By Paul Homewood
Matt Ridley in The Viewer:
A very strange parliamentary riot took place with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and dozens of other Tory MPs demanding an end to the ban on onshore wind farms. They argue that wind energy is cheap and getting cheaper. And surely, if we get into an energy war with Russia, we need all the power we can get?
That is a wrong argument many times over. There is no ban on wind farms – in fact it is a bogus standard planning requirement that they are restricted to areas designated for that purpose and with community support. copper. Nor do they offer a cheap solution: the cost is high and increasing. In fact, relying on wind will ensure that electricity is always expensive, because the unreliability of wind will poison the market, driving up the price of gas-powered electricity.
This week prices are on offer to anyone – anyone! – who could secure electricity on the chilly, windless evening of 29 November which quickly spiked to around £1,100 per megawatt hour (MWh), ten times higher than normal . Demand is forecast to peak at 41.2 gigawatts, and supply at 40.7. In the words of Mr. Micawber: the result is suffering. At such a price, furniture really provides enough, but not from the wind industry, which cannot turn on the wind when it wants to. A growing reliance on unreliable wind has cost Britain sky-high during the cold days. Remember when the secretary of state for business used to pose for the camera while blowing up old coal power plants? They will come in handy this winter.
The Ukraine war has pushed gas prices higher, but Net Zero Watch’s Andrew Montford says it would be foolish to assume this is permanent and design a policy based on the assumption that wind will be cheaper. gas in the future.
Claims that cheap land wind arose thick and fast from enslaved politicians to the most oil-rich crony capitalist industry, the wind traders. The claims are not supported by accounts of onshore wind farms, which show breakeven costs of around £80/MWh for the cheapest farms. And this, note, is for efficient wind farms with turbines of 200 meters (twice the usual height), located in the windiest places and at least 1,200 meters apart so they don’t rob each other’s wind. Cost estimates don’t even take into account the need to carefully manage backup power generation for times and places where the wind isn’t blowing hard enough or blowing too hard. It also doesn’t count the costs of building and operating transmission lines from far-flung wind farms to places where people actually live.
Wind farm reports also suggest that these costs are rising rather than falling, perhaps due to such grid constraints, the fact that the best locations are gone and the cost of steel and concrete Cardboard, copper and neodymium increases make new machinery more expensive. However, even £80/MWh is almost twice the cost of gas-powered energy with the average long-term gas price.
But that is if gas is allowed to provide uninterrupted power without much interruption. If you keep asking gas-fired power plants to shut down because of the wind, as we do, they’ll have to (and do) more charging to make up for the inefficiency of the turbine heating and cooling. – gas bin. The more wind we add, the higher the price of gas-powered energy. In this way, the wind locks in high electricity prices, accelerating British deindustrialization, or what remains of it.
And hello, wind farms can charge high prices similar to gas, delaying the start of the ‘contract for difference’ they have signed to supply at a lower price. Why? Because this document is a great thing for wind farm operators: it is not a power supply contract at all, but an option to do so whenever the zephyrs of the ball god. The government, in its infinite stupidity when the Lib Dems were in charge of energy, gave wind farms the power to supply electricity (with bonuses if the grid couldn’t cope on a windy day). ) but did not keep them at the price they offered. At least not without a trivial penalty. Incredible? If only.
The proposed ‘contracts for difference’ not only transfer the cost and risk of all uncertainty to the rest of the system, but are also dropped at the first sign of a good deal. than. Hornsea 2, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, commenced operations this year. Orsted, the developer, signed a differential contract in 2017 to sell electricity for £57.50/MWh. In this case, it delayed the contract until next year and sold electricity for four to ten times the price, costing consumers hundreds of millions of pounds a year. See what I mean about trading plans based on spot prices?
The best thing about wind farms, for municipal companies, is that they move money from the poor to the rich. The costs are borne by the person paying the electricity bill – and electricity consumes twice the monthly budget of a poor person compared to a rich person. Rewarded by the rich: landowners, private equity investors, lobbyists, Chinese mine owners.
Professor Gordon Hughes of the University of Edinburgh told me how markets can and should be reformed. If anyone wants to get serious about onshore wind, he said, let them sign a contract to provide a guarantee of the required power supply for at least 20 years – with severe penalties if they cannot deliver. grant. So the wind farm would be coupled with enough battery or other backup capacity to be as reliable as a gas power plant.
This will force the industry to build a 100 megawatt wind farm, but only guarantee 40 megawatts to the grid, storing the excess in batteries when the wind farm produces less than 40 megawatts. of wind would probably be more than 200 pounds per megawatt hour.
Speaking of batteries, wind energy fans (no pun intended) got excited on November 21 when Harmony Energy opened Europe’s largest battery farm near Hull. “But what happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine blah blah bl – oh yes, we now have industrial-scale batteries,” said David Shukman, the BBC’s former science editor. .
Consisting of around 50 megapacks of Tesla the size of a truck parked on a site the size of a football field, the plant will be capable of storing enough electricity to keep just 1% of the UK grid running. in four minutes. Electricity isn’t like carrots or coal – it’s incredibly expensive to store.
But think how profitable it would be to do so. When the wind drops on a cold November evening as soon as Harry Kane and his crew start to warm up, the grid (on your behalf) will pay a decent amount for stored electricity. This is why high wind costs are a bug, not a feature, as far as the industry is concerned. High prices are passed directly to the consumer. The more problems wind farms cause, the more useful wind farms become. The bigger the projects, the more attractive the ribbon-cutting ministers are.
Note that these are purely economic arguments. I haven’t even started talking about the environmental limitations of wind farms yet. They needed large amounts of concrete and steel, both of which were made of coal; they kill rare birds of prey, especially eagles; they kill bats; they overwhelm the scenic spots; Their magnets require rare earth minerals to be mined in China in extremely polluting ways.
Wind is a very low density form of energy, so you need a very large number of wind farms to make a significant contribution to the UK’s electricity generation capacity: hundreds of square miles per gigawatt of capacity. A gigawatt of fossil fuel or nuclear power takes up a tiny fraction of space and even less than the sky. In Scotland, where most onshore wind farms are proposed, this means turning most upland areas into what planners call a ‘wind farm landscape’. Enjoy watching.
Then there’s the question of how much carbon dioxide do wind farms actually save. It is true that when spinning, they produce no emissions, but during construction they generate a lot: the extraction, production and transportation of concrete facilities, steel towers, carbon fiber propellers and metal-rich turbines. That means that for the first few years of ‘green energy’, a wind farm is merely giving back what it has released. Meanwhile, its sporadic power is destabilizing the grid, destroying the economics of near-zero-emission nuclear and requiring redundancy from less efficient sources such as cycle gas turbines. open, so give it a few more years before you break even with carbon dioxide.
These are extremely difficult calculations to make, but not impossible as some wind farms, located in less windy areas, take ten years to save any carbon dioxide. . How long do they last? Repairs start to become uneconomical at some point, maybe as little as 20 years into the life of the wind farm. Article must be dismantled and disposed of. Now do the math: wind generates about 4% of our total energy in 2020 (people find this number hard to believe, but it’s true: not electricity, note, energy). But only in the second half of its life it was an emissions-saving wind farm. So all UK wind farms are reducing the nation’s emissions by just 2%, or 0.02% of global emissions.
If you think net zero is important — and even if you don’t — all of these things are important. Why don’t Tory MPs know this kind of stuff? One thing the wind industry is really good at is selling itself. It never mentions discontinuity and hides the scale of its contribution to decarbonisation by talking about ‘powering a thousand homes’, a meaningless metric. Somehow, the wind farm has become a symbol of environmental virtue as strong as the cross. And we are all paying the price.
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