Spirit of inquiry

I've been taking a look at the BEIS committee's report on the effects of Brexit on climate and energy policy, and in particular the section on investor confidence, which struck me as likely to be the most interesting. The section opens thus.

The decision to leave the EU should not distract from the Government’s policies to provide secure and affordable energy supply and to seek ambitious plans to decarbonise our energy system.203

The citation is to the submission from, erm, 38 Degrees. Which does rather make it look as if they are dictating the text. 

Reading on, I find that:

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Decorative diesel

From the Guardian

South Pacific island ditches fossil fuels to run entirely on solar power

Using more than 5,000 solar panels and 60 Tesla power packs the tiny island of Ta’u in American Samoa is now entirely self-sufficient for its electricity supply – though the process of converting has been tough and pitted with delays.

From the website of the government of  American Samoa

The project description lists 1,410 kW of Solar panels and 6,000 kWh of battery storage.  Also, three new 275KW Cummins Diesel Generators...

The latter presumably for decoration.

Game just changed again

It’s an absolute game-changer

The citation on the award of a Danish design prize to the Tesla powerwall battery in 2015

Tesla has quietly removed all references to its 10-kilowatt-hour residential battery from the Powerwall website, as well as the company’s press kit. The company's smaller battery designed for daily cycling is all that remains.

Recent news report

The vacuity of Naomi Oreskes

You turn your back for a few hours and suddenly Naomi Oreskes does something even more foolish and generally loathsome than normal. Her op-ed in the Guardian yesterday looked at the subject of nuclear energy, and using her normal considered approach to people with whom she has minor political differences she decided to unleash the 'd' word.

There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.

Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world.

Of course nobody with an IQ in double figures takes anything Oreskes says seriously, but we have to welcome this intervention because it does give us the opportunity to laugh at all the people who are quite happy to use the 'd' word about those on the opposite side of the climate debate now venting their spleen over the use of the term in the energy debate.

Incredibly, @NaomiOreskes calls top scientists "denialists" for supporting nuclear power to tackle climate change: https://t.co/gAMYVrJ4dc

— Mark Lynas (@mark_lynas) December 16, 2015

Calling everyone who disagrees w/ you about anything a "denier" is a great way to cheapen the word & dilute support for climate science.

— David Roberts (@drvox) December 16, 2015

The world the greens created

While the energy and climate punters are concentrating on Paris, the results of the government's latest capacity auction are out. The market cleared at £18/kW which means that no new CCGT power stations will be built. Instead, the gap is going to be filled with diesel generators and OCGT.

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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Gas crackers

A team from the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology claims to have made a breakthrough on the energy front. They have developed a process to "crack" methane, removing the hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel, and leaving behind black carbon rather than carbon dioxide.

My initial reaction to this was to wonder what we would do with all that black carbon, but the press release has this to say:

It is already widely employed in the production of steel, carbon fibres and many carbon-based structural materials. The black carbon derived from the novel cracking process is of high quality and particularly pure powder. Its value as a marketable product therefore enhances the economic viability of methane cracking. Alternatively, black carbon can be stored away, using procedures that are much simpler, safer and cheaper than the storing of carbon dioxide.

It would be interesting to do the maths here - just how much black carbon might be produced, how much energy would be required to turn it into structural materials and so on. At the moment I remain somewhat unconvinced that this is the breakthrough claimed.

Green Deal claptrap

Yesterday the government announced it was to scrap funding for the Green Deal, spelling the end for its flagship energy household efficiency programme. Richard Howard is head of centre-right think tank Energy and Environment, Policy Exchange. Ed Davey is former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

An extraordinary interview  on energy policy took place at 7.50 am on BBC Radio 4 Today programme, with John Humphreys soliciting the opinions on the scrapping of the Green Deal from the two below.  [Funny that a spokesman on energy policy from this think tank is OK, while Lord Lawson from the GWPF (the clue is in the name) is persona non grata. ]

After the usual introduction, (there is a scientific consensus, we are all doomed by dangerous climate change unless we act)  from JH,  there followed a  barmy mixture of  a reasonable helping of financial common sense from Richard Howard, tempered by the obligatory "renewables are a jolly good thing". He did say that the Government are "looking at the removal of subsidies"  in the Green Deal rather than definitely "removing them". Amber Rudd's speech should  clarify this, if anyone has read it carefully.

Ed Davey (Ed Davey!!) held forth with his usual breakneck-speed delivery of illogical claptrap, including the statement that renewables were a huge success under the coalition government. Apparently as electricity prices were forecast to be much higher but had dropped, this meant that the green subsidies cost less than they would have done otherwise. which made them really, really good value.

There are more comments on this on Unthreaded from BH readers quicker off the mark than me.

TM

Another one bites the dust

Emily Gosden has posted some more good news this afternoon at the Telegraph

Launched in 2013, the Green Deal was touted as a "revolution" in upgrading Britain’s old and draughty housing stock, designed to encourage millions of households to take out loans to install insulation and new boilers.

But on Thursday, with less than 10,000 loans in place, ministers pulled the plug and acknowledged the scheme would be seen as a "total flop".

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) said it would provide no further Government funding for the Green Deal Finance Company, which provides the loans, "in light of low take-up and concerns about industry standards". It had so far provided £59 million to the company.

All we need now (well, nearly all) is the end of the Climate Change Act.

TM

Updated 6.18pm

AAAAAGH! Harrabin on BBC Radio 4 PM programme has just declared that the Green Deal would have resulted in a reduced demand for new power stations.

Rolling blackouts

Don't miss the BBC Radio 4 programme at 11am this morning which will discuss the acute problem of rolling power blackouts  already occurring in  South Africa and the current solution- diesel generators.

TM

Birthday honours?

The Queen's birthday honours list was out a couple of days ago and as I always I have scanned it looking for familiar names. There are no climatologists this year, but two names in particular stood out.

David Warrilow is the UK's long-term representative on the IPCC and has come to the attention of BH from time to time, although as I have noted in the past he is someone who operates very much in the shadows. BH readers did some research on him in the comments here, including Doug Keenan's recollection of a meeting between the two of them. Warrilow gets himself an OBE.

The other was Anne Glover, the former chief scientist at the EU, whose gradual descent into climate alarmism I have followed with interest. She becomes Dame Anne.

The only other one that struck me as being of interest was someone called David Surplus, the director of a renewable energy group in Northern Ireland, who is awarded an OBE. What a strange world, I thought, where it is considered honourable to achieve success through vigorous sucking at the taxpayer's teat.

Update on Jun 15, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In the comments, it is pointed out that David Kennedy, Lord Deben's former sidekick at the Committee on Climate Change, is also honoured.

The proposed Swansea Bay tidal lagoon

These notes from a presentation to the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) at Taunton on 13th January 2015 were taken by Phillip Bratby.

Background

Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay (TSLB)[1] was founded by its CEO Mark Shorrock in 2012.  He has a long history of involvement in renewable energy (CEO of Shire Oak Energy, Low Carbon Group, Low Carbon Investors Ltd and Wind Energy Ltd).

Finance of the initial phase of tidal lagoon development is being funded by Mark Shorrock to the tune of about £20m.  Thereafter it is expected that institutional investors would fund the construction and would become shareholders.

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FoE in support for fracking shock

Updated on Mar 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

After years of campaigning against fracking, Friends of the Earth Scotland have made an extraordinary u-turn and are now vigorously campaigning in favour of the controversial* technique.

This shock news comes to us via the Scottish Government who have announced a £250,000 fund to accelerate development of geothermal energy in Scotland. The press release includes a statement from the minister involved Friends of the Earth's Richard Dixon:

Heating is our biggest source of climate emissions and geothermal energy can play a major part in replacing fossil-fuelled heating. We already know that there is potential to deploy geothermal energy on a very wide scale in Scotland This new funding is very welcome and will help good proposals get moving and attract further investment. Different techniques will have different impacts but geothermal energy is clearly worth serious investigation, and it is great that the Scottish Government is taking the lead in making this happen.

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Building a crony capitalist society

A few days ago I noted the comments of the UNFCCC's Christiana Figueres about the UN's desire to transform the basis of daily economic life:

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution.

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Competitive insanity

If you think that the government's deal for Hinckley point was the ultimate in state insanity, think again. A week or so ago, the FT reported on a bid by a Gloucester company to create a massive tidal power station in Swansea bay. A similar report appeared in the Telegraph on Monday.

The interesting detail that the FT got, but which the Telegraph overlooked, was this:

The company wants a “strike price” of £168 per megawatt hour, compared with the £92.50 offered to EDF for Hinkley Point.

Words simply fail me.