A dampish squib

So President Obama has a new climate plan out and his fans in the BBC are getting very excited about it. The main thing seems to be a requirement for states to formulate climate plans, but not for a while. There is an even longer delay before they have to implement them.

Here are my impressions:

• The main objective is to make climate change an wedge issue in the next round of elections.
• The delays will make them more acceptable to the states.
• The plan will make only a tiny fraction of a degree of a difference to global temperatures at the end of the century.
• The US is halfway to the new target already on the back of the shale gas revolution.
• The new rules are put in place by executive order and can therefore be removed just as easily.

I'm not sure this amounts to a particularly large hill of beans.

Today's top news: greens write a letter

Anti-capitalist green groups and crony capitalists are annoyed about George Osborne's decision to cut renewables subsidies and have written to the Prime Minister to say he's a bad boy. With depressing inevitability, the BBC has launched a full-scale PR campaign to back them up.

So we have a Roger Harrabin article about the letter here, a segment on the Today programme here (from 1:17.35), which is essentially an opportunity for a series of opponents of the new policy to air their views.  Interestingly, there was less quoting of green anti-capitalists this time round. Perhaps my criticisms of Harrabin's last piece made an impact. But not much of an impact - the nearest thing to a supporter of the policy changes was someone from KPMG, who thought the subsidy removal was necessary but taking place too quickly.

I gather the FiveLive phone in features anti-capitalist campaigner from Friends of the Earth as well.

Props away

So, rather remarkably, George Osborne has decided to knock away some of the props holding up the leaky old edifice that is the renewable energy industry. It seems that subsidy junkies will soon no longer be able to claim exemption from the climate change levy. Gratifyingly, the bigwigs at RenewableUK say that it is "a punitive measure for the clean energy sector" and if ever there was a sector that needed a bit of punishment it is green energy, which would have no existence at all were it not for the money extracted from poor consumers that they have persuaded politicians to hand over.

However, some of our green friends seem relieved that it wasn't worse. In particular the Levy Control Framework, which specifies an ever-rising amount that energy companies can extract from consumers in order to meet the requirements of government policy, is set to remain, although some reckon it could be reviewed later in the year.

The markets seem quite sure that this is going to hit the renewables sector quite hard, with Drax shares collapsing, but what it means for consumer prices is anyone's guess. Until the whole machinery of energy sector intervention is torn down, we will never know.

Another power station to close

SSE has announced that it is to close a coal-fired power station at Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire, taking a further 2GW of capacity out of the grid. I'm not sure whether this has been factored into Ofgem's capacity margin calculations already.

The unions, who have been toeing the green line for years, are squealing loudly. If I were one of their members I would be wondering what I'd been paying them for all this time.

DECCline and fall?

I was half-jokingly suggesting that we should start a campaign to have Owen Paterson made the next energy and climate change minister - in reality I can't see Cameron having the gumption to stand up to the green blob for even five minutes. However, Jonathan Jones points me to an interesting post at Ruth Dixon's blog, which raises an interesting possibility:

For what it’s worth (and based entirely on gut feeling) I don’t think the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will survive to the end of the forthcoming 5-year parliament. I predict that its functions will be returned to their original departments (out of which DECC was carved in 2008). Energy will go back to Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and Climate Change will go to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

If energy were to be transferred to BIS, it would at least give the country a chance of dealing with the energy supply crisis without having any practical policies choked off at source by the blob. It's a good idea.

Which probably means it will not happen.

Your money or your lights

Keith Anderson, the head of Scottish Power has an article in the Herald in which he reveals that his company is willing to take steps to keep the lights on. But only if a large enough bung is sent Scottish Power's way.

One thing that remains constant in this period of change is security of supply. To help achieve this, ScottishPower is investing around £8 billion over the next five years, mainly in renewables and networks. But with renewables, the wind doesn't always blow, so having sufficient flexible back-up generation is vital. We plan to invest in further gas-fired generation to do exactly that. And 50 years after our Cruachan pumped storage plant first provided the benefit of instant generation to meet demand peaks, we intend to double its capacity if it proves economic to do so with appropriate incentives.

The next 12 months are going to be rather interesting.

Green policy - complicity in genocide?

Matt Ridley has republished his Times column from yesterday at his blog. It picks up many of the themes that have been the focus of BH in recent days, particularly the curious moral corner into which the greens have worked themselves:

Without abundant fuel and power, prosperity is impossible: workers cannot amplify their productivity, doctors cannot preserve vaccines, students cannot learn after dark, goods cannot get to market. Nearly 700 million Africans rely mainly on wood or dung to cook and heat with, and 600 million have no access to electric light. Britain with 60 million people has nearly as much electricity-generating capacity as the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, minus South Africa, with 800 million.

His post also contains the valuable information that Britain has, like the USA, banned investment in fossil fuel power stations in developing countries.

Matt is an admirably polite writer, even in the face of gross provocation from environmentalists. Tom Fuller, who has also been discussing these matters, is much blunter about what it all means:

[T]o be agonizingly clear, there is a case to be made for saying the aggregate effect of Green policy in the developing world is perilously close to being complicit in genocide.

That's about the size of it.

Diary dates, daily edition

The BBC's Daily Politics is having an energy and environment feature today, with representatives of all the main parties in attendance. My expectations are low.

Daily Politics Environment Debate line-up with @afneil & @RHarrabin - Mon 20 April 2pm BBC2 #bbcdp (1/9) pic.twitter.com/GaK4vQamim

— roger harrabin (@RHarrabin) April 18, 2015

This will mean that we will have a series of half-baked claims about the climate from the Conservative, Labour, LibDem and Green spokesmen, with Roger Helmer expected to rebut the lot of them. I'm not even sure we will get heat, let alone any light. It will be largely declarations of the faith and damning of the heterodox.

Roger Harrabin's presence is interesting. I'm not a regular viewer of the show, but I can't recall an occasion on which Andrew Neil was given an overseer. Are BBC managers worried he might ask awkward questions?

Diary dates, find us some energy edition

In May, the Glasgow Science Centre is holding a debate which might be summarised as "OMG where is the energy going to come from?".

Join us and a highly-qualified guest panel, chaired by writer and broadcaster Iain Macwhirter, on Tuesday 5^th of May to discuss the challenges we all face as the energy sector moves into an uncertain future.

Challenges include:

•Tackling the impact of climate change and responding to carbon-cutting legislation
•Finding new sources of conventional energy including oil and gas
•Developing new renewable energy sources such as offshore wind and marine
•The future of nuclear.

The guest panel includes:

Peter McGregor, International Public Policy Institute, University of Strathclyde
Gordon Ballard, Chairman, Schlumberger UK
Ken Cronin, Chief Executive, UK Offshore Oil & Gas
Niall Stuart, Chief Executive, Scottish Renewables

 Tickets are free and available here.

Longannet to close

The BBC reports that the Longannet power station is to close in 2016.

Scottish Power has announced plans to close its huge coal-fired power station at Longannet in Fife early next year.

The move comes after the energy firm failed to win a crucial contract from National Grid.

Scottish Power said it was "extremely disappointed" at National Grid's decision.

The Greens are celebrating.

Gina Hanrahan, from WWF Scotland, said National Grid's announcement was "another important step in Scotland's energy transition".

The correspondent who pointed the story out to me (to whom many thanks are due) adds this:

National Grid have given a £15million contract to maintain grid voltage to [the gas-fired station in] Peterhead, but that is for only 385MW of the station's potential 1.2GW. 

Longannet is 1.8GW (2.4 in theory but they don't like to crank it up nowadays).  So a net loss of 1.4GW capacity and a significant loss of grid inertia.  It's maybe not the best analogy, but National Grid are now sailing very close to the wind.

Walport: energy security is paramount

Launching the Institute of Chemical Engineers' new energy centre this morning, Sir Mark Walport has apparently said that:

...security of energy supply is paramount.

It was just a year ago that I noted that Walport had described the climate/energy policy as needing to be viewed through multiple lenses - of energy security, climate change, pricing and fuel poverty, and so on. Security was the first of these, but I wonder if we are now seeing a further subtle shift.

Renewables "most expensive policy disaster in modern British history"

The Centre for Policy Studies has been taking a look at Britain's energy policies and has concluded that they're not actually very good.

In fact, they are a disaster.

The true cost of wind farms and other green power projects is far higher than ministers have admitted, a new Centre for Policy Studies report claims, claiming renewable energy will be "the most expensive policy disaster in modern British history".

This is not news to BH readers, but it never hurts to reiterate these things.

Saving the world with fossil fuels

The must read article this morning is Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal, who points out that little-mentioned but rather critical point about fossil fuels - we can't do without them.

As a teenager’s bedroom generally illustrates, left to its own devices, everything in the world becomes less ordered, more chaotic, tending toward “entropy,” or thermodynamic equilibrium. To reverse this tendency and make something complex, ordered and functional requires work. It requires energy.

The more energy you have, the more intricate, powerful and complex you can make a system. Just as human bodies need energy to be ordered and functional, so do societies. In that sense, fossil fuels were a unique advance because they allowed human beings to create extraordinary patterns of order and complexity—machines and buildings—with which to improve their lives.

The result of this great boost in energy is what the economic historian and philosopher Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment. In the case of the U.S., there has been a roughly 9,000% increase in the value of goods and services available to the average American since 1800, almost all of which are made with, made of, powered by or propelled by fossil fuels.

I don't think the greens are going to like it.

The environment correspondent's standards

The FT reports that carbon dioxide emissions remained steady in 2014, despite the global economy having continued to expand.

One of the reasons is apparently China's energy mix:

China has cut its use of coal, one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions, and installed more hydroelectricity, wind and solar power.

Now the FT article is written by Environment Correspondent Pilita Clark, so claims about the involvement of wind and solar need careful examination. I think a little data is required, which, thanks to Reuters, I am able to bring you:

Click to read more ...

Labour's energy wheeze

The election is approaching and politicians across the land are trying to outbid one another their attempts to come up with the most eye-catching (for which you should read "foolish") wheezes for the future of the country. Ed Miliband is something of an expert when it comes to foolish and he and his sidekick Caroline Flint - the Dastardly and Muttley of the energy debate - have decided that the way forward is to have prices in the energy market set by a bureaucrat.

A Labour government would give the energy regulator new powers to force firms to cut electricity and gas, Ed Miliband will say.

It follows Mr Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices for two years if he is elected.

The Labour leader will use a speech to say that if he wins the election he will pass a new law giving Ofgem a “legal duty to ensure fair prices this winter”.

It's stupidity piled on foolishness piled on insanity. It's bonkers, all the way down.