UK: Heat Pumps Are Unlikely To Ever Cut The Mustard

Has there ever been a more pernicious lie spread by government and lobbyists than the claim that net zero will save us money?

Heat pumps, for example, weren’t just supposed to ‘decarbonise’ home heating and thereby ‘save the planet’; they were all going to slash our bills as we switched from expensive gas to cheap-as-chips ‘renewable’ energy from wind and solar farms.

The narrative was always flawed: if heat pumps really did promise to save us money the government would hardly need to push them at us, offering grants of £7500 through its Boiler Upgrade Scheme.

The government has good reason to bribe, as heat pump installations last year reached only 55,000 – far short of the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028.

As today’s National Audit Office report all but confirms, people are not falling for the bait. The Boiler Upgrade scheme has been an expensive failure, with consumers seeing through the guff and working out that dumping their gas boiler for a heat pump is not going to save them a bean.

On the contrary, it will cost them more to install and more to run.

Remember how government grants were supposed to allow the industry to reach a scale at which prices would start to tumble? That’s not quite going according to plan.

The average real-terms cost of a heat pump installation has actually risen over the past four years, from £10,328 in 2019 to £11,287 in 2023 (both at 2021 prices). It still costs four times as much to replace a gas boiler with a heat pump than with a like-for-like replacement.

True, there are those aforementioned £7500 grants available for early-adopters, so it might be possible if you have a small property to fit a heat pump at no greater cost than a gas boiler.

But grants are not free money: we are all paying for them through our taxes and energy bills. If the government ended up having to bung all 30 million UK households grants of £7500 to fit a heat pump, it would add over £200 billion to annual public spending.

Electricity prices are so much higher than gas prices that you can’t count on saving money when it comes to running costs – even if your heat pump works as intended, and pumps at least three times as much heat energy into your home than it consumes in electrical energy.

In any case, field trials have repeatedly shown many heat pumps failing to reach this benchmark, with the coefficient of performance (the ratio of heat energy out to electrical energy in) achieving a median of 2.80, falling to a mean of 2.44 when the outside temperature falls below 2 Celsius – exactly when you need your heating the most.

Bizarrely, given this tale of serial under-performance in both cost and effectiveness, the green lobby wants the government to double down in pushing heat pumps on consumers.

The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit preposterously blames low take up of heat pumps on government ‘dithering’ over hydrogen boilers. The government has said that it will make a decision by 2026 as to whether the existing gas network might be repurposed for hydrogen in future.

Predictably enough, the heat pump industry doesn’t like hydrogen and wants it ruled out sooner, saying that it will turn out to be too expensive.

Maybe it will, but the inescapable truth is that a switch to heat pumps, too, will cost the country a fortune.

And that the bill is going to fall on the heads of us all, in one way or another.

https://principia-scientific.com/heat-pumps-are-unlikely-to-ever-cut-the-mustard/

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Backlash Against Wind And Solar Projects Is Real, Global, And Growing

All around the world, big solar and wind projects are being rejected.

From rural England to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, local communities are telling alt-energy developers to take their projects and put them where the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. [emphasis, links added]

As I have documented in the Renewable Rejection Database, there have been at least 639 rejections or restrictions of wind or solar projects in the U.S. alone since 2015.

Why are so many communities objecting? The answer is simple: landowners and homeowners want to preserve the integrity of their neighborhoods.

They don’t want their landscapes and views destroyed by oceans of solar panels and forests of 600-foot-high wind turbines. They are also rightly concerned about the diminution of their property values and the noise pollution that comes with these projects.

Don’t blame yourself if you haven’t heard about these rejections.

The widespread opposition to wind and solar doesn’t fit the narrative that’s relentlessly pushed by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and other big media outlets about the “energy transition” and “clean” energy.

Nor do they fit with claims made by the Biden administration, which has repeatedly touted its goal of having a “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.”

These myriad rejections are a massive problem for corporate interests that are trying to build huge new wind and solar projects. Indeed, rural communities are standing between big business and tens of billions of dollars in tax credits.

According to the latest numbers from the U.S. Treasury, this year alone, the production tax credit (used primarily for wind energy) and the investment tax credit (primarily solar) will cost taxpayers $35 billion.

For reference, the oil and gas industry’s most significant tax credit, the depletion allowance, will cost taxpayers about $1.6 billion.

Given the vast sums at stake, it’s not surprising that lobbyists for the wind and solar sectors are pushing measures that strip local communities of their zoning authority and hand that authority to state bureaucrats.

In fact, four heavily Democratic states, New York, California, Michigan, and Illinois, have recently passed measures that do precisely that.

But before delving further into what’s happening across the U.S., here’s a quick roundup of what’s happening overseas.

Last December, a French court ruled that a wind project in southern France near the town of Luna must be dismantled due to “noise complaints from residents and the effect it is having on birds.” According to one news report, “Residents in the immediate surrounding area have long complained about the noise from the wind farm.”

In March, a judge in Ireland sided with local landowners and ruled that the noise pollution generated by a wind project in County Wexford built near their properties amounted to a “nuisance to the plaintiffs.”

The judge also wrote, “I find that the plaintiffs’ complaints are objectively justified in that the noise interferes with the ordinary comfort and enjoyment of their homes. When it occurs, this interference is a substantial interference.” Damages in the case have yet to be determined.

In England, the solar rejections are piling up so fast it’s challenging to keep track. Since January, local authorities have rejected a 102-acre project in Cambridgeshire, a 198-acre project in Holbeach, a 66-acre project in Kent, a 96-acre project in Herefordshire, and a 103-acre project in Coventry.

After the rejection of the Holbeach solar project, a local politician, Nick Worth, said the land “should be used for farming, not energy. We should be producing more food, not less, particularly on the best land in the country.”

In January, an Australian court rejected an application for a 10-megawatt solar project proposed near Mudgee in New South Wales.

The ruling confirmed the judgment of a regional council that had determined the project would be an “alien feature” on the landscape and that the area would be “irreversibly changed” by the 25,000-solar panel facility.

Last year, in Canada, regulators in Alberta imposed a moratorium on all wind and solar projects. In February, provincial officials announced updates to their regulations, including a ban on alt-energy projects on prime agricultural land.

Further, in an unprecedented move, the rules will require a 35-kilometer (21.7 miles) buffer zone between wind and solar facilities and protected areas or “pristine landscapes.”

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said the new regulations were made in response to Alberta residents who “don’t want large-scale developments to interfere with our province’s most beautiful natural features.”

Back here in the U.S., in February, local officials in Tennessee vetoed a proposed solar project that was supposed to help fuel a data center owned by Facebook parent Meta Platforms.

According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “A proposed solar farm that was slated to occupy about 600 acres of land in Millington was denied by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners Monday evening, amid fervent opposition from residents.”

The Shelby County denial is one of 212 rejections or restrictions of solar that have occurred since 2017.

Meanwhile, as we show in our new five-part docuseries, “Juice: Power, Politics & The Grid,” the Osage tribe is prevailing in the longest-running legal battle over wind energy in American history.

In December, a federal judge in Tulsa ruled that Enel, the Italian company, violated the tribe’s sovereignty when it built a 150-megawatt wind project on Osage traditional land but did not obtain mining leases from the tribe.

The judge ordered the company to remove all 84 wind turbines, which the company says will cost about $300 million.

The tribe’s legal battle with Enel started in 2011. Its court victory is a historic win for Native American sovereignty.

The federal court ruling is an embarrassing and costly loss for Enel and a massive black eye for the U.S. wind industry, which has repeatedly tried to roll over rural communities in its inexorable thirst for tax credits. Despite the importance of the decision, it’s been largely ignored in the media.

Legacy media outlets may refuse to honestly report on the growing backlash against wind and solar projects, but the facts on the ground are clear.

Legacy media outlets may refuse to honestly report on the growing backlash against wind and solar projects, but the facts on the ground are clear.

The binding constraint on the growth of solar and wind around the world is that fewer and fewer communities are willing to accept the landscape destruction that comes with large alt-energy projects.

And no amount of PR or spin can change that fact.

https://principia-scientific.com/backlash-against-wind-and-solar-projects-is-real-global-and-growing/

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BBC’s Failed ‘Fact Check’ of Daily Sceptic Report on Arctic Sea Ice

The BBC More or Less radio programme recently ‘fact checked’ the Daily Sceptic’s report that sea ice in the Arctic had soared to its highest level for 21 years on January 8th this year. Alas, the report was confirmed to be true so the Beeb went down the ‘cherry pick’ line of attack.

Curiously missing from the programme was any mention that the article dealt mainly with long term trends in Arctic sea ice and concentrated on scientific evidence that showed at least a decade-long slow recovery. The ‘fact check’ did little more than confirm the widely held suspicion that many BBC programmes are now infected with a need to crowbar a climate catastrophe narrative into broadcast messages.

Being accused of “cherry picking” by an organisation that routinely catastrophises bad weather events is of course risible. Taking lessons from a state-reliant operation that can publish a recent story from a “science correspondent” that starts, “Climate change threatens to ‘call time’ on the great British pint”, is also laughable. The 21-year high on January 8th was clearly identified as part of a number of short and long term trends, and in the third paragraph of the article it was noted that ”we must be careful not to follow alarmists down their chosen political path of cherry-picking and warning of climate collapse on the basis of individual events”.

It is evident that the BBC did little investigative work on the matter despite More or Less priding itself on checking statistics and data. Instead it relied on the usual ‘scientists say’, in this case Professor Julienne Stroeve. The UCL “Earth Scientist” attempted to muddy the Arctic sea ice waters by suggesting the ice extent is thinner, but presenter Tom Colls had to admit, “the data is not available yet”.

If you pick a particular day, you might just be talking about the weather, states Colls. There is no correlation between winter sea ice extent and how much the ice will melt in the summer, added Stroeve. What you see since 1979, continued Stroeve, is that the trend in Arctic sea ice is downwards for four decades. The overall decline in long term Arctic sea ice is very easy to see, adds Colls.

If you ‘cherry pick’ the date 1979, probably the high point for Arctic sea ice for almost a century, and draw a line to the present day, the cyclical trend is undoubtedly down. There was more ice around at the high point in 1979 than there is now, nobody disputes that. If you are just after a simple political message of climate collapse to promote the Net Zero fantasy, further examination of the data will be unwelcome.

But a more detailed review of the statistics gives a more realistic interpretation. According to recent work published by the Arctic scientist Allan Astrup Jensen, the summer ice plateaued from 1979-97, fell for 10 years and then resumed a minimal downward trend from 2007. Jensen observes that either side of the 10 year fall after 1997, there have been minimal losses.

In fact using a four-year moving average, the trend has been slightly upwards over the last few years. The graph below is compiled by the investigative science writer Tony Heller and shows the recent stability of Arctic summer sea ice around the minimum recorded every September. A slight recovery from about 2012 can be clearly seen.

As we can see, More or Less has produced little more than a narrative-driven attempt to keep the Arctic sea ice poster scare going for as long as possible. Since the drop in the early part of the century, alarmists have been forecasting ice free summers in the Arctic in the near future. Sir David Attenborough told BBC viewers in 2022 that the Arctic could be ice free by 2035. Professor Stroeve claims to have briefed former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, a man who has never lived down reporting that the ice could all be gone by 2014. In fact what has clearly been happening is noted by Tony Heller. They bury the old data going back to the 1950s, “and pretend they don’t notice sea ice is increasing again”. Nevertheless activists are starting to learn lessons about putting short timelines on their fanciful forecasts. For her part, Stroeve suggests ice free summers in the Arctic by the next 50 years.

Meanwhile, after the ‘hottest year ever’, the maximum winter sea ice for 2024 was recorded on March 14th at 15.01 million sq kms. Polar bear scientist Susan Crockford noted that the ‘U.S. headline writers’ at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre said it was below the average for 1981-2010. Indeed it was, although this year’s total was within two standard deviations, states Crockford. But why compare the a 30-year average to 2010 when another decade of data to 2020 is available? Cynics might note that taking out the higher totals of 40 years ago and replacing them with the lower recent figures would produce – more or less – an above average maximum in 2024.

https://climaterealism.com/2024/04/bbcs-failed-fact-check-of-daily-sceptic-report-on-arctic-sea-ice/

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The Age of Underpopulation Is Here

The age of overpopulation is over. The age of underpopulation is here. After decades of warnings and fear about an overpopulation crisis, population is now rapidly declining in most of the world. The overpopulation disaster predicted by world elites did not occur.

Total fertility rate is the average number of children born per woman. Demographers tell us that a country’s fertility rate must be at least 2.1 children per woman to sustain the current level of population.

According to data from the United Nations, total world population still continues to rise, but population is declining in all major nations, where fertility rates have fallen below the minimum population replacement rate. Africa is the only continent where the population continues to grow. According to birth rates and without counting immigration flows, population is now falling in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, the United States, and all European nations except Monaco and the Faroe Islands.

For the last four decades of the 20th century, world leaders warned of a coming catastrophe from an uncontrolled rise in global population. In 1950, the average woman was birthing about five children during her lifetime. Global population was growing at a rate of about two percent per year by 1955.

“The Population Bomb,” written by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, became a worldwide best seller. The prologue of the book stated, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The author warned of coming famines and resource shortages and advocated for compulsory population control.

The fear of overpopulation produced a population control movement by the early 1970s. A consistent theme of the movement was that population growth was unplanned. Ehrlich stated: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.”

The United Nations indicated that people were not intelligent enough to plan their own families. James Grant, Undersecretary General for the UN, wrote in 1992: “Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology available to the human race.”

Convinced by the overpopulation elites, governments of the world endorsed tragic population control measures. By the 1970s, it became U.S. government policy to grant foreign aid only if population control measures were implemented. The World Bank and the U.N. also established policies requiring population control in exchange for loans or aid.

During the last decades of the 20th century, population programs proposed by Western intellectuals and the U.N. were implemented in the form of anti-human policies by the governments of China, India and dozens of other nations. The government of India established sterilization and intrauterine device insertion quotas in 1966. Over 40 million people were sterilized between 1965 and 1985, most coercively.

The People’s Republic of China implemented population policies in 1970 and adopted a one-child policy for all families in 1979. By March 2013, the China government reported that 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations had been carried out since 1971. Sex-selection abortion became common and even the killing of girl babies was practiced in both China and India.

Population control policies typically disproportionally impacted disadvantaged races or social classes. In India, coercive policies often targeted people of lower castes. In 1966, sterilization programs were set up at federally funded Indian Health Service hospitals in the U.S. Thousands of Native American women were sterilized between 1966 and 1976, often without informed consent. In Peru, sterilizations targeted rural natives of Incan descent.

But the overpopulation intellectuals were wrong. Famine did not kill hundreds of millions of people as the Ehrlichs predicted. Instead, an agricultural revolution increased global output of corn, rice and wheat by a factor of five from 1960 to 2023. The malnourished portion of world population declined from 30 percent in 1950 to 10 percent today and continues to fall.

The world fertility rate dropped from about five children per woman in 1950 to 2.3 children per woman in 2021 and continues to fall. The population growth rate dropped to 0.82 percent per year by 2021 and is declining rapidly.

Nations moved from agricultural, to industrial, to technological societies, achieving the elimination of infectious disease, improved sanitation, improved food supply, a decline in infant mortality, and rising levels of education. Women entered the work force in larger numbers and family sizes declined.

But despite tragic implementation of population control policies in several nations, today’s families are having fewer children, the world population is stabilizing, and the predicted overpopulation disaster did not happen. Governments now pursue programs to boost family size in China, Japan, South Korea, and many nations of Europe.

But didn’t population control programs cause the drop in fertility rates? The answer is “no.” Fertility rates dropped faster in South Korea than in China, driven by economic development, rising incomes, and increased levels of education and workforce participation for women, without forced population control measures. Fertility rates dropped faster in Brazil and Mexico due to demographic changes, than in India where forced population control was employed.

What is the lesson from the overpopulation crisis that did not occur? The United Nations, the intellectuals, and strident political leaders were dead wrong about overpopulation. People do not multiply like cancer cells. Rather than being a species “out of control,” humans plan their own families and react to changing societal conditions. The lesson from the overpopulation debacle is that people adapt to their environment.

But the United Nations and world elites now warn of a coming climate catastrophe. They demand a costly energy transition to Net Zero emissions. They demand that we change our transportation and our home appliances, that we stop eating meat, and that we adopt hundreds of other proposed climate-saving remedies. Will we have a climate disaster, or will the global elites be wrong again?

https://heartland.org/opinion/the-age-of-underpopulation-is-here/

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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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