A convocation of rogues

So the Energy and Climate Change Committee are having their end of term shindig today, with a variety of subsidy junkies explaining why the country needs more expensive power (and why it should hand over more subsidies too, no doubt). Twitter feed here.

We gather that Tim Yeo has said we should have shale gas (one wag asks if this means he has got himself a seat on the board at Cuadrilla) and that we should not oppose onshore wind because the alternative is offshore wind at twice the price. Personally I reckon our choice might be slightly wider than that. I also wonder if Mr Yeo shouldn't get a copy of David Mackay's book.

Catherine Mitchell, the eccentric energy policy activist prof from Exeter is pushing demand-side management - but I'm not sure whether she is from the "switch off the factories" school or the "switch off the peasants" school.

And Jeremy Leggett to come. I can hardly wait.

Quote of the day, corruption edition

By far the biggest beneficiary of the contracts awarded without competition last year was Danish energy giant DONG Energy, which owns three of the five offshore wind farms and stands to reap £7.8bn in subsidies.

Benj Sykes, head of its UK wind business, said he did not know whether his company’s projects could have been built more cheaply but he insisted the subsidy price was not “in any way giving us any sort of return that is not justified”.

The scale of the corruption that the government has brought upon us is sometimes rather startling. Read the whole thing.

Money talks

Two related stories caught my eye over the last couple of days, which seem to put our choices at election time in a fairly stark light.

At Guido's we learn that David Cameron has received a donation from one of the partners in his father-in-law's windfarm venture.

Meanwhile, the Times (£) reports that Labour have secretly told windfarm businesses that subsidies will flow unabated should they win the election. Indeed there seems to be a suggestion that the flood of money will turn into a tsunami.

A vote for either seems to be a vote to have your wallet emptied.

Greenery is national security threat

Windfarms and all the other bonkers attempts to green the electricity grid are not only an expensive and pointless gesture that encourages graft and sets neighbour against neighbour. It turns out that they represent a threat to national security too:

Security experts said last year that measures to make the electricity grid greener are boosting its vulnerability to computer hacking since new wind farms, solar panels and smart meters mean there are additional portals to be breached.

“The energy grid today is vulnerable from all degrees,” Slava Borilin, critical infrastructure business manager at Kaspersky, said in an e-mail. “Its electricity production is under threat of interruption and down-time from breaches of industrial control systems.”

WWF spivs are spinning

It hasn't taken long, but the story put out by WWF over the weekend about windfarms meeting nearly all domestic demand during December is being torn to shreds.

Euan Mearns gives the claims a good going over here:

Their press release is biased, vague and ambiguous, and journalists may be forgiven for reaching the wrong conclusions and miss reporting it. It would appear this is the intention.

And David Mackay, the former chief scientist at DECC, is having a go on Twitter too.

.@LangBanks "Home" is a misleading unit - total power cons'm'n in all forms is about 24x greater than "all homes" http://t.co/6rcs7UnGKU

— David MacKay FRS (@davidjcmackay) January 5, 2015

Update on Jan 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Anoneumouse sends us the new logo for WWF.

Windfarm boss funds antifracking challenge

Via commenter Tomo, we learn that windfarm millionaire Dale Vince was funding Frack-free Balcombe's application for judicial review of West Sussex County Council's decision to grant planning permission to Cuadrilla.

Great news – we now have all the money we need for our judicial review. Last week we explained how we needed to have £10,000 available in the event of our losing the judicial review and having to pay WSCC’s costs. Ecotricity has kindly stepped forward and sent us £10,000. FFBRA will hold this in our bank account ring fenced to either return in the event we win our judicial review or to use to pay any costs awarded against us if we lose. This is tremendous news.

Click to read more ...

Diary dates, cafe culture edition

The Dundee Cafe Science has an event on renewables on Monday:

Dr David Rodley from the University of Dundee Centre for Renewable Energy will speculate on how the energy landscape in Scotland and the wider UK might look in the future. Will carbon become the new currency as extreme targets for limiting greenhouse gas emissions begin to bite? Can Scotland achieve its goal for 100% equivalent renewable electricity, and how might smart metering help keep the lights on, and affordable?

Details here.

Google: renewables "simply won't work"

Via The Register we learn that some of Google's top engineers have been tasked with making renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels. We also learn that they have given up.

At the start...we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope ...

Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

There's lots of kowtowing to Gaia in the article ("scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger"), but on renewables they seem to have done their homework.

(H/T El Reg)

Diary date, charade edition

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee is going to take evidence on an inquiry into the cost of renewable energy next week. As usual the witnesses are largely going to be delivering the message that Parliamentarians want to hear, namely that everything is fine and dandy with renewables. This is, however, one of those racy occasions on which they allow someone who is a critic to show their face and so Gordon Hughes is to appear as well. As is normal on these occasions they make sure that the critic appears opposite plenty of people likely to take the opposite view, so on the same panel there is Richard Green, who wrote a rebuttal to Hughes' paper on the decline of wind turbine performance over time and the head of the Renewable Energy Association.

Witnesses

Tuesday 18 November, Committee Room 4A, Palace of Westminster

At 10.40am:

• Dr Nina Skorupska, CEO, Renewable Energy Association;
• Professor Richard Green, Professor of Sustainable Energy Business, Imperial College London; and
• Professor Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics, University of Edinburgh

At 11.40am:

• Professor Jon Gibbins, Professor of Power Plant Engineering and Carbon Capture, University of Edinburgh;
• Dr Keith MacLean, Honorary Fellow of Energy Policy, University of Exeter; and
• Professor William Nuttall, Professor of Energy, Open University

More details here.

Quote of the day, waste of money edition

It is important to recall that well over $1,700,000,000,000 ($1.7 trillion) has been spent on installing wind and solar devices in recent years with the sole objective of reducing global CO2 emissions. It transpires that since 1995 low carbon energy sources (nuclear, hydro and other renewables) share of global energy consumption has not changed at all.

Euan Mearns, whose latest post on the subject is a must-read.

Wind is not working

The Scientific Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute have a joint report out on windfarms. Martin Livermore, the head of the Scientific Alliance, has a blogpost up summarising the paper here.

The results will be no surprise to anyone who has looked at this topic in any detail: output is highly variable, and the entire fleet would only produce 80% or more of its rated output for about one week a year. The problem is that, however much we hear about wind being a free resource and the cost of equipment coming down, the effect of adding more and more wind turbines to the electricity grid is to push prices up with only a modest impact on carbon dioxide emissions (the whole reason for current policy) and no improvement in energy security.

If there were no arbitrary renewable energy target, governments would be free to focus on what most voters expect: providing a framework in which a secure and affordable energy supply can be delivered. If emissions are also to be reduced, the most effective measures currently would be a move from coal to gas and a programme of nuclear new build. In the meantime, the renewables industry continues to grow on a diet of subsidies, and we all pick up the tab. Getting out of this hole is not going to be easy, but it’s time the government started the process rather than continuing to dig deeper.

The report is here.

The underpinning of energy policy collapses

UK energy policy has one key predicate, namely that fossil fuels are going to get inexorably more expensive. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, the sine qua non of the whole renewables programme. Renewables, we are told, will save consumers money, and only if we dig much deeper might we discover that in fact we are actually being told that renewables are being forecast to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the future.

For years that forecast has looked ever more implausible, as all around us a revolution in unconventional oil and gas has caused fossil fuel prices to fall. Now, finally, the government has been forced to respond and to reduce its forecast prices.

Burning gas for power is currently far cheaper than electricity from wind farms, which receive billions of pounds in subsidies from consumers.

Yesterday however the Department of Energy and Climate Change released new forecasts slashing its power and gas price forecasts for later this decade by as much as 20 per cent.

But ministers have repeatedly argued that gas prices will keep on rising, eventually making green energy good value for money.

This is a bit of a nightmare for the greens in government, and it is hard to imagine that the government and its advisers are not going to have to reassess the whole renewables programme. No doubt it is not beyond the wit of the bureaucrats in DECC to come up with some plausible explanation of why renewables will get much cheaper in the future, but it will be interesting to see just how much they have to wriggle first.

Inner damage

The Telegraph is carrying an interesting report about an experiment carried out by German researchers, who fired low frequency sound at human subjects to see if they could find an effect on the inner ear.

The physical composition of inner ear was “drastically” altered following exposure to low frequency noise, like that emitted by wind turbines, a study has found.

The research will delight critics of wind farms, who have long complained of their detrimental effects on the health of those who live nearby.

In fairness, the sample size is small - only 21 subjects - but almost all of them exhibited the same reaction, and one gets a warmish feeling from the work because the scientists were measuring a physical effect rather than relying on their subjects' subjective reporting of what they experienced.

Worthy of further research, I would say.

Wind in the doldrums

The Telegraph is reporting the latest official figures about wind energy generation in the UK. Despite a rapid increase in capacity since last year, output in the three months to June was actually lower than a year ago  because the wind hasn't been blowing hard enough.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said that the impact of increased capacity was “out-weighed by that of very low wind speeds”.

“Average wind speeds were 1.6 knots lower than a year earlier, and the lowest for quarter two for four years. Average wind speeds in June were the lowest for any month in the last 14 years,” it said.

A glance at Gridwatch suggests that the next three months is going to be even worse. September has been nothing short of disastrous for wind generators, with the whole wind fleet at a virtual standstill.

Renewables don't work

The message that renewables simply don't work seems to be getting around. John Morgan, an Australian industrial scientist working in the area of grid storage technologies, has been looking at the EROI measure that was discussed at BH a few weeks back and has concluded that there is a bit of a problem with the whole concept of grid storage:

Several recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that, against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar power.  Not for reasons of technical performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after construction of the generators and the storage system to power our present civilization.

Given the amount we have lavished on renewables in this country, Morgan's conclusions could be viewed as just more than slightly unfortunate.