EU Referendum

Showing posts with label renewable energy. Show all posts

feed-in[i-feed-in]
Propaganda comes in all shapes and sizes, but no more so than the BBC's treatment of the launch of the feed-in tariff today.

Unremittingly positive, it describes "a cash-back scheme" that "will give subsidies to families, businesses, farmers and communities who generate their own green electricity." The only marginally critical note allowed is the observation that "some concerns have also been voiced about the possible impact on the rural landscape."

There is, of course, no mention of the insanity of a scheme that creates "subsidies" that will cost £8.6 billion a year or more, or that they will be paid from electricity bills, including from those who are not fortunate enough to avail themselves of this bribe.

Nor, of course, is there any reference to the pitiful amount of power that we will get for this obscene amount of money – around two percent of the total demand – the cash payments being enough to fund three sizeable nuclear plants each year.

The scale of this theft is astronomical. For twelve years of the scheme's operation, enough money will have been extracted from electricity consumers to have completely renewed the entire generating infrastructure, installing 100GW of reliable capacity.

But nothing of that must be conveyed to the public. We pay through the nose and are not even allowed by the BBC to know how much, its only concession to "impartiality" being to offer a helpful link to the Friends of the Earth website.

To give it its due, however - as a reader tells me - "Costing the Earth" did give the issue a more "balanced" hearing on BBC Radio 4 last week.

COMMENT THREAD - CLIMATE CHANGE

Blyth[i-Blyth]And so it comes to pass that The Sunday Times is picking up that which anti-wind campaigners have been pointing out since the dawn of time – that "some treasured landscapes may have been blighted for only small gains in green energy."

However, so often does the media publish the entirely meaningless capacity figure for new wind developments that it is a real change to have Jonathan Leake write that an analyses of data released by Ofgem "reveals that more than 20 wind farms produce less than a fifth of their potential maximum power output."

One site, at Blyth Harbour in Northumberland (pictured), is thought to be the worst in Britain, operating at just 7.9 percent of its maximum capacity. Another at Chelker reservoir in North Yorkshire operates at only 8.7 percent of capacity. Both are relatively small and old, but larger and newer sites fared badly, too.

Siddick wind farm in Cumbria, now operated by Eon, achieved only 15.8 percent of capacity. The two turbines at High Volts 2, Co Durham, the largest and most powerful wind farm in Britain when it was commissioned in 2004, achieved 18.7 percent. Thus does Leake write that the best achieve only about 50 percent efficiency and the norm is 25-30 percent.

Such is common knowledge so we hardly needed Michael Jefferson, professor of international business and sustainability at London Metropolitan Business School, to tell us that the subsidy encourages the construction of wind farms. "Too many developments are underperforming," he says. "It's because developers grossly exaggerate the potential. The subsidies make it viable for developers to put turbines on sites they would not touch if the money was not available."

Nevertheless, the story is picked up by The Daily Mail (online) and it also provokes a splendid leader in The Sunday Times, which declares: "Too much wind and not enough puff". And, after a reference to onshore wind as "disappointing", we are told that "solar power is likely to be even more so, especially in Britain."

Helpfully, the paper then tells us that this kind of problem arises when renewable targets are set from on high, in this case from the European Union: "It wants 20 percent of energy across Europe to be generated from renewable sources by 2020," a situation which is described as "folly of the highest order", if the only way it can be done is inefficiently and expensively and at the cost of damaging our environment. Far better, says the paper, "to push on with technologies we know can deliver, such as nuclear and clean coal."

The answer, sadly, it concludes, "is not blowing in the wind."

Even sadder, perhaps, is that this is not entirely an EU issue. Agreeing to the target in the mad days of the end of his premiership was Tony Blair, caught up in the collective hysteria of the European Council of March 2007, when the colleagues were outbidding each other to ramp up the targets to the absurd levels at which they currently stand.

And, as The Guardian informed us at the time, these targets were so unrealistic as to be unreachable. Thus does the cold wind blow, not the wind that will give us power via these useless bird choppers, but the cold wind of reality, as it gradually dawns on a wider constituency that they've been had.

That, of course, doesn't stop the likes of Dr Sue Armstrong-Brown, of the RSPB, defending her dire organisation against Booker's attack last week.

She tells us in a letter today that "as a charity concerned with the future fortunes of wildlife, we can't hide from the fact that climate change is the single biggest threat biodiversity faces. Renewable energy, such as that provided by wind, must play a part in the nation's future energy mix, as must tidal and solar energies."

The only joy to be got out of that bit of self-serving stupidity is the news that RWE is considering turning the wind farm at Haverigg in Cumbria into a site for a nuclear power station, requiring the demolition of the bird choppers. Where the RSPB fails, nuclear leads the way.

Needless to say though, Sky News describes this site as "efficient", even though it averages a load factor of a mere 35 percent. That just goes to show how far that cold wind of reality must blow before it reaches the sterile brains of the broadcast media.

COMMENT THREAD

Booker+birds[i-Booker+birds]It is a criminal offence to kill bats and golden eagles, writes Booker today in his column – unless of course you are a windmill owner.

The main objection to these bird choppers is, of course, their outrageous expense – machines for producing derisory amounts of electricity at colossal cost. That is why the government wants us to spend £100 billion on building thousands more of them which, even were it technically possible, would do virtually nothing to fill the fast-looming 40 percent gap in our electricity supply.

But, in all the time spent railing against these useless machines, Booker has never mentioned their devastating effect on wildlife, notably on large birds of prey, such as eagles and red kites. And particularly disturbing, he says, is the extent to which the disaster has been downplayed by professional bodies.

Two of those who are notably muted in their protests are the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Britain and the Audubon Society in the US. They should be at the forefront of exposing this outrage, but which have often been drawn into a conflict of interest by the large sums of money they derive from the wind industry itself.

Booker goes on to outline some of the evidence for the worldwide scale of this carnage. The world's largest and most carefully monitored wind farm, Altamont Pass in California, he says, is estimated to have killed between 2,000 and 3,000 golden eagles alone in the past 20 years.

Since turbines were erected on the isle of Smola, off Norway, home to an important population of white-tailed sea eagles, destruction is so great that last year only one chick survived. Thanks to wind farms in Tasmania, a unique sub-species of wedge-tailed eagles faces extinction.

And here in Britain, plans to build eight wind farms on the Hebridean islands, among Scotland’s largest concentration of golden eagles, now pose a major threat to the species' survival in the UK.

The real problem, we are told, is that birds of prey and wind developers are both drawn, for similar reasons, to the same sites – hills and ridges where the wind provides lift for soaring birds and heavily subsidised profits for developers.

Eagles may thus be drawn from hundreds of square miles to particular wind farms. And, as can be seen from the YouTube video of a vulture circling above a turbine in Crete, the vortices created by blade tips revolving at up to 200mph can destabilise such large birds, plunging them into a fatal collision with the blades.

What has been particularly helpful to Booker in detailing this problem is the emergence of Mark Duchamp, a retired French businessman and now campaigner living in Alicante. Through his website Iberica 2000, he has documented multiple episodes of bird-kill, including at Spanish sites where they may be killing up to a million birds a year.

Duchamp also focuses his campaign on what he sees as the disturbing failure to protect birds by the bodies whose job it is to do so, from the RSPB to the European Commission. The RSPB claims to keep a critical eye on those effects, but nevertheless urges a major expansion of wind farms, on the grounds that "climate change is the most significant threat to biodiversity on the planet".

As always, money talks – not least to the RSPB which receives £10 from the wind-farm builder Scottish & Southern Energy for every customer signing up for electricity under its "RSPB Energy" scheme. Ornithologists also derive a good income from developers for providing impact assessments for planning applications or for monitoring existing wind farms for bird collisions.

So it goes on. Conflict of interest, petty corruption and downright abrogation of responsibilities mean absolutely nothing when you can convince yourself that you are saving the planet – then anything goes. And when it comes to the EU commission, their Birds and Habitats Directives - which they are usually so zealous in ensuring are enforced throughout the member states – suddenly becomes rather inconvenient.

Just in case you ask, Booker does mention power lines. Large birds of prey are far from being the only victims of wind farms, and the thousands of miles of power lines needed to connect them to the grid. A study cited by Birdlife International shows that, each year, power lines can be responsible for up to 800 bird kills per mile. And wind farms, with their new grid, will ensure that the carnage increases.

The bizarre thing is that these "greenies" are supposed to be pro-nature. Yet, time and time again, it is they who are the ones supporting the degradation of the natural environment, then relying on convoluted arguments and deception to cover up their inconsistencies. In time, we could tie them to the blades of their windmills, as ad hoc bird scarers, at which point we will finally have found a use for them.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

solar-panel[i-solar-panel]For anyone with any residual doubts about the wave of madness about to engulf us with the introduction of the feed-in tariff on 1 April, they need go no further than read a recent report from the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, entitled: "Economic impacts from the promotion of renewable energies: The German experience".

Packed with detail and well-argued, its conclusions are unequivocal and coruscating. "Although Germany's promotion of renewable energies is commonly portrayed in the media as setting a shining example in providing a harvest for the world," the authors write, "we would instead regard the country's experience as a cautionary tale of massively expensive environmental and energy policy that is devoid of economic and environmental benefits."

You really cannot get much clearer than that, the result of a failed experiment based on an aggressive policy of "generously subsidising and effectively mandating renewable electricity generation" in Germany that has led to a doubling of the renewable contribution to electricity generation in recent years.

In this narrative, taken directly from the executive summary, we are told that the preference for renewables came primarily in the form of a subsidy policy based on feed-in tariffs, established in 1991 by the Electricity Feed-in Law.

A subsequent law passed in 2000 guaranteed continued support for 20 years. This required utilities to accept the delivery of power from independent producers of renewable electricity into their own grid, paying technology-specific feed-in tariffs far above their production cost of 2 to 7 euro-cents per kilowatt hour (kWh).

With a feed-in tariff of 43 euro-cents per kWh in 2009, solar electricity generated from photovoltaics (PV) is guaranteed by far the largest financial support among all renewable energy technologies. Currently, the feed-in tariff for PV is more than eight times higher than the wholesale electricity price at the power exchange and more than four times the feed-in tariff paid for electricity produced by on-shore wind turbines.

Even on-shore wind, widely regarded as a mature technology, requires feed-in
tariffs that exceed the per-kWh cost of conventional electricity by up to 300 percent to remain competitive. By 2008 this had led to Germany having the second-largest installed wind capacity in the world, behind the United States, and the largest installed PV capacity in the world, ahead of Spain. This explains the claims that Germany's feed-in tariff is a great success.

However, installed capacity is not the same as production or contribution. By 2008, the estimated share of wind power in Germany's electricity production was 6.3 percent, followed by biomass-based electricity generation (3.6 percent) and water power (3.1 percent). The amount of electricity produced through solar photovoltaics was a negligible 0.6 percent despite being the most subsidised renewable energy, with a net cost of about €8.4 billion for 2008.

The total net cost of subsidising electricity production by PV modules is estimated to reach €53.3 billion for those modules installed between 2000 and 2010. While the promotion rules for wind power are more subtle than those for PV, the authors estimate that the wind power subsidies may total €20.5 billion for wind converters installed between 2000 and 2010.

As in the UK, consumers ultimately bear the cost of renewable energy promotion. In 2008, the price mark-up due to the subsidisation of green electricity was about 1.5 cents per kWh, meaning the subsidy accounted for about 7.5 percent of average household electricity prices.

Yet, given the net cost of 41.82 cents/kWh for PV modules installed in 2008, and assuming that PV displaces conventional electricity generated from a mixture of gas and hard coal, "carbon" abatement costs are as high as €716 per ton.

Using the same assumptions and a net cost for wind of 3.10 cents/kWh, the abatement cost is approximately €54. While cheaper than PV, this cost is still nearly double the ceiling of the cost of a per-ton permit under the EU's cap-and trade scheme. Renewable energies are thus amongst the most expensive GHG reduction measures.

There are much cheaper ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than subsidising renewable energies. For instance, the authors say, the current price of emissions certificates in the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is only €13.4 per ton (October 2009). Hence, the cost from emission reductions as determined by the market is about 53 times cheaper than employing PV and four times cheaper than using wind power.

Moreover, the prevailing coexistence of the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) and the ETS means that the increased use of renewable energy technologies generally attains no additional emission reductions beyond those achieved by ETS alone. In fact, since the establishment of the ETS in 2005, the EEG's net climate effect has been nil.

Turning to employment, while projections in the renewable sector convey seemingly impressive prospects for gross job growth, they typically obscure the broader implications for economic welfare by omitting any account of off-setting impacts.

These impacts include, but are not limited to, job losses from crowding out of cheaper forms of conventional energy generation, indirect impacts on upstream industries, additional job losses from the drain on economic activity precipitated by higher electricity prices, private consumers' overall loss of purchasing power due to higher electricity prices, and diverting funds from other, possibly more beneficial investment.

Proponents of renewable energies often regard the requirement for more workers to produce a given amount of energy as a benefit, failing to recognize that this lowers the output potential of the economy and is hence counterproductive to net job creation. Significant research shows that initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred. Trade and other assumptions in those studies claiming positive employment turn out to be unsupportable.

In the end, Germany's PV promotion has become a subsidisation regime that, on a per-worker basis, has reached a level that far exceeds average wages, with per worker subsidies as high as €175,000. It is most likely that whatever jobs are created by renewable energy promotion would vanish as soon as government support is terminated, leaving only Germany's export sector to benefit from the possible continuation of renewables support in other countries such as the US.

Due to their backup energy requirements, it turns out that any increased energy security possibly afforded by installing large PV and wind capacity is undermined by reliance on fuel sources – principally gas – that must be imported to meet domestic demand. That much of this gas is imported from unreliable suppliers calls energy security claims further into question.

Claims about technological innovation benefits of Germany's first-actor status are also unsupportable. In fact, the regime appears to be counterproductive, stifling innovation by encouraging producers to lock into existing technologies. In conclusion, government policy has failed to harness the market incentives needed to ensure a viable and cost-effective introduction of renewable energies into Germany's energy portfolio.

On the contrary, Germany's principal mechanism of supporting renewable technologies through feed-in tariffs imposes high costs without any of the alleged positive impacts on emissions reductions, employment, energy security, or technological innovation.

castle[i-castle]
Yet, this is the scheme that is to come into force in the UK on 1 April. Predictably, organisations such as the National Trust are leaping on the bandwagon, having already fitted PV to their Dunster Castle in Somerset (pictured, above). They are adding insult to injury by attracting funding from Barclays, the "Big Lottery Fund Bio-Energy Capital Grants Scheme" and the Rural Development Programme. Equally predictably, they do not tell us how much this is going to cost other electricity consumers, concentrating instead on the illusory "carbon" savings.

Delingpole, of course, gets the point (as well as making a ribald comment about the "independent" inquiry of the IPCC), picking up on the point that the British scheme, when fully developed, will cost the equivalent of four aircraft carriers each year.

Anyone with even a fragment of a brain can see the utter madness of the scheme, and the German experience simply reinforces the blindingly obvious. Yet, it seems that our current government's brain cell is flying solo.

But, if you despair that sentient creatures can be so utterly stupid, until we hear otherwise we have to continue to note that the Conservatives want a much larger scheme, set to cost £60 billion a year. That, in case you are interested, is 30 aircraft carriers a year. (Pick your own comparator if you prefer – it would, for instance, buy 50 billion bacon butties, thereby abolishing world hunger except in the Moslem world).

Forgive me for harping on, but this is so staggeringly stupid – in a land beset with stupidity – that it is difficult to take on board. One can only surmise that they really cannot be that stupid, and it is all a joke. After all, the scheme is set to start on 1 April. Sadly, though, they are serious. We are going to have to do something equally serious.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME