Category: Uncategorised

Labour’s ambitious target for offshore wind could be quietly shelved to make way for the giant funding commitment to pay for Sizewell C nuclear power plant

Much of Labour’s manifesto commitments for clean energy, a state-owned ‘Great British Energy’ company to promote new technologies and funds to support buildings-based insulation and low carbon measures, have been widely flagged already. But there’s not much attention being given to two big, interlinked, threats to Labour’s clean energy strategy. One is the looming black financial hole that the incoming Labour Government will trigger as it gives the financial go-ahead for Sizewell C. The second is the problem of organising a much more rapid build-up of renewable energy than the Conservatives have managed to achieve. Both will involve the Treasury having to commit themselves to supporting forward spending, and we know that money is tight!

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As I say in my forthcoming book  Energy Revolutions, Profiteering versus Democracy (PlutoPress): ‘if recent growth trends in renewable energy continue, then sustainable renewable energy sources (mostly wind and solar PV) will make up 100 per cent of world energy consumption (all energy, not just electricity) by the year 2050. ……..Based on trends over the last ten years, nuclear power would be projected to supply only around 3 per cent of world energy in 2050. There is a consistent trend in the last ten years of world growth in renewable energy (mostly wind and solar power) of 12.6 per cent per year…….By contrast, the total primary energy consumption (that is, all energy, not just electricity) is showing an average growth of 1.4 per cent per year over the previous ten years’ This is shown in a Table below taken from my new ‘Energy Revolutions’ book (published by Pluto Press):

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See the updated storage and balancing guides for 100 per cent renewable UK scenarios and issues – and also studies on 100% renewable energy systems around the world. This includes including the summary document ‘options for energy storage’ at our webpage HERE

There’s lots of fantastic links including links to videos and top papers and reports!

It has been standard in the UK to talk about the wonders of the French nuclear programme and how if only we copied them nuclear power would get cheaper and cheaper. The story has gone ‘If only we built a series of nuclear power plant like they did’. But it turns out that the idea that the French nuclear programme was ever getting any cheaper was a myth.

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The offshore wind schemes that will be given contracts by the Government this year will cost the public a great deal less than the budget implies and might even save consumers’ money

On March 6th the Chancellor announced what amounts to one the greatest pieces of energy gaslighting that I can ever remember (and that is saying something!). Jeremy Hunt claims that the Government is set to subsidise offshore wind to the tune of £800 million. In reality, the offshore wind schemes that will be awarded contracts (that will pay guaranteed prices for electricity output) will cost the consumer very little, and might even save them money. It is monumentally ridiculous to claim that the Government will spend anything approaching £800 million of its published budget supporting offshore wind. That is, given the electricity price projections for the future.

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It is now very well known that the UK has achieved big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in recent decades. But the notion that the UK is in the lead in action on climate change need to be taken with a bucket load of salt. Britain’s apparent big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions reductions since 1990 are heavily based on British de-industrialisation and domestic impoverishment and less on deliberate policies to reduce emissions than may be claimed.

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Professor Stephen Thomas, the UK’s leading analyst of ‘small modular (nuclear) reactors’, has concluded that the idea faces a dead end, with no future. Yet the UK continues to give large grants to hopeful companies to develop these white elephants. The Government has proclaimed the need for ‘billions of pounds‘ of investment in SMRs. Meanwhile badly needed district heating networks to be supplied by large-scale heat pumps and a range of other realistic clean energy initiatives go unfunded!

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Increasing numbers of solar farms are going ahead without any contractual support from the Government and some of them are based on cooperative or community support

Voltalia is among the latest to signal the start of construction of a solar farm which has no financial support organised by the UK Government. The project is being backed by the Co-op. I want to avoid the term ‘subsidy-free’. That is because the UK Government only gives out contracts for difference (CfDs) to renewable energy generators to pay them guaranteed prices that are well below the UK wholesale power prices.

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Leading experts will support the petition calling on the UK Parliaments’s Environmental Audit Committee to conduct an enquiry into the practicalities of a 100 percent or near 100 percent renewable energy system for the UK. That is rather than the one-sided hearing held in December for small modular reactors (SMRs).

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The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) of the House of Commons are busy chasing nuclear corporate fantasies for small modular reactors.

We want to complain about this set of priorities and insist on an enquiry into the practicalities of a 100 per cent renewable energy system for the UK.

However we need more funds to mount this campaign. Please donate to our Go Fund Me! website (see below)

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Despite a flurry of headline-jerking agreements at Dubai’s COP28 a UN Report suggests that global warming will reach 3 degrees. This conclusion, issued by the UN Environment Programme’s ‘Emissions Gap Report’, is based on the continuation of current policies. This assumes, for instance that in the UK and the USA, the targets for net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 not achieved. This, by the way, is by no means an unreasonable assumption. In fact, as things stand at the moment, it’s dead right!

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The news that around the world offshore wind prices have gone up after several years of decline is disconcerting. But don’t worry too much folks, because history says the prices will come down again.

Here below is a chart from a paper of mine published in 2015 which shows how offshore wind prices (set by the Danish Energy Agency) rose and then fell in the earlier years of offshore wind. There are some good stats on this simply because the Danes were ( to a large extent still are) streets ahead of everyone else in the green energy, especially wind power, stakes.

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The Government are deceiving us about the effectiveness of their new funding mechanism for nuclear power

Consumers face a double whammy of bills to pay for the planned nuclear power plant, Sizewell C, due to be given a go-ahead soon. According to a ‘worst case scenario,’ consumers are likely to (collectively) pay around £34 billion in today’s prices before any electricity is generated from Sizewell C at all. But, in addition, according to my calculations, under this (quite likely) worst-case scenario consumers will then also pay around £160 per MWh in today’s prices for electricity produced by Sizewell C. This works out as £117 per MWh in 2012 prices (ie the base year for setting the cost of Hinkley C). The Government appears to be doing little or nothing to prevent this scenario from occurring.

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There’s been a lot of talk about how offshore wind has ‘increased’ its costs since the last Government contract auction – but that’s not a patch on nuclear power a la Hinkley C, courtesy of EDF. Capital costs for the project have increased in real (not just inflation) terms by around 50 percent since 2012, and there’s probably a lot worse to come.

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Electric car revolution: Polestar experience to date

08/09/2023/in Translation / taken from website; go to hetranslations

With 230,000 miles on the clock my 20-year-old Volvo V70 was still going strong, but in early 2022 the time had come to think of a replacement. My mind was made up that the next car had to be electric, and preferably one that was designed from scratch for the purpose, rather than based on an existing internal combustion model.

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