But renewables are already cheaper, and better for us, than fossil fuels in almost all situations.
He then links to Max Roser. Who is a lovely chap but not actually correct on all things.
We can indeed say that generating electricity can be cheaper by renewables. Which is a different statement from running a nation on renewables is cheaper. It’s that second which is important of course and it’s also that second which is not true as yet.
But it’s not just him, and it’s not just journalism. The radical right moves as a pack, and Heath is just one of many now insisting that climate catastrophe is something we should simply suck up.
How weird. Absolutely everyone says – no, really, everyone – that we’re going to have to do some adaptation. Which is what sucking it up is, adaptation.
George does seem confused on this subject.
To be fair he might be basing this statement on British government data, which deliberately understates the cost of renewables.
For example, The carbon budget assumes the cost of onshore wind to be £1,860 per MW, declining to £1,120 per MW by 2050, compared to real capital costs that exceed £3,000 per MWh and are rising as wind farms have to construct in deeper water and further from shore.
HT Jaberwock’s substack
The real numbers need to rise vastly to meet the objective which is matching demand 24 X 7.
Their quoted price for offshore wind is meaningless. They are measuring the wrong thing.
Yep, those numbers are just the cost of the kit, not the total cost of using unreliables.
The real numbers need to rise vastly to meet the objective which is matching demand 24 X 7.
They’ve solved that problem by standing it on its head. Businesses have been put in a situation where demand has to match supply and they will be disconnected if demand increases beyond supply. Retail customers are next in line for that treatment.
At the same time our government wants to blame the Tories for the lack of industry.
Solar panels and turbine blades are difficult / impossible to recycle so they just get dumped. Oil companies have to pay into a fund to carry the cost of decommissioning (cutting off a platform to no higher than a few metres above the sea bed, which is ridiculous when these things are marine sanctuaries). So why are renewables not subject to the same regime?
I think we know the answer to that, philip.
He’s forgotten the old proverb: “One swallow doesn’t make a summer”.
It’s been hot for a long time now but we don’t get these very often. 1976 is the last one that sticks in my mind. Also, as I noted on another post, the farmer’s lodge near us is by no means as low as it has been in some past years so it’s not real drought yet.
I’ll believe there has been real and significant warming only if we get these long hot summers much more often.
For all the talk and f drought when I walked past a local ford this morning I was a bit surprised to see so much water still flowing. I’m sure it’s lower if not dried out in the 16 years we’ve been here.
Perhaps it’s because the water table is so high after all the rain of the past few years that the springs are still springing? I have memories of reports of the water table being so low that aquifers were emptying and farmers were having to bore deeper for water.
The one thing we can be sure about with British weather, there’s always something going on to keep the doom sayers happy.
Last winter was wet. Hence the fuel load causing the fires in France/Spain/etc. Reservoirs were full by the end of Spring, water table had been replenished. A dryish warmish summer following a (relatively) dry winter/spring is worse for water levels than a very dry, hot summer following a wet autumn/winter/spring.
It wasn’t just last winter, it’s been going on for a few years round here.
Have a look on Google Earth to see how many sewage treatment plants are located upstream of it…
None, it’s just a country stream although some people have complained that the odd cess pit leaks into it but never offered any evidence.
It’s obvious renewables are cheaper, so long as you ignore:
The costs of duplication required (gas / nukes needed to cover when renewables aren’t generating), subsidies, levies, cost of upgrading the rest of the network to cope with the location of generation, cost of upgrading the grid to cope with the intermittent generation of renewables, the maintainance costs (off shore wind in particular), constraint payments made to renewable energy suppliers when no one wants to buy their energy, the increase in wear and tear and maintenance costs to gas energy suppliers due to cycling the plants on and off (cont.p94)
I still can’t get over the concept of powering AI by windmills. A strange concoction courtesy Cervantes and Mel Brooks…
I wonder if anyone has asked an AI model if it thinks this is feasible?
Yes. Technically feasible, economically marginal. The problem is that mountain of hardware used for training the AI model is very expensive. When the wind doesn’t blow no training is happening but you are still paying the capital cost for all that expensive hardware to sit doing nothing.
It’s a great idea! When the wind drops everyone has to go back to reading books and talking to each other.
“…cheaper …. In almost all situations…. “
Solar on a summer’s day even in the UK, ok, but when that situation changes to a winter’s night it becomes a non productive capital cost.
If we can’t control the weather or thereby the climate, if we can’t explain past variations by our CO2 hypothesis, then we MUST adapt. Remembering that the whole effect of the predicted warming using that flaky hypothesis is only equivalent to a degree or two of latitude so it’s a big SFW.
Yes rhoda, about the difference in temperature between London and Peterborough. We’re all going to burn!!!!!
The marginal cost of wind is indeed very low. Overheads and amortization are the killers. Wind and solar are very cheap at the farm gate, but not a lot of energy consumers live there. Hidden entirely from the calculations is the cost of backup when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, or when the wind is blowing too hard.
And rebuilding the grid to cope with thousands of relatively small-scale intermittent sources sited mostly round the periphery of the country, rather than a few dozen reliable large-scale producers sited where the demand is. Last estimate I saw was £600 billion, but I expect an HS2 multiplier is needed.
This is one of our problems in Oz.
“better….in almost all situations”
How about at night when the wind is not blowing? That’s a not uncommon situation in the UK.
I wonder if it’s even true that the direct cost is cheaper, once you factor in the actual yield (don’t they actually produce less than claimed, because they can’t be used as often?), divide the capital cost by the actual life, rather than the predicted one, and include dismantling & disposal costs.
The claim is based on all of them running under optimal wind conditions and not interfering with each other, which never happens.
And the continual blade breakages.
The ‘Capacity Factor’ of offshore wind is around 35%, meaning you won’t be getting anywhere near the advertised ‘capacity’ of any wind farm.
The one closest to me has a nameplate capacity of 170MW which means over the course of a year it will actually only deliver 59MW. It is a grift, nothing more.
Even if we could strip out all the man-made CO2 and other “pollutants” the climate would still change and we’d have to adapt. The Roman and medieval warm periods weren’t caused by man-made gases nor was the Little Ice Age.
Do you think Monidiot *ever* let simple facts interfere with his Narrative?
Dunno if you’ve actually skimmed the article, but he’s going full mouth-frothing, spit-speckling hyperbole. Full-on soap box Doom™ Prophet…
It’s almost sad to see…. And *used* to be such…..”members of Society”… would have been given a nice restful stay in a padded room…
He hasn’t really copped-onto the notion that the wind doesn’t blow all the time (at the right speed) and that it gets dark at night!
There’s an interesting article in this month’s Critic magazine pointing out how difficult it is to connect all these renewable sources to the distribution network. It’s one thing to run connectors to a static, large output power station but what do you do when you have groups of solar panels scattered across random fields?
They mostly get connected to the 33kV subsidiary network, which is a grid stability issue in itself. Uncertain flows in both volume and direction on a network that isn’t as ‘stiff’ as the main 400kV network are not good news.
You can’t (easily) without going through a stable buffer.
Which basically what batteries at source are *supposed* to provide, but generally don’t…
I’ve worked with the setup at two largefestivals.
Two sets of two parallel-boxed Gen. IV/V gennies, each feeding a bank of 4 batteries, which *then* feed their areas.
The two battery banks themselves are synced and linked through a 1500V connect through 350 Amp powerlocks over something like half a kilometer, so *they* ( and not the gennies..) can provide extra Oomph when needed.
It can be… temperamental… But that’s what the Lappie of God, based at Mission Central and perma-manned by someone Knowledgeable is for… You can manually shift/start/stop/divert Things with that little beast.
It really helps that Catering ( the actual main consumer) is pretty predictable in its demands, and a good reason to tell the bloody light jockeys to %^(&%&%$) Go Easy on the Blinders… $*%%)&*%)&%)&%)%&!!
But the trick is in the batteries… If you try to do it directly from the Gennies…. OhBoi….
Now imagine a Local Grid doing the same *without* the batteries… With Solar panels and bird choppers being *much* more …temperamental than the Gen IV/V gennies….
It’s a bloody nightmare only EcoLoons with no knowledge of power distribution at all can come up with…
And if peeps wonder why those festivals use such a setup:
It’s not in the cost of the equipment/cabling… The kit is twice as expensive , and takes actual *officially certified* Volunteers ( yes, we don’t get paid… we get to Play with Big Shiney Kit we’d otherwise never get near…. Nerds, y’know…) to make it work.
It’s in the cost reduction *around* the power supply.
*FAR* easier EcoBollocks Red Tape. Saving impressive amounts of $$ in the prep/permission phase of the festival.
Significantly reduced fuel use, because the gennies run Optimal, and don’t run idle.
In case anyone hasn’t noticed… Diesel is….expensive…
The EcoDiesel is even more expensive, but over the *week* the gennies need to run for a weekend festival, you only need to refuel *once*.
And that’s only because you return the buffer tanks either empty or full..
And full is Easier than risking sucking up Crud from the bottom….
In line with that… no need to rent two extra JCB’s/Manitou’s + fuel tanks which need Certified Drivers because you *will* need to do fuel runs through a mass of people at the most importune moments Because Murphy to fuel that one gennie that used more than planned..
It’s all in the balance between direct costs, and all the *other* costs associated with settng up a working power system in wet meadows/parks..
And for festivals above a certain size it’s simply *far* cheaper to do it that way.
Forgot the biggest Boon…. ( my opinion..)
Because you can load up the batteries manually, you have Quiet Nights…
No Chug of a churning diesel, one set of which is *always* right next to the volunteer campsite…..
The Gennies ( as quiet as they are..) are *off* at night…. And all the Fridges and Cooling and Anti-Dew base currents in the stage equipment still happens….
The radical right moves as a pack
Wut?
Don’t forget this is Monidiot…..
From his position Far Left of North Korea, even a Pinko Centrist is already Far Right, if not Radical Right..
And from that distance you can’t see the differences in opinion/strategy anymore, if the horizon doesn’t interfere already…, so everything *seems* to move as a solid pack to him..
There *is* logic buried in the Madness…
Dunno, but it sounds promising.
If unreliables are cheaper why does my electricity cost more than 4 times as much per kWh as my gas. Leccy from Gas (CCGT) costs less than twice as much. Leccy from unreliables must cost *more than twice as much* as Leccy from Gas for the sums to work out..
We have noticed this in Oz. The unreliables are cheaper, so we naturally have to pay more for the privilege of using them!!
Good observation.
Burning gas in a condensing gas boiler to give usable heat should give you 90-94% efficiency. Burning it at a power station and transmitting it 100 miles to your home then using a traditional electric fire give to heat, gives you 50-56% efficiency. In pure energy terms electricity should cost ~1.8 times a much as gas. Everything else is down to the cost of generation, transmission, renewables and tax.
Adding renewables to the mix pushes up the non fuel costs, making the cost of fuel less and less relevant.
As I keep banging on: if you’re going to use gas in your fuel mix, then it should be piped directly to the consumer where it is converted to useful energy once, not buned in a power station (losses) to heat water (losses) to turn a turbine (losses) to generate electricity (losses) to push over hundreds of miles of wire (losses) to the consumer where it is then converted into end-use heat (losses).
But people want to use electric lights not gaslights and electric appliances (even James Dyson hasn’t invented a gas-powered vacuum cleaner). So your idea that no-one should use electricity instead of gas goes down like a lead balloon.
People want electricity and there isn’t much you can do without generating stations [I think that it should be mandated that all air-conditioning systems be supplied by solar panels on the walls or roof of the building but that is a tiny share of demand]. Nuclear power stations for base load is fine but they are not suitable for variable supply adjusting to variable demand. Hydro is great but we have limited potential hydroelectric supply and are using almost all of that which is economic. You need a flexible supplier to meet the constantly changing gap between demand and the supply of unreliables which can only be met by coal, oil or gas – or millions of slaves on treadmills. Gas is the most efficient – unless you are volunteering for the treadmill!
“But unusables are already cheaper”
Welcome to the alice in wonderland clown world of surreal voodoo euphemistically known as “economics”.
There’s a nobel prize for this shite!