Belgium asks "Can I borrow your power cable?"

Reader "Wellers" writes with an update from Belgium on the energy crisis there.

Yesterday there was more bad news regarding the two 1GW power stations already shut down in Belgium. They are probably shut down for good.

Predictably, the Energy Minister has come on air to try to allay the public’s fears. He appears to have a “cunning plan”, as Baldrick would say. Here is a quick translation I made from today’s De Standaard newspaper:

“There is an extra power station, but the cable is missing”

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.

Fewer climate movies for the natives

From time to time I have noted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's spending on a network of "climate change advisers". On one occasion, I noted one such public funded official using their time to do research for Democrats in the US Congress. Another seemed to fill her days with showing ecodisaster movies to the natives and helping them to make their own ones.

It's therefore quite pleasing to see that William Hague has belatedly been reining back the spending somewhat:

The UK is slashing its climate change diplomacy budget even as global efforts to reach a deal intensify, RTCC can reveal.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) cut spending on its core climate change activities by 39% over the past three years.

Given Hague's posturing as a green, this has no doubt been driven more by the cost-cutting imperative in the Treasury than any concern over whether the money is being well spent. Nevertheless, one should not look a gift horse in the mouth...

Nonconsensus

An interesting headline in the Australian - paywalled, so I can't see the rest of the article:

AUSTRALIA’S peak body of earth scientists has declared itself unable to publish a position statement on climate change due to the deep divisions within its membership on the issue.

After more than five years of debate and two false starts, Geological Society of Australia president Laurie Hutton said a statement on climate change was too difficult to achieve.

This is very interesting, because it suggests that the society has actually asked its members what they think. What a refreshing contrast to the learned societies in the UK, whose politically inclined leaderships are happy to issue statements in the names of their members without batting an eyelid.

Update on Jun 4, 2014 by Bishop Hill

What fun to recall the Royal Society's attitude:

In the past we have been able to give advice to governments as a Society without having to seek consensus of all the members.

Hitting back at scientivists

In recent months, US lawmakers have been putting their collective foot down in a bid to prevent every bureaucrat in Washington from splurging taxpayers' monies in spurious bids to save the planet from the spectre of climate change. Just last week it emerged that the Pentagon was told that melting icecaps (allegedly) were none of its business.

This robust approach to political activism and wild excess within the bureaucracy seems to be catching on, with the Abbott government in Australia slashing green "research" budgets too, as the Guardian reports:

It’s no secret that Joe Hockey’s first budget took the knife to many federal spending programs. But science and innovation were among the hardest hit areas. In addition to cuts to the CSIRO, there were cuts to basic research at the Australian Research Council, as well as cuts to the Australian Institute for Marine Science and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. Also slashed was funding for postgraduate researchers, for environmental science, clean technologies, water science and Cooperative Research Centres. There have also been huge cuts to R&D and innovation programs, and to virtually every federal renewable energy program.

It can't happen in the UK of course, partly because greenery is part of the Cameron brand and partly because the demented-green Liberal Democrats are in charge of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, which is responsible for research funding. So we will just have to watch as things are sorted out in Australia.

The lucky country indeed.

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.

Chinese renewables

An article in the Financial Post in Canada looks at China's much-vaunted renewables industry and shows that it is nearing collapse:

Sinovel – one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers – went from earning hundreds of millions of dollars in profits in 2010 when the renewable energy industry was booming to millions in losses that grow by the day. Revenues are now just a fifth of what they were in 2010. The company has closed its overseas offices and recently laid off thousands of employees.

And it seems that the solar industry is doing just as badly. In China, just as in Europe, renewable energy was only able to survive if it was regularly hosed down with public funds. As soon as the taps were switched off, the industry was in trouble.

About those Poles...

Marcin KorolecReaders who watched yesterday's questions in the Lords will have noted the noble and learned Baroness Worthington asking a question about what the government are doing about learning from the Poles on the shale gas front.

Interestingly, today we learn that the Polish prime minister has sacked his environment minister Marcin Korolec and is to bring in someone who is going to work a bit harder to accelerate the pace of shale gas development:

"It is about radical acceleration of shale gas operations. Mr Korolec will remain the government's plenipotentiary for the climate negotiations," Tusk told a news conference.

Lurch

Underlining the UK's growing isolation on the carbon reduction front, Japan has announced a dramatic slashing of its carbon reduction target.

Japan has warned that it will fall short of an ambitious greenhouse-gas reduction target it set for itself four years ago, saying that under the most extreme scenario – involving an immediate and permanent shutdown of its nuclear industry – emissions would rise slightly rather than fall by 25 per cent as promised.

Yoshihide Suga, the chief cabinet secretary, said on Friday that the government had committed to a new target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 3.8 per cent over the 15 years ending in 2020. That would represent a rise of 3 per cent over the longer span covered by its previous commitment, which used 1990 as its base year.

Everywhere you look, the involvement of politicians in the energy market bring nothing but wild policy lurches from one extreme to another. This lurch is in the right direction, but who knows what the next one will bring. Politics is the problem, not the solution.

Flannery flung out

New Australian PM Tony Abbott has got straight down to the job of cleaning the Augean stables of public sector sinecures. Top of the list seems to have been Tim Flannery, the head of the Climate Commission.

PROFESSOR Tim Flannery has been sacked by the Abbott Government from his $180,000-a-year part-time Chief Climate Commissioner position, with the agency he runs to be dismantled immediately.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt called Prof Flannery this morning to tell him a letter formally ending his employment was in the mail.

Good things happen when conservatives are in power.

Aussie elections open thread

Here's a thread for anyone who wants to discuss the Australian election result. What does it mean?

Echoes of Oxburgh

Nick Cohen in the Guardian writes about the scandal of the London School of Economics' acceptance of funding from the Gaddafi regime and the questions that are being asked over its awarding of a degree to the Libyan leader's son. There is an interesting twist though:

The university has appointed Lord Woolf – a retired lord chief justice, no less – to investigate Giddens, Brahimi and their colleagues. He will find out what happened to the hundreds of thousands of pounds the university took from Gaddafi's son, Saif, and whether it was in return for a Phd and academic support for his crime family's rule of Libya. The "independent inquiry" will establish the "full facts", the university says, as it drops heavy hints that it is time to "move on".

Willing though the amnesiac media always are to jump to the next scandal, this story isn't over yet. No one outside the LSE has noticed that Lord Woolf may face a conflict of interest. Some would argue that if he were still a judge in a court of law, he would have to tell the parties to a case that they had the right to ask him to stand down.

Somebody remind me how the Guardian dealt with the appointment of Oxburgh to deal with the UEA inquiry...

Disturbing news from Oz

Australian government ruins farmers in name of global warming. They're blocking protestors too, it seems.

Jock on Somalia

Jock Coats has written a really interesting piece about how life is improving for people in Somalia. They still have no government, but life expectancy is now ahead of that of their "civilised" neighbours.

Iranian police shoot at protestors from rooftops

You need to see this. (From here.)