Today does sensible

The Today programme looked at energy security today, with particular reference to Europe's relations with Russia. But in addition to this current preoccupation there was also some clear-eyed consideration of the effect of renewables on the grid and the relationship between environmental concerns and the need to keep the lights on.

It's twenty years too late, of course, but I suppose we should be grateful.

Audio below.

Energy security Today

Security blanket

Updated on Apr 24, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Ed Davey has announced a further expansion of the government's renewable energy scheme, with eight new projects unveiled, blanketing the UK's waters with wind turbines. These projects are apparently so enormous that they will, on their own, produce a noticeable rise in household electricity bills of some 2%. The rise in industrial electricity prices that will result and which must also be absorbed by consumers - something like the same amount again - goes unstated.

Interestingly, the argument that renewables are cheap have gone out of the window. Instead, with Ukraine in the news on a daily basis, Davey is emphasising energy security:

Mr Davey defended the cost, arguing that these kind of low-carbon projects were essential to boost energy security and battle climate change.

Click to read more ...

Wind speculation

There was a major power cut in the north of Scotland at 8:30pm yesterday. At one time, as many as 200,000 homes were affected. According to the Scotsman, the current theory is that there may have been a problem in power lines near Inverness.

Teams of engineers are today out checking the thousands of kilometres of power lines across the region.

A spokesman for energy firm SSE said a helicopter was also assisting in the search for the cause.

He said: “Our engineers are still investigating the cause and location of the fault. It is a large geographical areas these guys have to search.

“Some times you really need to go out an inspect the lines by eye.”

It is understood engineers are concentrating their efforts on an area between Moray and Inverness.

However, over at the Scotland Against Spin Facebook page, speculation is rife that it may be something to do with the wind turbine fleet.

...having looked at yesterdays wind data something very strange happened at about 20.27.... that may have been the power cut which triggered it .. but wind dropped sharply.

Seems to me that [National Grid] were expecting a rise in wind speeds (which did come afterwards) and started to ramp down gas & coal in expectation of it, when the sudden lull arrived.

Intriguing!

Constraining generators

There was a story doing the rounds a week or so ago about how much windfarms were receiving to switch themselves off. The levels of these "constraint payments" has now apparently reached £8.7m in a single month.

When the story appeared in the Times (£), there was a response in the Guardian which noted that constraint payments to windfarms are dwarfed by those to conventional generators.

National Grid made special payments of £300m over the last 12 months to big energy companies – sometimes for switching off their power stations in an attempt to "balance" the system.

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Dealing with DECC

Alex Henney sends me a 2012 article from the journal New Power, in which he and Fred Udo examine electricity grids in several countries around the world and assess how the use of wind turbines has affected the carbon intensity of the power generated. Suffice it to say that it's not quite what the environmentalists intended.

What is particularly interesting is that the article prompted a response from DECC, whose ability to misunderstand the arguments presented is something to behold, and the resulting correspondence is appended to the end of the file.

Henney and Udo

On proportion

Yesterday the BBC hit us with the shock news that raptor poisonings in the Scotland have doubled.

To six.

The wind industry in the USA is estimated to kill about 83,000 raptors a year. The number in the UK would be smaller, but assuming proportionality to the USA, the death count for Scotland must be at least in the high thousands.

Energy poll

As a measure of how successful the likes of Friends of the Earth have been in misinforming the public, take a look at Ipsos-Mori's latest poll on public attitudes to science, and in particular the section on energy (p.31 here):

• 76% of adults support offshore wind, 36% support shale gas
• 58% think that offshore wind will have a positive effect on the UK economy (about the same percentage as for shale gas)

I wonder how much of UK industry will be shut down before we see those figures change.

Wind power eases off

Readers will remember the ding-dong between Gordon Hughes and DECC's Chief Scientist David Mackay over the rate of decline of wind turbine performance over the years. Hughes had written a paper that suggested that this was significant, with Mackay arguing that Hughes' approach was flawed.

At the time Mackay pointed to a forthcoming paper by Staffell and Green that he said would support his case. This has now appeared in the journal Renewable Energy and it indeed supports Mackay's case.

The Renewable Energy Foundation, who published the original report, have issued a statement that suggests the story is far from over:

Click to read more ...

European justice?

Pat Swords sends me a link to this press release by the European Platform Against Windfarms, who have been suing the European Commission over its non-compliance with the Aarhus Convention. The Commission's response was to apply to the European Court of Justice to have the case thrown out on the grounds that the EPAW is not a legal person. The court has apparently now decided to accept the Commission's case without allowing EPAW to respond.

There is no doubt that this is remarkable, EPAW had no opportunity to reply to the arguments put forward against it, especially the main one, which is not based on fact: the European Commission having decided that EPAW was ‘a non-profit-making legal person registered in France’. However, when EPAW first formally approached the European Commission, on behalf of itself and other environmental NGOs, in requesting an Internal Review of the EU’s post 2020 renewable programme, it provided specific contact details in Scotland, which were to be used for this purpose.

Moreover, it seems that the court has previously accepted cases from organisations - including ones involved with violence - that have similar structures to EPAW. There appears to be a very strong suggestion that the court is bowing to the will of the Commission.

"European Court of Justice". There's a /sarc tag missing there I think.

Windfarm blight or shale gas bounty?

The Mail on Sunday is reporting the results of a study at LSE, which found that wind turbines adversely affect house prices in their immediate vicinity.

The study by the London School  of Economics (LSE) – which looked at more than a million sales of properties close to wind farm sites over a 12-year period – found that values of homes within 1.2  miles of large wind farms were being slashed by about 11 per cent.

Click to read more ...

Wheels coming off

In Germany, the shift to renewables has led to rises in both energy prices and in carbon emissions.

The fields carpeted with solar panels and the North Sea wind farms may have gratified the green conceits of Germany’s middle class but they have come at a terrible economic and social cost. According to Nature, the international science magazine, this year German consumers will be forced to pay €20bn (£17bn) to subsidise electricity from solar, wind and bio-gas plants, power with a real market price of €3bn.

In the UK, a big renewables company has announced that it is halving its investment levels in the UK and the Liberal Democrat minister responsible for business has said that the soaring price of energy that his own party's policies have caused is having a hugely detrimental effect on industry.

The insanity that has gripped the Westminster village is going to have very, very serious repercussions.

Identifiable decline

Readers will no doubt recall the study by Gordon Hughes, which suggested that wind farms are wearing out much more quickly than previously thought. This was the subject of a bit of to and fro at BH the other day, when Prof David Mackay, the chief scientist at DECC, appeared in the comments to dispute the findings. There were some further developments at around the same time, which I have been meaning to post since before Christmas.

At around the same time he appeared in the comments at BH, Prof Mackay published a more detailed rebuttal of Hughes at his own blog, which he said showed that Hughes' results were spurious. Hughes' model has parameters for the age-related performance of the wind farm, one for the windiness of the place in which it is located, and another to relate its performance to other windfarms. Mackay's case is that Hughes' model is non-identifiable, which means that the fit to the data is arbitrary: Hughes could, according to Mackay, explain the data say with a fast decline in performance and an increase or windiness, but could also do it with a slow decline in performance and a decrease in windiness. This point was disputed by Hughes.

Click to read more ...

How to make money doing nothing

The Times has a big front-page splash on windfarms today. I haven't seen the full story, but the headline is: "Windfarms will be paid billions to switch off".

That should set the cat among the pigeons.

In related news, the Telegraph has been reporting that factories will be paid to operate at night so as to use energy from windfarms.

Update on Jan 8, 2014 by Bishop Hill

I've now located the underlying report that the Times has reported. Here's an excerpt:

On the basis of the NG figures, which show that 13 projects with a connected capacity of 600MW* generated £17m of constraint payments in the three months ending 30th June 2013, what total value of constraint payments can we expect from a contracted connection of 36.5GW on average five years#ahead of the system being capable of transmission? A simplistic calculation is (36,500MW/600MW) x £17m x 20 quarters = £20,700,000,000 (£20.7bn). There is not, so far, any other calculation to dispute this.

That’s TWENTY POINT SEVEN BILLION POUNDS.

Accelerated depreciation

This article at a blog called Billo The Wisp is important if true. Turbine gearbox failures apparently happen typically after 5-7 years rather than the 20 years that we are normally led to believe wind turbines last for. Moreover, their failure can be completely catastrophic, leading to the destruction of the whole turbine.

Billo has discovered that a group of US scientists has been commissioned by Washington to look into the problem, but they don't seem to have come up with anything since they started work in 2007.

You reap what you sow

Andrew Motion has quietly been composing five sonnets about climate change, which will be set to music by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the Master of the Queen's Music..."To me, climate change is so bleeding obvious. Anyone who thinks it's not happening should get outside more. It's such an appalling, huge, unapproachable subject...I've written a lament about it which has the air of a call to arms. Each sonnet tells a little story."

The Telegraph, May 2009

Wind farms have 'industrialised' the countryside, Sir Andrew Motion says. The president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England and former Poet Laureate condemns politicians' "gung-ho" emphasis on growth at the expense of natural landscape.

The Telegraph, January 2014

When the state acts the perverse incentives of the bureaucrats and the corruption of those that surround the government machine will be brought into play. So when Andrew Motion issued his call to arms he was effectively accepting that these forces would be unleashed.

He was playing with fire and now he must accept the part he played in the rape of the British landscape.