for renewable-generating capacity by 2030 from 50 gigawatts to 35-38 gigawatts. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies which were being battered by low wholesale prices up until 2021 have had a great couple of years. Suddenly, the divestment campaign which told us to bail out of soon-to-be ‘stranded assets’ and pile into wind and solar because they are the future looks a little poorly thought-out.
It is fair to say that not every renewable energy company has done as badly as Orsted, which has run into particular problems in a now-cancelled project to build two wind farms off the coast of New Jersey. Depending on what contracts they have, existing wind and solar farms have either benefitted from high electricity prices in Europe or they have continued to make plodding but reliable index-linked earnings thanks to guaranteed ‘strike’ prices. But Orsted’s misfortunes do rather expose the claims – still being made by Labour and others – that wind and solar energy is incredibly cheap as well as clean. The biggest problem for wind and solar is that most of their lifetime costs come upfront, in the construction phase. That is an issue when the cost of steel and other raw materials are going up – and even more so when the near-zero interest rates on which the finances of these projects were based are no longer there.
That the economics of building wind farms had changed was clear last July when Swedish firm Vattenfall withdrew from a North Sea project which it had won the right to build in a UK government auction just a year earlier. Next time the government held an auction, in September, there was not a single bid. In response, the government has since increased the maximum strike price on offer from £44 to £73 per MWh. That is still a little lower than the average wholesale price of electricity over the past year but 50 per cent above the average wholesale price in the decade up to 2020. Wind and solar energy can no longer claim to be cheap – and, barring a highly-unlikely return to near zero interest rates, making an Orsted-style switch to renewables is certainly not looking like a way for oil and gas giants to boost investment returns.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-renewables-bubble-has-burst/ ?
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Eating green ideology: official Australian diet advice to warn of climate impact
The federal government’s official advice on diets will now incorporate the impact of certain foods on climate change, sparking outrage from farmers who fear it is driven by an “ideological agenda” against red meat.
It could lead to consumers being told to reduce steak and lamb chop intakes in favour of alternatives like chicken, which some scientists say has a lower carbon footprint.
Red meat producers are concerned that the move by the National Health and Medical Research Council to incorporate environmental sustainability into Australian Dietary Guidelines will be based on “misinformation” and present an incomplete picture about the industry’s effect on the environment. They have called for it to be scrapped.
The statutory authority’s dietary guidelines expert committee says the change is based on “stakeholder feedback” and has already started setting up a sustainability working group to help its review of the 2013 guidelines, due by the end of 2026.
Red Meat Advisory Council chair John McKillop accused the NHMRC, which is responsible for funding medical research and providing health and nutrition recommendations to the government, of straying beyond its remit. “These developments are an overreach by the dietary guidelines expert committee that go well beyond the policy intent of the Australian Dietary Guidelines to provide recommendations on healthy foods and dietary patterns,” he said.
“The red meat industry has a strong story about sustainability, so our concerns are not because we believe it’s a weakness but because it’s not the role of the dietary guidelines nor is it the expertise of the dietary guidelines expert committee. The nation’s dietary guidelines should be focused on promoting public health, preventing chronic diseases and ensuring that all Australian have access to accurate and reliable information about their basic nutritional requirements.”
Sustainability was included in an appendix of the previous guidelines, but the expert committee says “sustainability messaging should be incorporated within the revised dietary guidelines, and not included as a separate section within the appendices”.
Mr McKillop said expanding the scope of the dietary guidelines into other non-nutritional topics would undermine their purpose and the public’s confidence in them. “This is going to make clear and simple nutritional messaging even more difficult,” he said.
RMAC will ask the NHMRC committee to reconsider the change to the guidelines. “If they refuse, we’ll be asking the federal government to intervene as it’s starting to look like the process is running off the rails,” he said.
“The dietary guidelines review process must not be allowed to be used as a vehicle to drive ideological agendas at the expense of the latest nutritional science.”
The dietary guidelines expert committee has defined sustainable diets as being “accessible, affordable and equitable diets with low environmental impacts”.
In a statement, the NHMRC said including sustainability followed a “stakeholder survey” in which one in three people surveyed listed it as a priority.
“While the 2013 guidelines included messages about the environmental impact of food choices, the placement of the messages in an appendix has made them easy to overlook,” a spokesman said.
“Stakeholder feedback suggests there is low awareness of their existence. The revision of the guidelines provides an opportunity to improve integration of messages about food sustainability into the guidelines.”
The organisation rejected the suggestion that incorporating sustainability messaging would undermine public confidence.
“Developing or updating NHMRC guidelines involves a thorough review of the evidence, methodological advice on the quality of these reviews, drafting of the guidelines, public consultation and independent expert review of the final guidelines,” the spokesman said.
“The dietary guidelines expert committee advised that recommendations for dietary patterns and food groups should firstly consider health impacts in the Australian context, followed by consideration of sustainability and other contextual factors,” the spokesman said. “This is consistent with how sustainability has been incorporated into dietary guidelines in other countries.”
Central Queensland cattle farmer Mark Davie said industry concerns were heightened by perceived misinformation about the health impacts and sustainability of red meat production permeating media, public policy and nutritional advice.
Mr Davie, who chairs the Australian Beef Sustainability Framework, questioned how the NHMRC could measure one food source against another while still accounting for benefits to things like soil or biodiversity.
Meat producers are concerned that an updated version could follow rhetoric from organisations like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which advocates for reduced livestock grazing.
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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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