Bishop Hill Political murder
Sep 24, 2013 Energy: grid The political classes do seem hell-bent on murder don't they? The murder of the UK economy I mean.
Today Labour leader Ed Miliband apparent promised a two-year price freeze on energy prices as well as proposing the total decarbonisation of the UK economy. I wonder if readers can spot the flaw in Miliband's reasoning?
There are some clues here, from Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital, whose job it is to analyse the deepest thoughts of our political leaders and consider the impact on the City:
This is a call to dis-invest. Price controls are a rubicon not to be crossed
Price cap must be illegal. If govt picks up cost I estimate it will cost at least £3bn. Also drives horse through EMR
Question for DECC - is govt imposed price cap a foreseeable law change under CfDs? If so then no one can sign them. EMR dead on delivery!
If anybody thought it was impossible to come up with a worse energy policy than that of the coalition, you now know better.
Reader Comments (76)
I think Miliband/bean/brain (or Wallace, as he's known in this house) has one 'L'. [Thanks, done. BH]
Its astonishing to see the response to the market conditions Ed Miliband was partly responsible for with the 2008 Climate Change Act. Answer: further market distortion.
Still the greens will be unhappy at the proles not having their carbon emissions being priced out of existence...
The political classes do seem hell-bent on murder don't they? The murder of the UK economy I mean.
It is not just the British economy. It is the economy of all developed nations they want to throttle. See the story about Mary Robinson in today's Guardian.
Major fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground, senior diplomat warns
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/23/fossil-fuel-reserves-left-in-ground?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
Some quotations from the article are given below.
The former Irish president and UN high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, is to spearhead a new international push aimed at breaking the climate talks deadlock and silencing sceptics, with a group of senior diplomats and politicians from around the world.
Climate sceptics are "not based in reality" and parts of the business community are "trying to cloud and distort the science", she said, adding that strong political leadership was needed to counter them.
Robinson told the Guardian that governments would have to confront the harsh reality that much of their fossil fuel reserves, and accompanying economic value, would have to be left behind if runaway emissions were not to threaten the climate.
Robinson called for strong messages by world political leaders on tackling global warming, which she said were needed to combat the growing chorus of climate sceptics, emboldened by recent media coverage ahead of the IPCC report. "The best way to counter the sceptics is to have strong political leadership. They [the sceptics] are not based in reality."
Her backers, signatories to a declaration published on Monday by the Mary Robinson Foundation, include a roll call of former developing country presidents, including Richard Lagos, former president of Chile; Luisa Dias Diogo, former prime minister of Mozambique; Botswana's ex-president Festus Mogae; Bharrat Jagdeo, former president of Guyana; Tuiloma Neroni Slade, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum; and Jay Naidoo, a former minister in Nelson Mandela's government; as well as senior diplomats and labour organisations.
1 'L' of a prat.
I think Milliband has one L of a cheek talking about limiting energy prices when the skyrocketing started during his tenure at the Ministry of Silly Walks.
Ed Milliband is a jolly nice man. Claims that any policies he supports are unworkable, absurd, incoherent, made up on the spot, the product of an ignorance that apparently knows no limits are simply too beastly for words and jolly unfair.
I would like to remind the readers of this blog that Ed Miliband was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change when the 2008 Climate Change Act was passed and as such clearly had no responsibility for it.
He also at no point had any dealings with Damian McBride. Plus, Gordon Brown never shouted at him. Not even a little bit. And he also never met Ed Balls. OK, that bit may not be strictly true. But the point remains: that this is a man of honour, conscience and consistency with an iron commitment to decency and fairness who did not shaft his vastly more able (though hardly more likeable) brother in the back.
He has never – and will never – have any truck with political expediency. His core values remain unshakeable.
To call him a political chancer is a grotesque slur. I repeat, a man of honour.
If Milliband's speech had contained the words, "As the Minister responsible I regret to say that I was in large part responsible for the seriously flawed policy, albeit with the consistent and unanimous advice of the civil servants around me at the time. Global warming stopped in 1998 - fact - and a Labour administration will call an immediate halt to all the measures currently in place to combat it, including the windmills blighting our beautiful country" his party would get my vote.
Further evidence of the dangers of allowing one's ego to grow faster than one's brain.
Her background is in Law and she probably knows less about climate change than I do. The fact that she was the first female president of Eire had all the bien pensants from every corner of the globe slobbering over her from the day she was elected. Which explains how she ended up as one of those wonderful "special envoys" the UN is so keen on.In truth, of course, it's not the climate sceptics that are "not based in reality" as Mother Nature is busy telling us e'en as we speak.
Playing my usual game of running that quote through the Readability Calculator I find it is only marginally less abstruse than the Met Office statement I dealt with this morning.
And what the hell is "thought leadership" when it's at home!
What did you expect? This is the eejit who gave us the Climate Change Act.
On the other hand, perhaps it was a jolly good idea after all - we've certainly stopped warming. You can't argue with facts like that.
The flaw? No flaw, when there is no electricity then it can't be paid for and hence lower bills.
The man is a genius.
It's all so pathetic as he's directly responsible for much of the price rise.
This is just a distraction anyway, as the energy sector is changing...............http://www.thegwpf.org/cuadrilla-strikes-black-gold-balcombe/
It might be spelt with one 'L' but it's pronounced Tim Tim Nice But Dim
Not a peep of criticism of this lunatic proposal of Milliprat from the beeb on its news coverage of his speech. No doubt the grauniad will also love it.
"thought leadership"
Propaganda - Mike.
Nigel Farage must be laughing his socks off... shades of Michael Foot and his 1983 electoral 'triumph' via "the longest suicide note in history" ?
When I see Milliband retraining for a career as a nuclear engineer then I may believe he means what he says. That won't make it any more possible, of course. It requires some technical advances that haven't yet happened. Perhaps fifty or a hundred years would be my guess.
It seems more likely that one of his speech writers thinks it is a good thing say in advance of the latest IPCC report. Or possibly a new donor of funds to the Labour Party would like him to say that.
It is, perhaps, a ploy to solve the problem of immigration. Considering it was the general climate of the British Isles that encouraged so many to flee the place for more equitable climes in times past, then driving the economy back to the state that it was in before the 18th century will result in many of those who flocked to our shores to flock off.
That it will also result in the deaths of many of the poorer and elder natives is of little consequence to politicians of the stature that are now creeping round this land
Yes, this is utterly ridiculous.
However, imagine how this is going to play with the general public. All those people with extremely high energy bills who know nothing about the 2008 climate change act, who think that big business is evil (particularly energy companies), and who think that the world is getting hotter and hotter (the BBC tells them it is).
They don't follow the nonsensical, magic-ringing-tree science of climatology. They don't know anything about economics. They don't know anything about the limits of the possible.
A politician stands up and says he's going to make their life cheaper.
They going to vote for him. It may be insane, but that's how it works.
"Milliband" or "Miliband", perhaps "Presuming Ed" would be a better name.
Today’s electricity requirement and production for the UK (a few minutes after Milibands speech) was -
Total power requirement 40.42 GW - coal output 15.13 GW - gas output 14.37 GW - Nuclear output 7.08 GW and wind supplying a massive 0.15 GW 0.0037%.
The maximum output of the metered wind turbines has been 6 GW therefore 40.42 GW / 6GW x 0.15GW = a projected future supply under similar atmospheric condition if all power came from green wind of 0.999999 GW or 0.025% of demand.
You know what Miliband said time and time again today, BRITAIN CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS --- YOU BET WE CAN.
dolphinhead,
Tim Tim Nice But Dim?
No, Microband isn't nice, and I find it odd that this creature is being presented as a clean break from the infighting of the Blair/Brown era given given he's spattered in the political blood of his own brother.
I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit him.
Sep 24, 2013 at 6:48 PM | Registered CommenterPhillip Bratby
"Not a peep of criticism of this lunatic proposal of Milliprat from the beeb on its news coverage of his speech. No doubt the grauniad will also love it."
There's a bit of a dig by Robert Peston on the beeb which I stuck in Unthreaded.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24232289
Robert Peston "The boss of one of our biggest power companies has already said to me that the prospect of a Labour government instructing him what he can charge will put even the diminished investment plans of his business on hold.
And if there were such an investment hiatus across the industry, the imperative of replacing obsolete and CO2-spewing generators would not be met."
If you thought Ed Miliband, Chris Huhne and Ed Davey hadn't a clue about energy, listen to shadow energy secretary Caroline Flint (Channel 4 news). With her in charge, the lights would be out in Labour's first week in office. There's still time to get your generator before the election
Yes, yes, I know the lights have gone out, but comrade, celebrate the glorious fixed price brownout!
Take his comments literally for a second. What do we see?
Taking Barry Wells' figures above....
Demand.............................40.42 GW
Nuclear................................7.08 GW
Wind................................... 0.15 GW
Total 'Low Carbon output....7.23 GW
Shortfall.............................33.19 GW
So, we have around 16 years to replace 33 GW of 'dirty' power with over 33 GW of 'low carbon' energy. Literally, that cannot be done. We could not physically construct what's allegedly 'required' by 2030 even if we wanted to.
Ed Milliband may just be the most dangerous man in Britain.
He isn't dim either. He knows that what he has promised today cannot be delivered easily or simply. Remember he was a member of the Brown government and understands that getting power is the game, Backtracking on promises comes as second nature to a politician, citing "events dear boy, events".
But Phil, once you swop practical solutions for ideology, it really doesn't matter what you believe. Your superior motives alone ensure that you are always right. Not least if your salary is guaranteed by precisely those whom you are simultaneously shafting – in the interests of the higher good that only you are privy to, of course.
In keeping with the title of the post and for those of you harbouring let's say unkind thoughts about certain politicians - I can reccomend Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die: The Assassination of a British Prime Minister
The resemblance between the present time and the turn of the 18th / 19th centuries sometimes looms pretty large
No shortage of disgruntled ex Russian resident businessmen around at the moment I suspect - and most definitely an issue for which the cure is far, far in a way worse than the supposed affliction.(to the point where precipitating economic meltdown and associated woe doesn't seem to be factored into the obsessive dullands reasoning on any level)
Cheshirered
Don't forget that a lot of our nuclear generation capacity is closing down in the not too distant future so the figures that you show will actually require a much bigger replacement of generating capacity.
The real time generation data can be obtained from the dashboard at the following web site http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
Data is logged for each 15mins since 2011 in excel and can be downloaded, from my own inspection of this data the max wind generation is 6GW - the minimum is 0GW and the average is around 1.5GW since 2011. I hope that you find this site interesting I know I did.
Yeah, government price fixing is a brilliant idea. In Venezuela, the government decided to fix the price of toilet paper. Here's what happened:
http://www.todayindillon.com/venezuela-seizes-toilet-paper-factory.html
"Venezuela’s leftist government said Saturday it temporarily seized a major toilet paper factory hoping that it can end troublesome shortages of the staple personal care item. “The temporary occupation of [the toilet-paper manufacturing plant] is aimed at verifying that toilet paper industry production, marketing and distribution” are all in line with state policies, Vice President Jorge Arreaza said ..."
Now, I wonder what would happen when (not if) energy price-fixing resulted in brownouts and blackouts? That would be a bit more serious than toilet paper shortages. It's a perfect excuse for a government takeover.
I used to think that this line of thought was the domain of conspiracy theorists. These days, I'm not so sure.
http://www.itv.com/news/update/2013-09-24/davey-compares-freeze-plan-to-california-blackouts/
Tried Energy price freeze in California.Because the Electricity companies could not make a profit they simply withdrew their
supply power blackouts across the state
Politics Show Andrew Neal challenged Caroline Flint about it.
Yes indeed, Ed Miliband partly responsible for pushing through the ludicrous 2008 Climate Change Act was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change at the time and so knowlegeable on the subject that here he is with Frannie Armstrong (notorious for that obnoxious 10/10 video) warning the public of that if temperatures go above 2 degrees then we'll get 'negative feedback loops' and be in much more danger of runaway climate change!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r29uVnKfaQ
Age of Stupid indeed.
And inconceivable that as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change he would have been unaware that there had been no significant warming for more than a decade!!!
Spain capped electricity prices (before they capped wind subsidies). Spanish power companies, Iberdrola etc, for whatever reason (I don't understand how Spanish politics works) picked up the difference which amounted to them being owed billions by the Spanish government by 2010. Things went badly for the economy and they never got repaid although as recently as last year the government considered securitising the debt. I think this has become a typical EU balance sheet fudge - now you see it, now you don't (the billions, that is).
If Miliband attempts this it will be a disaster. He will have to accommodate companies like SSE who quite recently mothballed 1GW of CCGT gas generating capacity and have hard mothballed, ie it will take a year to bring them back on line, other plants. And here's the rub; Cameron has to sort this out now. How he does this without curtailing wind subsidies and the priority afforded wind and convincing companies like SSE that the spark gap (the cost between gas and the price got from generating power using gas) will rebalance if wind does not have priority looks impossible. Miliband as last Energy Secretary set all this up. He was, in my opinion, the poorest, most incompetent Energy Secretary we have ever had. Brown then boxed them in by making CO2 targets legal. If Cameron doesn't sort this out then costs will explode, well rise very rapidly. Not only will we be bribing wind farms but everyone else from kw solar panels owner to 1GW generators. Think how much electricity prices have risen with only a couple of GW renewable (mostly wind excluding hydro) power and then think how much it might cost if we have to bribe the other 58GW.
When it comes to spelling his name I always remember that the 'L' is like the 'N' in w*nker: singular.
The one thing you don't do if you are going to impose an energy price freeze, is to announce it a year and a half before you do. He's just engineered the mother of all price rises in fall 2014.
When you think about it, Mr Millibrain's ideas of an energy price freeze and total energy decarbonisation actually sit very comfortably together.
"Decarbonised" energy will only be available during the hours of daylight and when it's windy (but not too windy). If that doesn't reduce everyone's energy bills I'd be very surprised. Give the man some credit!
For the effects of government price controls, land theft etc. as suggested by Milimong, look no further than
RhodesiaZimbabwe, that thriving economic land of milk and honey...JT Broadhurst...yes, the Spanish government has been securitising the deficit under a programme, without a hint of irony, called FADE (Fondo de Amortización del Déficit Eléctrico). Issuance already stands at €20bn, with a further €4bn promised by next May. Under some rather bizarre Eurostat accounting rules - despite the programme bearing an implicit state guarantee - the debt doesn't count towards the Spanish government's.
https://www.fade-fund.com/FADE-FUND/docs/130919%20investors%20presentation%20-%20September%202013.pdf is pretty interesting for those with an interest in things financial.
There seems to be a sort of piezolectric effect at work: As the pressures of reality increase on the AGW doomsayers, their pronouncements get more and more shrill, even as reality crushes their prophecies. The magical idea that one can have stable reasonable prices even as an industrial economy 'decarbonizes' is the equivalent of nearly ultrasonic shrillness. As the AGW kooks get more and more shrill, fewer and fewer reasonable people hear them.
Deep thinking and Miliband are mutually exclusive.
@ Barry Wells ,Sep 24, 2013 at 7:16 PM
According to NETA http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
the metered wind energy sources on the UK electricity grid total 7.14 GW
c.f.peak wind generation table.
From Gridwatch's yearly graph it becomes clear the windmills never reach this value.
I tried to argue for the right to bear arms in this country over in the Discussion area. This cretinous group of politicians who plan our future show exactly why it must come soon. This country belongs to the citizens and we elect politicians to run it in our best interests, what a joke! UKIP is the last chance saloon.
Sep 24, 2013 at 7:13 PM | Stuck-Record: "They're going to vote for him. It may be insane, but that's how it works."
Well said - that's exactly how it works. And this article (Ed Miliband’s energy announcement may be nonsense, but it could become popular) on the Speccie blog says the same thing. Its conclusion:
And that doesn't seem very likely.Charming creatures on the Grauniad:
quote
Given the scale of the disaster they seem perfectly willing to allow, they will be lucky to get off with just a prison term once the full effects begin to cause the many major agricultural disruptions, species extinctions, property damages and inevitable major loss of human lives.
Needless to say, once these things become absolutely undeniable to even 6th graders, these same pukes will pretend they knew it wiuld happen all along...that it was those liberals who were responsible for the failure to act because.....well...that's the kind of people they are. Simply incapable of seeing themselves for what they really are, but instead telling themselves they are the only "adults" in society, the only "true" patriots and "salt of the earth" family values types.
But we can fix that, - one way or another - by keeping as many of their names listed in a safe place so we can reveal who it was that was at least partially responsible for the crisis, or at least who among us was defending the bastards who were directly responsible for it.
Oh yeah.... They will be lucky indeed to get away with just a prison term once the world's population begins the inevitable campaign of retribution sure to come if things keep on being deferred by political inaction. Certainly that will be the case if I get a chance to get my hands on a few of these despicable excuses for a human being.
unquote
The writer is under a pseudonym. Now there's a surprise.
JF
I complain regularly that people on BH criticise the left or the right and blame them for our problems, this shows once again that it has nothing to do with left or right. Both the coalition and Labour now have economic suicide as a policy aim, the only difference being that the MiliBean would get us there faster (a MiliBean is a person with one thousandth of the IQ of MR BEAN).
Johanna, there is a new IPCC report due out in a few days, so I don't think we need to start worrying about peak toilet-paper yet.
With regard to wind capacity, let's not forget that there is roughly another 50% on top of the official figure in the so-called "embedded" generators which are not visible to the grid nor under any external control. The grid has to deal with this as "negative demand" so, when the wind drops, not only does the visible windpower diminish but demand goes up.
As for Milispend, he has proved many folk wrong who thought that the Climate Change Act was the most incompetent political action of all time. Mind you, it could just be that the realisation has dawned so his only way out from under the consequences is to bring the whole shemozzle crashing down. Just unbelievable - pure Ayn Rand.
With wind power generating a miserable 100 MW today meeting just 0.3% of the UK's power needs, the lights will be up and down like a yoyo in a decarbonised Mili-Britain. So perhaps the 1 green million jobs are really for energy backup when we lie becalmed 10 days a month. At least we can also simply solve the NHS obesity problem overnight by installing cycling turbines in every house.
The sad fact is that a sustainable "carbon neutral" britain would be very similar to 1700 when he population was ~3 million. People forget that agriculture, fertilizers and Tesco are 100% dependent on fossil fuels.
P.S. the answer is nuclear fusion.
Does this mean the NHS hospitals generating electricity for the National Grid won't be able to make a profit?
Energy firms declare war over Ed Miliband's fuel freeze
Gas and electricity bills will be frozen for 20 months if Labour wins the election, party leader tells Brighton conference
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/24/energy-firms-declare-war-ed-miliband-fuel-freeze
"Energy UK, the body representing the largely foreign-owned energy firms, said Labour was sending out a signal to the world that the UK was not open for business. It said: "Freezing the bill may be superficially attractive, but it will also freeze the money to build new power stations, freeze the jobs of 600,000 people dependent on energy industry and making the prospect of energy shortages a reality." Centrica, the energy firm with most UK customers, warned: "If prices were to be controlled against a backdrop of rising costs, it would simply not be economically viable for Centrica or indeed any other energy supplier to continue to operate and far less to meet their sizeable investment challenges the industry is facing.
Ian Peters, head of residential energy at British Gas, meanwhile, told a fringe meeting at the conference: "If we have no ability to control what what we do in retail prices and wholesale prices suddenly go up within a single year that will threaten energy security."The promise to freeze energy prices surprised coalition ministers who believed Miliband would find it impossible to go further than their efforts to force energy bills down."
That is bad enough, but then the Tories manage to trump it!
"The Tories claimed a two-year freeze would jeopardise the building of renewables for which the energy companies had been required to set aside £9bn"