Subsidies drying up. Public resistance to wind turbines in the neighbourhood. Is the climate steamroller running out of puff in Germany?
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The German wind power industry is suffering setback after setback, says The GWPF.
Hardly any new turbines are being built, and more and more old wind turbines are being phased out. Now wind industry lobbyists are calling for new subsidies and construction rules to be relaxed.
In the Free State of Bavaria there is almost nothing going on when it comes to wind power.
Coal-hungry China [image credit: democraticunderground.com]
Prosperity before flaky climate theories for Asia’s present and future industrial powerhouse economies. Once again we’re sold the myth of ‘cheaper renewables’, which always need subsidies — even for being turned off.
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Five Asian countries are responsible for 80 percent of new coal power stations planned worldwide, says Phys.org, with the projects threatening goals to fight the climate crisis, a report warned Wednesday.
China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam are planning to build more than 600 coal plants, think-tank Carbon Tracker said.
The stations will be able to generate a total of 300 gigawatts of energy—equivalent to around the entire electricity generating capacity of Japan.
Some electricity consumers may feel like muttering obscenities if they see the figures. Meanwhile the BBC insists renewables are now cheaper than coal. – – – The Global Warming Policy Forum has condemned what it called the “obscenity” of windfarm subsidies and has called for a complete rethink of energy policy.
GWPF research has shown that just six offshore windfarms are now sharing £1.6 billion pounds in subsidies between them every year.
Three receive annual subsidies of over a quarter of a billion pounds each year.
How things that need constant subsidies could generate wealth is known only to frequent visitors to Cloud Cuckoo Land. Has this former ‘green energy’ lobbyist never heard of Ponzi schemes? Suffice to say they tend to end badly for the ‘investors’, at least the ones who stay in too long.
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The Liberal Democrats want the government to use profits from green infrastructure projects to create a new fund for climate action and green jobs, reports BBC News.
Leader Sir Ed Davey put forward his “sovereign green wealth fund” proposal at his party’s spring conference.
He said the government raised £9bn last month from auctions to build wind farms on the coasts of England and Wales.
As climate obsessives in the UK demand the cancellation of plans for a coal mine in Cumbria, the spotlight falls once more on the far more relevant issue of industrial-scale biomass burning, which produces more ’emissions’ of carbon dioxide than coal but rakes in fortunes in subsidies. The world must wait decades for new trees to grow enough to fully replace the ones burnt. The illogicality of it all won’t go away.
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A former vice chairman of the United Nations’ climate advisory body has called on the British government to review its policies surrounding the burning of wood for energy, reports Sky News.
Jean Pascal van Ypersele, Professor of Environmental Sciences at Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, has told Sky News he believes subsidies given to the industry by the UK government are “contradictory” to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement – signed by countries in 2015 to try to limit global warming.
The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial strategy says subsidies are only given to biomass which complies with strict sustainability criteria and biomass is a “valuable” part of the National Grid.
Trees are a natural way to tackle climate change [Talkshop comment – or so the theory goes] and soak up carbon.
But Mr van Ypersele, who was vice chairman of the IPCC – the body which assesses science on climate change – says burning wood pellets creates a ‘carbon debt’ and accounting rules don’t properly take into consideration the time it takes for replacement trees to grow back.
He said: “We release the CO2 now hoping that future woods will absorb the CO2 in the future. But that’s a very strong assumption. Burning wood doesn’t make much sense if you want to reduce CO2 emissions.”
The UK is the world’s biggest importer of wood pellets. In the move away from coal over recent years there has been a switch towards burning biomass to generate power.
Call it the Grim New Deal. Everyone must dance to the EU’s climate-obsessive tune – they wish – or pay trade penalties. But opposition is already mounting.
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Europe’s Green Deal and its planned carbon border tax are in serious trouble as the Biden administration raises concerns about its potentially disastrous fallout on international trade and relations, says The GWPF.
According to the European Commission the EU’s Green Deal and its 2050 Net Zero target are threatening the very survival of Europe’s industries unless a carbon border tax is enforced upon countries that are not adopting the same expensive Net Zero policies.
Oh yes, they’re the great pretenders: useless in calm weather or after the sun goes down, wind and solar can never really compete with coal, nuclear or gas.
And anyone trying to convince you otherwise, ought to be gently encouraged to seek psychiatric help.
Comparing ever-reliable coal, nuclear or gas with never-reliable wind and solar is patent nonsense; and only an eco-loon or renewable energy rent seeker entertains that process.
In the latter case, it’s because the wind and solar rort depends upon the engineered pretence that wind and solar are cheaper than the rest.
Ever insightful, Donn Dears takes a look at the number games played by America’s wind and solar crowd in their efforts to pretend to be playing in the big league.
Distorting the Levelized Cost of Electricity Power for…
This post is a reblog of an article by Dr Robert Sansom, independent consultant and member of the IET’s Energy Policy Panel.
Recently, Professor Cebon wrote on this blog that pursuing the hydrogen economy would be a mistake. I am neither an advocate of hydrogen nor am I associated with the oil and gas industry, but I was the lead author of a report, produced by the IET in 2019, which focused on the engineering questions that need to be addressed if the UK is to transition to hydrogen. There are also major questions around the electrification of heat. Until these questions are dealt with, I do not believe anyone can say that one technology is better than another.
Bureaucracy is often slow and inefficient, maybe even more so where handing out public money – subsidies in this case – is involved. Who knew?
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England’s much-hyped £2bn green homes grant is in chaos, renewable energy installers say, with some owed tens of thousands of pounds and struggling to stay in business, reports The Guardian (via The GWPF).
Members of the public have been left waiting nearly four months, in some cases, to take advantage of the scheme to fit low carbon heating systems.
Some installers say customers are pulling out after losing faith in the green grants.
Boris Johnson touted the grants as one of the key programmes in his ten 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution.
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As COVID drains the national exchequer, plans to hose a few trillion pounds at the phantom problem of innocuous carbon dioxide molecules go almost unnoticed.
As Margaret Thatcher put it: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
That adage, however, doesn’t appear to trouble Britain’s current PM, Boris Johnson, whose plan to squander a further £50,000,000,000 on subsidies and over-the-market contracts for intermittent offshore wind power beggars belief.
But that colossal crony-capitalist boondoggle, is a mere snip by comparison with the £3 trillion that he’s planning to squander on an effort to completely remove carbon dioxide gas from the British atmosphere – well, at least the kind generated by all human activity, that is.
Andrew Montford takes a look at the numbers in order to get a grip on the cost of Boris Johnson’s ‘net zero’ CO2 plan for Britain.
Honesty is needed on the huge costs of attempting “net-zero”
Conservative Home
Andrew Montford
5 December 2020
Politicians can be divided into those who like to spend big…
They’re just stating the obvious, but now a few people have made the switch away from fuel-burning cars their warnings will no doubt become louder. Non-car owners can’t be penalised with an electricity surcharge, and EV subsidies can’t be handed out to everyone forever. They add a free dollop of climate alarm miserablism to their mutterings.
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Taxes must increase or services be cut to compensate for the loss of fuel tax income thanks to the advent of electric cars, the Treasury has admitted.
Officials have been long concerned about the future loss of more than £30bn in revenue from drivers, says BBC News.
In a new review the Treasury has acknowledged the problem in a way that will spark a debate about how driving should be taxed in the future.
One idea would be to charge motorists for every mile they drive.
One of its claims is: ‘we will make the UK the home of green ships and planes’. Easy – just ban their engines from being started. Publishing wish lists doesn’t guarantee engineering feasibility. These policies will cost a fortune but energy bills will be ‘affordable’, they claim. Who’s paying for all the subsidies – Father Christmas?
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The government has launched its long-awaited Energy White Paper to clean up the nation’s energy systems and ensure the journey to net zero by 2050 is achievable and affordable, says Energy Live News.
The white paper expands on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recently announced Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution and sets out the steps needed to cut emissions from industry, transport and buildings by 230 million metric tonnes.
Boris ‘Bonkers’ Johnson’s plan to ‘power’ Britain on wishes, sunshine and breezes is more like Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole. Intriguing and fascinating, yes. But also a complete and utter fantasy.
The concept smacks of delusion, at every level. Neil Collins tackles the topic from the economic perspective.
This green fantasy will bankrupt us
Investment lite
Neil Collins
20 November 2020
It’s 2050. You wake in your cosy, insulated house, turn on the windfarm-powered lights, cook up a breakfast and coffee on the hydrogen stove before jumping into your electric car. You whizz silently along roads with air as fresh as a mountain stream past happy e-bikers and carbon-neutral schools to your heat-pump powered office.
So, viewed from Britain in 2020, can you spot the odd one out? Here’s a clue: the e-bikers get no subsidy. Everything else on this list loses money, and needs state support on a…
Of course the assumption behind most of this is that the climate needs ‘saving’ from the demonic trace gas CO2, according to failing climate models anyway. We’ll skip most of the BBC commentary and show the main points of the plan. The expressed aim is ‘to put the UK on track to meet its goal of net zero emissions by 2050’. No sign of the eye-watering costs, in this report at least.
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New cars and vans powered wholly by petrol and diesel will not be sold in the UK from 2030, Boris Johnson has said.
But some hybrids would still be allowed, he confirmed.
It is part of what the prime minister calls a “green industrial revolution” to tackle climate change and create jobs in industries such as nuclear.
Tree planters required – no experience in climate saving necessary? Government announcement here.
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Investors are keen to create ‘green jobs’ in technologies such as nuclear, hydrogen and carbon capture but they are too expensive to work without subsidy, says The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is seeking advice from industry on how to create green jobs in the U.K. as unemployment rose at the quickest pace in a decade.
The government is gathering a green jobs taskforce that seeks to create employment for 2 million by 2030.
Johnson is planning a major speech on how he will spur an industrial revolution in clean-energy technologies, part of a series of initiative leading up to global talks on climate change the U.K. will host next year.
Electricity bill payers are in effect subsidising work that’s being exported round the world while promises of so-called green jobs for Scottish workers, and the government’s own ’emissions’ policies, are forgotten or ignored. The irony being that the high cost of UK electricity – and rising due to renewables – is part of the problem.
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A trade union has called for a halt to new offshore wind farms until a local supply chain is established, says The National (via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
GMB London echoed the growing anger from GMB Scotland after it was announced last week that contracts to supply turbine jackets for SSE’s offshore wind farm, Seagreen, in Angus, were awarded to firms in China and UAE.
The decision meant Scottish firm Burntisland Fabrications (BiFab) was left overlooked in favour of companies based thousands of miles away, even though it has engineering sites in the country, in Fife and Stornoway.
Despite BiFab securing backing from the Scottish Government to win the work, SSE Renewables claimed the gap between the submissions of foreign firms and BiFab was “too significant to close”.
Any ‘green’ ideas were never about economic sanity anyway, but that problem is now even more acute.
H/T The GWPF
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Green technologies that were known money-losers before the pandemic are still money-losers today.
There’s a curious idea floating around that the COVID crisis undid the principles of economics, says Ross McKitrick.
Nobody puts it exactly like that, but it’s implied in the various proposals for restructuring the post-pandemic economy so that it will look very different from the one we experienced up to the end of January.
Amid the buzzwords about “Resilient Recovery” and “Building Back Better” are proposals for an investment push into green technologies and new environmental policies, including initiatives that failed to pass standard economic tests before the pandemic.
So how, exactly, did the pandemic change the criteria for evaluating policies, investments and major public projects?
The short answer is: it didn’t, and any claim otherwise is untrue.
As the world emerges from Covid-19 lockdown we are now being told that the economic recovery from the pandemic-panic needs to be “green.” Political leaders and mass media editors cite the well-known slogan “never let a crisis go to waste,” and claim that massive sums need to be spent on economic recovery plans, and that the spending has to be “sustainable.”
Prince Charles – a prognosticator of apocalyptic climate change – said at the opening of a virtual World Economic Forum event that the global pandemic presented an opportunity to “reset the global economy and prioritize sustainable development.” Using similar language, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab calls for a “Great Reset” of capitalism. Seeing a silver lining in the pandemic, he advocates “radical changes” to “create a new economic system” including sustainably green urban infrastructure.
Fare-paying travellers can rejoice in subsidising the buses and the means of producing the fuel for them, i.e. the wind turbines, under this plan. Maybe do the same for trains too.
The owner of manufacturer Wrightbus has said he hopes to bring another 1,500 jobs to Ballymena as he pushes for a Government subsidy to fund the building of more than 3,000 buses in the town, reports the Belfast Telegraph.
Jo Bamford, executive chairman of the historic bus-builder, said the use of hydrogen could usher in a new era of environmentally-friendly transport.
It’s seeking subsidy funding of £500m from the UK Government, with the aim of building over 3,000 hydrogen-fuelled buses in Ballymena by 2024.
In short, Scottish wind power often produces too much for the electricity system to handle, yet more is planned. Meanwhile the super-expensive Western Link is failing miserably to draw off the excess power. Matt Ridley is trying to blow the whistle on this fiasco in the House of Lords, with some success.
Last weekend the Italian cable manufacturing company, Prysmian, released a statement announcing to the markets that the Western Link High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) interconnector between Hunterston and Deeside had failed again, on the 10th of January, says the Renewable Energy Foundation.
This grid link, which is a joint venture between Scottish Power Transmission (SPT) and National Grid (NG), employs cables manufactured by Prysmian.
This £1 billion project has a peak transit capacity of 2.25 GW and was designed solely to facilitate the export of Scottish wind power to the English and Welsh markets.
In doing so it was expected to reduce constraint payments to wind power, payments which amount to £630m since 2010, with a record £130 million in 2019 alone.
The project was expected to come online at the end of 2015 but in fact did not become fully operational until late 2018 and has been plagued with faults ever since.
Some electricity consumers may feel like muttering obscenities if they see the figures. Meanwhile the 
