There was an excellent article in the Sunday Telegraph by Ross Clark (January 3rd) giving us the facts about green energy. It is accessible at this link: Idealistic politicians are willfully blind to the inconvenient truth about green energy (telegraph.co.uk) [ behind a pay wall]
Ross reminds us of former climate change minister, Chris Huhne's comments made in 2011 when he said that green energy would "protect us from price shocks". Since then we have closed early all our coal-fired power stations - down from producing 31% of our power to 2.1%. They will be gone for good by 2024. But where is the benefit in terms of prices?
Adjusted for inflation, prices of electricity have risen by 19% between 2011 and 2020. By next April they are likely to double, despite the fact that a barrel of oil costs less now than in 2011. Ofgem says that 25% of our electricity bills are made up of social and environmental levies.
If the government had gone ahead with fracking, instead of caving in to a small vocal minority, we could have had our own secure supply, instead of relying on Russian gas, where we are being outbid by the Chinese.
Claims that the cost of wind and solar have fallen dramatically in recent years do not take into account the huge cost of dealing with intermittency. At some times suppliers have been forced to pay up to 40 times the usual wholesale cost cost to keep the supply going.
The "19 - 25% of social and environmental levies" is mostly subsidy against the excess cost of gas. Green electricity is cheaper and sustainable, unlike fossil fuels.
ReplyDeleteGreen electricity includes burning wood chips which produces more pollution than burning coal. It is massively subsidised, otherwise it would not be used. Wind and solar are intermittent and therefore unreliable. Without subsidies they would not be used much at all.
ReplyDelete“ In order to be deemed green energy, a resource cannot produce pollution, such as is found with fossil fuels. This means that not all sources used by the renewable energy industry are green. For example, power generation that burns organic material from sustainable forests may be renewable, but it is not necessarily green, due to the CO2 produced by the burning process itself. ”
DeleteBtw, the solar power from my roof isn’t subsidised and is reliable (although output varies with cloud cover and therefore light it IS predictable).
The senator from West Virginia is bought and paid for by Big Coal. With his help the dying industry is pulling one final heist — and the entire planet may pay the price.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/joe-manchin-big-coal-west-virginia-1280922/?fbclid=IwAR09SSg8Z4FvYpRJCqmf30CRjSEn5gV7ZGQeRKITBvcRrNlRZE6gG0dOjSM
You are clearly completely convinced of the global warming fear. Until you open your mind and read the evidence against this proposition there is nothing more I can say. We will have to wait a few decades to see how this turns out. My guess is that China and Russia will be the winners.
ReplyDeleteIt seems very clear to me (and the majority of scientific opinion).
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/ed_hawkins/status/1481682750478376960?s=21