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The extraordinary attempts to prevent sceptics being heard at the Institute of Physics
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Entries in Energy: costs (44)

Friday
May032019

What will net zero cost?

Yesterday's CCC report was a masterpiece of bureaucratic obfuscation, with acres of verbiage and a generous sprinkling of buzzwords that was never entirely successful in obscuring a marked shallowness of thought. One of the things that struck me about it was the almost complete lack of any cost information. We were told that all the CCC's whizzbang scheme would cost just 1-2% of GDP in 2050 (pull the other one!) but there was nothing to substantiate this figure (or indeed most other figures in the report).

It all struck me as extremely unlikely. Just a couple of days before I'd come across a study that put the cost of deep retrofitting insulation measures to the UK housing stock at £2 trillion, which over 30 years is £67 billion per year. That's 2% of current GDP on its own. The report puts the cost of converting to low-carbon heat (heat pumps etc) at £15 billion per year.

With this in mind, I wondered whether BH readers could come up with some more capital costs of the Great Leap Forward that our lords and masters are intending to unleash. 

As a start, I reckon that current UK energy demand is around 1600 TWh per year. How many offshore windfarms will we need to deliver that? And what will they cost to build (every 15-20 years)?

 

 

Wednesday
Jan132016

It's the greens, stupid

With the cold weather finally upon us, albeit in rather halfhearted fashion, ComparetheMarket.com has put out a press release reporting that old folk are going to be switching off the heating rather than switching it up. This has been widely reported

More than 60 per cent of elderly people will ration their heating this winter amid fears over high energy bills, according to a new survey.

As many as two in five (42 per cent) said they would also consider cutting back on food in order to meet the cost of heating their homes, comparison website comparethemarket.com said.

Hat tip then to Fenbeagle for pointing me to this report by the Competitions and Markets Authority, which found that much of the blame can be laid at the feet of environmentalists and their friends in high places:

...for electricity, the main drivers of 7 domestic price increases from 2009 to 2013 were the costs of social and environmental obligations and network costs...For gas, there has been a broadly even percentage increase in wholesale costs, network costs, obligation costs and indirect costs...

 

Tuesday
Jul012014

Think before you vote

Tata Steel is to shed hundreds of jobs at its plant in Port Talbot. And the reasons?

Chief executive Karl Koehler said the changes were vital if the company was to remain competitive.

He pointed to the UK's high business rates and "uncompetitive" energy costs as factors in the decision.

So despite all those people who claim that energy costs are nothing to do with the flight of heavy industry from these shores, it seems quite clear that it is in fact an important factor.

It's interesting to consider that most of those who have been flung out of work probably voted for the area's Labour MP Hywel Francis, a proponent of an decarbonisation target during the passage of the recent Energy Bill (and apparently a former communist!). Francis is to stand down at the next election, replaced by the red prince, Stephen Kinnock, another keen advocate of renewables. So to some extent the people of Port Talbot may be the authors of their own misfortunes.

Neither the MP nor his prospective replacement appears to have commented on the news as yet. In such circumstances, keeping one's head down is probably wise.

Tuesday
Jun102014

Liberally Dim - Josh 278

We did of course already know that the UK was planning on using diesel to compensate for renewable energy fluctuations, cartoon here. But Ed Davey's latest bright idea is to use diesel for just about any kind of hiccup in energy. And, of course, to have us, the public, pay for the privilege. See here, here and here.

Proper mad.

Cartoons by Josh

Wednesday
Mar192014

Heat or eat?

Ross McKitrick emails to point me to an interesting new paper in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A about how UK households alter their spending in response to cold weather.

Do households cut back on food spending to finance the additional cost of keeping warm during spells of unseasonably cold weather? For households which cannot smooth consumption over time, we describe how cold weather shocks are equivalent to income shocks. We merge detailed household level expenditure data from older households with historical regional weather information. We find evidence that the poorest of older households cannot smooth fuel spending over the worst temperature shocks. Statistically significant reductions in food spending occur in response to winter temperatures 2 or more standard deviations colder than expected, which occur about 1 winter month in 40; reductions in food expenditure are considerably larger in poorer households.

The full text is available here. There are a number of caveats to the findings that are worth taking on board.

Monday
Oct282013

Transparency and culpability

I return to the blogging saddle to find little changed. The Guardian's campaign to put the lights out continues apace, promoting a campaign to get universities to divest from fossil fuel companies and trying to pin the blame for power system chaos on the big six energy firms.

Looking on the bright side, there are at least the hint of some changes in the government line:

Some green charges will be scrapped while others will be taken off bills and instead funded by Government directly. If extra public money is needed to pay for this, that will be provided by additional spending cuts.

I imagine that no charges will be scrapped, although at least we might get some transparency over costs if they become direct rather than hidden in power bills. If so, it would be interesting to see if the Guardian's campaign against the energy companies holds water.

 

 

Monday
Aug052013

Public opinion on shale and energy

Yougov has published a poll of UK public opinion for the Sunday Times, which this time round includes a number of questions about shale gas exploitation and energy policy in general. These are the questions and main responses. The segmented responses can be seen in the original document here.

I'm not sure that it tells us very much, except that the public are a bit mixed up on these questions.

Shale gas is natural gas trapped under sedimentary rock, which is extracted using a method known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking". There are large reserves of shale gas in parts of England. Some people think that using shale gas could be a solution to Britain's energy needs. Other people think that fracking is a dangerous technique that risks contaminating ground water and causing minor earthquakes. From what you have seen or heard about the issue, do you think Britain should or should not start extracting shale gas?

Click to read more ...

Friday
Jul192013

Energy prices rises caused by government

RWE Energy have issued a major report looking at energy price rises in the UK. El Reg has done the analysis for us.

Care to guess how much "gas prices" have surged over the last six years, as the average household bill has climbed by roughly thirty per cent?

They are up by just ten per cent. That's strange.

And it gets stranger. RWE npower's analysts believe that the relatively small rises in commodity/production prices we've seen will probably go away again by 2020, so that their costs in this regard will return to the same level as they were in 2007. This will be due to gas fracking, more efficient powerplants and other factors.

In the year 2020, then, "gas prices" will have gone up by zero per cent since 2007. What will have happened to bills? Will they have gone down again to reflect this, in npower's view?

Certainly not. By that point, the company forecasts that our energy bills will have climbed even more. They will be up no less than fifty-six per cent on 2007 levels, on top of no increase at all in "gas prices".

Read the whole thing.

Friday
Jul052013

The Energy Swindle

If any UK readers have not written to their MPs about energy prices yet, take a look at the Taxpayers' Alliance Energy Swindle website.

Thursday
Jul042013

TPA fights green taxes

The Taxpayers' Alliance is doing a sterling job fighting green taxes, with the Mail covering a new campaign launched today.

 

Punitive green taxes will help inflate the average family energy bill by almost a third to £1,900 by the end of the decade.

By 2020, green charges and tax will make up £620 of the typical annual bill for gas and electricity, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

The group will today launch a campaign to persuade ministers to ‘stop the energy swindle’ as households struggle with record charges.

 

Friday
Jun282013

Sans raison - Josh 228

Andrew Simms hilariously titled article is here. It is so funny I have just repeated it. He seems to be worried that we might have too much prosperity, be able to keep the lights on for longer and generally ignore mad renewable schemes like Wind turbines for many many years. This sounds like great news to me. 

Cartoons by Josh

Wednesday
Jun122013

Look, it's renewable, ok? Josh 227

 

We are speechless. Maybe a cartoon will help.

Cartoons by Josh

Click image for larger version

Friday
Mar292013

Cold on Nelson's column

It's not new, but Fraser Nelson has a very eloquent denunciation of energy policy and the effect on the old in today's Telegraph.

By now, the Energy Secretary will also have realised another inconvenient truth – that, for Britain, global warming is likely to save far more lives then it threatens. Delve deep enough into the Government’s forecasts, and they speculate that global warming will lead to 6,000 fewer deaths a year, on average, by the end of the decade. This is the supposed threat facing us: children would be less likely to have snow to play in at Christmas, but more likely to have grandparents to visit over Easter. Not a bad trade-off. The greatest uncertainty is whether global warming, which has stalled since 1998, will arrive quickly enough to make a difference.

Wednesday
Mar272013

Spend to save

Ed Davey's statement on energy costs is getting a great deal of attention, and I think it's fair to say that nobody is impressed:

£286 green tax on energy bills: But ministers insist 'efficient appliances' will SAVE us money

  • Energy Secretary insisted households will be better off due to initiatives
  • But families will only benefit if they buy more efficient domestic appliances
  • Average bill is now £1,267 with £112 of that amount going on green taxes
  • By 2020 green taxes will have risen by over 150 per cent - £286 per family
  • DECC reckons households will be saving £452 a year then due to schemes
  • Charity said government 'embarrassed by terrifying cost of green policies'
  • Claimed it is 'covering up' with a 'whitewash of wildly optimistic assumptions'
Sunday
Mar032013

Dave Summers on everything

BH reader Dave Summers, a Professor emeritus of mining engineering, is interviewed by CNBC on just about everything to do with energy and climate. There's caution on shale, pessimism on the economy and a healthy dose of scepticism on climate:

As long as journalists are advocates rather than reporters the true story will not emerge. The lack of journalistic challenge in the mainstream media to the deliberate deception employed in hiding the decline in temperature prediction accuracy with the tree rings which dropped just as temperatures were rising, thus invalidating the "hockey stick," was an early indication that media manipulation was going to be a critical factor in this debate.

How long must global temperatures remain relatively stable before someone brings this up as a front page story? The amount of money involved with those who espouse anthropogenic causes of climate change dwarfs the funding that has gone to those who raise questions when so many papers so this "may" happen, and that "might" occur. And those who pay the bills . . .