Shameless, shameless, shameless

Having been hanging round the energy and climate debate for a long time now, it's not often I am taken aback by the Green Blob. But this article by Carbon Tracker's Anthony Hobley really made me gasp. The whole thing is amazing, but this in particular took the biscuit.

Investors are paying dearly for the inactions of the energy incumbents who have seemingly ignored and laughed off the impact of renewables. In the last five years 26 coal companies have gone bankrupt and US coal equities are down over 76%[1].

The suggestion that the pain being felt by coal companies is caused by anything other than the shale gas revolution and the surge in production from OPEC is astonishing. Non-hydro renewables are just 7% of US energy generation. Their impact is therefore nugatory, and there is simply no way Hobley cannot know it.

Shameless, shameless, shameless.

Update on Sep 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

On Twitter, Hobley claims that he was describing a "perfect storm" of factors doing for coal.

Unfortunately, a brief perusal of his article suggests that this is simply not true.

No other factors are mentioned. No word of "shale" or "gas".

Shameless.

FITs to burst

It's not a good day to be a green or a crony capitalist: the government has announced its proposals on feed-in-tariffs and it makes pretty ugly reading for all those who feed at the trough of government subsidies.

The headline news is that rooftop solar subsidies are going to be slashed from 12.6p to a token 1.6p per kWh. All those claims that solar is close to being cost-competitive with traditional forms of electricity are therefore now going to be given a fairly rigorous testing. If the claims are true then we can look forward to solar panels spreading to every rooftop.

And if they are not, it will mean the end of all those cold calls.

[Updated to reflect that these are proposals rather than commitments]

Carwyn's car crash

The renewable energy sector is of vital importance to North Wales, [which] is becoming a powerhouse for renewable energy.

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones, December 2014

[W]e’ve been saying for a long time, as have Tata, energy costs in the UK are too high.

“When compared to other countries, even in Europe, it’s very difficult for our industries to use a lot of energy to actually be competitive.

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones, today

Wales has to move to a green economy as fast as possible, says First Minister Carwyn Jones...Mr Jones told a renewable energy conference in Cardiff that he had taken personal responsibility for energy policy within the Welsh government.

BBC News report, 2011

Greenpeace's failed predictions

Whilst offshore wind is expected to get cheaper as the industry grows, the cost of gas is set to increase due to a combination of rising fuel and carbon prices. Our bills are likely to go up in all future energy scenarios, but the government's own advisers say the best way to limit that rise is through increased renewable energy.

Greenpeace spokesman, September 2013

The gas price has fallen – which makes subsidising nuclear (and offshore wind) much more expensive. Cheaper options for cutting emissions – like onshore wind and efficiency measures have, for various reasons, been parked.

Greenpeace spokesman, August 2015

Which is about as convincing a demonstration as you could wish for of the foolishness of listening to environmentalists.

Hat tip Ben Pile

In Poland, workers and windfarms sit idle

It's hot in parts of Eastern Europe at the moment - this happens in summertime I believe - and so people are switching on the airconditioning in droves.

In Poland this has produced some pretty major problems because the electricity grid can't supply sufficient electricity to meet demand. It's a familiar story: Poland relies on coal for the bulk of its electricity, but nobody wants to invest in new coal-fired power plants because the market is being rigged in favour of renewables and the EU is going to shut them all down anyway. Meanwhile there is hardly a puff of wind to be found anywhere in Europe so Poland's wind fleet is not helping either.

Click to read more ...

That voice

I get called up quite often by Radio Scotland to talk about energy. It's a hot topic north of the border and they struggle for people who are willing to do anything other than parrot the received wisdom (if you can call it that) on renewables.

So it wasn't altogether a surprise when they called this morning to see if I might be willing to talk about Obama's energy plan and what impact a change in the US situation might mean for further developments here in Scotland. The researcher sounded quite interested in what I had to say - you can guess the content - and went away to talk to her producer.

Unfortunately, when she got back to me half an hour later she said they already had "that voice" in the show, and explained that they wouldn't be needing me. Fair enough.

But now take a listen to what "that voice" had to say. It made me laugh, anyway.

Radio Scotland Renewables

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.

Wind turbines: worse than we thought

Readers may recall the little ding-dong between Gordon Hughes and David Mackay over the rate of decline in performance of wind turbines as they age. Hughes thought that this happened much faster than Mackay.

Mackay has been looking at the subject again today, analysing how newer windfarms have performed against older ones. His intention was to look at how technological improvements have shown up in the load factors of the turbines, but it's possible that he has inadvertently shown that Hughes was right.

The reason for this is that the rate of improvement in load factor is no greater than would be expected from the fact that the turbines are newer. So you can draw one of two conclusions:

• load factors have not been enhanced by technological improvements
• the rate of performance decline is greater than Mackay had thought.

Either way, wind turbines look just a bit more like a dead end than they did yesterday.

Spanish fail to fly

Interesting news from Spain, where it has been revealed that the country has failed to install a single megawatt of wind power capacity in the last six months. This comes after managing just 27 MW in 2014.

This makes the country's plans to put a further 5000 MW in place by 2020 look just a tad optimistic.

(Link to Spanish language article)

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.

Matt does wind turbines

The world's finest cartoonist is having some fun at the expense of the subsidy junkies...

Calvinist popes, toilets for bears and windfarm flexibility

I thought for a moment I was reading the thoughts of Barry Cryer on windfarms, but it actually turned out to be Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent and fervent adherent to the green cause:

Great explanation by Gordon McDougal on Today Prog about how low cost clean onshore wind's flexibility adds real value to the grid.

I'm thinking that onshore wind's "flexibility" must rank alongside the Pope's Calvinism and the tendency of bears to seek out hygienic toilet facilities as one of the more hilarious propositions to have attracted my attention in recent years.

Click to read more ...

IPPR admits renewables hit the poor hardest

The Institute for Public Policy Research has published a series of policy proposals to try to deal with the adverse impact of renewable energy on the poor - the very policies they have been advocating for years. Yes, without even so much as a murmur of an apology, they have admitted that the renewables are indeed hitting the poorest hardest, although without the gumption to also admit the beneficiaries are the wealthy.

Their proposals include ideas like doing more onshore wind rather than offshore and trying to reduce the cost of nuclear by getting the public sector to own the new capacity, a suggestion that does rather seem to fly in the face of bitter experience.

As you can see, these ideas could best be categorised as "transferring a bit less money from rich to poor" and thus miss the point that forced transfers of wealth from poor to rich are not exactly ethical.

But it's a start I suppose.

The consolation prize

After the appointment of a green tinged minister at DECC, the realist community's consolation prize from the Cameron government is the appointment of a windfarm sceptic as one of her underlings. Andrea Leadsom has campaigned vigorously and consistently against onshore wind but despite this has managed to get herself a role as minister of state at DECC.

However, what this signfies is unclear. One wouldn't put it past Mr Cameron to try to spend his way out of a corner by going for the eye-wateringly expensive offshore wind instead.

What's your view?

 I have noticed an increase in references to hydrogen as fuel in the press lately.

Here are a couple for your comments - one appears dubious, while the  other enthuses about wind-powerd hydrogen storage facilities.

TM