;)
There's an article at the Guardian today that really takes one aback. Taking into account the author, the author of the underlying report, and those it quotes, it's quite a gallery of rogues.
Guardian energy editor Terry Macalister writes that wind energy is now the cheapest technology for electricity generation in the UK. Yes, folks this is the Great Levelised Cost Lie in action again. Here's how Macalister explains it:
The numbers drawn up by Bloomberg are a “levelised cost of energy” (LCOE) which takes into account financing, intermittency and other issues, so that different technologies can be fairly compared. However LCOE does not account for the cost of managing intermittent power in the national grid electricity system.
Everybody, but everybody in the energy policy debate knows that levelised costs are grossly misleading because the cost is only one half of the equation. The value of the output matters just as much, and the value of intermittent renewables is only a fraction of the value of dispatchable technologies. So when Macalister - or Doug Parr of Greenpeace, or Seb Henbest of BNEF - tell you that LCOE is a way to "fairly" compare different technologies it's not true. And when they tell you that wind is "fully competitive" with other technologies it's not true either.
They are behaving like the worst kind of city spiv, the most shameful dealer in dodgy share schemes.