Look, it's renewable, ok? Josh 227

We are speechless. Maybe a cartoon will help.

Cartoons by Josh

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The future of UK energy - diesel

This story comes from the BBC:

Two diesel power stations planned in Plymouth will compensate for fluctuations in supplies from green energy, say developers.

Green Frog Power got planning permission last year and Fulcrum Power has made an application for a similar power station.

The Devon-based Regen centre for green energy questioned the use of diesel generators.

Both firms said their power stations supported renewable energy.

I'm speechless. Again.

(H/T Keith)

All change

The government has announced that it is going to change the planning rules for onshore windfarm developments. Local communities are going to be given more say in where windfarms are sited, and they will get much larger bribes from developers too - five times larger in fact.

It's hard to tell at this stage how important this is. The new planning rules are to be outlined in a forthcoming document from the relevant government department (DCLG). Only once we have these will we be able to assess them impact.

Watch this space.

The text of the press release is as follows:

Click to read more ...

What goes around...

It has long been noted that country landowners are using wind farms to make small (and large) fortunes at the expense of the poor. The big political parties are relaxed about this of course, and no doubt the landowners are pretty pleased about it too. However, things may be changing:

THE leader of the Scottish ­Government review of landownership yesterday pledged to examine ways of redistributing the cash wealthy lairds make from wind farms to benefit the less-advantaged.

Alison Elliot, chair of the Land Reform Review Group (LRRG), said the issue would be investigated amid concerns that aristo­crats are benefiting from the renewables revolution while the poor grapple with fuel ­poverty.

This will be interesting. The poor will still be fleeced for the fuel bills, and then the money will be clawed back in some way and handed out, no doubt to "community groups" or other politically connected bodies.

The winners will be the bureaucrats, as ever.

Obama wants to let windfarms kill eagles with impunity

AP is reporting that the Obama administration is considering new rules that would allow wind farms to kill eagles with impunity:

Eagle deaths have forced the Obama administration into a difficult choice between its unbridled support for wind energy and enforcing environmental laws that could slow the industry's growth.

Former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in an interview with the AP before his departure, denied any preferential treatment for wind. Interior Department officials said that criminal prosecution, regardless of the industry, is always a "last resort."

"There's still additional work to be done with eagles and other avian species, but we are working on it very hard," Salazar said. "We will get to the right balance."

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has proposed a rule that would give wind-energy companies potentially decades of shelter from prosecution for killing eagles. The regulation is currently under review at the White House.

The article notes that oil companies have been handed enormous fines for killing wolves. This looks like an extraordinarily unevenhanded approach to the law. Coming on top of the revelation that the tax authorities in the US targeted Obama's political opponents one can sense something of a pattern emerging.

And not a pretty one either.

The BBC and the great levelised costs lie

When watching Matt Briggs' lecture on the use and misuse of statistics by climatologists and social scientists, I was struck by his summary of the problems with the use of p-values, namely the view within the field that since everybody uses them, it doesn't matter that doing so is silly.

The reason I noticed Briggs' point was that it reminded me of an exchange I'd had with a BBC journalist about the use of levelised costs by advocates for windfarms. I had explained how misleading levelised costs are, a point that elicited the following response:

...this is the current standard measure - used by governments, industry, academics and international bodies. Any such measure, by its nature, will have limitations.

It doesn't matter that it's misleading. Everybody is being misleading.

UK takes the German path

The government has just released its provisional figures for 2012 greenhouse gas emissions, and it's not good news. Emission are up sharply, taking them back to the levels prevalent in 2009, when the Climate Change Act had just been put in place.

Click to read more ...

Bringing politicians to Booker

Christopher Booker is in fine form this morning, describing in horrific detail the steady progress of the UK's energy system towards disaster. Perhaps mercifully, he does not move on to consider what this will mean for the economy as a whole and for individuals.

[It] is all insane in so many ways that one scarcely knows where to begin, except to point out that, even if our rulers somehow managed to subsidise firms into spending £100 billion on all those wind farms they dream of, they will still need enough new gas-fired power stations to provide back-up for all the times when the wind isn’t blowing, at the very time when the carbon tax will soon make it uneconomical for anyone to build them.

Update on Mar 24, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Interestingly, a leader in the Telegraph calls for the government to repeal the Climate Change Act. One can't help but be reminded about Winston Churchill's quote about being able to trust Americans to do the right thing once they've tried all the other options.

Nice to hear, but ten years ago would have been better.

Update on Mar 24, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The Mail is headlining on the excess deaths from the current cold weather.

Freezing Britain's unusually harsh winter could have cost thousands of pensioners their lives.

This month is on track to be the coldest March for 50 years – and as the bitter Arctic conditions caused blackouts and traffic chaos yesterday, experts warned of an 'horrendous' death toll among the elderly.

About 2,000 extra deaths were registered in just the first two weeks of March compared with the average for the same period over the past five years.

Taking the fight to the enemy

Scotland against Spin is planning to take the fight against windfarms to the enemy, namely Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond. The plan is to have a mass protest on Saturday at the Scottish National Party conference in Inverness. The plan is to have a march from Inverness Castle to the conference venue and then hand over a petition to the great man himself. Unfortunately ChickenBraveheart Salmond seems disinclined to acknowledge the request to hand it over. Press release below; details of times and places in the file attachment right at the end.

Click to read more ...

The latest from Pat Swords

Pat Swords writes with the latest news from his legal battle to have Irish energy policy declared illegal under the Aarhus Convention.

On Tuesday the case to be heard the next day (13th) went instead into adjournment until the 11th April. There are complex legal issues involved in the case, which I have not yet had the time to finish writing up, but they go beyond the renewable energy issues to the core principle of access to justice and 'who watches the watch keeper'. The lawyers on both sides have agreed to extra time to prepare additional written affidavits. In summary though, due to Ireland's failure to ratify the Convention, I could not have taken my case in the Court until after Ireland's ratification of the UNECE Convention took effect in September 2012. As it turned out, the ruling had by then come through from the UNECE Compliance Committee and I brought it before the High Court and got leave in early November 2012, within the recognised time frame applying post ratification.

Click to read more ...

Gotcha

Stuart Young, an anti-windfarm campaigner from the far north of Scotland, has issued a formal complaint to the presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament over the behaviour of Energy Minister Fergus Ewing. According to an article in the Press and Journal:

Energy Minister Fergus Ewing has been urged to apologise to MSPs amid claims he "knowingly" allowed them to be misled about the impact of renewable energy on consumers' bills. Highland anti-windfarm campaigner Stuart Young has urged Holyrood's deputy presiding officer John Scott to take action against the SNP MSP for failing to correct his Nationalist colleague Mike MacKenzie. Speaking in a debate on February 21, the backbencher referred to "the myth consumers are paying very high premiums to subsidise renewables now known to be of the order of £21 per annum - a tiny fraction of annual fuel bills. Mr Young, a retired construction worker who stays near Thurso, claimed Mr Ewing knew the figure was actually £64.15...

Young's correspondence with Scott and Ewing, together with a dossier of background information can be seen via the link below.

Young files

The great still

Commenters have been noting the preposterously low output of the wind fleet at the moment - currently generating about 0.4GW or a tenth of one percent of demand.

The environmentalist argument is that by use of smart grids we can import wind power generated in other parts of Europe (I think this is because the spirit of European cooperation will inspire them to offer it to us rather than using it themselves.

However, a look at the current windspeed map for Europe suggests there may be a flaw in this plan:

Update on Mar 3, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Last night wind generation fell to 0.029GW.

The unbearable detachment of EU beings

This is a guest post by Pat Swords.

One sometimes has to go be persistent and dig out the evidence bit by bit until one has what can be justifiably described as a 'smoking gun'. Look at the attached emails, received from the EU Commission by Joseph Caulfield, one of those now following my 'road somewhat less travelled'. If you look at the first message you might be initially perplexed, but then you might not recognise the person in the Commission it is from. However, while not a household name, the sender does have some major significance: she is the Secretary General of the EU Commission.

Click to read more ...

Still still

There has been precious little wind over the last month. The graph below, redrawn from here, shows that most of the time output has been less than 2GW, roughly 5% of average daily demand.

And as we learned yesterday, widescale deployment of wind farms will produce power plants that are even less efficient.

Big wind just got smaller

A new paper by Amanda Adams and David Keith reports that once deployed on a large scale wind farms may generate even less power than previously thought.

Estimates of the global wind power resource over land range from 56 to 400 TW. Most estimates have implicitly assumed that extraction of wind energy does not alter large-scale winds enough to significantly limit wind power production. Estimates that ignore the effect of wind turbine drag on local winds have assumed that wind power production of 2–4 W/m² can be sustained over large areas. New results from a mesoscale model suggest that wind power production is limited to about 1 W/m² at wind farm scales larger than about 100 km².

Click to read more ...