Green jobs - Josh 93

Comments

[Cumbrian Lad]

:)

[Alexander K]

Yessss!!

[Lord Beaverbrook]

Have I missed a particular storyline for this or is it just putting the obvious into historical perpetuity?

[Rick Bradford]

Shouldn't it be a fat cat?

[David C]

It should be a loathesome green leech or other slimy parasite, never mind birds or cats.

[Frosty]

One flew over the CRUcoos nest :)

[Frosty]

Hark I hear birds calling.....

CRUcrew CrRUcrew................ CRUcrew CRUcrew...........................

[David]

Josh - it absolutley should be a fat cat - because it is only the 'fat cat' developers, landowners and wind turbine builders who benefit from these so-called 'green' projects. The rest of us are the dismayed little birds who are LITERALLY being robbed...

[David]

Sorry folks - can't spell 'absolutely'....

[David C]

Here's a particularly fat feline:

http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/news/archives/2009/dale-vince-ufos-alternative-energy-and-money

[Don Pablo de la Sierra]

On target

[RETEPHSLAW]

Miaowwwww!

Love it!

[David]

David C - said fat feline is due to sue the UK government because they have cut the 'feed in' tariff for large solar arrays - something he'd invested heavily in, because he obviously thought he'd found the goose that lays the golden egg...
Never mind the fact that the UK is not particularly noted for its sunshine - especially at night - perhaps he was planning to follow the example of fat Spanish cats, who thought it would be a good wheeze to run diesel generators at night to maximise their feed-in tariff revenues...

[BBD]

David C

Dale 'Ecosubsidy' Vince. A national treasure funded by national treasure. Not my favourite human being.

[David]

BBD - one hopes fervently that this 'OBE' (how appropriate 'Other Buggers' Efforts' is in this case) will come crashing to earth some time soon, as the inevitable laws of economics start to strangle all the loony 'green' projects...

[BBD]

Only the abolition of all renewables subsidy in the UK will starve and kill the parasite class that Ecothievery Vince so perfectly represents.

And I don't see that happening any time soon, although we can hope, I suppose.

It will require the removal of Huhne, and very likely two further changes of government before the truth is so absolutely apparent that action will follow.

By which time it will be too late, of course.

[Turning Tide]

I'm was really trying to get my head around reconciling these two statements from the interview with Dale Vince:

"... a four-bedroom stone house in Stroud ..."

"...I don't have much respect for money ..."

Then I reached this bit:

"HOW MUCH DID YOUR HOUSE COST?
I don't own it. I bought it in 2005 for £600,000 but the company owns it and I pay them rent. I would have needed a large mortgage to buy a house and that would have meant a big increase in my salary, putting my tax bill up. Rather than have more money going to the taxman, I realised that if the company owned the house I could just pay rent, which is a bit cheaper. And if the value of the house goes up the company will benefit."

So basically a recipient of taxpayer largess in the form of subsidies is bragging about dodging taxes. And someone who professes to have "no respect" for money nevertheless has a personal fortune of £90 million, according to the Telegraph.

Are there are greens who aren't odious hypocrites?

[Josh]

Green jobs is for the birds.

;-)

[BBD]

TT

Ecothievery Vince is so up-front about the old tax doge of 'the company owns everything' that it looks as though he doesn't see the moral conflict of his revenue stream principally deriving from energy 'taxes' on the rest of us.

I think I may have been mistaken about his apparently jaw-dropping hypocrisy. Perhaps it is instead a pathology of a much worse kind. The man simply inhabits a moral vacuum where anything's okay so long as he benefits from it.

Such people are extremely dangerous.

[Turning Tide]

And to make things even worse, he has three children.

Aren't the greens always lecturing people about how the worst thing you can do for the planet is to have kids? And how, among kids, rich developed-world kids have so much more impact than poor third world kids?

Yet another do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do environmentalist.

And he even thinks the UK could be powered 100% by wind turbines. Apparently we'd only need 100,000 of them, so we'd only have to put them on every little last remaining scrap of wild hillside left on our once sceptered isle.

[BBD]

TT

Does he really think we can power the nation on wind? He needs to have a chat with the chief scientific advisor to DECC (David MacKay) then:

Plugging in the British population density: 250 people per square kilometre, or 4000 square metres per person, we find that wind power could generate

2 W/m2 ×4000 m2/person = 8000 W per person,

if wind turbines were packed across the whole country, and assuming 2 W/m2 is the correct power per unit area. Converting to our favourite power units, that’s 200 kWh/d per person.

Let’s be realistic. What fraction of the country can we really imagine covering with windmills? Maybe 10%? Then we conclude: if we covered the windiest 10% of the country with windmills (delivering 2 W/m2), we would be able to generate 20 kWh/d per person, which is half of the power used by driving an average fossil-fuel car 50 km per day.

Britain’s onshore wind energy resource may be “huge,” but it’s evidently not as huge as our huge consumption. We’ll come to offshore wind later.

I should emphasize how generous an assumption I’m making. Let’s compare this estimate of British wind potential with current installed wind power worldwide. The windmills that would be required to provide the
UK with 20 kWh/d per person amount to 50 times the entire wind hardware of Denmark; 7 times all the wind farms of Germany; and double the entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c4/page_32.shtml

But then, presumably in his Vince-o-centric world-view, covering the entire UK (and much of its shallow offshore waters) with windmills is the right and proper thing to do. Because it will make Vince the Eco King even richer than he already is.

And that is good so it must be right.

Like I say, a dangerous man.

[simpleseekeraftertruth]

Dale Vince is a product of a distorted market. But there is more to come; as Huppert stated at the RS on CCS "...because there is money in it..."

"The greenest government ever" as in easily led or deceived; simple; naive.

[woodentop]

@BBD

I heard our resident green windbag Patrick Harvie (aspiring Green MSP) let the cat out of the bag the other day when he referred to "demand management" as a component of how all our future energy needs could be met by renewables (and no nuclear power).

A quick google turned this up:

http://www.visionofearth.org/industry/renewable-energy/renewable-energy-review/demand-side-management-to-help-build-a-renewable-power-grid/

All fairytale "choices" and "encouragement" pie in the sky, with no mention of the inevitable (and compulsory) black/brownouts.

[Foxgoose]

Vince was a "new age traveller" living in an old van for years - which probably explains his cavalier approach to helping himself to other people's money.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2004/sep/18/energy.renewableenergy

His company, Ecotricity, bribed a local farmer here to try his luck with three mega-windmills - on a totally unsuitable lowland site right on the edge of our village.

So far we've manged to Nimby his planning applications - but I expect he'll be back.

[BBD]

woodentop

Keep looking. 'Demand management' is a euphemism for 'rationing'. This becomes necessary when the penetration of renewables into the UK energy mix is sufficient to cause supply shortfalls.

These will be 'managed' via 'smart meters' which we are all apparently going to have to have installed.

One has to ask:

1/. If renewables are capable of displacing fossil fuels as claimed, why the need for energy rationing?

2/. Does the already commonplace use of euphemisms such as 'demand managment' and 'smart meters' mean that supply shortfalls are considered inevitable?

3/. If so, on what basis does this or any government justify its pursuit of current energy policy?

4/. If the answer to (3) is 'tackling climate change' then how? The UK is responsible for ~2% of global annual CO2 emissions. This is not enough to influence global trends, even if reduced to zero. So why are we doing this?

5/. If the answer to (3) is 'moral leadership' then why?. China and the rest need the cheapest available energy source for baseload generation to underpin their industrialising economies. They will ignore our gesture politics because economic realities give them no choice.

[James P]

So Dale Vince needs a mere 20kW to heat his home?! I'd like the see the solar PV array needed to keep that running in the UK...

[James P]

BTW, a great cartoon, Josh. By coincidence, there was a fascinating programme on the radio this morning about cuckoos...

[Colin]

BBD

"Does he really think we can power the nation on wind?"

Given that we have been governed by politicians' hot air for such a long long time, I suspect the answer is yes to that style of 'thinking'.

[acementhead]

woodentop at 8:13 PM

"All fairytale "choices" and "encouragement" pie in the sky, with no mention of the inevitable (and compulsory) black/brownouts."

There is no need at all for "black/brownouts" to manage demand. All that is needed is real-time(OK, five minute) pricing.

Wholesale electricity prices for New Zealand can be found at

http://www.electricityinfo.co.nz/comitFta/five_min_prices.main

Since midnight today power price has varied by a factor of six. Sometimes the variation during the day can be from essentially free to over $200 per MWH.

http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/electricity-price-spike-debate-continues-4095832

Fixed prices cause waste. Horrendous waste. Markets promote efficient use of capital(and everything else as well).

[woodentop]

@BBD
The link I provided above states this (not that I agree with it):

Let us be clear that this is not proof that increasing energy consumption in rich nations is unrelated to economic growth. Recent studies have demonstrated that increasing energy consumption in OECD nations does cause some economic growth. It certainly appears though that there are diminishing returns as humans use more and more energy. Wealth and well-being are becoming increasingly de-coupled from energy usage as nations become more advanced.

This makes sense when looking at the aggregate perspective: The poorest countries of the world cannot easily afford heating, roads, and industrialized food production. The developing nations of the world are still building the infrastructure to meet their basic needs. Conversely, the industrialization of the richest countries in the world has slowed or even reversed.

The rich world has met its primary infrastructure needs for now, and can be regarded as being in what we might call ‘maintenance mode’. This is not to say that we are merely maintaining existing infrastructure. We are also not claiming that the industry in rich nations is stagnant in any way. We are merely saying that in order to continue to meet and even exceed our basic needs in rich nations we do not need to industrialize our society more than we already have.

elsewhere it says this (my emphases):

Dispatchable demand management

What does dispatchable demand mean? In a very simple sense, it means that grid operators have the ability to turn off some electric devices that are consuming power. In this way the grid operator can reduce demand at certain times when it would be overly expensive or dangerous to try to meet the demand merely through increased supply.

The owner of the electric device usually has some say in the matter. Dispatchable demand management programs are usually voluntary. The grid operator offers some financial incentives for people and companies to sign up for the program. Generally the payment is some fraction of the money ‘saved’ by not having to turn on expensive peak-matching power generation at peak demand times. The more peak power you can save, the more money you can get back from your power utility.

In Ontario there is a program called Dispatchable Loads that does exactly this.

Which hardly seems consistent.

@acementhead
I'm not sure I follow you.

[BBD]

woodentop

'usually has some say; usually voluntary'

And in a decade or so? You have to wonder.

The article says

Let us be clear that this is not proof that increasing energy consumption in rich nations is unrelated to economic growth.

Which makes me wonder if decreasing energy availability to 'rich' nations will have a positive or a negative effect.

The article asks

What does dispatchable demand mean?

It means 'electricity rationing' doesn't it?

They are cheeky, aren't they?

[David S]

I like the way that in 2009 Ecotricity (sole director Dale Vince) paid £1.5 million to, er, Dale Vince, for the intellectual property residing in its name. Then in 2010 Ecotricity (now with two Directors, Dale Vince and a presumably unrelated K Vince) paid presumably a fourth Dale Vince £328,000 for 89.7% of a company called Ecotopia Limited that had negative net assets.

The entire balance sheet rests on the assumption that the fixed assets are worth nearly twice what it cost to build them, but as the valuation comes from a respected independent firm of consultants, it must be OK.

If this company was in the City rather than building eyesores all over the country, they might well have been closed down by the regulators rather than harvesting £20-odd million of public money and OBEs all round.

[David S]

Sorry that was only a third Dale Vince, I got carried away.

[BBD]

What were they called again?

Ecotricksy? It was something like that.

[hro001]

Shouldn't it be a fat cat?

As a cat lover, I have to say absolutely not! Besides ... everyone knows that green jobs are for the birds ;-)

Great cartoon though, Josh (as always!)

[andyscrase]

@acementhead

Your links to NZ spot prices are of interest to me, as a fellow NZ resident. Maybe you could fill in some more detail? Thanks