Time to switch off

 I really mean it too..

Check this story out - a very well written piece in Bloomberg that actually factually summarises all the relevant key points at hand. 

Due to no wind, there is a 10% gap in energy production in the UK this week. France has many of its nukes off-line, so we rely on back up coal and gas. Right at the point where global supply chain issues mean that prices are soaring.

And I mean soaring, one contract on Monday went for £1760, as opposed to the usual £50 per KwH. The average a mere £345 - just a seven-fold price increase for the week. 

Of course, the wind will blow again, but there is no way this episode does not lead to markedly higher consumer prices over the winter. Cold spells in winter now are going to cost the wholesalers even higher prices than this as supplies of gas are so tight. 

As such, time to make sure you turn of unused plugs around the house and look to limit consumption where you can. My rough guess is electricity prices will double over the winter at a minimum from where they are now and stay that way for a while. Worst case will be 3x or 4x the price in January.

Hello, is that inflation I see coming down the road at speed?

Coal: Guardian Speak With Forked Tongue (again)

Needless to say, the lower headline, 'coal on the way out', applies to the USA.  It would apply to most of Europe, too.  But there it stops.  It's the top item that matters, of course, if anyone's counting.  Which I'm not sure they are.

By the way, although da kidz may not wish to hear this during their school strikes, one of the 'ways they could save the planet' (bottom right) would be to stop online computer gaming.  That's now using so much energy globally, special data centres are being built for it, similar to bitcoin mining.  (And as for FB etc ...)

ND

Swansea Tidal Lagoon. Oh Dear, Oh Dear

The axeing of the Swansea Tidal Lagoon.  It's ju-ust possible the goverment could have thought through the presentational aspects better - but by Heaven they got the decision right - eventually.

Cue hysterical tears across the greenie consituency, plus a large slice of the Welsh populace that had swallowed this inane concept.  Well now: all that's happened is that the government won't mandate electricity users to pay for it.  So perhaps someone else will.

Shouldn't laugh, but ...

No, I didn't mock that up, it's a genuine Just Giving page.  Misguided charitable gestures aside, there are quite a few mainstream punters who are already set to lose out on this one: the project has burned through tens of millions.  It was always highly speculative.  Mercifully it was an investment "suitable only for experienced investors" so there won't be many widows & orphans hurt in the crash.  Ironic, really, because the PR man running the whole show (the latest in his very eclectic run of odd entrepreneurial ventures, starting with film schemes) tried to get a bandwagon rolling, disingenuously called "Ours to Own".   As if somehow it belonged to the Welsh people.  Read their stuff and cringe.

Question is, do they have the stamina to hang on waiting for Saviour Corbyn to turn up?

ND


  

Who's in the Doghouse, Greenies?

Here are a couple of entertaining graphics, (courtesy of data from BP: that's millions of tonnes of CO2 along the bottom).

Well, whatdya know?  Those paragons of renewable energy, the EU and China ...

And hey, aren't we still in the EU - what's been our 'contribution' over the years?

At yet still, somehow, the Energiewende is the model we should all revere.   When will someone tell these simpering green idiots:  measure the wrong thing and you'll get the wrong results.  Measuring 'renewables' gets you a lot of bits of expensive kit labelled 'renewable' (and very big electricity bills).  It says very little about the outturn CO2.

ND

Good News Week?

We've been on the case of the ridiculous Swansea Tidal Lagoon since it got a mention in the Tory 2015 manifesto.  Since then, the only noteworthy developments have been (a) a really laughable 'official independent report' on tidal lagoons in 2017 by Charles Hendry, a classic old-school red-faced Tory buffer who was seriously suckered by the Swansea mob's slick PR (it's all they've got) into supporting the notion; and (b) the Welsh government being equally suckered into offering under-priced finance to get the thing off the ground.

The FT is now reporting that the lagoon will be given the long-overdue coup de grâce this coming week.

Praise be!  There was always the chance the Tories would be so desperate for Welsh votes, they'd just roll over and pay up the monstrously expensive subsidy being sought.  If the FT is right, we shall raise a glass to those in charge at BEIS.

ND

Drax and a Climate-Change Tipping Point

HNY, C@W readers everywhere!   Mine's off to a good start as I got round to reading this piece in the Observer:

Burning wood for power is ‘misguided’ say climate experts

Well yes; some of us have been saying this ever since the UK biomass thing really got going (click 'Drax' thread below).  The science is easy, the conclusion a no-brainer.  Then again, no-brain is exactly how the 'green' debate proceeds, as a glance at many of the CiF comments BTL under that story will confirm.  At the same time, there are even more anti biomass comments there too - which wouldn't have been the case even a couple of years ago.  2017 probably marks the year the biomass issue turned around in public discourse.

This whole thing exemplifies neatly a phenomenon one can often identify.  Something, somehow, becomes 'received wisdom' - in this case, that burning trees for electricity is carbon-neutral.  Anyone suggesting otherwise gets deluged with derision and disdain (or, in less advanced societies, gets lynched).  Then, one day, the penny drops and the cry goes up: why did no-one ever warn us about that?  And to the obvious answer: well actually, they did - the response is: yes, but those people are nutters.  (I recall Roy tub'o'lard Hattersley deploying this logic after the financial crash a decade ago.)  It's an interesting cognitive trap: you can't pay heed to the lone voice in the wilderness - because, by definition, he's obviously bonkers - but ...   

But what?  I suppose the only real rationalisation could be:  ... but someone (the 'experts', maybe?) ought to have listened on our behalf, and carefully considered the nutter's arguments, and told us to change our views.  Ah yes, the experts.  I think we know the fallacies in such an argument.  Ho hum; that's the way of the world.  You can get pretty cold and bitter, out there in the wilderness.

The Lie

The 'carbon-neutral' biomass thing was always a demented view, given the lie by two centuries of science and technology: but it wasn't just a batty green opinion.  No, it forms the basis of gigantic 'renewables' subsidies for woodpellet-burning electricity in the UK (almost £1 billion p.a.) which in turn has spawned a substantial new industry: the felling of tens of millions of trees a year in North America;  conversion into wood pellets;  shipping to northern England (we are the world's biggest wood pellet burners, oh yes);  and storing / onward trucking thereafter to the powerplants.  Several port authorities, and firms like Eddie Stobart, have become pretty well hooked on the trade; not to mention Drax and its smaller peers.

We've wondered before how long Drax plc - up to its eyebrows in biomass subsidies that must surely be in question - can survive when it becomes increasingly obvious the biomass game is up.   To be fair, Drax has been diversifying as fast a big company can - which isn't particularly fast but it is fairly purposeful.   They know the score.

Bottom?

My guess is, the government has decided it can continue to brazen out the carbon-neutral nonsense: nobody actually cares about CO2 when push (GHG) comes to shove (GDP).   But air quality is a new-ish issue that really does exercise people.  It's for that reason, not CO2, the Chinese are trying to cut back on coal.  The government will find it harder to ignore the appalling particulates spewed out from wood-burners.  Yes, as well as being worse than coal in terms of (a) energy efficiency and (b) CO2, wood-burning is (c) very much worse as regards genuinely harmful particulates.  (Have a watch of this Drax-plume-tracker - unless you are prone to epilepsy ...)   

So Drax is still in trouble, long-term  That graph may not yet have found the bottom.

ND

'Green' means nothing to Modern Man

Readers will know I sometimes pause to take pictures out of the window during my travels, at goings-on that catch my eye.  Yesterday's photo opportunity was in a new Dutch business park that wishes to be known as a paragon of ultra-green practices.  Out of the window I espy this git, whose task seems to be to use a leaf-clearing blower to remove a large quantity of sand off a flat roof.  He appears to be trying to blow it, thoughtfully, onto the ground / vehicles below.

Whatever he thinks he's doing, he's useless at it.  Every time he corrals some of the sand with his blower, he waves the thing somewhere else and the first bit of sand is disturbed again.  Back and forth he goes, making no significant headway.  Either he has no idea how to use his 'tool', or it's the wrong method.

After 20 minutes of this nonsense, operative #2 appears with ... a broom!  He gets to work, evidently making excellent and steady progress - their relative achievements can be clearly seen in the picture below.  He shovels the sand that he's methodically mounding up into a wheelbarrow, instead of idly over the edge.  They stop to have an argument.  Broom-man prevails, and they finish up in no time, with almost all the sand in his barrow, available for recycling.

My observation is that Modern Man has a strange sort of stupid pride that says - using a broom is beneath me: I must be given a power-tool !  Funnily enough, I'm also willing to bet it's more effort waving that chunk of a leaf-blower around for an hour than it is spending 15 minutes with a broom.  But, obviously, it's somehow demeaning.  So capital equipment must be furnished, and electricity consumed.

It goes without saying, Modern Man's Stupid Pride has consequences a lot less *green* than broom-man's approach.  A plague on oafish Modern Man - and the lame management that panders to him.

ND 

Biodigestion

One of our anon's asks:   Off topic I guess, but what are your thoughts on biodigesters for small scale generation? 

We never mind a bit of off-topic.  I have a template for looking at these ‘renewable’ sources, anon.  First of all we should park the whole (C)AGW controversy because there’s no point: if you reject the AGW concept you don’t go on to discuss the finer details of one scheme vs another. 

So: (1) does the source of electricity actually contribute to reducing CO2?  Answering this requires looking deeper than just the official line; we have the ghastly example of large-scale biomass burning (wood pellets for electricity by the millions of tonnes) which actually increase CO2 emissions, even vs coal - and the "carbon debt" may not be repaid for decades or even longer.  This all happens (and nearly a billion £££ in subsidies paid annually to Drax and the like) because the regulations simply - and erroneously - deem biomass burning to be CO2-neutral at the point of combustion.   It's actually pretty outrageous.

(2) Where does the scheme sit on the Marginal Abatement Cost Curve?  Logically speaking (*huh!*) there is no point pursuing more expensive approaches when there are cheaper, or indeed self-financing approaches still to be fully exploited.  Of course, it happens all the time but it's crazy. 

(3) What are the *unintended consequences*?  Biomass sources of all kinds are seriously prone to this, from appalling deforestation to direct competition with food crops etc etc.  Tree-burning for electricity is among the worst: the 'particulates' emissions are very bad, much worse even (again) than coal.  I reckon air quality will be a major new front against biomass soon. 

Which brings us to your precise question and biodigestion - which we did once take a pot-shot at before.  (1) There is a reasonable case to be made that it can actually reduce CO2 (and methane-escape) though this depends on the detailed counterfactuals, as always.  (2) It's not very economically-placed on the MACC - worse than many, but better than some (don't get me started on the Swansea Tidal Lagoon).  It's "dispatchable" to some extent, too (i.e. can fire up on demand, more or less), which counts in its favour compared to wind, solar and tidal.

(3) is interesting.  What you find is that, even in rural areas, you need to cast your net quite widely to get enough pigshit, soiled straw etc to fire up even a small anaerobic digestion plant.  So a large number of diesel-miles are required to round it all up - which ought to be factored into the CO2 equation.  (To be fair, they do include a bit of allowance for this in the reporting, though prob not enough.)  Secondly, these plants, though not particularly vast to look at, do require extensive foundations to sit on, and a large area of proper concrete hardstanding for the constant arrival and turnaround of shit-laden trucks.  Again, this makes it CO2-intensive (and cost-intensive generally) to set them up in the first place - not any old corner of a farmyard will do.  But sometimes you can find, e.g., a suitable patch on a disused RAF airbase that fits the bill nicely.

I haven't looked into the particulates in detail, but my general understanding is that while the raw material is foul, it's methane that is being burned (= 0 particulates, of course).

Finally, a cow's stomach is more than 20 times more efficient at producing methane than the most advanced biodigester currently available!  This alone suggests the technology is not suitably advanced yet for it to be a Good Idea in the abstract.  But when did that ever influence a lobby-pandering politician?

So there you go.  I wouldn't allow any of them until the cheaper schemes have been fully exploited - but what do I know?

ND

Something Really Interesting in ... Flitwick!

I have been a big, unapologetic and, OK, obsessive critic of subsidies in the energy sector for a good few years.  I'll come on to a possible, partial defence of them in a second, but let's pause to acknowledge a Big Day in the history of "green" energy.  A subsidy-free** solar-plus-battery-park has opened in our very own Flitwick, Beds!

Rather dull photo: Anesco

Steve Shine OBE, Anesco’s Executive Chairman said: "For the solar industry, Clayhill is a landmark development and paves the way for a sustainable future, where subsidies are no longer needed or relied upon. Importantly, it proves that the Government’s decision to withdraw subsidies doesn’t have to signal the end of solar as a commercially viable technology."

Yes, the government is quite properly chuffed about this, as may we all be.  Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't.  Maybe it's a dumb use of large-scale batteries, which (I strongly suspect) could make even more money selling quick-reaction services directly to the grid.  Who cares - ? because it's private money!  People make and lose fortunes all the time with their brilliant / dumb ideas: it's what makes the world go around.  C@W, see?

The collapse in 'costs' of offshore windfarms since proper competition was introduced for access to those subsidy-pots is another good sign.  They still want - and get - subsidies, though; and aren't made to contribute to the cost of balancing their intermittent output.

Of course, it's early days, and outrageous subsidies are still being paid to / on offer to:  legacy projects;  Hinkley Point;  biomass-burning power stations that, disgracefully, actually increase emissions of CO2 vs even coal ...  the list goes on.  But hopefully the points are slowly being registered that (a) subsidies needn't be required; (b) subsidies can lead to grotesque unintended consequences, as well as unnecessary costs being heaped onto (in this case) electricity users; and (c) whatever scheme you are going to come up with, it will be better if you put it out to auction / competitive tender.

Not required?  The subsidy lobby (which includes people who aren't even beneficiaries! - and who probably be most dismayed to meet the flinty-eyed subsidy-farming bastards they have helped to enrich) would argue that without the R&D and the 'new industries' helped into being by the first decade and more of crazy bungs for crazy schemes, we'd never have reached the happy position where this may soon no longer be needed.  There is, of course, a soupçon of truth in this.

But (a) it could have been done better by (i) funding only the R&D and (ii) ensuring proper competitive conditions every step of the way.

And (b) it didn't need to be done by us!  Let other coutries waste their money on the R&D - they won't fail to sell their stuff to us in due course.   We know this, because that's exactly what they do right now.

If, of course, every penny spent in the last decade of British subsidies went to British universities, R&D shops, engineering firms and manufacturers on competitive terms, it might be seen in a more favourable Keynsian light.  As we know, that is far from how things have been.  And we're not done yet with this monstrous waste.

ND

_____________
** Everyone is saying "subsidy-free" but I wouldn't be surprised to learn there is actually some modest form of subvention going on here in one form or another.  Cynic?  Moi? 

Endgame for Drax?

Drax is a great name for a villain:  and for anyone who gives a toss about the way 'green' subsidies are thrown about, Drax plc can certainly be cast as one of the villains of the piece.  Drax and its fellow industrial-scale wood-chip burners receive nearly £1 billion a year in subsidies for generating electricity that way, and are not required to proffer CO2 emission permits or pay the carbon tax - on the pretext that wood-burning reduces CO2 emissions.

Except, it doesn't - it increases them, even by reference to coal (which is the obvious comparator, since it is coal-fired power generating capacity that is essentially being replaced by biomass-burning).  It's basic physics, plus a little logic.  A perfect example of crass policy-making at its most perverse - whatever view you take on (C)(A)GW.  The way they get away with it, BTW, is under the utterly demented 'carbon accounting rules' which allow them to account only for the CO2 emitted in the manufacture and transportation of the wood-chips - and to ignore the CO2 emitted during actual combustion, which is nowhere recorded.  To repeat, wood-chip burning generates more CO2 than coal burning: and in answer to the riposte that eventually, if you replant the forests, it all balances out, the answer is that 'eventually' is several decades at best, but maybe 100 years or more.  Meantime, all this is happening by the many millions of tonnes of mostly North American forest per annum.

There have been a number of people saying this patiently for quite some time, mostly from the green side; although of course the hatchet-faced subsidy-farmers and their 'green' lobby the REA are all in favour.  Well, after all, a billion is a billion ... 

Yesterday, the fairly universally-respected Chatham House has published what everyone knows to be the truth (here and here).  Even the Beeb has picked up on it (though silence from the Grauniad at the time of writing).  The REA's response is risible.

Why does the government (which, by the way, knows all this too) continue to load up our electricity bills with these subsidies?  Easy.  (a) the UK depends on biomass to meet its 'binding' EU renewables targets; (b) in a world of windfarms and ever decreasing coal, it depends on the reliability of biomass (inter alia) to keep the lights on in winter; (c) Drax and its smaller confreres are up shit creek without the subsidies, which greatly exceed their profits.  I don't know whether Drax - a FTSE 250 company - would go under without the subsidy (and remember, if that is withdrawn then by the same logic Drax should also be paying the carbon tax which would compound their woes).  But withdrawal of the subsidy would certainly impact massively on its fortunes.

I can't see the status quo continuing indefinitely.

ND

Generating Electricity by Fantasy-Power

Towards the end of last year, as part of the Green Crap Purge George Osborne Amber Rudd withdrew the £1 billion pot allocated for encouraging the development of Carbon Capture & Storage, one of the great moonbeams-from-cucumbers schemes of our time.

Now it so happens that all scenarios for achieving the UK's official daydream of Full Decarbonisation by 2050 depended upon a chain of reasoning as follows:  "most heating needs to be electric", followed by "most transportation needs to be electric", followed by "there must be lots of genuinely CO2-neutral** biomass power generation";  then - because as eny fule kno we will needs a heap of gas-fired power plants, and maybe even some coal plants to generate those quite staggering quantities of elelctricity "there needs to be lots of CCS": and all finally, triumphantly anchored by "the residual CO2 from non-electric transportation - you know, aircraft and such - needs to be offset by biomass-PLUS-CCS",  which is of course CO2-negative! ('net negative emissions' in the jargon).

Thus, our 'decarbonised' energy future was being built on some inescapable logic plus the manifestation, well before 2050, of the unicorn of CCS.  Economically viable CCS, to boot.

So, the government having cruelly withheld the billion, they can be blamed for the disintegration of the entire chain!  And they will be, from now until 2050, I should imagine.

When do we get to register that CCS is a non-existent deus ex machina for *solving* an insoluble problem?  That it is an ontologially-challenged concept?  That it is a pure fantasy? 

ND

__________
**as opposed to burning mature trees a la Drax, which is anything but CO2-neutral as the greenies are slowly coming to realise.  Sorry, Drax

Three Causes for (Modest) Optimism

There's enough in the news to make for grinding of the teeth (not to mention things that give rise to CU's regular threats to emigrate) that I am inclined to register a little cluster of recent items which redress the balance a bit.

(1) The tenor of the latest IPCC report: as several commentators have noted, adaptation to climate change has started to feature as a mainstream topic instead of being viewed as tantamount to abject surrender of the greenie-lefty desideratum of abatement-only policies by diktat, in not-so-subtle pursuit of their goal of World Government.  Adaptation is the correct direction of travel, and it is to be hoped that after another 5 years of slow progress, public policy will be substantially redirected to this potentially quite urgent end.  The only vague excuse for windfarms has been as a programme of Keynsian public works, and intelligent flood defences etc are infinitely better on that score - saints preserve us, they could even show a genuine return on investment !

(2) The interview with Caroline Lucas in the Grauniad 

For Lucas, the big problem with fracking has nothing to do with the risk that it will cause earthquakes, contaminate the water table or pollute the soil. In fact, she thinks it possible that stringent regulations could minimise those risks. "It's not that fracking itself is necessarily worse than ordinary gas extraction ... Lucas accepts that we do need gas ...

These words (my emphasis) are a cut-out-and-keep collectors item.

(3) The re-opening of the Dawlish stretch of railway.   When it was first washed away, everyone shook their heads sadly and proclaimed it would take 6 months and more to fix.  And who could disagree, given the shocking length of time that British civil engineering projects generally take ?  Makes the blood boil: FFS, World War 2 only took 6 years!  Anyhow, for once the finger was pulled out and the job was done in good time.  The same attitude needs adopting rather more widely: hey, maybe even for implementation of, errr, adaptation policies ...

So - credit where it's due, and a modest round of applause to these three disparate entities for their belated but worthwhile conversions to the ways of righteousness.  There is more rejoicing in Heaven, etc etc: and no-one is beyond salvation !

ND

"Roll Back Green Taxes" - Two Powerful Principles

OK, so we all know the right answer is to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act and/or remember that the soi-disant 'legally binding target" for CO2 emissions is not what the greenies would have us believe.

BUT this is a post for the real world, in which the LibDems have a veto on anything so radical.  Nevertheless, there are still useful things to be done that:  can be promoted with compelling logic; do not prejudice taking a more radical approach in the event the Tories one day have a free hand (no laughing at the back); and will in some measure actually have the desired effect

As he comes to review the panoply of green imposts, Cameron should employ these two practical and powerful principles:

• no UK emissions target ahead of actual back-of-the-pack EU achievement 
• only intervene strictly according to merit-ranking on the MACC

The first is self-explanatory, and Osborne's recent rhetoric (OK, recent drivelling) has been feeling towards this really obvious approach.  It really shouldn't be impossible to sell this politically; we could all come up with appropriate slogans.

MACC may need more explanation.  The Marginal Abatement Cost Curve is a very simple concept.  Rank CO2 abatement measures according to how much the cost per unit abated by that method, from least to most expensive.  The cheapest actually don't cost anything, of course, they are profitable to carry out - without subsidy - and hence "self-financing" (the bars below the X-axis on the left hand end, mostly efficiency measures).  So an MAC curve looks like this.

Each bar represents a different abatement method.  The width of each bar shows the quantity of abatement that each method could yield.  An MACC will apply to a given country or sector, because each one will differ in the details of its energy-economy, and of the abatement-potential of the various measures.  (If, for example, in a particular country all light bulbs have already been switched to energy-saving, that abatement technique no longer has any potential there).

The basic use for the MACC is to read off what should be the cost of achieving a particular level of abatement: if we want X million tonnes, we read across from left to right until the cumulative widths of the bars hits X: then we read up the Y-axis to find out (a) the marginal abatement cost - i.e. the most we need to pay per unit to achieve our target, and (b), integrating under the curve to that point, the total cost involved.

There is a truly obvious assumption being made here: you always do the cheapest things first.  Right ?  I mean, if there are lots of self-financing measures available, maybe overall we could meet a target and actually make money !

Wrong.  The idiots at the helm throw money at measures that are way up the right-hand end of the curve, e.g. solar power in NW Europe.   It's genuinely outrageous.  Why they do this is an interesting topic in itself: but enough said for now.  The point is, there is real scope for cutting out this nonsense, and what could be more easily defended than sticking to the left-hand end of the curve ?

[One last comment: some of the "self-financing" items never get financed because the relevant parties don't have the capital (insulation for cash-strapped tenants being the classic example).  This may fairly be described as a technical market failure, but we understand it well enough and there is an excellent case for government stepping in to intermediate.  They mandate a bit of this via the energy companies, but the schemes have been maladroit and they should do better.]

So - there you go, Dave: C@W points the way.  Get cracking & do something useful.

ND

Tidal end of a fantasy...

Got to love this story in the register. Now Mr Alex Salmond, the famed Scottish leader who is preparing more hot air than ever for this coming year to try and persuade his people to vote of independence, has nowhere to hide as regards energy.

Mr Salmond fell for the green energy brigade a long time ago and is very keen on all things green in a wild hope that he can somehow copy Norway or Iceland. The thing is, Iceland is the only country in the world with such large geothermal reserves and Norway too has great natural water resources; both countries have rather poor weather too.


Nothing so inconvenient as facts tend to stop an infection of the mind with make-believe green energy fantasies. We can see this within Westminster too and the mad ramblings of the current DECC occupants. The reality is that green energy is not going to produce anything like enough power to keep our current lifestyle going. So a road to green energy as a big make-up of our power mix is a road to blackouts and eventually in an all too real sense, a new dark age.

Instead of course the money and effort needs to be spent on fuels that will work. One day nuclear fusion power will come on line, perhaps not in our lifetimes in any commercial way, but once it does then many energy problems we have will go away (not aeroplanes though, I do wonder if at the end of the age of fossil fuels they will go the way of the dodo). In the meantime there are adequate resources of shale oil and gas to see us through to the breakthrough.

it's really not that hard, but to convince marxist inspired greens is a task too onerous for anyone.