Don’t listen to the Climate Change Committee on car bans, British ministers are warned
Net Zero Watch has warned ministers that the Climate Change Committee’s call for a ban of hybrid cars poses an existential threat to Britain’s car industry.
In its latest report the Climate Change Committee urged the government to ban the sale of hybrid cars in 2030, five years earlier than planned.
Industry insiders and MPs have warned that the Committee’s radical proposal risks the closure of car plants and the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs. It would also deprive millions of ordinary Brits the buy an affordable car.
The chair of the parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group Craig Mackinlay MP warned: “The UK’s uniquely stupid net zero policies is likely to lead to the loss of our proud car industry by the end of the decade.”
Net Zero Watch has welcomed the rejection of the proposal by Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch and has renewed its call for Rishi Sunak to follow the EU’s decision to cancel the planned sales ban of conventional cars altogether.
Now that the European ban of the sale of combustion engine cars has been abandoned, the government needs to follow suit if it wants to avoid destroying large swathes of the British car industry.
For millions of Britons electric vehicles will not be a viable solution as they are much more expensive than cars with combustion engines. And electric cars will probably still be more expensive than conventional cars in seven years.
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Italy Returns to Nuclear Sanity. Shouldn’t We?
The Italian parliament, demonstrating confidence in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, this week formally backed her plan to reintroduce nuclear power plants into Italy’s energy mix, reversing the nation’s 1987 moratorium on nuclear power. Meanwhile, energy-starved Germany is feeling the pinch from shuttering all of its 17 nuclear power plants.
The U.S. has closed 11 nuclear reactors since 2013, with another eight of the 94 remaining reactors scheduled for decommissioning by 2025. Although Presidents Trump and Biden have favored bolstering the U.S. nuclear energy portfolio, America’s bureaucrat-heavy regulatory jungle remains designed to drag out facility permitting and construction for decades.
The sad truth is that the energy crisis is imminent – we don’t have decades to play gotcha political games. Another truth is that wind and solar cannot fully power the U.S. grid.
Meloni’s plan would enable Italy to generate up to 35 MW of power from nuclear energy by 2050 (likely from small modular reactors). The plan adds nuclear to the list of low-carbon technologies with guaranteed sales of the energy they produce. The move towards nuclear also bolsters Meloni’s negotiations over Italy’s participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Given the cutoff of Russian natural gas, Germany’s removal of nuclear power from its energy mix makes little sense. Higher energy prices and shortfalls have led many German manufacturers to shut down or relocate to other, more energy-friendly nations. Germany has had negative economic growth since last October.
The German delusion is perhaps best exemplified by Steffi Lemke, minister for the environment and nuclear safety, who glowingly praised the shuttering of the last German nuclear power plants as an “excellent – indeed, visionary – move.” By contrast, fellow Green Party minister for the economy Robert Habeck recently bemoaned that German industries face an existential threat due to high electricity prices.
Habeck’s proposed solution is a massive (Bidenesque) subsidies program that would guarantee a fixed consumer price per megawatt-hour until 2030 – at a back-end cost to the public of 25 to 30 billion euros (not included in the “fixed” price).
As nuclear energy advocate Todd Royal points out, Congress in 2018 passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act that requires the Department of Energy to “develop a versatile fast neutron test reactor that could help develop fuels and materials for advanced reactors.” It also authorized DOE national laboratories to host reactor testing and demonstration projects.”
Congress in 2018 also passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which requires the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “develop an optional regulatory framework suitable for advanced nuclear technologies.” This February, the Nuclear Innovation Alliance released draft recommendations for addressing barriers to NRC licensing of advanced reactors.
The draft recommended bolstering staff capacity and capability for licensing advanced reactors; upgrading unaccountable regulatory processes and procedures for scheduling, breadth of scope, and depth of review; developing regulatory processes that streamline rather than inhibit the commercialization of advanced reactors; and establishing practices that increase stakeholder understanding and public trust in the regulatory process.
As a follow-up, in April, five Republican and five Democrat Senators introduced the bipartisan ADVANCE ( Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy) Act, which addresses licensing fees, insurance, and a host of other barriers to moving proposed nuclear reactors from drawing board to full operation.
Today, companies that develop and sell new reactors pay upfront the government’s $290 per hour cost for analyzing license applications. The 18,000-plus hours for reviewing even small test reactors presents a massive financial hurdle, especially for startups with innovative designs.
The bill recommends deferring these fees until the applicant has a license and can generate revenue from sales. The NRC would be compensated from a small rolling fund seeded by the government. A second proposal adds a time cap for reviewing an accepted application, with additional billable hours paid by Congress.
The bill also grants a 20-year extension to the Price-Anderson Act, which pertains to civilian power plants, that would otherwise expire in 2025. The extension gives policymakers sufficient time to tweak the law while reassuring potential investors and developers that its reauthorization will not be a barrier to startups.
Regulatory reform appears to be a hot issue, as President Biden just this week endorsed a reform bill proposed last fall by Sen. Joe Manchin (D, WV) that would streamline permitting for mining of critical minerals and remove barriers for renewable energy.
White House energy spokesman John Podesta said delays caused by the current permitting process “are pervasive at every level of government,” resulting in “we got so good at stopping projects we forgot how to build things in America.”
Manchin stated last fall, “No matter what you want to build, whether it’s transmission pipelines or hydropower dams, more often than not, it takes too long and drives up costs. You can double your cost within a five to six, seven-year period from what the original cost may have been.”
If the regulatory reform momentum that covers transmission lines and mining extends to nuclear, that bodes well for widespread efforts to revitalize the long-bearded U.S. nuclear energy industry. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is spearheading an effort to restart a decommissioned reactor in her state, with help from Holtec Decommissioning International, whose primary focus is, as its name implies, decommissioning old plants.
Whitmer now says that keeping the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station open “is critical for Michigan’s competitiveness and future economic development opportunities.” But the 800-MW reactor that had provided 5 percent of Michigan’s electricity was plagued with complaints about poor maintenance, including instances of nuclear fuel container weakening – serious issues that forced its shutdown weeks earlier than originally anticipated.
On the other end of the spectrum, Westinghouse just announced the launch of its AP300 reactor, which it calls “the only small modular reactor offering available that is based on deployed, operating, and advanced reactor technology.” CEO and President Patrick Fragman is confident that the $1 billion per unit, 300-MW reactor design can win NRC approval by 2027.
From these developments, it appears the U.S. is aligning itself more with the so-called “right-wing” Italian government than with the Green Party-infused German leadership – at least on nuclear energy. Nuclear energy has powered U.S. submarines since the U.S.S. Nautilus was commissioned in 1954. And nuclear has supplied up to a fifth of U.S. electricity despite heavy propaganda and lack of government support.
Maybe, just maybe, after seventy years of nuclear submarines, America will finally believe – as Todd Royal believes – that carbon-free nuclear power is the nation’s best hope for meeting growing U.S. demand for electricity and global needs for basic economic growth. With worldwide energy consumption expected to grow by 50 percent by 2050, reliance on wind and solar (and, yes, geothermal) alone to meet that demand is a pipe dream.
https://cornwallalliance.org/2023/06/italy-returns-to-nuclear-sanity-shouldnt-we/
***************************************************Wind costs will remain high
The crash in Siemens Energy’s share price on Friday has admirably highlighted an issue with wind costs that colleagues and I have been examining for more than a decade. The painful facts are that (i) wind generation, both onshore and offshore, is more expensive than we are being told and (ii) the performance of wind turbines tends to deteriorate with age, in significant part because of the kind of failures reported by Siemens Energy. There is strong evidence to support these conclusions, which has been presented in reports published by the Renewable Energy Foundation in 2012 and in 2020 for the UK and Denmark, with updates provided by the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch.
The news about Siemens Energy brings a strong inclination to say ‘you were warned’. However, their travails are a symptom of a much more widespread disease, which affects all of us, either directly through the costs of electricity or indirectly as the owners of wind farms (via pension funds and other investment vehicles). The plunge in the share price of Siemens Energy is dramatic, but that may be written off as a temporary market response to disappointed expectations. We need to look beneath the immediate story to understand the reasons for the disappointment and their implications for the prospects for wind generation.
The announcement by Siemens Energy focused on higher-than-expected failure rates for their onshore turbines. These were ascribed to problems with key components, but newspaper reports suggest more systematic design faults in recent generations of large turbines. Previous announcements have referred to problems with offshore turbines, and the market reaction suggests few believe that the current problems are confined to onshore turbines. Further, while each of the major turbine manufacturers has its own specific problems, Siemens Energy is not unique in experiencing high warranty costs due to higher than anticipated failure rates.
In increasing order of importance, there are three aspects to note:
(a) Siemens Energy and other manufacturers have given warranties on performance that won’t be met because of higher failure rates. They will incur additional expenses, either to replace components or to compensate wind farm operators for any resulting underperformance. Those costs are the basis for the write-offs that Siemens Energy has had to take. Investors will be painfully aware that the company has been declaring profits when they sell wind turbines, but without making adequate provision for future warranty repair costs.
In accounting terms this is known as recognising future profits for new contracts. When it becomes clear that the contracts will be less profitable, the company must write down the value of previously reported profits and, thus, the value of the assets on its balance sheet. In effect, though perhaps entirely innocently, the company has been misleading investors about its past and current profitability. Senior managers should be feeling very uncomfortable about their positions since the problem was predictable (and predicted).
(b) Warranties have a limited period – often 5 to 8 years – but the higher failure rates will persist and affect performance over the remainder of the life of the wind farms where the turbines have been installed. Their future opex costs will be higher than expected, and their output will be significantly lower. This will reduce their operational lifetimes, which are determined by how the margin between revenues and costs changes as wind farms get older. Lower revenues and higher costs bring forward the date at which replacement or repowering is necessary. These changes will reduce, often quite substantially, the returns earned by the financial investors – pension funds and other – to whom operators sell the majority of the equity in wind farms after a few years of operation.
(c) Siemens Energy and other manufacturers may argue that they can – with time – fix the component and design problems which lead to high failure rates. They may well be correct. The history of power engineering is littered with examples of new generations of equipment which experienced major problems when first introduced but which were eventually sorted out. Many companies have found themselves in severe financial difficulties or even forced into bankruptcy by these “teething” problems. The error in this case has been to pretend that wind turbines were immune to such failures.
The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger 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 – the whole development process has been a case of too far, too fast. Again, this was both predictable and predicted. The idea that wind turbines are immune to the factors that affect other types of power engineering was always absurd. The consequence is that both capital and operating costs for wind farms will not fall as rapidly as claimed and may not fall significantly at all. It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe and the United States are based on foundations of sand – naïve optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.
In the longer term it is (b) and (c) that are the big story. With respect to (a), serious analysts have long since recognised that claims made about future wind costs and performance by the wind industry should not be taken seriously. It has been obvious that they were kidding themselves and their investors ever since the last 2010s. Unfortunately, we have now been tied into a high energy-cost future, with all the implications that has for the economy and standards of living.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/siemens-and-wind-costs/
****************************************************Still Waiting For The Magical Future Of Free Wind Power
Wind power: It’s clean. It’s free. It’s renewable. Google the subject, and you will quickly find fifty articles claiming that electricity from wind is now cheaper than electricity from those evil, dirty fossil fuels. So why doesn’t some country somewhere get all of its electricity from wind?
In fact, despite now several decades of breakneck building of wind turbines, no country seems to be able to get even half of its electricity from wind when averaged over the course of a year, and no country has really even begun to solve the problem of needing full backup when the wind doesn’t blow.
Germany is the current world champion at trying to get its electricity from wind. (It also gets a small contribution from solar panels, but since it is the world’s cloudiest country, those don’t help much.). According to Clean Energy Wire, December 2022, in 2020 Germany got 45.2% of its electricity from wind and sun. Then that declined to 41% in 2021, due to lack of wind. In 2022 they appear to have bounced back to 46%. Germany has enough wind turbines that they produce big surpluses of electricity when the wind blows at full strength. But they still haven’t cracked the threshold of meeting 50% of electricity demand with wind and sun over the course of a year.
It’s no better over in the territory of co-climate crusader UK. Despite a crash program to build wind turbines (also accompanied by a smidgeon of solar panels), the UK’s percent of power from wind in 2022 was 26.8%, according to the BBC on January 6, 2023. Solar added a paltry 4.4%.
Well, maybe this project isn’t as easy as the central planners thought it would be. News of the past week brings to light a few more speed bumps on the road to energy utopia.
At the website Not A Lot Of People Know That, Paul Homewood on June 21 presents a calculation for the UK of how much wind turbine capacity would be necessary to supply the country with all its electricity needs by building extra wind capacity and using it to electrolyze water into hydrogen. The calculation was initially prepared by a guy named John Brown, and provided to Paul. For those interested in reviewing the calculation, it is available by emailing Mr. Brown at jbxcagwnz@gmail.com
For starters, Homewood notes that average demand in the UK was 29 GW in 2022, and it has 28 GW of wind turbine capacity already. As you can immediately see, the fact that 28 GW of “capacity” only supplied 26.8% of average demand of 29 GW indicates an average capacity factor of under 30% for the wind turbines. The total demand for the year came to 262 TWh, but the wind turbines only produced 62 TWh.
Brown then calculates how much wind turbine capacity would be needed to generate enough electricity to supply all of the demand, either directly, or by electrolyzing water to make hydrogen and burning the hydrogen. He comes up with 370 TWh of total production needed from the wind turbines — 262 TWh to supply existing demand, and another 108 TWh for the various losses in the processes of electrolysis and then burning the hydrogen. The 370 TWh is about 6 times the current wind turbine capacity of the UK. Homewood:
The reason why the total generation needed, 370 TWh, is so much higher than demand is the hopelessly inefficiency of the hydrogen process. John has assumed that electrolysers work at 52% efficiency, and that burning hydrogen in a thermal generator works at 40% efficiency. Both assumptions seem reasonable. In other words, the efficiency rate for the full cycle is 20.8%. In simple terms, you need 5 units of wind power to make 1 unit of power from hydrogen.
Brown and Homewood do not go into detail on the costs of this project, other than to note that the cost of the wind turbines alone for the UK would be about 1 trillion pounds (or $1.3 trillion). Since the U.S. is more than five times the population, that would mean more than $6.5 trillion for us. And that’s before you get to the cost of building the electrolyzers for the hydrogen, the costs of transporting and storing the stuff, and so forth. Let alone dealing with doubling the demands on the grid by electrifying all home heating, automobiles, transportation, etc. A multiplying of costs of electricity by around a factor of 5 to 10 would be a good rough estimate.
In other words, this is never going to happen. The only question is how far down the road we get before the plug gets pulled. As I wrote in my energy storage report, the only thing to be said for hydrogen as the means of backup for a decarbonized economy is that it is less stupid than using batteries as the backup.
And in other news relating to the future utopia of wind power, we have a piece in the Wall Street Journal of June 23 with the headline, “Clean Energy’s Latest Problem Is Creaky Wind Turbines.” The first sentence is “The ill wind blowing for clean-energy windmills just got stronger.” The article reports that shares of German wind turbine giant Siemens Energy fell 36% on Friday after the company withdrew profit guidance for the rest of the year and stated that components of its installed turbines are wearing out much faster than previously anticipated. Thus costs of fulfilling warranties will greatly increase; but also, the expected replacement cycle for the turbines needs to be shortened. The writer (Carol Ryan) comments, “The news isn’t just a blow for the company’s shareholders, but for all investors and policy makers betting on the rapid rollout of renewable power.”
Barron’s on the same date (June 23) quotes the CEO of Siemens wind turbine subsidiary Siemens Gamesa as follows:
In a call with reporters, Siemens Gamesa CEO Jochen Eickholt said “the quality problems go well beyond what had been known hitherto. . . . The result of the current review will be much worse than even what I would have thought possible,” he added.
And then there’s the comment from parent company CEO Christian Bruch:
In the call with reporters, Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch called the developments “bitter” and “a huge setback.”
Those are by no means the usual types of words uttered by ever-optimistic public company CEOs.
In the short run, don’t expect the climate doom cult to walk away from any of their grand plans. The immediate answer will be more, and still more government subsidies to keep the wind power dream alive. But at some point this becomes, as they say, unsustainable.
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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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