Calling a bluff

The FT is reporting some new research by investment bank Lazard, which claims that in some parts of the US wind and solar are now cost-competitive with gas fired power.

Costs have fallen and efficiency has risen for solar panels and wind turbines, the investment bank found, to the point that in areas of strong wind or sunshine they can provide electricity more cheaply than fossil fuel plants.

I asked Ed Crooks, the author of the article, whether this wasn't just levelised costs rearing their ugly head again. He confirmed that it is, but argues that the impact of intermittency is low.

Click to read more ...

The ASA is a kangaroo court

Americans tend to be completely taken aback when they learn that the UK has a body that rules on what can and cannot be said in the public sphere; they see the Advertising Standards Agency as an affront to the hallowed principle of free speech. A ruling against an advertisement in the Telegraph by US unconventional gas company Breitling suggests that they are right to do so.

This is not the first time that the ASA has been called on to adjudicate in a shale gas case. Last year, shale gas operator Cuadrilla was hauled up in front of them after a complaint about a leaflet it had distributed. Some of the ASA's ruling was bizarre. For example, a statement that

Click to read more ...

Constraint payments

There has been an interesting exchange of views about windfarm constrain payments in recent days. Last week, the Telegraph reported that three windfarms had been received £11 million to switch off, prompting a mealy-mouthed response from DECC.

Constraint payments are nothing new. National Grid has been paying coal and gas generators - and others - to change their planned output well before wind farms joined the mix.

Click to read more ...

Renewables cannot sustain civilisation

The other day we were considering the concept of EROI, the amount of energy you get out of a given technology for the amount you have to put in. Specifically we were looking at the figures for solar PV in Spain.

With splendid timing, the Energy Collective has published a post considering EROI for the full gamut of energy technologies. At first glance the story looks not too bad, with wind and solar PV (so long as it's in a desert) above the minimum level of 7 that the article says is needed to sustain a modern society (breakeven EROI of 1 is not really worth the bother). The problem arises when you have to start storing all energy from renewables, which as their adherents suggest is the key to having them compete with fossil fuels.

Click to read more ...

The cost of wind

An article in the Australian Financial Review takes issue with the Abbott government's plans to scale back subsidies for the renewables industry. The counterargument goes that renewables doesn't actually add very much to the cost of an electricity bill, but I was interested in the graphic that accompanied the article, which breaks down the typical Australian electricity bill.

As far as I can see, nearly every single component cost of the bill is increased by renewables.

• Conventional power stations are forced to ramp their output up and down to compensate for mometary drops in wind, making them much less efficient. Worse, if wind power is subsidised sufficiently to get a lot of turbines connected to the grid, the economics of conventional power stations can be sufficiently adverse to prevent any new investment in new power stations that would take advantage of price reductions in other forms of energy and would also bring more efficient and therefore cheaper power to consumers. In the UK, this has led to the capacity market, in which all market participants will be subsidised.
• Wind is a dispersed form of energy generations, requiring prodigious quantities of power lines to connect the turbines to the grid.

Only the costs of the retail end are not obviously inflated by renewables.

It would be interesting to know how much of the 52% represented by network costs is inflated by the need to connect wind turbines to the grid.

Vehicle movements and energy infrastructure

I was having an exchange of views with Michael Liebreich on Twitter yesterday. He was getting a bit excited about the number of vehicle movements associated with developing a shale gas pad, saying that the public needed to know that they would be on the receiving end of 60 HGV movements per day. We talked about the duration of these 60 movements per day and I pointed out that the AMEC report on shale had come up with a range of 14-51 movements per day, depending on whether water was tankered in or came straight from the mains.

This seems to have prompted a blog post from David McKay, the former chief scientist at DECC, who set out an analysis of vehicle movements for construction of a shale gas pad, a windfarm and a solar array. He came up with a range of 2900-20,000 movements in total for a 10-well pad, as compared to 7000 for an 8-turbine windfarm. I pointed out to him that his figures had nothing to cover access road construction, and so he redid the figures, coming up with a revised estimate of 7800. One could consider adding more to cover removal of soil for the foundations, but since this might be disposed of onsite, it is arguably valid to leave it out.

Click to read more ...

Windfarm critic fired by Danish university

Another day, another researcher on the receiving end of retribution from his green-minded colleagues. The story this time comes from Denmark, where a leading expert on infrasound, in particular infrasound generated from windfarms, has lost his job at Aalborg University. English translations of the coverage in the Danish newspapers is here:

He is not only known as the country's leading noise researcher, but also as a person who with his academic qualifications has repeatedly challenged and criticized both the EPA and the wind turbine industry for misinforming others about the low‐frequency noise that large wind turbines emit.

Now the 63‐year‐old professor Henrik Møller has been fired from Aalborg University after 38 years of service, and the reason is that the professor is no longer sufficient financially lucrative for its faculty.

The official explanation is that I do not earn enough money. Apparently I am not my money's worth, because I've spent my time on wind turbines. But I know there have been many years where my activities have resulted in quite a substantial income. Besides, statistically, it is probably about half of the faculty members who make a loss...

H/T John Droz.

Expert commission

I'm back at my desk for a couple of days...

The Scottish Government has published the findings of an expert commission into how the energy market north of the border would work post-independence. Unlikely as that result might seem at the present time, the report makes for amusing reading.

The commission itself seems to be one of those bodies like the Russell or Stern reviews that was put together to lend credence to a pre-ordained result. If you take a look at the panel members you can see what I mean:

Click to read more ...

Renewables just aren't worth it - Josh 281

 

Many thanks to Bjorn Lomborg for his help in putting this Infotoon together. There are also a couple of short but excellent videos on Bill Gates blog here - worth retweeting/sharing widely.

Cartoons by Josh

Falling prices, falling windfarms

The FT notes an interesting side effect of falling wholesale electricity prices in the UK: as prices come down the subsidy paid to windfarms increases. Now at first sight this would appear to represent something of a dark cloud for the consumer, but in fact there is a substantial silver lining. Because the total amount of subsidy has been capped, there is effectively a limited pot of money and if the analysis of prices coming down faster than predicted is correct then that pot is going to be eaten up faster than expected:

This could have worrying implications for many big offshore wind projects in development, which are heavily reliant on state incentives.

The UK needs such projects to go ahead if it is to meet its legally binding target of generating 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Signs have emerged that concerns about the size of the subsidy are already having a chilling effect.

So if they carry on in their current vein, the Westminster geniuses may achieve the remarkable feat of fixing the market in such a way that nobody is willing to build any new power plant of any kind.

Astonishing, when you think about it.

Wind and solar are worst

The venerable (and somewhat woolly liberal) Brookings Institution in Washington DC has published a working paper on the most cost-effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Commendably, the paper eschews the dishonest levelised-cost (LCOE) approach used by DECC and its colleagues in the green movement. 

The author, Charles Frank, concludes that solar and wind power are the worst possible approach to the problem:

...nuclear, hydro, and natural gas combined cycle have far more net benefits than either wind or solar. This is the case because solar and wind facilities suffer from a very high capacity cost per megawatt, very low capacity factors and low reliability, which result in low avoided emissions and low avoided energy cost per dollar invested.

Click to read more ...

The SNP's energy policy

So, the subsidies have flowed, the markets rigged, the countryside has been besmirched with windfarms, the coal-fired power stations closed or switched to biomass and the rooftops have been tiled with solar panels.

And the result?

The Scottish Government has missed its greenhouse gas emissions target following a rise in pollution last year.

Click to read more ...

Mr Swinney's footwork

Readers will recall that a power cut put a large swathe of northern Scotland in the dark a few weeks back, apparently due to a faulty relay in a substation. However, a number of expert commentators have observed that this seems to be a somewhat implausible explanation and there have been several attempts to check the facts, including an FOI request submitted by yours truly.

One of the other attempts took the form of a question put in the Scottish Parliament by Alex Johnstone, the MSP for North East Scotland.  Here, such as it is, is the answer he received:

Electricity Grid Failure (Wind Turbines)
3. Alex Johnstone (North East Scotland) (Con): To ask the Scottish Government whether it has undertaken any further investigation into whether an overreliance on wind turbines as a source of electricity played a role in the grid failure on 16 April 2014. (S4O-03258)

Click to read more ...

Wind or not?

This little snippet appeared in Scottish Energy News yesterday:

MSP Alex Johnstone (Conservative, North East Scotland) has this week tabled question for answer in the Scottish parliament on causes of last month’s power black-out which cut off electricity to 200,000 homes in the Highlands and Islands.

So perhaps we will get to the truth.

That blackout

Readers may recall the story I posted about a major power cut in the North of Scotland last month and the speculation that the underlying cause was windfarms. This has officially been put down to a faulty relay, but today Euan Mearns notes a letter by an electrical engineer in a local newspaper which tells another story:

SIR, I was amazed to learn that a Scottish Hydro Electric transmission spokeswoman said “repairs are being carried out on the faulty relay” that allegedly caused the power cut on April 16 (“works to fend off blackouts”, P&J, May 10).

I have been an electrical engineer for over 40 years and have never heard of anyone “repairing” a hermetically sealed relay switch.

Click to read more ...