Telegraph Columnist Calls ‘Renewable’ Energy ‘Useless’
On July 29th, the Telegraph ran a story with the headline ‘Climate change is real, but it is an unfortunate fact that renewables are useless‘
The article states:
Panic, always a mistake, is most dangerous when the problem is real. And the ill-informed panic of the educated is worst of all, since it guarantees the selection of specious and even counterproductive remedies.
The last 25 years of British energy policy is an extended demonstration of that principle, and it finds its latest echo in Tim Stanley’s recent piece on the French fires.
There is no question that the situation in France is grave, but one televised summer is not a firm foundation for energy policy stretching many decades into the future. However, let us concede the alarming premise, and move to the question that actually matters. If we must act, will the action proposed, renewable energy, really work?
If you haven’t read Tim’s piece yet…
Here the scepticism of the Right, however crudely expressed online, is founded on something more than prejudice, firstly on physics, and also on decades of unusually well-documented failure.
It is often said, and Tim Stanley repeats it, that “the renewables revolution” is already under way. But is it? Global energy consumption has tripled since the early 1970s, bringing vast advances in wellbeing, but virtually all of that growth has been supplied by oil, coal and gas. Renewables, including the traditional biomass on which a significant part of the world still cooks, accounted for some 12 per cent of primary energy in 1971.
They account for about 15 per cent now, and much of that modest proportional gain is the result of heavy subsidy in the West, over £200bn in the UK alone since 2002, as well as intense market coercion favouring wind and solar and deprecating coal and gas. The cost has been large, yet the resulting renewables output is not only modest but still, after all these years, in need of subsidy.
“Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.” The mountains laboured, and brought forth a ridiculous mouse.
The Office for Budget Responsibility’s most recent forecast puts the Renewables Obligation subsidy at £8.3bn this year and Contracts for Difference at £2.7bn, both for large-scale generators. To these could be added the Feed-in Tariff for small generators, which the OBR does not list at all. Ofgem’s latest annual report puts the scheme at just under £1.84bn.
Approaching £13bn a year, then, in direct income support to renewables before any other costs are included. And while the OBR expects the Renewables Obligation to taper as older contracts expire, the Contracts for Difference liabilities will double, from £2.3bn in 2024-25 to £5.1bn by 2030-31. Total environmental levies rise across the same period from £10.5bn to £18.5bn.
Instructively, the Capacity Market, which cost £1.3bn in 2024-25, is forecast to reach £4.4bn by 2030-31. This is required because subsidised, zero-marginal-cost, weather-dependent generation has driven the firm generators that guarantee security of supply out of the energy market, and that plant must now be paid to exist. This is an indirect subsidy to renewables, and there are others.
Overall, grid balancing costs ran at some £370m a year in the early 2000s, before wind and solar, but now amount to several billion annually. Transmission charges have also climbed as the grid is extended and reinforced to connect remote wind with centres of demand. Adding the direct and the indirect together, my colleague Lee Moroney and I at Renewable Energy Foundation estimate that the total renewables subsidy cost to consumers since 2002 stands at about £223bn in 2024 prices – near £8,000 per household – running now at roughly £25bn a year.
Renewables subsidy accounts for something like 40 per cent of the total cost of electricity supply in this country. Most tellingly of all, the subsidy per megawatt hour of renewable electricity generated has not fallen but has actually risen by about half in real terms since 2005, to around £200.
How can 20-plus years of lavish public support have been so unsuccessful? Physics.
Editor’s note: PSI would disagree with the first part of the Telegraph headline, but absolutely agree with the second.
See more here notalotofpeopleknowthat
Header image: Wave Awards
Bold emphasis added
very old white guy
| #
The foolishness of constantly using the word renewable without understanding that nothing can be made to generate energy/electricity without using coal, oil and gas. I wish someone would hit these people with a smart stick to get their brains working.
Reply