Bishop Hill The subsidy cuts and the pea under the thimble
Dec 19, 2015 Energy: solar ;)
This is a guest post by Phillip Bratby.
Readers will no doubt have seen the apoplexy of Roger Harrabin and others in the media about the cuts in subsidies for rooftop solar power announced by Amber Rudd on 17th December (DECC press release here). Cuts of 64% (Telegraph, BBC) or 65% (Guardian, Independent, FT) were reported. The new subsidies (the Feed-in-Tariff scheme which consists of a generation tariff plus an export tariff) were given following a consultation, which had supposedly been proposing cuts of 87%.
However, examination of the facts shows that the above figures are incorrect. All the relevant data are in the consultation document and in the Government response to the consultation. The existing generation tariff for small rooftop schemes (<4kW) for January 2016 is 12.47p/kWh, the proposed consultation generation tariff was 1.63p/kWh and the final generation tariff (after the consultation) will be 4.39p/kWh. From these figures it can be seen that proposed reduction in generation tariff was (1-1.63/12.47)×100 = 87% and the final reduction in generation tariff is (1-4.39/12.47)×100=64.8%. However the generation tariff is only part of the subsidy, because there is also the export tariff. This is given by Ofgem as 4.85p/kWh and is unchanged following the consultation (quote from Government response to the consultation "Government does not propose introducing changes to the FITs scheme in relation to the export tariff"). Thus the true reduction in subsidy if all the electricity is exported is (1 - (4.39+4.85)/12.47+4.85)x100 = 46.7%.
In fact, the reduction in subsidies would, in reality, be even less, because for every kWh (unit) of electricity that the owner uses, rather than exports, he will only be paid the generation tariff but would consume one fewer unit for which he would have had to pay his supplier about 14.05p (Energy Saving Trust figure). Thus his generation and use of 1kWh would save him 4.39+14.05 = 18.44p compared to the current figure of 12.47+14.05 = 26.52p. Thus the reduction is (1-18.44/26.52)×100 = 30%.
So none of the media outlets has fully examined the issue of the Feed-in-Tariff subsidy and the changes and none has given the true picture, which is a reduction of between 30% and 47%, not 64% or 65%.
Also it should be noted that there are subsidies all the way up to solar farms of 5MW. These have also been cut and the tariff bands have been simplified. There is no mention of these in the media. One wonders why?
Furthermore there have been cuts to the subsidies for wind and hydro. There is no mention of these in the media. One wonders why?
Roger Harrabin gave Friends of the Earth free rein to give out the lies "It's outrageous that the government continues to hand out billions of pounds in subsidies every year to climate-wrecking fossil fuels". The Government is quite clear in the consultation response that "There are a wide range of definitions of what constitutes a fossil fuel subsidy. The UK, like the EU and the IEA, excludes tax treatment from its definition of what is meant by a fossil fuel subsidy, using international market price as a benchmark. The UK therefore has no fossil fuel subsidies". Obviously Friends of the Earth did not read the consultation document before commenting to the BBC. One can reasonably assume that none of the correspondents read the consultation document or understood it. This comes as no surprise!
Reader Comments (84)
tomo, 97% of the Green Blob don't believe in statistical accuracy..
DougUK
Can you give us some feedback about how much solar power you manage to generate and with how much equipment?
Dec 20, 2015 at 9:48 AM | Unregistered CommenterDougUK
I had fourteen 285 Kw panels fitted last year
Surely, 14 x 285W panels to give an installation of about 4.0kW?
Browned off : ok that answers the how much equipment part. :)
What I'm wondering is would it be worthwhile now without subsidies (but still with a tax break on installation) and also could you power a house if you had the extra battery setup (which seems now to be more affordable) rather than selling to the grid. Assuming of course an installation in the South of England - I know solar is useless up North. Alas you can't really believe someone who is selling you the stuff.
JamesG, how much further south than Southern England do you have to go before solar power is not useless?
It would be logical to assume that Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain could generate a substantial proportion of their daytime electricity from solar, especially in popular tourist locations, which do so well out of sunshine, during the months when it is mostly scorchio, but not so well when it is more dullio and coldio.
PIGS do seem to have got burnt in the sunshine scams. Pig farmers from Denmark, or the Highlands and Islands could have pointed that out, before too much money was wasted on fraud.
JamesG.
Some time ago I found a website with live steaming of performance of a 4kW installation in Scotland, well north of Edinburgh.
It has been going for 21 months or so and claims nearly 6,000 kWh total with 3,000 kWh so far this year.
Over a year, the average performance is about 3,400 kWh.
Average sunshine in Scotland over the year is about 3 hours 50 mins/day so the potential maximum is 365 x 3.83 x 4, about 5,600 kWh per year. So, this installation runs at about 60%.
Average sunshine in Brighton over the year is about 4 hours 50 mins/day so potential maximum is 365 x 4.83 x 4, about 7,000 kWh per year. So, in Brighton at 60% gives about 4,200 kWh.
DECC says average domestic electricity consumption for year 2014 is about 4,000 kWH:
http://tinyurl.com/opechx9
"1000 times more efficient"
A moment's thought will reveal that either, a) this is a load of dingo's kidneys, or b) that windmills are currently even less efficient than anyone had suggested.
Unfortunately, a moment is longer than most Greens seem able to think.
Brownedoff 12:28 A website offering "live steaming" could solve the worlds energy transfer issues.
Cooking vegetables will be cheaper too.
Dear gulf charlie,
There is an openig for a poof reader hear at Brownedoff Towers.
Please send yore VC as soon as pissable.
Toodle pip!
BO
Thanks.
"Who needs subsidies when the next generation of windmills will be 1/3 the cost and 1000 times more efficient."
Still no use for Heartland and CFACT- you can't see the Unibomber clearly if the blades spin that fast .
Nice picture of the Climate Hustle opening night crowd though.
Russell - is there any level of climate bollocks that you wouldn't defend? A null hypothesis, if you like.
And wasn't it the Unabomber?
tomo
I just read the UOW piece, and it’s hard to know where to start. I don’t suppose Dr H had much of a hand in composing it. At least, I hope not, lest anyone think he is claiming to have discovered perpetual motion, among other things.
However, if a superconducting material is used, the current will circulate indefinitely even after the power is turned off.
Dr Hossain is developing a magnesium diboride superconducting coil, made from magnesium and boron, which is very cheap and easy to manufacture.
Up to 200km of coil is needed to generate electricity in wind turbines and with current technologies, that coil would cost between $3-5million to manufacture. The same length of magnesium diboride superconducting coil costs $180,000 and that figure could reduce dramatically as magnesium diboride becomes less and less expensive.
I was going to look up the real price of MgB2, which I somehow doubt is going to be cheaper than copper anytime soon, but I expect Tim Worstall will know. Wikipedia insists that it will be ‘inexpensive’, but I think that’s in the same way that it superconducts at ‘high temperature’, viz. a balmy 39K. That’s going to need a bit of energy to maintain, isn’t it..?
@jamesp at least the twerp that wrote it up didn't use percentages in case long division might be involved - be grateful for small mercies...
More unicorn farts.
No mention of the need for the continuous supply of the super cooling fluid and the associated capital cost nor of the inevitable reduction in service factor, inevitable as complexity goes up.
Brownedoff, I spent agas building a poodle dip, but the blue mine brigade couldn't get the hag of it.
For all you physics whizzes......
If replacing the wheel bearings and grease on my car with some new product will reduce friction by 97%, it doesn't make my car go 97% faster, or make it 97% more economical.
If this new MgB2 is as good as it is being advertised, what ACTUAL benefit might be noticed? Does it mean we only need 99,000 wind mills, not 100,000 to run the country with a 30mph windspeed, or we only need 20mph wind speeds, but still 100,000 windmills? Or .... ??
Sliced bread was an amazing invention, but didn't improve the taste, price or quality of the actual bread, though it may have improved consumption and profitability simply through ease of use.
GC
I think you've hit on a logic flaw in Green thinking, but I'm still confounded by the 1000x efficiency claim. 1000% would be a bit more believable, but that would still be an order of magnitude, and it's hard to see how the ditching of gearboxes and the introduction of Magnesium Dibromide (sorry, Diboride) could impart such an improvement. If true, they must be in a wretched state at the moment!
Still, I'm looking forward to the introduction of Dilithium crystals...
The limiting factor with birdmashers is not coil design/materials, but the rotor shaft and its bearings. You can spend billions on the coil, but until you can come up with zero resistance bearings and rotor shafts that do not bend or deform when they are not turning, and are not affected by vibrations caused by damage/icing to their blades; they simply cannot deliver these sort of outputs.
tomo
Where does the '200km of wire' come from? Given that it allegedly costs $20 a metre and must be a heavy gauge to cope with thousands of amps, I can't see it being longer than a few hundred metres, if that. Am I missing something..?
BTW, it's going to be fun keeping the bearings at a workable temperature if the windings are to be cooled to 39K...
I have noticed that boat/jetski owners are very reluctant to reverse their car and trailer combinations such that the car wheels go into salt water. The trailer wheel bearings may only be used for 6 months a year, do less than a hundred miles, and are cheaper and easier to replace, than those of the car.
As a yottie, I am aware of the corrosive properties of sea air, before you even stick something in the water.
The life expectancy of an off shore wind turbine is, I believe, significantly less than one onshore. Gearbox/bearing failure being the cause.
Is ir ever due to corrosion of the copper windings, and would the MgB2 offer any benefits or create additional 'issues' not currently resolved with copper? (Despite all the money 'invested')
jamesp,
Beats me. Perhaps they made the 200km by adding the strands of multi-strand wire. Weight or volume would have made a more useful comparison.
GC
The windings will be 'potted' in epoxy or similar resin and therefore not too exposed to sea air, but everything else will, hence the lucrative sub-industry of windmill maintenance, involving well-paid engineers and boat crews who can only operate in calm seas and relatively windless (!) conditions. The stand-by pay is quite good too, I believe.
With the possible exception of sub-sea turbines, you could hardly devise a less suitable mechanism for offshore deployment...
RS
"adding the strands of multi-strand wire."
That sounds plausible, especially if there are, say, 24 poles. I bet they're adding up the wrong things, though.. :-)
Salopian
1000% right.
jamesp & Salopian, thank you!
I have done design work, but also the trouble shooting side of things. Sometimes looking at an installation or project, it is clear the concept was wrong, before it even got as far as a drawing board. Fixing off shore windturbines seems to be filling the void for oil rig maintenance engineers and associated contractors. There is a certain amount of humour in that!
Meanwhile, any claims of 1000% improvement for wind turbines with MgB2, might produce 10% (?) better sliced seagull, or 20%(?) better mashed merlin and magpie?
@jamesp
200km of wire?
dunno is the straight answer - but I suspect, ahem... not without some evidence - that some ignorance and exagerration is at work in the UOW PR department.
I'd say that the cryo system for the superconductor, the required cryo support equipment and servicing it at the top of a large pole, offshore.....would be an absolute logistical nightmare. Far, far better to put superconducting alternators on the ground, in a large shed on the end of a LFTR nuke.
tomo, would the cryo unit have a small access hatch so maintenance engineers, 200 feet above the stormy North Sea, on an unstable vibrating wind turbine could keep some beers cool? Obviously getting reliable electricity on a wind turbine to boil a kettle for a cup of tea, is a bit unlikely.
jamesp and gc
I used to have an MgB gT, in white with wire wheels and fitted with a Laycock de Normanville overdrive.
It was as least 10,000% more fun than the dark green Morris 1100 it replaced.
Poodle Tip.
Brownedoff
"Laycock de Normanville"
I do remember those (mine was in a Triumph 2.5 PI) but it's only just occurred to me that the name is perfect for a risqué character in a bodice-ripper, or even a Carry-On film.
"Oh, Sir Laycock..!"
There's that. Not many jobs, but some. Since it's all pretty pointless, there are no criteria by which these things can be deemed economical, therefore none by which they can be deemed uneconomical. So maybe it's a job for life (hope some of these guys).
It's also been reported to me by people working on these things that HSE oversight is relaxed and nothing like the OTT regimes on oil and gas installations. Which is nice for them.
Brownedoff & jamesp
Due to advances in the molecular structure of paint, it was well known in the 1970s, that if you had a red MgB gT, it would have gone 97% faster than a white one. The Heath Government could not accept the Political implications of red cars going faster, and the unions were wary that red workers should work faster than white ones, and the rest is dismal history.
Of course, if you explain that to a modern student of industrial relations, they won't believe a word of it.
Re Sir Laycock;
on a whim one day I discovered that someone actually called their son Darcy Pugh.