Bishop Hill Diary date, charade edition
Nov 15, 2014 Climate: Parliament Energy: wind The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee is going to take evidence on an inquiry into the cost of renewable energy next week. As usual the witnesses are largely going to be delivering the message that Parliamentarians want to hear, namely that everything is fine and dandy with renewables. This is, however, one of those racy occasions on which they allow someone who is a critic to show their face and so Gordon Hughes is to appear as well. As is normal on these occasions they make sure that the critic appears opposite plenty of people likely to take the opposite view, so on the same panel there is Richard Green, who wrote a rebuttal to Hughes' paper on the decline of wind turbine performance over time and the head of the Renewable Energy Association.
Witnesses
Tuesday 18 November, Committee Room 4A, Palace of Westminster
At 10.40am:
- Dr Nina Skorupska, CEO, Renewable Energy Association;
- Professor Richard Green, Professor of Sustainable Energy Business, Imperial College London; and
- Professor Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics, University of Edinburgh
At 11.40am:
- Professor Jon Gibbins, Professor of Power Plant Engineering and Carbon Capture, University of Edinburgh;
- Dr Keith MacLean, Honorary Fellow of Energy Policy, University of Exeter; and
- Professor William Nuttall, Professor of Energy, Open University
More details here.
Reader Comments (8)
The juxtopisition of Green and Hughes will be interesting. I wonder if they'll wander off into the depths of their statistical analysis? But whatever, it should be remembered that even Green's report detected deterioration in the availability of windmills over time. It was perhaps not as severe as Hughes' conclusion, but it was still a rate far higher than anything seen in the fossil/nuclear generation industries.
Somehow, I don't think even that will be revealed to the HoC technical luminaries.
Andrew: This is the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, not the HoC.
If they want "impartial" evidence, then they should not allow any witnesses who have a vested interest (ie profiting) from the renewables subsidies. They should not allow Dr Nina Skorupska, CEO, Renewable Energy Association, to be a witness, particularly as it states "A Lords inquiry looking into the resilience of the electricity system continues next week with evidence from academics specialising in energy policy".
[Thanks. Fixed]
The gravy train rolls ever onwards. No sign of the buffers yet.
An overload of academics, it seems. Do they ever listen to anyone from the real world?
They really don't have a clue!
They're still in the cloud cuckoo land world where people have no choice but to keep voting these twats back in.
The majority of idiots who populate these committees deserve the UKIP surge that they have created.
There seems to be more professors than undergraduates these days.
For my sins I receive the IET's house magazine. It might as well be run by Greenpeace or FoE when it comes to commentary on renewables.
In the letters pages of the current issue there's a reference to the cost analysis that's been prepared by Ecofys ("Sustainable Energy for Everyone" - you have been warned). This costing analysis is based on extrernalities rather the more usual engineering levelised costs. I find this heavy going:
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/studies/doc/20141013_subsidies_costs_eu_energy.pdf
You'll get the drift from this statement:
"Economic externalities represent the impacts of production and consumption onto entities other than those producing and consuming [sic?], which are not reflected in prices. While externalities can be either positive or negative, the remit of this project was to quantify negative environmental externalities” . . [since] . . “benefits are most often private and are reflected in the prices, so unlike the impacts we consider, are not external”
Unfortunately, rather think that these costs are the ones that Ed believes in. The Guardian's bought it:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/13/wind-power-is-cheapest-energy-unpublished-eu-analysis-finds
We'll see if it pops up in this HoL meeting.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! I would literally be ashamed to have such a title (not the Power Plant Engineering bit). Is there no end to the extent that people will demean themselves for money?