Matt Ridley has written an excellent article in this week’s Spectator about the bizarre rebellion within the Conservative Parliamentary Party whereby various prominent MPs, including Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Michael Gove, are demanding an end to the ban on on-shore wind farms on the grounds that it is a reliable source of sustainable energy that is cheap and getting cheaper. This is particularly urgent, the rebels argue, given the impact of the war in Ukraine on gas prices.
Why is the rebellion bizarre? Let Matt count the ways.
There is no ban on wind farms – it is actually a bog-standard planning requirement that they be confined to areas designated for that purpose and with community support. Nor do they offer a cheap solution: the costs are high and rising. In fact, relying on the wind for power would guarantee that electricity is expensive for ever, because wind’s unreliability poisons the market, driving up the price of gas-fired power too.
This week the prices offered to anybody – anybody! – who could guarantee to supply power on the chilly, windless evening of 29 November shot up briefly to about £1,100 per megawatt-hour (MWh), more than ten times the normal rate. Demand was forecast to peak at 41.2 gigawatts, supply at 40.7. In the words of Mr Micawber: result, misery. At such a price, enough supply did indeed come out of the woodwork, but not from the wind industry, which can’t just turn on the wind when it wants. Growing reliance on unreliable wind has left Britain paying sky-high prices on still, cold days. Remember when the secretary of state for business used to pose for the cameras while blowing up old coal power stations? They would be handy this winter.
The Ukraine war has driven gas prices higher, but, says Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch, it would be daft to assume that this is a permanent state of affairs and design a policy on the assumption that wind will be cheaper than gas in the future.
Claims that onshore wind is cheap come thick and fast from politicians in thrall to the most well oiled of crony-capitalist industries, the wind merchants. The claims are not supported by the accounts of onshore wind farms, which indicate a breakeven cost of around £80/MWh for the very cheapest farms. And this, note, is for the efficient wind farms with 200-metre turbines (twice the typical height), located in the windiest sites and spaced at least 1,200 metres apart so they don’t they steal each other’s wind. The cost estimate doesn’t even count the need to carefully manage backup power generation for those times and places where the wind is not blowing hard enough, or blowing too hard. Nor does it count the cost of building and running transmission lines from remote wind farms to places where people actually live.
Wind farm accounts also show that this cost is rising, not falling, presumably due to such grid constraints, the fact that the best sites have gone, and the rising costs of steel, concrete, copper and neodymium making new machines pricier. Yet even £80/MWh is nearly double the cost of gas-fired power at the long-term average price of gas.
But that is if gas is allowed to supply electricity continuously without much interruption. If you keep telling gas power stations to switch off because the wind is blowing, as we do, then they will have to (and do) charge more to cover the inefficiency of heating up and cooling down the gas turbines. The more wind we add, the higher the price of gas-fired power. In this way, wind locks in high electricity prices, hastening the deindustrialisation of Britain, or what’s left of it.
Worth reading in full.
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Up is down. left is right. As soon as you accept that everything is portrayed as the opposite of reality, it all makes sense.
Central planning doesn’t work.
The market consistently outperforms the brainiest collection of technocrats.
Demonstrated over and over again throughout history.
Here’s a nice little (actually, a rather big one) counterexample: From winter 1914 until the end of the first world war, the German empire was cut off from cross-atlantic and cross-mediterranean trade by the so-called British sea blockade. This led to the military taking over an ever increasing part of the German economy to ensure that arms and other supplies for the army would be produced in the required quantities and to prevent the population from starving in face of limited food supplies. And it worked: Starvation of civilians- expressively supposed to happen according to British designs – was kept in the low hundredthousands and the army remained sufficiently supplied to keep fighting successfully (until it started shrinking because casualties couldn’t be fully replaced anymore and even then, it was never really defeated in the field) against odds which overwhelmingly favoured its opponents.
Oh and apparently , for all of us who heat our homes with oil ,according to the Telegraph ,new oil boilers are being banned from 2025 not 2035 as for gas .I think there may be some confusion but the suggested replacement by the Nettards is those super duper , highly effective and so cheap to install and run heatpumps , all powered by that really reliable , cheap windpower . Oh I do wonder if the local grid can supply enough juice out here in the wilds of Mid Norfolk if the small village has to move to the heat pumps and supply power for all those super cheap EVs we will all soon be driving.
If this idiocy looks like it may come to pass I will revolting !!Just off to sharpen my pitchfork>>>
Indeed, our local electric supply here in the North Devon boondocks cannot handle that level of electric demand. People here with more engineering knowledge are better placed than me to comment but my understanding is that heat pumps have a start-up electric demand higher than their normal running power and so the cabling infrastructure has to be capable of handling the demand when the heat pumps start up.
Thats yet another hidden cost to be born by the consumer .I was pondering moving my meter and cable entry points from the kitchen.This has to be done by UK power networks and the estimated cost for my smallish bungalow is in excess of 3,5 K .If the mains cabling out to the overhead line needs updating as well no idea what that would add..I am “Certain “all this was thought through by our dear leaders when they signed us all up to this crap.
Lets have a referendum on Nett Zero now .If not where did I leave my scythe ??
I’m making faggots. Not the eating kind or the American kind; the burning kind.
Well done .I will bring the firelighters and matches !!
Talking to a friend who used to work for a power company, most electricity sub-stations (transformers) are being seriously challenged by both new housing estates and the increasing demand for power in each house.
The quantum leap in power demand by the promised all electric regime is likely to push many over the edge, and installing a new substation is not a cheap or quick undertaking.
You also need to add to this the installation of new cabling to most houses to carry the additional power needed for heat pumps and EVs, not to mention the additional demands caused by running additional electric heating because heat pumps fail to deliver heat, but only manage warmth.
They will also be faced with increasing demand as temperatures cycle downwards after the current panic-inducing warm(ish) period.
Please can we have some grown-ups in charge.
According to https://grid.iamkate.com/ , the price per MWh was just under £50 from 2012 to 2020, to an average of about £200 this year (it was £418.01 at 17:30 today – but very little wind; over 50% gas and a little coal.
Maybe they’re gambling about the price, or hoping it stays high through the service life of the proposed setup.
On holidaying in Cyprus, where every home has a solar panel on the roof, we discovered that the heating of the water had to be backed up by electricity!
The supporters of wind turbines as an energy source are coming from the point of view that humans should have zero impact on the world. But there are negative effects from all energy solutions. This idea that fossil fuels can be replaced by wind solar and tidal and life will tick along just as before is absurd, and only comes from the mouths of people who do not understand how energy works, or they do know how energy works but have decided that people are going to have to go without it anyway. I remember the head of the National Grid said a few years ago that “We are going to have to get used to using electricity as and when it is available” Yet no one seemed to bat an eyelid. Fossil fuels provide 90% of the worlds energy and this will not change. What will change is that wealthy western countries will impose expensive energy on their citizens in line with UN Sustainable Development agenda’s that insist the west became prosperous because of fossil fuels and that we have used up more than our fair share of those and MUST STOP . —-The excuse for that is “Climate Change” and ofcourse due to endless bombardment about us causing global warming that will engulf coastal cities etc etc from government and media, most people think they are being told some kind of ultimate truth. ——–Nope , they are NOT. They are being swindled out of their standard of living and forced into energy poverty for no good reason. There is no climate crisis. We see endless amounts of extreme weather events beamed to our TV sets from every corner of the globe, and this might give the impression that everything is getting worse, but that is all it is—-an impression. In reality there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event and no increase in the rate of sea level rise which is currently about 7 inches per century. So we are having full time affordable energy in coal and gas removed and having it replaced by expensive part time energy in wind and sun for political purposes and only by understanding what those politics are can we realise how the pseudo scientific fraud is impoverishing us, and all of our political class are in on this scam, not just the Tories
Great summary ! Reading a couple of articles this week on the influencers of Sunak and I am amazed at how embedded this is in the so called elite blob.
WE need political change and a flushing of our system !!!!
Bang on the nail. Terrific post.
Surely we know after the Covid debacle that our politicians follow the most stupid advice, because they don’t have a clue about CO2 and its benefits and minimal effect on climate. Real competent scientists have established that enen if we acheive the net zero targets (which we won’t) it would have very minimal effect on global temperatures. Our planet is not at risk from CO2 created by humankind and we can’t control climate although climate disasters have not overall got worse in recent decades, despite the media making a big issue of every climate event that occurs to make it appear as if they have. Our demonisation of fossil fuels in the UK has just exported the effects they have to China, India and other similar countries which don’t allow themselves to be effected by climate extremists who have not properly researched their stupidity. Wind farms are an eyesore on our landscape, do not provide reliable cheap energy and are causing a large number of deaths to our wlildlife. until nuclear or fussion technology in decades time can provide what we need, fossil fuels are the most efficient energy generators we have and we in this country are progressing scientific means of reducing their pollution. It is this that our government should be supporting, not ineffective wind farms
The “renewable” scam has two purposes:
It has SFA to do with “saving the planet.”
Spot on.