Solving the Uruguay mystery

According to Wikipedia, in 2013, Uruguay had 10MW of wind power capacity out of a total electricity generating capacity of 2337MW. That's 0.4%. Fully 1538MW or 66% was hydro. It suggests wind as a percentage of generating capacity would hit 30% by 2016.

Six months ago, Bloomberg reported that wind capacity was due to hit 800MW this year.

But today, according Jonathan Watts in the Guardian, Uruguay has made a "dramatic shift to nearly 95% electricity from clean energy". The picture at the top of the article is, of course, of a wind turbine and we learn that:

Uruguay gets 94.5% of its electricity from renewables. In addition to old hydropower plants, a hefty investment in wind, biomass and solar in recent years has raised the share of these sources in the total energy mix to 55%, compared with a global average of 12%, and about 20% in Europe.

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Mackay bashes EU energy policy

David Mackay is in the headlines this morning, having described the EU Green Energy Directive as "scientifically illiterate" in a forthcoming episode of Costing the Earth.  He takes a potshot Ed Miliband for the foolishness of his policy decisions. Excerpts were included in the Today programme this morning, alongside a response from Ed Davey, who comes over very badly in my opinion.

Inevitably a BBC journalist - Tom Feilden - has tried to spin Mackay's comments as an attack on the government. Fortunately Mackay has corrected him - given that the current government was not mentioned at all in the Today programme, Feilden was not even allowing himself a level of plausible deniability, which was a bit daft, even by BBC standards of shamelessness. The offending tweet has now been removed.

dr @davidjcmackay already responded to this tweet @TomFeilden.y did you delete & repost w/o correcting? https://t.co/ZaxTvbwNLo #science #uk

— Gagan Sidhu (@thebrolster) November 17, 2015

The Today programme piece is well worth a listen. It's here.

Mackay Today

Getting into hot water

As part of their aim to become “carbon neutral”  or something equally daft, the University of St Andrews is planning to close the road to Dundee and to the station at Leuchars for several months in the New Year, requiring diversions of at least three extra miles, while they run a water pipe under the road from their new biomass plant four miles away from St Andrews. They intend to generate hot water which will be piped the four miles to heat university buildings and residences in town. The whole "green energy plant"  is projected to cost £25 million pounds, £10 million from taxpayer via the Scottish government. 

Can anyone give some informed opinion on whether this is possible while retaining enough of the heat to make it worthwhile? Presumably Icelandic district heating systems do something like this but what are the insulating materials used?  Geothermal heat will make the whole process cheaper in Iceland than biomass (“fuel sourced from a radius of 50 miles” -until the trees run out) to be used here, as the Icelanders won't have to generate the heat in the first place. My initial thoughts were that the whole University idea is crackpot, but maybe  I am  wrong? TM

Update on Oct 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

A shorter closure but further to drive than I had thought.

Residents and workers in North East Fife are being advised to expect travel disruption during early Spring 2016, when major pipe-laying works get underway on the main A919 Guardbridge to St Andrews road.

Fife Council will close the road, from 15 February 2016 to 8 April 2016, to allow 4 miles of water-pipe to be laid, connecting Guardbridge’s new £25 million Green Energy Centre with St Andrews, and providing the essential infrastructure for ongoing inward investment into Fife, job creation, and renewable energy production.

...diversions will be in place through Balmullo, adding an extra 7.5 miles to journeys north of St Andrews and south of St Michaels.

Update on Oct 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

I am sure that there was talk of importing fuel from North America for the Glenrothes plant- it may be the 10% virgin wood they are talking about here.

The [Glenrothes} project was financed, in part, with an £8.1m Regional Selective Assistance grant from the Scottish Government and Forestry Commission Scotland has also helped underpin the investment with a long term contract for timber supply to the plant, providing 750,000 tonnes of timber over the next ten years.

The plant is fuelled by  a mixture of 90 per cent recovered wood waste – primarily from the construction industry – which otherwise would end up in landfill sites, and ten per cent virgin wood sourced from a variety of sites across the UK.

When fully operational, the CHP will burn 400,000 tonnes of wood of both types in a fluidized bed boiler and flue gas system – that’s an estimated 67 wagon loads, (1500 tonnes per day) of waste wood supplied from storage plants, the nearest being Cardenden

 RWE [npower] said the new contract would see Malcolm Logistics transport around a third of the overall fuel needed for the site by road from two local ports and RWE’s recently opened off-site processing facility at Cardenden..

Where are DECC's numbers coming from?

Last week, DECC responded to a question from Labour MP Jim Cunningham about the carbon emissions savings from using "biomass energy crops". Minister of State Andrea Leadsom said this:

The 2013/14 Renewables Obligation sustainability data [1] indicate that, for data available, the average greenhouse gas saving from energy crops on the European Union fossil fuel electricity average, by consignment, was approximately 90% (within a range of 85-94%).

This looks jolly impressive (or should I say "completely implausible"?), but less so when you read in the Renewables Obligation Annual Report that operators of biomass stations self-report this information. Even less so when you actually look for the figures given in the dataset linked. I certainly can't find it.

Can anyone throw any light on where the figures come from?

National Trust wants to clearcut North American forests

Dame Helen Ghosh, the former Whitehall bureaucrat who now runs the National Trust, was on the Today programme this morning explaining why climate change is the biggest threat to the Trust's work.

Pressed to explain herself, Dame Helen had almost nothing to justify her position, apart from a suggestion that the Trust likes to address the issues of the day. This came across to me as saying "we just jump on any passing bandwagon, it's good for business".

She did mumble something about declines in house sparrow and hedgehog populations. Unfortunately for this case, the fall in sparrow numbers appears to be due to changes in farming practices, to cats, and to pesticides, and in hedgehog numbers because of habitat loss. Dame Helen is therefore engaging in some pretty misleading scaremongering on the climate front.

When pressed on whether people should stop burning fossil fuels she again waffled, before saying that the Trust was going to be getting most of its energy from renewables. Interestingly, she didn't mention windfarms, no doubt because she might have been hammered on the "desecration of the uplands" front (although on the BBC she would presumably have been safe enough). Instead she spoke of hydro schemes and biomass boilers.

Given that wood pellets are being imported from North American forests that are clearcut for the purpose, this does seem quite a strange policy for the National Trust to adopt. Is this really what the National Trust wants to see happening?

Greenery will destroy us

David Rose's article in the Mail on Sunday this morning is a must-read. He has been over in the USA looking at the supply chain for the new wood-fired generation facilities at the Drax power station here in the UK.

[North Carolina’s forests] are being reduced to pellets in a gargantuan pulping process at local factories, then shipped across the Atlantic from a purpose-built dock at Chesapeake Port, just across the state line in Virginia.

Environmentalists destroying the environment. Part 125.

Another power plant closes

The Tilbury B power station is to close, reports the FT (see also the more in-depth coverage at the Guardian):

Tilbury B was scheduled to close under an EU environmental measure known as the Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD). Under the legislation, Tilbury was allocated a quota of 20,000 hours of operation from January 1, 2008. In 2011, RWE decided to switch it to biomass for the remainder of its LCPD hours, due to end at midnight on Tuesday.

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The biomass industry is nervous

Energy giant RWE has announced that it is suspending work on a biomass plant at Tilbury:

RWE npower has suspended development of a dedicated biomass power plant at Tilbury Power Station blaming lack of detail in the Energy Bill and difficult market conditions.

The company announced the move in a statement released yesterday, confirming work would be halted while "options on project feasibility are assessed and reviewed".

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Booker on Drax

Christopher Booker reviews the madness of the decision to convert the UK's biggest power station from coal to biomass.

As from next month, Drax will embark on a £700 million switch away from burning coal for which it was designed, in order to convert its six colossal boilers to burn millions of tons a year of wood chips instead.

Most of these chips will come from trees felled in forests covering a staggering 4,600 square miles in the USA, from where they will be shipped 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to Britain.

I know of several people who have bought home generators. Booker's article may push a few more that way.

Read the whole thing.

All that is Goldenberg does not glitter

Suzanne Goldenberg enjoys (if that's the right word) a certain reputation among BH readers and her latest offering will do nothing but enhance (if that's the right word) her position in our estimation.

America's carbon dioxide emissions last year fell to their lowest levels since 1994, according to a new report.

Carbon dioxide emissions fell by 13% in the past five years, because of new energy-saving technologies and a doubling in the take-up of renewable energy, the report compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) for the Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE) said.

The reduction in climate pollution – even as Congress failed to act on climate change – brings America more than halfway towards Barack Obama's target of cutting emissions by 17% from 2005 levels over the next decade, the Bloomberg analysts said.

The Bloomberg report is here.  It actually says little about emissions, but as far as I can see it says nothing like what Ms Goldenberg suggests it does on the subject of renewables. try this for example:

The reductions in coal generation, ascendancy of gas, influx of renewables, expansion of CHP and other distributed power forms, adoption of demand-side efficiency technologies, rise of dispatchable demand response, and deployment of advanced vehicles are all contributing to the decline in carbon emissions from the energy sector (including transport), which peaked in 2007 at 6.02Gt and have dropped by an estimated 13% since.

And as the report also makes clear, the big change in the energy mix has been the rise of gas:

Total US installed capacity of natural gas (442GW) plus renewables (187GW) is now at 629GW (58% of the total power generating mix) – up from 605GW (56%) in 2011 and 548GW (54%) in 2007. Between 2008 and 2012, the US nearly doubled its renewables capacity from 44GW to 86GW (excluding hydropower, which itself is the single largest source of renewable power, at 101GW as of 2012).

Volte face

Friends of the Earth 2004:

The Government should introduce a Biofuels Obligation, to stimulate a UK biofuels industry as a lower carbon alternative to conventional transport fuels. The obligation would require that a proportion of all road transport fuels in the UK should be sourced from accredited renewable sources. Fuel suppliers would either supply the target percentage of biofuel, or choose to pay a penalty. The revenues raised would be proportionately distributed to those who supplied complying fuels, encouraging growth in supply up to the Obligation target. The cost to the consumer is negligible, and it would benefit the economy and environment.

News report 2013:

Friends of the Earth Scotland said there were concerns government proposals for renewable electricity subsidies encourage “large, polluting and inefficient” biomass power stations.

Andrew Llanwarne, of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: “We are astonished that the Scottish Government would fund these climate-wrecking projects.”

The Archers on subsidies

The Archers, the BBC's ultra-long-running farming soap opera covered renewables subsidies in one of its story lines the other day (H/T Guy). The writers were somewhat off message (link below).

I wonder if this signifies anything.

Archers

Officially sanctioned conflict

Some weeks back, I noticed the odd dual role of Bernie Bulkin, chairman of DECC's Office for Renewable Energy Deployment, who doubles as an adviser to VantagePoint Capital Partners, a company that invests in the energy sector. Reader Terry Sanders has been following up on this story and writes to update us on what he has found.

After reading [your post] I looked into Bernie and discovered he was a director of Ludgate Investments which had a significant piece of its funds (7.9%) in a biomass company so I left a comment on his blog asking about it. My comment stayed in the "awaiting moderation" for 10 days which 1 thought was strange. I figured if they haven't let it through or declined it then they must be discussing it so I sent in a FOI request for all communication regarding the comment.

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Biofuelishness

Matt Ridley has ripped into the biofuels debacle in an op-ed for the Times.

...there is nothing carbon-saving about bio-energy. Take wood, a more carbon-rich fuel even than coal. As the environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in New York, has shown, when you burn wood more carbon dioxide is emitted than from coal for the same amount of energy.

Yet Britain is dashing to replace coal with wood. Many coal plants are being subsidised to switch to biomass. Drax in North Yorkshire, the country's largest power station, is switching partly from coal to biomass while Eggborough, in the same county, will convert fully to become Britain's leading renewable power plant.

Stripping the land bare

As if one needed any more evidence of the insanity that appears to have gripped the governing classes, this latest news report should be enough to have several ministers and a few civil servants sectioned.

The UK currently burns or co-fires around one million tonnes of wood, but the government has highlighted the importance of biomass in 2009's Renewable Energy Strategy and this year's Renewables Roadmap.

Planning permission has been granted to more than 7GW of biomass power plants, which the IIED said is likely to increase demand to 60 million tonnes a year, five or six times the nation's currently available resources.

The British landscape is going to get a new, pared-back look it seems.

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