Interesting and very honest, the National Grid has confirmed that the solution to proving how cheap Renewables are is too lie. There is nothing wrong with looking at alternative Energy sources that can be used to boost existing Energy security, nothing wrong with development of alternative Energy sources that can be tested in a live situation, improved and provide a valuable contribution, but, too just state that fossil out, Renew in without ensuring that it is capable is madness.
National Grid are currently trying to get approval for a new line of pylons from Norwich to Tilbury to take offshore wind to London. The most sensible thing would be an offshore grid laid on the seabed to take the power direct from the wind farms to London. Unfortunately they have already signed connection agreements to take the power ashore in Norfolk. If only someone had planned this properly from the outset (ie Government).
Very interesting that National Grid thought it necessary to pay for this article.
Iona historically the CEGB was responsible for planning and coordinating generation which they did very effectively through the 60/70's albeit they massively over forecasted electricity demand during the 70/80's but at least they built out the grid and located the power stations to balance demand without too much losses. Oh and demand did materialise 20 years later than expected. Now since the drive for net zero we have a chaotic and uncoordinated approach with windfarms, solar and interconnectors being built out without due consideration to the overall system impact. The worst example is in Scotland where there is massive excess of generation over transmission and as a result the ESO is spending a fortune on constraint costs. So far this financial year 860m has been spent turning up gas and given 300m to wind farms to switch off. What happened to us being the Saudi Arabia of wind!! Yes the transmission operators have a part fix for this the 2B Easter Green Link but wont be online till 2029 and by then more wind will have been added despite the lack of interest in AR5.
So if the govt is serious about net zero it needs to get a grip of planning this in a methodical way as you suggest
The same thing is happening with solar in the south of England (or indeed anywhere in England). Developers are approaching any landowner within reasonable distance of a grid connection. Many are tempted as the profits they can make are much greater than profits from farming (though they have to hand over their land for 40 years and won’t benefit from agricultural property relief for IHT). Planning inspectors are giving a much greater weight to net zero than eg loss of agricultural land and landscape impact and are frequently overruling decisions of planning committees which have refused permission. The solar roadmap is for 70GW but there seems to be no co-ordination of where it should be built, with the decisions left to the planning system. Most solar farm applications are for less than 50MW so they are determined by the local planning authority. Only applications for 50MW or over are determined by the Secretary of State.
You cannot just link into the grid anywhere - because of grid & DNO constraints, grid / network connections are only available in certain locations at any one time - part of the connection process is for Grid / DNO to ascertain if any connection capacity is available
Energy is not even a devolved issue in Scotland yet the nutters in charge think that by demolishing all the fossil fuel power stations and carpeting the countryside in inefficient, unreliable wind turbines, they can somehow survive as a (fading) modern economy. Some parts of Scotland (e.g. around Strathaven) offer a 360° panorama of windmills as far as the eye can see which will all be junk in 20 or so years.
In the long-ago days of sanity, power stations were built in or near the centres of population. The nutters in charge have been despoiling the far north of Scotland with windfarms for years but they are only now realising that massive new power lines are needed to carry all the intermittent electricity to the main population centres some 250 miles to the south. They are even planning a major offshore wind hub centred on Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides: https://www.thenational.scot/news/24263077.new-multi-million-pound-port-project-announced-scottish-island/.
a. The full cost includes the stored backup that renewables need. The UK needs 30,000 gwh of stored backup, of either pumped storage or hydrogen, which is going to more than double the cost of renewables.
b. There is no point discussing solar, as solar does not work in the winter, which is when the UK needs the energy. I have been tracking solar, and it appears to drop to just 10% of its normal output in the winter.
.
Regards stored backup, we need 1,000 Dinorwigs (if Dinorwig could manage 30 gwh). Where on earth can we build those? And at what cost?
The Royal Society suggested hydrogen backup, with 800 caverns, being built, 2,500 ft down in Yorkshire. Large scale electrolysis, de-min water, and storage has never been tried before. And then we would need 60 new 2 gw power stations in Yorkshire, burning hydrogen - just for the backup system. The RS suggested piston engine generators - not sure why, as jets can run on hydrogen.
The main problem being that the full hydrogen cycle is only 30% efficient, and so extra wind farms would have to be built, to make up for the shortfall. The end result of all this (even if it could be made to work), is the huge costs involved.
The RS said £410 billion.
My cost was £4,300 billion.
(That is for renewables generation, plus the backup system.)
I sent the costings to parliament, and I note that some politicians are now quoting £4 trillion. Which is a much more realistic cost than the RS’s paltry £410 billion.
It's rather preaching to the choir by advertising in the Guardian, and excluding Green zealots and woke Leftists who read the Guardian to be 'informed' (have their confirmation biases reinforced) that leaves only people like us who read it to monitor the level of mis/disinformation on offer. It would be interesting to see if National Grid try the same trick in the Telegraph say. But yes, most definitely, complaints should be made to the advertising standards agency.
National Grid PLC has been fully assimilated by the Borg-like Green Blob; I don't think there is any going back now. Sacking a few managers here and there or even firing the CEO is not going to do it. The Green cancer has metastasized and spread throughout. The organisation needs to be completely disbanded.
As it happens, I got out of my pram earlier in the week about the mantra (I referred to it provocatively as "propaganda") that wind and solar are cheap, which they truly are, provided you ignore the costs.
Two days ago there was a public a few miles away meeting about the prospect of a string of 27 metre pylons bringing power from a proposed wind farm in mid Wales to Shropshire to link to the grid. I can't imagine the attendees cheering this on.
To my central point: to make stated national goals of moving toward a greater proportion of energy supplied as electricity, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and increase energy security at the cost of very large investment, and with no expectation of low consumer bills would be one thing. To comprehensively lie about it is another thing entirely, and it will prove counterproductive in provoking a massive backlash. Unless that was the real aim of the advert - now that would be Machiavellian!
To anyone who hasn't seen it, I commend the work of the late Prof David Mackay, who sadly succumbed to cancer in 2016 at the age of only 48. In his inestimable book 'Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air' (available free to download here: https://www.withouthotair.com/ ) he took a physics and numerical but extremely readable approach, which includes what should be a famous quote: "I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic". Energy density should be a tough proposition to argue against, yet it seems to have been neglected, though a nuclear renaissance appears to be building around the world.
I counsel against the use of loaded terms like heat pumps "lukewarming" homes. I know exactly what you mean, but being fortunate to live in a recent well-insulated self-build, kept toasty by a heat pump I installed myself I can report it ain't necessarily so. (If we'd been on the gas grid I'd have installed a gas boiler [or "furnace", the much better north American term] - I had a gas ticket at the time.)
Likewise being picky, is the fear of the effect on whales of offshore wind turbines grounded in reality or based on a dislike of the idea of wind energy, and how does it compare with the dangers posed by shipping? I simply don't know. One could equally justifiably write that many fear the danger posed by nuclear waste.
"Is the fear of the effect on whales of offshore wind turbines grounded in reality or based on a dislike of the idea of wind energy, and how does it compare with the dangers posed by shipping? I simply don't know."
NOAA knows.
“The NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources authorizes the incidental take of marine mammals under the MMPA to U.S. citizens and U.S.-based entities, if we find that the taking would:
Be of small numbers;
Have no more than a “negligible impact” on those marine mammal species or stocks; and
Not have an “unmitigable adverse impact” on the availability of the species or stock for subsistence uses.
Further, we must prescribe the permissible methods of taking and other means of effecting the least practicable adverse impact on the affected species or stocks and their habitat (i.e., mitigation), paying particular attention to rookeries, mating grounds, and areas of similar significance, and on the availability of such species or stocks for taking for certain subsistence uses; and requirements pertaining to the monitoring and reporting of such takings.
Most incidental take authorizations have been issued for activities that produce underwater sound.”
NOAA is currently processing ‘take’ applications from wind companies. This particular ‘take’ (ritual sacrifice) application includes 12 Humpback and Minke whales.
“Park City Wind, LLC Construction of the New England Wind Offshore Wind Farm Project off of Massachusetts
Status Public Comment Issued Date Effective Dates
In Process Closed — —
Summary: NOAA Fisheries has received a request from Park City Wind, LLC for Incidental Take Regulations and an associated Letter of Authorization. The requested regulations would govern the authorization of take, by Level A harassment and/or Level B harassment, of small numbers of marine mammals over the course of 5 years (2025-2030) incidental to construction of the New England Wind Project. Park City Wind proposes to develop the New England Wind Project in two phases, known as Park City Wind (Phase 1) and Commonwealth Wind (Phase 2). Project activities that may result in incidental take include pile driving (impact and vibratory), drilling, unexploded ordnance or munitions and explosives of concern detonation, and vessel-based site assessment surveys using high-resolution geophysical equipment. If adopted, the proposed regulations would be effective March 27, 2025, through March 26, 2030.”
National Grid might have a conflict of interest in the way it is regulated as a monopoly. I am no expert on this but I believe that Ofgem allows the company to make a fair return on its regulated assets. How this is done is described in the Price Control Financial Model which is available here.
The company is therefore rewarded by increasing its sum of regulated assets. Therefore all this extra investment in interconnectors and pylons required for wind and solar vs gas and nuclear is actually beneficial to its bottom line. As a monopoly it does not have any competition which might make it more efficient.
The regulator Ofgem has to strike a balance between being tough on the company to benefit consumers and being more lenient to ensure that the lights are kept on.
In some respects OFGEM haven't helped the situation either. On the one hand they in cohorts with Scottish govt have let rip wind farm build out in Scotland but not given regulatory approval to enhancements to the transmission system that are needed to move that power. The pendulum is now swinging the other way and they are supporting a crash programme of transmission enhancement in response to the cloud cuckoo list of generators seeking transmission entry capacity without any certainty any of them will actually get built. Until we actually have a coordinated approach we are not going to realise at least a lowest cost solution to this madness.
Well spotted National Grid uavevthe responsibility for preparing the Future Energy Scenarios used by DESNZ, the CCC and OFGEM., so naturally they all involve heavy expansion of the grid. The conflict of interest was spotted - well, at least I complained about it to OFGEM and to the BEIS Select Committee, which is why the grid control room and the FES have been hived off into NESO, which will have Kayte O'Neil, former head of the control room and part of the Fintan Slye Irish harem at NG as its CEO.
She has long been a non exec at SW Regen, the sock puppet think tank used by NG to produce their Day of Net Zero propaganda that pretends it all works with DFS and V2G. Nothing will really change.
Ofgem are part of the net zero climerati, with new additional duties to peddle net zero and force it upon consumers - they are not a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist
If only politicians had listened to the late UK Chief Scientific Advisor Professor Sir David MacKay, we would not now be facing an energy infrastructure horror story. In his online book “Sustainable Energy - without the hot air” published in 2008, he used simple engineering calculations to show the impossibility of powering a modern industrial economy with intermittent weather-dependent renewables which Uniparty governments have pointlessly imposed on us over the last 20 or so years. Professor MacKay’s indisputably sensible advice was wilfully ignored by our political class for a previously unfathomable ulterior motive which has only now been revealed through their evil Covid skulduggeries, see https://metatron.substack.com/p/reiner-fuellmichs-grand-jury-court.
Thank you David, I would have been totally unaware had I not seen your post. Much appreciate your complaining to the Guardian and National Grid too! I trained and spent a good deal of my career with the CEGB. National Grid have managed ro degrade a once global standard for transmission networks and created an unreliable, insecure and expensive piece-meal, ill thought through engineering embarrassment.
There are two fatal flaws with this article and one missing piece of information.
Firstly the chart and text mix comparisons of prices in 2021 pounds (from the UK government DESNZ "cost of generation figures") and 2023 pounds for the "expected CfD AR6" prices.
There has been roughly 17.6% CPI inflation between mid 2021 and mid 2023, so the blue chart bars and figures should be 17.6% bigger or the orange chart bars should be correspondingly smaller. I got that by multiplying two annual inflation figures (for July 2023 and July 2022) on the ONS CPI chart, but there are also more accurate tables which can be used.
To mix prices like that is at best negligent, and at worst deliberately misleading.
The second issue is that the the article is calling the cap prices for the 2024 CfD AR6 auction "expected prices". They are not expected prices. They are maximum cap prices for bids - bids above those prices will not be accepted. Most bids are highly likely to be below those prices.
We don't know for sure what the eventual strike prices will be for solar and onshore and offshore wind in the AR6 auction. My guess is that offshore wind prices will come in around 20% below the cap price the article quotes, but I don't have enough knowledge of UK onshore wind or solar to have a view.
So the chart not only tries to compare apples with pears, but also mis-states what the pears are.
The missing information is that the Ukraine war has disrupted various materials costs and hardware supply chains, particularly for wind turbines. Some of this has abated compared with the CfD AR5 auction, but not all of it. So the CfD AR6 bid and strike prices are likely to be high (in constant currency) compared to the long term average, and we will probably have to wait for AR7 or AR8 to get a good view of long term prices in constant currency.
Note that the government interest rate is of less importance in all this. Interest rates tend to roughly follow inflation rates (often with a bit of a lag), and the CfD process provides for an annual CPI price uplift. So it is the "real" interest rate (at constant currency) that matters, and this is more stable than "headline" interest rates. So the fact base rates are over 5% but about to come down should not affect AR6 pricing too much, though the Ukraine invasion disruption still will.
That is fair point over strike prices which is guess is why they are always quoted at 2012 price level. Fundamentally though the offshore wind strike price has been increased by 65% over the AR5 price which is way over any inflationary level and has been set to entice participants to avoid further embarrassment to govt. Also existing participants will be able to wriggle out of 25% of previously agreed contract capacity if they wish.
Reality is without CfDs no one will build the so called cheapest energy production in the world. Its about time there is some honesty from all parties here that a transition to net zero will cost energy users more there is no getting away from that.
Nickrl said "the [AR6] offshore wind strike price has been increased by 65% over the AR5 price"
You are just talking about the "administrative strike price" here, which the CfD documentation makes very clear is the MAXIMUM strike price, not the final auction outcome strike price. It is the final auction outcome strike price which determines how much the power will cost - this is an auction, after all.
At this point the AR6 strike price has not been fixed, and we don't know what it will be. We will know it sometime between June 28th and and September 30th this year, depending on the bidders and any objections to the results that they may make.
All we do know is that the final outcome strike price will not be any higher than £73/MWh (in 2012 pounds). It will almost certainly be lower than the maximum figure, though we won't know how much and for sure about this until the auction results come out.
What is true is that the eventual strike price for a CfD offshore wind auction (determined by the bids received) has never been as high as the cap price. Some examples
Auction, year, administrative strike price (=auction cap price in 2012 pounds), final strike price (in 2012 pounds)
AR1, 2015, £140-150/MWh (depending on install year), £114.39-119.89/MWh
AR2, 2017, £140-150/MWh (depending on install year), £57.50-74.75/MWh
AR3, 2019, £56/MWh, £36.95-41.611/MWh
AR4, 2022, £46/MWh, £37.35/MWh
AR5 2023, £44/MWh, no bids, so no final strike price
AR6, 2024, £73/MWh, ??? final strike price TBD
Nickrl said "Fundamentally though the offshore wind strike price has been increased by 65% over the AR5 price which is way over any inflationary level and has been set to entice participants to avoid further embarrassment to govt."
Because the CfD process provides for annual CPI inflation, in more normal times the final outcome strike prices would gradually reduce, and there would be no need to increase the strike price cap. The increase in the cap represents the fact that the Ukraine war has temporarily pushed up offshore wind project prices more than CPI is expected to increase. From what I read, CPI inflation was around 10% at the time, but the expected offshore wind project inflation was 40%.
However, supply chain issues and commodity price hikes (mainly for steel and copper?) are likely to reverse over time, but it is difficult to get suppliers to commit to lower prices until they have seen this happen.
You are correct the government probably bumped up the cap price for AR6 to avoid even more public shame. But it shouldn't represent a long-term price hike for offshore wind in 2012 prices - they should come back down again.
Nickrl said "Reality is without CfDs no one will build..."
The reality is that without some form of contract or a regulatory framework providing a good chance of making a profit, no one will build any form of generation. CfD auctions are just a particularly good way of contracting wind and solar which are mainly capital costs and zero fuel costs.
Ideally consumers would like fixed electricity prices, with maybe annual CPI uplifts. In particular that would help industry hugely to plan. But with fossil fuel generation they don't get that. Instead, the consumer covers the whole of the risk of fuel price increases, to the extend that the government had to cap them and provide a subsidy in 2022, or there would have been riots in the street. Electricity wholesale prices averaged £199/MWh in 2022, and wind and solar would have brought down the price to consumers, except in the event they just brought down the subsidy the government had to pay.
Nickrl said "a transition to net zero will cost energy users more there is no getting away from that."
That is not what the results of simulations show. And the administrative (cap) strike prices for AR6 cannot be used to claim offshore wind is suddenly going to cost £100/MWh (in 2023 pounds) when the actual strike price is not know yet.
To take just one example - electric arc furnaces. These don't need storage, because they work in batches, so can be stopped at the end of a batch. So the raw offshore wind (or onshore or solar when cheaper) price plus a small uplift is all they are likely to have to pay for power. That is almost certainly less than current coal-based furnaces cost to run.
Another example is the Intelligent Octopus Go tariff of 7.5p/kWh guaranteed for 6 hours per calendar day for consumers with a smart meter and an EV which can be smart charged. Most new load 2024-2050 could well have similar flexibility and similar low prices, though inflexible, existing loads may well cost something similar.
Recent CCGTs have been built without CfD's albeit they have a secured a capacity market contract but in the full knowledge they would be exposed to gas costs. Windfarms don't have the energy input uncertainty yet won't take the risk.
Anyhow i accept that 73/MWh is the cap and your probably right it will be less although in the main because of the amount of previous projects that will be able to take advantage of the permitted reduction of upto 25% on previous AR contracts not yet commissioned. This will potentially push up the bidding volume a couple of GW so depends on how low bidders are prepared to go.
The Octopus Go tariff is certainly good if you have an EV (as long as you don't use at night!) but they do level a higher rate for the other 18hrs compared to base tariff but fair dos to them in providing an incentive to shift a heavy load to overnight.
I don't think you can claim a final strike price for AR4 when already 19% of bid capacity awarded has seen its CFDs terminated, and further terminations are likely now that clarity into how terminated CFDs are handled with new owners. We kow that for AR5 any bids would have been above ASP, and therefore above the bids and likely the ASP for AR4.
The Ukraine war has nothing to do with rising costs in the wind supply chain. Neither Ukraine nor Russia are involved. It does have to do with turbine manufacturers getting into financial difficulties because they are experiencing higher maintenance costs than they budgeted on turnkey with maintenance supply contracts due to poor reliability (reducing expected average load factors and economics of new projects), and bid too low during the covid period when business was scarce simply to try to maintain an order book flow, while also facing higher costs for raw materials and semi manufacture out of China, and much higher interest rates and much more costly installation vessels for larger turbines. We may be seeing the economic limits of turbine size constrained by engineering reality, making nonsense of projections of future economies of scale. Several of these factors are not going to disappear entirely, meaning that costs are likely to be rather higher than forecast by the government's pet consultants in 2020 (peak lockdown depression), published in 2021.
From the point of view of wind farm owners, new projects must take account of the fact that they are now first in line to curtail, with no protection against negative prices unlike their earlier competitiors, and that curtailment is now on a sharply rising trend as installed capacity grows above overnight and shoulder levels of demand. A nightmare too for the grid, as it encourages all manner of deviant behaviour in response to the rigged markets, so the grid want to rig them more to try to offset.
The consumer is not getting the full benefit of reduced fossil fuel prices in the tariffs, which are being sharply escalated to pay for all the costs of extra grid, extra stabilisation and balancing, and multiple backup caused by rising renewables penetration. The reality in any case is that production weighted average wind cost as paid by consumers (i.e. including subsidies) remained above market prices throughout the energy crisis, and now is at ~£100/MWh premium even before we add in integration costs.
I doubt it makes economic sense to try to run an arc furnace on the basis of intermittent 6 hour overnight wind surpluses and low demand weekend shifts: as with renewables based hydrogen you end up with low average utilisation factors. In any event, the full cost of all the assets has to be paid for, and the overall system cost is going to rise with lots of extra costs for curtailment/wastage and storage as well as extra grid assets. If you subsidise one set of consumers, the rest have to make up the difference. There is already too much subsidy of rich greens.
Wind & solar would work better if they had associated storage built in as part of the installation - the reason they haven’t and largely don’t, is because the additional cost of suitable storage makes projects way too expensive - trying to retrofit sufficient storage to existing installations is also unsourceable and unaffordable - renewables will never power a nation without storage, hence why no nation has - they do however, need expensive coal, gas or nuclear back up - essentially 2 power sources on the same grid, all paid for by consumers & taxpayers
So real capex is much higher than the Government estimated in its Gen Cost report.
Moreover, interest rates have gone up massively since AR5 prices were announced, which pushes up the cost of capital. Yet the Gen Cost report assumed a cost of capital at a lower premium to gilts than the prior report.
Even though the CfDs are index linked, the cost of capital has gone up, which disproportionately impacts offshore wind. Indeed, developers have complained of higher interest rates as one of the reasons for increasing costs.
It is no good explaining that some prices are 2021 and some 2023, if you don't tell readers how to convert them. And rather than bothering to do this, surely it is more informative for readers to be presented with prices based on ££s for just one year. You could even now, easily do the conversion yourself.
But you don't know how much power from the AR6 auction is going to cost, because the auction hasn't been held yet, so it is surely premature to claim the National Grid have it completely wrong. And, in any case, the National Grid statement is surely referring to long term prices, not the outcome of just AR6.
Incidentally the DESNZ 2023 Generation Costs document seems to have an onshore wind price which is too low - because DESNZ has assumed 5 or 6 MW onshore turbines, which seem unlikely to pass any sensible planning regulations on maximum turbine height. So it is more likely new onshore wind will have a capacity factor of 35% maybe than 45-48%.
The rant by the Siemens CEO in the Telegraph is just that, and is only because costs went up because of the Ukraine war. He hits the nail on the head when he says "“I believe that for a while [customers] need to accept higher pricing." Not that he is not saying "long term". Likely it is just for a couple of years.
Real capex was higher last year, but is starting to abate now. If Ukraine beats Russia out and things recover fully in a couple of years, then we should see the historical low offshore wind prices come back (£37.35/MWh in 2012 pounds). There is no good reason why not - the technology costs are likely to come down each time installed capacity doubles, as usual. And the USA projects will add to the economies of scale.
But yes, we clearly have to get over the price hikes caused by Ukraine first.
The RWE boss did indeed ask for the strike price cap to be increased for AR6, but that was a while ago, so we will have to see how the final outcome AR6 strike prices turn out - all the vibes seem to be that commodity prices are down somewhat from the peak, and supply chains naturally adjust over time.
1. Renewables were made to look cheap by low interest rates in the era of virtually free money. That era is now over, but it will take a while for the various examples of capital misallocation to work through.
2. I think you are allocating too much weight to the Ukraine war's impact on commodity prices. The truth is that capital investment in new mines across a range of metals, notably copper, has been lacking for a decade or so. Increased demand for these metals will push up prices over a 1-5 year time frame. Geopolitical instability will make those price spikes worse.
On 1. the CfD CPI uplifts protect projects from inflation and an inflation-related rise in interest rates - provided the real interest rate at constant currency does not go up.
On 2. In 2021, Ukraine and Russia produced 97m tonnes of steel between them, ranking 14th and 5th between them. And starting mid 2021 Russia started its energy war on Europe, cutting back gas supplies. Offshore wind turbines use huge quantities of steel. Are you serious suggesting Russia's energy war and invasion of Ukraine did not hugely disrupt the steel market?
You can see the effects on the steel price at https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/steel - click on the 10 year view. As well as price hikes there were also big supply issues caused.
Copper is not necessarily that major a factor in the medium term, as aluminium is a good substitute for copper used as a conductor. In the short term increases in copper prices have a major effect as you can't re-engineer to aluminium at the drop of a hat.
Sure it wasn't the only factor, but it was pretty major.
QE has given us 15 years of negative real interest rates. That era is now over. Interest rates will now tend to be real and positive. Moreover, if you look at the hedging strategies of most wind farms you find that they seek certainty in borrowing costs by borrowing long term and converting floating bonds to fixed exposure using derivatives. That allowed them to lock in ZIRP borrowing costs, which are no longer avialable. I have even come across wind farms that sell their indexation benefit via inflation derivatives to pension funds, and pension funds have long been sold the idea that inflation linked dividends are a good reason to invest in renewables - never mind the real economics. See Orsted divestments for classic examples.
So far as steel is concerned, the prices rose in 2021 simply because steel stocks got rapidly depleted as economic activity picked up following the lockdown global economic shutdown. Prices already reached CNY 5400 for rebar in April 21, long before the energy squeeze really started. They peaked in September, and actually have been in a downtrend throughout the war. It has not driven steel prices, and in any case, neither Russian nor Ukrainian steel is used in making turbines or jackets and towers. Imports for that (increasingly, semi or completely finished) into Europe are now dominated by China.
Turbine costs were hit by massive price rises for neodymium and cobalt, both essential to making low weight generator magnets. Commodities controlled by China. These prices have dropped back, but it will take some time for contracts signed at higher prices to work through.
However you dress up renewables, they are expensive, intermittent, engineeringly incompetent power sources that without ever increasing consumer & taxpayer subsidies, wouldn’t even get built - every GW of wind & solar requires a GW of 24/7/365 coal, gas or nuclear as back up, so consumers have to pay for 2 power sources on the same grid, its absolute madness and regression
Energywise said "every GW of wind & solar requires a GW of 24/7/365 coal, gas or nuclear as back up"
This is clearly not true;.
Take a grid needing an average supply of 40 GW and a peak hour demand of 60 GW. Say you have 80 GW of offshore wind providing power at a 50% capacity factor - average output 40 GW, and you have 160 GWh of grid batteries (4 hours of average load). Note this grid won't do the job reliably.
You clearly don't need 80 GW of 1 for 1 gas backup, because the peak hour demand is only 60 GW. In fact you don't need 60 GW of gas backup either, because you can charge the batteries in advance of peak hour from the gas backup, and just use, say, 50 GW of gas + 10 GW from the batteries to supply peak hour demand. You need enough backup GW to match the average GW supply needed over the peak 24 hours - which is always less than the peak hour supply needed.
Still ignoring we haven't really configured the grid properly, lets look at the cost of backup vs the cost of wind power.
80 GW of offshore wind at £2.7bn/GW is £216bn. 50 GW of CCGT at £700m/GW is £35bn. So the backup increases costs by 35/216 = 16%.
In China now, grid batteries are coming in around $100/kWh, so 160 GWh would cost $16bn or about £13bn, adding another 6% to total costs. So far we have added 22% to the raw capital cost of wind. That is not unreasonable.
In practice you would need more than 80 GW of wind, of course, to match variable demand and enough provide green hydrogen to fuel the CCGT during back up. But no matter how much wind (and/or solar) you choose to install, you still only need 50 GW of gas turbine backup. So clearly it is not 1 to 1 wind GW to backup GW. And clearly the additional capital costs are manageable if wind power is pretty cheap anyway.
Further, the backup gas plants are just the existing gas plants - which are partially or fully depreciated. So they won't even add 16% to the capital costs of the wind.
Your 50GW of hydrogen powered CCGTs if thats even possible without massive conversion costs will need around 150GW of electrolyser capacity so thats another couple hundred billion on the bottom line.
For green hydrogen firing apparently you need to change the burners on the CCGT plants, and sometimes make other tweaks. Clearly the generator and secondary steam cycle CCGT stuff don't need to be changed at all. So the conversion costs are not that big.
The backup gas turbines would surely not be operating more than 10% of the time, so generating an average of 4 GW in my mythical 40 GW average supply grid. The power to hydrogen to power cycle efficiency is ~45%. Assume you can only operate electrolysers with a load factor of 60% - just when there is surplus offshore wind.
So 4 GW / (0.45 * 0.6) = 15 GW of electrolysers are required. Nel was expecting electrolyser cost by 2026 to be £320m/GW so the total electrolyser capital cost would be $5bn or £4bn. That adds another 2% to the capital cost of the offshore wind (£216bn). All very back of the envelope stuff, of course.
I suggest you read and try to understand the papers supporting the Llewellyn Smith study on storage for the Royal Society. Your toy examples are exactly the kind of muddled thinking it was attacking.
Well i'll take it as a positive that you at least recognised that some form of fulled generation will be necessary even in high renewable penetration grid.
I have scanned the Royal Society paper a couple of times now. It seemed more or less in accordance with my understanding of hydrogen backup. From memory, the Royal Soc tended to favour man made salt caverns for storage for some reason, while I can't see any reason why depleted oil and gas wells can't be used, similar to the UK Rough natural gas storage. For 2-3 months of grid supply of green hydrogen you need around 8-10 depleted wells with the volume of Rough, but it might be a few more because of the necessity for additional "cushion gas" which you can't use for backup because it is too low pressure to flow fast enough.
You talk about those multi £Billions as if it’s small change - where do you envisage these £Billions (nay £Trillions) coming from? Having to build in vast over capacity (because of generation intermittency) as well as vast amounts of unsourceable, unaffordable amounts of storage, is technically and economically comical - apart from all the additional kit for new builds, you also have to source additional materials for lifetime change outs, or to repair / replace defective kit
If unlimited money wasn’t an issue, we could afford everything we could wish for, but we can’t and natural resources such as lithium and rare earth metals (increasingly owned by BRICS+ nations) will become ever more difficult to obtain, either at reasonable prices, or indeed at all
We have hundreds of years worth of natural gas beneath our feet that could be very economically retrieved and piped into new CCGT power plants, giving 24/7/365 reliable (no matter the weather, or day or night) affordable electricity for all, with no back up required, whilst building out new nuclear / SMRs as a path to a completely nuclear powered future
SMRs or CCGT power plants can be better installed near to large load demand centres, thereby negating expensive overhead line infrastructure too (e.g. the new overhead line / subsea cable infrastructure required to get far Scottish North Sea or Welsh wind power down south)
The money to pay for capital expenditure on a green UK grid will come from the reduced amount spent on purchasing fossil fuels and investing in new fossil fuel production capacity. Currently the world spends at least $2.5tr per year on fossil fuels (one entry on Google was saying subsidies for it were $7tr per year, but maybe overstated). Divert some of that to installing renewables, instead of capital sums on oil and gas production, and you find eventually you have lower annual costs (including replacement capital costs) for the renewable solution.
But now look at one alternative. Install 10 GW of offshore wind as one year's capacity contracted in a CfD auction. Likely lifetime 30 years.
Take a mid point of 7 bcm per year for the fracked natural gas, which contains 7 x 11 = 77 TWh of heat. Factor in a 60% CCGT efficiency and you get 46 TWh of electricity from it.
Each year 10 GW of offshore wind at a CF of 55% would produce 5.5 GW average output or 48 TWh of electricity.
So one year's worth of expanded CfD auctions of 10 GW of offshore wind will deliver the same quantity of electricity as allowing UK fracking - i.e. 46-48 TWh of electricity.
So is it really worth doing any onshore UK fracking for gas? I don't believe it is. The gas would be sold at European market rates which have fluctuated hugely recently. By contrast the offshore wind is on a fixed price contract. So UK consumers would probably be a lot better off with the offshore wind, which can be used in heat pumps with a COP of 3 or 4 to provide a lot more building and water heating each year than 7 bcm of natural gas will.
If you are going to firm up the offshore wind power for inflexible loads (electric arc furnaces do not need firmed up power), then maybe you want to increase 10 GW to 12 GW of capacity.
The UK 2030 target for offshore wind is for another 36 GW to be installed - which is far more than would be needed to replace all the fracked gas from GB mainland.
Why bother with fracking? Just go straight to the offshore wind which is just not as politically sensitive. UK fracked gas just provided too small quantities of energy to upset people over.
Neither National Grid or Chas are climate accredited scientists or academics, that in itself precludes them from offering unbiased guidance - the fact Chas just regurgitates AGW peddling source material precludes him from offering any unbiased factual scientific facts
NG have paid this idiot to produce a childish piece of plagiarised nonsense, exactly as the climerati pay modellers and corrupt scientists for the right kind of result, one that fits the narrative
The narrative is slowly, but surely, falling apart before our very eyes, resulting in stranger and sillier claims from the globalist billionaire funded climate mob - the masses are not buying into technically and economically incompetent battery cars and heat pumps, whilst they see their electricity costs rocket higher and higher because of perversely subsidised renewables
Reality will end net zero, as it is doing and I hope to see the day the whole scam comes tumbling down like a house of cards
"Reality will end net zero, as it is doing and I hope to see the day the whole scam comes tumbling down like a house of cards" sadly won't happen anytime soon and with Labour looking most likely to be in power by the end of the year they will perpetuate this mess if not worsen it. Thing is Reeves keeping banging the growth drum as our only way to fix public services yet she has yet to make the link that ever more expensive energy won't help that cause.
Good work, Mr. Turver. That the article in question relies on data from Rocky Mountain Institute is enough to discard the entire thing. Glad to see the data from the UNECE on land use. That's helpful.
The elephant in the room is the contrived nature of climate alarm. The aim of climate alarmism is complete control of population and resources, in a rebranded form of eugenics.
In Conversation with Dr Niall McCrae about his seminal book, 'Green in Tooth and Claw'. Niall and Christopher from the Bruges Group's expose the Malthusian beliefs of climate extremists. This unique, timely and important book on the claimed climate crisis analyses the misanthropic designs of the globalist elite, who are using a contrived ecological emergency to create a totalitarian technocracy dubbed the 'Great Reset'.
The real aim of climate alarm is complete control of population and resources, in a rebranded form of eugenics. Pseudoscientific policies in pursuit of Net Zero are a tightening ratchet on the lives of ordinary people. It is vital to challenge the brainwashing in schools and media and to spread the word that the real danger to the future of humanity is not carbon dioxide but a cabal of tyrants who want to 'save the planet' for themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTCTb3DQ8G8
The US, Brazil, India, Russia, Mexico and Peru account for half of the global C-19 deaths and a third of the cases. WTF kind of GLOBAL pandemic is that? The US leads the ENTIRE globe w 16% of the deaths and 15.6% of cases. And WTF is wrong with US medical care??
Since 1/20 there have been over 11.5 MILLION deaths from ALL causes in the US, 8.9% attributed to C-19. There were 12.6% unnatural deaths, i.e. suicide, drug O.D., murder, accident. And cancer (18.0%), heart disease (20.8%) and assorted C-19 comorbidity deaths (10.2%) were EACH a greater share than C-19 alone. Ordinary flu/pneumonia/respiratory each were under 1.5%.
Would not know that from the lying, race baiting, fact free, rabble-rousing, anti-democratic, fake news MSM that rebranded the ordinary flu/pneumonia/respiratory as C-19 pandemic so they could stampede the electorate into deposing Trump.
Over 80% of C-19 CASES are among those UNDER 65.
75% of C-19 DEATHS are among those OVER 65 at 15% of the population.
26% of C-19 DEATHS are among those OVER 85 at 2% of the population.
33% of C-19 DEATHS have been in hospice, nursing homes, residence, DoA.
Per CDC data.
What kind of widespread pandemic is that?
C-19 is just Mother Nature and the Grim Reaper culling the herd of the too old, too sick, too many, too crammed together as Medicare/Medicaid cash cows in contagious badly run (BLUE) eldercare warehouses.
More like "big lie" scam-demic foisted on the public by the lying, science illiterate, race baiting, fake news scumbag press and NWO politicians.
Earth is cooler with the atmosphere, water vapor, 30% albedo not warmer.
Ubiquitous GHE heat balance graphics use bad math & badder physics.
The kinetic heat transfer modes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules render impossible a BB surface upwelling and looping “extra” LWIR energy for the GHE.
Consensus science has a well-documented history of being wrong & abusing those who dared to challenge it. (Bruno, drawn & quartered)
GHE & CAGW are wrong so alarmists resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship & violence.
The chart of EROI and land use has a few misleading values in it.
Firstly, the consensus view on EROI for wind and solar PV is upwards of 10. Both technologies have become much more efficient to produce over the years. You can only get values as low as are quoted in the table if you ignore current production efficiencies and go back to figures from a decade ago.
Secondly the land use figure for onshore wind is totally misleading. It comes from the source figure for the total extent of a wind farm. However, within that total extent, less than 2% is used for wind turbines bases, access roads and supplementary buildings, leaving 98% of the area free to be used for whatever it was used for before. Cows don't mind wind turbines on their fields.
Interesting and very honest, the National Grid has confirmed that the solution to proving how cheap Renewables are is too lie. There is nothing wrong with looking at alternative Energy sources that can be used to boost existing Energy security, nothing wrong with development of alternative Energy sources that can be tested in a live situation, improved and provide a valuable contribution, but, too just state that fossil out, Renew in without ensuring that it is capable is madness.
National Grid are currently trying to get approval for a new line of pylons from Norwich to Tilbury to take offshore wind to London. The most sensible thing would be an offshore grid laid on the seabed to take the power direct from the wind farms to London. Unfortunately they have already signed connection agreements to take the power ashore in Norfolk. If only someone had planned this properly from the outset (ie Government).
Very interesting that National Grid thought it necessary to pay for this article.
Iona historically the CEGB was responsible for planning and coordinating generation which they did very effectively through the 60/70's albeit they massively over forecasted electricity demand during the 70/80's but at least they built out the grid and located the power stations to balance demand without too much losses. Oh and demand did materialise 20 years later than expected. Now since the drive for net zero we have a chaotic and uncoordinated approach with windfarms, solar and interconnectors being built out without due consideration to the overall system impact. The worst example is in Scotland where there is massive excess of generation over transmission and as a result the ESO is spending a fortune on constraint costs. So far this financial year 860m has been spent turning up gas and given 300m to wind farms to switch off. What happened to us being the Saudi Arabia of wind!! Yes the transmission operators have a part fix for this the 2B Easter Green Link but wont be online till 2029 and by then more wind will have been added despite the lack of interest in AR5.
So if the govt is serious about net zero it needs to get a grip of planning this in a methodical way as you suggest
The same thing is happening with solar in the south of England (or indeed anywhere in England). Developers are approaching any landowner within reasonable distance of a grid connection. Many are tempted as the profits they can make are much greater than profits from farming (though they have to hand over their land for 40 years and won’t benefit from agricultural property relief for IHT). Planning inspectors are giving a much greater weight to net zero than eg loss of agricultural land and landscape impact and are frequently overruling decisions of planning committees which have refused permission. The solar roadmap is for 70GW but there seems to be no co-ordination of where it should be built, with the decisions left to the planning system. Most solar farm applications are for less than 50MW so they are determined by the local planning authority. Only applications for 50MW or over are determined by the Secretary of State.
You cannot just link into the grid anywhere - because of grid & DNO constraints, grid / network connections are only available in certain locations at any one time - part of the connection process is for Grid / DNO to ascertain if any connection capacity is available
Energy is not even a devolved issue in Scotland yet the nutters in charge think that by demolishing all the fossil fuel power stations and carpeting the countryside in inefficient, unreliable wind turbines, they can somehow survive as a (fading) modern economy. Some parts of Scotland (e.g. around Strathaven) offer a 360° panorama of windmills as far as the eye can see which will all be junk in 20 or so years.
In the long-ago days of sanity, power stations were built in or near the centres of population. The nutters in charge have been despoiling the far north of Scotland with windfarms for years but they are only now realising that massive new power lines are needed to carry all the intermittent electricity to the main population centres some 250 miles to the south. They are even planning a major offshore wind hub centred on Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides: https://www.thenational.scot/news/24263077.new-multi-million-pound-port-project-announced-scottish-island/.
Or……they could just scrap useless, intermittent wind farms and build some more coal, gas & nuclear power stations
Regards costs of renewables…
a. The full cost includes the stored backup that renewables need. The UK needs 30,000 gwh of stored backup, of either pumped storage or hydrogen, which is going to more than double the cost of renewables.
b. There is no point discussing solar, as solar does not work in the winter, which is when the UK needs the energy. I have been tracking solar, and it appears to drop to just 10% of its normal output in the winter.
.
Regards stored backup, we need 1,000 Dinorwigs (if Dinorwig could manage 30 gwh). Where on earth can we build those? And at what cost?
The Royal Society suggested hydrogen backup, with 800 caverns, being built, 2,500 ft down in Yorkshire. Large scale electrolysis, de-min water, and storage has never been tried before. And then we would need 60 new 2 gw power stations in Yorkshire, burning hydrogen - just for the backup system. The RS suggested piston engine generators - not sure why, as jets can run on hydrogen.
The main problem being that the full hydrogen cycle is only 30% efficient, and so extra wind farms would have to be built, to make up for the shortfall. The end result of all this (even if it could be made to work), is the huge costs involved.
The RS said £410 billion.
My cost was £4,300 billion.
(That is for renewables generation, plus the backup system.)
I sent the costings to parliament, and I note that some politicians are now quoting £4 trillion. Which is a much more realistic cost than the RS’s paltry £410 billion.
R
It's rather preaching to the choir by advertising in the Guardian, and excluding Green zealots and woke Leftists who read the Guardian to be 'informed' (have their confirmation biases reinforced) that leaves only people like us who read it to monitor the level of mis/disinformation on offer. It would be interesting to see if National Grid try the same trick in the Telegraph say. But yes, most definitely, complaints should be made to the advertising standards agency.
National Grid PLC has been fully assimilated by the Borg-like Green Blob; I don't think there is any going back now. Sacking a few managers here and there or even firing the CEO is not going to do it. The Green cancer has metastasized and spread throughout. The organisation needs to be completely disbanded.
Thank you for this.
As it happens, I got out of my pram earlier in the week about the mantra (I referred to it provocatively as "propaganda") that wind and solar are cheap, which they truly are, provided you ignore the costs.
Two days ago there was a public a few miles away meeting about the prospect of a string of 27 metre pylons bringing power from a proposed wind farm in mid Wales to Shropshire to link to the grid. I can't imagine the attendees cheering this on.
To my central point: to make stated national goals of moving toward a greater proportion of energy supplied as electricity, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and increase energy security at the cost of very large investment, and with no expectation of low consumer bills would be one thing. To comprehensively lie about it is another thing entirely, and it will prove counterproductive in provoking a massive backlash. Unless that was the real aim of the advert - now that would be Machiavellian!
To anyone who hasn't seen it, I commend the work of the late Prof David Mackay, who sadly succumbed to cancer in 2016 at the age of only 48. In his inestimable book 'Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air' (available free to download here: https://www.withouthotair.com/ ) he took a physics and numerical but extremely readable approach, which includes what should be a famous quote: "I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic". Energy density should be a tough proposition to argue against, yet it seems to have been neglected, though a nuclear renaissance appears to be building around the world.
You can also see Prof Mackay on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gAQ82IHyZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE
I counsel against the use of loaded terms like heat pumps "lukewarming" homes. I know exactly what you mean, but being fortunate to live in a recent well-insulated self-build, kept toasty by a heat pump I installed myself I can report it ain't necessarily so. (If we'd been on the gas grid I'd have installed a gas boiler [or "furnace", the much better north American term] - I had a gas ticket at the time.)
Likewise being picky, is the fear of the effect on whales of offshore wind turbines grounded in reality or based on a dislike of the idea of wind energy, and how does it compare with the dangers posed by shipping? I simply don't know. One could equally justifiably write that many fear the danger posed by nuclear waste.
Ian,
"Is the fear of the effect on whales of offshore wind turbines grounded in reality or based on a dislike of the idea of wind energy, and how does it compare with the dangers posed by shipping? I simply don't know."
NOAA knows.
“The NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources authorizes the incidental take of marine mammals under the MMPA to U.S. citizens and U.S.-based entities, if we find that the taking would:
Be of small numbers;
Have no more than a “negligible impact” on those marine mammal species or stocks; and
Not have an “unmitigable adverse impact” on the availability of the species or stock for subsistence uses.
Further, we must prescribe the permissible methods of taking and other means of effecting the least practicable adverse impact on the affected species or stocks and their habitat (i.e., mitigation), paying particular attention to rookeries, mating grounds, and areas of similar significance, and on the availability of such species or stocks for taking for certain subsistence uses; and requirements pertaining to the monitoring and reporting of such takings.
Most incidental take authorizations have been issued for activities that produce underwater sound.”
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/permit/incidental-take-authorizations-under-marine-mammal-protection-act
NOAA is currently processing ‘take’ applications from wind companies. This particular ‘take’ (ritual sacrifice) application includes 12 Humpback and Minke whales.
“Park City Wind, LLC Construction of the New England Wind Offshore Wind Farm Project off of Massachusetts
Status Public Comment Issued Date Effective Dates
In Process Closed — —
Summary: NOAA Fisheries has received a request from Park City Wind, LLC for Incidental Take Regulations and an associated Letter of Authorization. The requested regulations would govern the authorization of take, by Level A harassment and/or Level B harassment, of small numbers of marine mammals over the course of 5 years (2025-2030) incidental to construction of the New England Wind Project. Park City Wind proposes to develop the New England Wind Project in two phases, known as Park City Wind (Phase 1) and Commonwealth Wind (Phase 2). Project activities that may result in incidental take include pile driving (impact and vibratory), drilling, unexploded ordnance or munitions and explosives of concern detonation, and vessel-based site assessment surveys using high-resolution geophysical equipment. If adopted, the proposed regulations would be effective March 27, 2025, through March 26, 2030.”
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/marine-mammal-protection/incidental-take-authorizations-other-energy-activities-renewable
Thanks for that!
National Grid might have a conflict of interest in the way it is regulated as a monopoly. I am no expert on this but I believe that Ofgem allows the company to make a fair return on its regulated assets. How this is done is described in the Price Control Financial Model which is available here.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission/who-we-are/how-we-are-regulated
The company is therefore rewarded by increasing its sum of regulated assets. Therefore all this extra investment in interconnectors and pylons required for wind and solar vs gas and nuclear is actually beneficial to its bottom line. As a monopoly it does not have any competition which might make it more efficient.
The regulator Ofgem has to strike a balance between being tough on the company to benefit consumers and being more lenient to ensure that the lights are kept on.
In some respects OFGEM haven't helped the situation either. On the one hand they in cohorts with Scottish govt have let rip wind farm build out in Scotland but not given regulatory approval to enhancements to the transmission system that are needed to move that power. The pendulum is now swinging the other way and they are supporting a crash programme of transmission enhancement in response to the cloud cuckoo list of generators seeking transmission entry capacity without any certainty any of them will actually get built. Until we actually have a coordinated approach we are not going to realise at least a lowest cost solution to this madness.
Well spotted National Grid uavevthe responsibility for preparing the Future Energy Scenarios used by DESNZ, the CCC and OFGEM., so naturally they all involve heavy expansion of the grid. The conflict of interest was spotted - well, at least I complained about it to OFGEM and to the BEIS Select Committee, which is why the grid control room and the FES have been hived off into NESO, which will have Kayte O'Neil, former head of the control room and part of the Fintan Slye Irish harem at NG as its CEO.
She has long been a non exec at SW Regen, the sock puppet think tank used by NG to produce their Day of Net Zero propaganda that pretends it all works with DFS and V2G. Nothing will really change.
I’d love to comment further on the Fintan Slye Irish Harem but circumstances prevent me, at least for now. 😎
Ofgem are part of the net zero climerati, with new additional duties to peddle net zero and force it upon consumers - they are not a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist
If only politicians had listened to the late UK Chief Scientific Advisor Professor Sir David MacKay, we would not now be facing an energy infrastructure horror story. In his online book “Sustainable Energy - without the hot air” published in 2008, he used simple engineering calculations to show the impossibility of powering a modern industrial economy with intermittent weather-dependent renewables which Uniparty governments have pointlessly imposed on us over the last 20 or so years. Professor MacKay’s indisputably sensible advice was wilfully ignored by our political class for a previously unfathomable ulterior motive which has only now been revealed through their evil Covid skulduggeries, see https://metatron.substack.com/p/reiner-fuellmichs-grand-jury-court.
Thank you David, I would have been totally unaware had I not seen your post. Much appreciate your complaining to the Guardian and National Grid too! I trained and spent a good deal of my career with the CEGB. National Grid have managed ro degrade a once global standard for transmission networks and created an unreliable, insecure and expensive piece-meal, ill thought through engineering embarrassment.
There are two fatal flaws with this article and one missing piece of information.
Firstly the chart and text mix comparisons of prices in 2021 pounds (from the UK government DESNZ "cost of generation figures") and 2023 pounds for the "expected CfD AR6" prices.
There has been roughly 17.6% CPI inflation between mid 2021 and mid 2023, so the blue chart bars and figures should be 17.6% bigger or the orange chart bars should be correspondingly smaller. I got that by multiplying two annual inflation figures (for July 2023 and July 2022) on the ONS CPI chart, but there are also more accurate tables which can be used.
To mix prices like that is at best negligent, and at worst deliberately misleading.
The second issue is that the the article is calling the cap prices for the 2024 CfD AR6 auction "expected prices". They are not expected prices. They are maximum cap prices for bids - bids above those prices will not be accepted. Most bids are highly likely to be below those prices.
We don't know for sure what the eventual strike prices will be for solar and onshore and offshore wind in the AR6 auction. My guess is that offshore wind prices will come in around 20% below the cap price the article quotes, but I don't have enough knowledge of UK onshore wind or solar to have a view.
So the chart not only tries to compare apples with pears, but also mis-states what the pears are.
The missing information is that the Ukraine war has disrupted various materials costs and hardware supply chains, particularly for wind turbines. Some of this has abated compared with the CfD AR5 auction, but not all of it. So the CfD AR6 bid and strike prices are likely to be high (in constant currency) compared to the long term average, and we will probably have to wait for AR7 or AR8 to get a good view of long term prices in constant currency.
Note that the government interest rate is of less importance in all this. Interest rates tend to roughly follow inflation rates (often with a bit of a lag), and the CfD process provides for an annual CPI price uplift. So it is the "real" interest rate (at constant currency) that matters, and this is more stable than "headline" interest rates. So the fact base rates are over 5% but about to come down should not affect AR6 pricing too much, though the Ukraine invasion disruption still will.
That is fair point over strike prices which is guess is why they are always quoted at 2012 price level. Fundamentally though the offshore wind strike price has been increased by 65% over the AR5 price which is way over any inflationary level and has been set to entice participants to avoid further embarrassment to govt. Also existing participants will be able to wriggle out of 25% of previously agreed contract capacity if they wish.
Reality is without CfDs no one will build the so called cheapest energy production in the world. Its about time there is some honesty from all parties here that a transition to net zero will cost energy users more there is no getting away from that.
Nickrl said "the [AR6] offshore wind strike price has been increased by 65% over the AR5 price"
You are just talking about the "administrative strike price" here, which the CfD documentation makes very clear is the MAXIMUM strike price, not the final auction outcome strike price. It is the final auction outcome strike price which determines how much the power will cost - this is an auction, after all.
At this point the AR6 strike price has not been fixed, and we don't know what it will be. We will know it sometime between June 28th and and September 30th this year, depending on the bidders and any objections to the results that they may make.
All we do know is that the final outcome strike price will not be any higher than £73/MWh (in 2012 pounds). It will almost certainly be lower than the maximum figure, though we won't know how much and for sure about this until the auction results come out.
What is true is that the eventual strike price for a CfD offshore wind auction (determined by the bids received) has never been as high as the cap price. Some examples
Auction, year, administrative strike price (=auction cap price in 2012 pounds), final strike price (in 2012 pounds)
AR1, 2015, £140-150/MWh (depending on install year), £114.39-119.89/MWh
AR2, 2017, £140-150/MWh (depending on install year), £57.50-74.75/MWh
AR3, 2019, £56/MWh, £36.95-41.611/MWh
AR4, 2022, £46/MWh, £37.35/MWh
AR5 2023, £44/MWh, no bids, so no final strike price
AR6, 2024, £73/MWh, ??? final strike price TBD
Nickrl said "Fundamentally though the offshore wind strike price has been increased by 65% over the AR5 price which is way over any inflationary level and has been set to entice participants to avoid further embarrassment to govt."
Because the CfD process provides for annual CPI inflation, in more normal times the final outcome strike prices would gradually reduce, and there would be no need to increase the strike price cap. The increase in the cap represents the fact that the Ukraine war has temporarily pushed up offshore wind project prices more than CPI is expected to increase. From what I read, CPI inflation was around 10% at the time, but the expected offshore wind project inflation was 40%.
However, supply chain issues and commodity price hikes (mainly for steel and copper?) are likely to reverse over time, but it is difficult to get suppliers to commit to lower prices until they have seen this happen.
You are correct the government probably bumped up the cap price for AR6 to avoid even more public shame. But it shouldn't represent a long-term price hike for offshore wind in 2012 prices - they should come back down again.
Nickrl said "Reality is without CfDs no one will build..."
The reality is that without some form of contract or a regulatory framework providing a good chance of making a profit, no one will build any form of generation. CfD auctions are just a particularly good way of contracting wind and solar which are mainly capital costs and zero fuel costs.
Ideally consumers would like fixed electricity prices, with maybe annual CPI uplifts. In particular that would help industry hugely to plan. But with fossil fuel generation they don't get that. Instead, the consumer covers the whole of the risk of fuel price increases, to the extend that the government had to cap them and provide a subsidy in 2022, or there would have been riots in the street. Electricity wholesale prices averaged £199/MWh in 2022, and wind and solar would have brought down the price to consumers, except in the event they just brought down the subsidy the government had to pay.
Nickrl said "a transition to net zero will cost energy users more there is no getting away from that."
That is not what the results of simulations show. And the administrative (cap) strike prices for AR6 cannot be used to claim offshore wind is suddenly going to cost £100/MWh (in 2023 pounds) when the actual strike price is not know yet.
To take just one example - electric arc furnaces. These don't need storage, because they work in batches, so can be stopped at the end of a batch. So the raw offshore wind (or onshore or solar when cheaper) price plus a small uplift is all they are likely to have to pay for power. That is almost certainly less than current coal-based furnaces cost to run.
Another example is the Intelligent Octopus Go tariff of 7.5p/kWh guaranteed for 6 hours per calendar day for consumers with a smart meter and an EV which can be smart charged. Most new load 2024-2050 could well have similar flexibility and similar low prices, though inflexible, existing loads may well cost something similar.
Recent CCGTs have been built without CfD's albeit they have a secured a capacity market contract but in the full knowledge they would be exposed to gas costs. Windfarms don't have the energy input uncertainty yet won't take the risk.
Anyhow i accept that 73/MWh is the cap and your probably right it will be less although in the main because of the amount of previous projects that will be able to take advantage of the permitted reduction of upto 25% on previous AR contracts not yet commissioned. This will potentially push up the bidding volume a couple of GW so depends on how low bidders are prepared to go.
The Octopus Go tariff is certainly good if you have an EV (as long as you don't use at night!) but they do level a higher rate for the other 18hrs compared to base tariff but fair dos to them in providing an incentive to shift a heavy load to overnight.
I don't think you can claim a final strike price for AR4 when already 19% of bid capacity awarded has seen its CFDs terminated, and further terminations are likely now that clarity into how terminated CFDs are handled with new owners. We kow that for AR5 any bids would have been above ASP, and therefore above the bids and likely the ASP for AR4.
The Ukraine war has nothing to do with rising costs in the wind supply chain. Neither Ukraine nor Russia are involved. It does have to do with turbine manufacturers getting into financial difficulties because they are experiencing higher maintenance costs than they budgeted on turnkey with maintenance supply contracts due to poor reliability (reducing expected average load factors and economics of new projects), and bid too low during the covid period when business was scarce simply to try to maintain an order book flow, while also facing higher costs for raw materials and semi manufacture out of China, and much higher interest rates and much more costly installation vessels for larger turbines. We may be seeing the economic limits of turbine size constrained by engineering reality, making nonsense of projections of future economies of scale. Several of these factors are not going to disappear entirely, meaning that costs are likely to be rather higher than forecast by the government's pet consultants in 2020 (peak lockdown depression), published in 2021.
From the point of view of wind farm owners, new projects must take account of the fact that they are now first in line to curtail, with no protection against negative prices unlike their earlier competitiors, and that curtailment is now on a sharply rising trend as installed capacity grows above overnight and shoulder levels of demand. A nightmare too for the grid, as it encourages all manner of deviant behaviour in response to the rigged markets, so the grid want to rig them more to try to offset.
The consumer is not getting the full benefit of reduced fossil fuel prices in the tariffs, which are being sharply escalated to pay for all the costs of extra grid, extra stabilisation and balancing, and multiple backup caused by rising renewables penetration. The reality in any case is that production weighted average wind cost as paid by consumers (i.e. including subsidies) remained above market prices throughout the energy crisis, and now is at ~£100/MWh premium even before we add in integration costs.
I doubt it makes economic sense to try to run an arc furnace on the basis of intermittent 6 hour overnight wind surpluses and low demand weekend shifts: as with renewables based hydrogen you end up with low average utilisation factors. In any event, the full cost of all the assets has to be paid for, and the overall system cost is going to rise with lots of extra costs for curtailment/wastage and storage as well as extra grid assets. If you subsidise one set of consumers, the rest have to make up the difference. There is already too much subsidy of rich greens.
Wind & solar would work better if they had associated storage built in as part of the installation - the reason they haven’t and largely don’t, is because the additional cost of suitable storage makes projects way too expensive - trying to retrofit sufficient storage to existing installations is also unsourceable and unaffordable - renewables will never power a nation without storage, hence why no nation has - they do however, need expensive coal, gas or nuclear back up - essentially 2 power sources on the same grid, all paid for by consumers & taxpayers
The chart makes clear that the Gen Cost report is in 2021 prices and AR6 is quoted in 2023 prices.
But even if adjusted to the same price terms, AR6 prices are much higher than the Gen Cost report.
The AR6 price for offshore wind in 2012 terms is exactly what the RWE boss asked for.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/25/electricity-prices-rise-70pc-pay-wind-farms-energy/
Moreover, turbine companies like Vestas and Siemens Energy are losing money and complaining of no profit pool and asking customers to pay more.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/21/energy-bills-must-rise-pay-for-net-zero-siemens/
So real capex is much higher than the Government estimated in its Gen Cost report.
Moreover, interest rates have gone up massively since AR5 prices were announced, which pushes up the cost of capital. Yet the Gen Cost report assumed a cost of capital at a lower premium to gilts than the prior report.
Even though the CfDs are index linked, the cost of capital has gone up, which disproportionately impacts offshore wind. Indeed, developers have complained of higher interest rates as one of the reasons for increasing costs.
It is no good explaining that some prices are 2021 and some 2023, if you don't tell readers how to convert them. And rather than bothering to do this, surely it is more informative for readers to be presented with prices based on ££s for just one year. You could even now, easily do the conversion yourself.
But you don't know how much power from the AR6 auction is going to cost, because the auction hasn't been held yet, so it is surely premature to claim the National Grid have it completely wrong. And, in any case, the National Grid statement is surely referring to long term prices, not the outcome of just AR6.
Incidentally the DESNZ 2023 Generation Costs document seems to have an onshore wind price which is too low - because DESNZ has assumed 5 or 6 MW onshore turbines, which seem unlikely to pass any sensible planning regulations on maximum turbine height. So it is more likely new onshore wind will have a capacity factor of 35% maybe than 45-48%.
The rant by the Siemens CEO in the Telegraph is just that, and is only because costs went up because of the Ukraine war. He hits the nail on the head when he says "“I believe that for a while [customers] need to accept higher pricing." Not that he is not saying "long term". Likely it is just for a couple of years.
Real capex was higher last year, but is starting to abate now. If Ukraine beats Russia out and things recover fully in a couple of years, then we should see the historical low offshore wind prices come back (£37.35/MWh in 2012 pounds). There is no good reason why not - the technology costs are likely to come down each time installed capacity doubles, as usual. And the USA projects will add to the economies of scale.
But yes, we clearly have to get over the price hikes caused by Ukraine first.
The RWE boss did indeed ask for the strike price cap to be increased for AR6, but that was a while ago, so we will have to see how the final outcome AR6 strike prices turn out - all the vibes seem to be that commodity prices are down somewhat from the peak, and supply chains naturally adjust over time.
Two points:
1. Renewables were made to look cheap by low interest rates in the era of virtually free money. That era is now over, but it will take a while for the various examples of capital misallocation to work through.
2. I think you are allocating too much weight to the Ukraine war's impact on commodity prices. The truth is that capital investment in new mines across a range of metals, notably copper, has been lacking for a decade or so. Increased demand for these metals will push up prices over a 1-5 year time frame. Geopolitical instability will make those price spikes worse.
On 1. the CfD CPI uplifts protect projects from inflation and an inflation-related rise in interest rates - provided the real interest rate at constant currency does not go up.
It is not a perfect offset, but it is a a significant positive correlation between base rates and CPI inflation. See https://chasedeveremedical.co.uk/time-to-get-real-on-interest-rates/.
On 2. In 2021, Ukraine and Russia produced 97m tonnes of steel between them, ranking 14th and 5th between them. And starting mid 2021 Russia started its energy war on Europe, cutting back gas supplies. Offshore wind turbines use huge quantities of steel. Are you serious suggesting Russia's energy war and invasion of Ukraine did not hugely disrupt the steel market?
You can see the effects on the steel price at https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/steel - click on the 10 year view. As well as price hikes there were also big supply issues caused.
Copper is not necessarily that major a factor in the medium term, as aluminium is a good substitute for copper used as a conductor. In the short term increases in copper prices have a major effect as you can't re-engineer to aluminium at the drop of a hat.
Sure it wasn't the only factor, but it was pretty major.
QE has given us 15 years of negative real interest rates. That era is now over. Interest rates will now tend to be real and positive. Moreover, if you look at the hedging strategies of most wind farms you find that they seek certainty in borrowing costs by borrowing long term and converting floating bonds to fixed exposure using derivatives. That allowed them to lock in ZIRP borrowing costs, which are no longer avialable. I have even come across wind farms that sell their indexation benefit via inflation derivatives to pension funds, and pension funds have long been sold the idea that inflation linked dividends are a good reason to invest in renewables - never mind the real economics. See Orsted divestments for classic examples.
So far as steel is concerned, the prices rose in 2021 simply because steel stocks got rapidly depleted as economic activity picked up following the lockdown global economic shutdown. Prices already reached CNY 5400 for rebar in April 21, long before the energy squeeze really started. They peaked in September, and actually have been in a downtrend throughout the war. It has not driven steel prices, and in any case, neither Russian nor Ukrainian steel is used in making turbines or jackets and towers. Imports for that (increasingly, semi or completely finished) into Europe are now dominated by China.
Turbine costs were hit by massive price rises for neodymium and cobalt, both essential to making low weight generator magnets. Commodities controlled by China. These prices have dropped back, but it will take some time for contracts signed at higher prices to work through.
However you dress up renewables, they are expensive, intermittent, engineeringly incompetent power sources that without ever increasing consumer & taxpayer subsidies, wouldn’t even get built - every GW of wind & solar requires a GW of 24/7/365 coal, gas or nuclear as back up, so consumers have to pay for 2 power sources on the same grid, its absolute madness and regression
Energywise said "every GW of wind & solar requires a GW of 24/7/365 coal, gas or nuclear as back up"
This is clearly not true;.
Take a grid needing an average supply of 40 GW and a peak hour demand of 60 GW. Say you have 80 GW of offshore wind providing power at a 50% capacity factor - average output 40 GW, and you have 160 GWh of grid batteries (4 hours of average load). Note this grid won't do the job reliably.
You clearly don't need 80 GW of 1 for 1 gas backup, because the peak hour demand is only 60 GW. In fact you don't need 60 GW of gas backup either, because you can charge the batteries in advance of peak hour from the gas backup, and just use, say, 50 GW of gas + 10 GW from the batteries to supply peak hour demand. You need enough backup GW to match the average GW supply needed over the peak 24 hours - which is always less than the peak hour supply needed.
Still ignoring we haven't really configured the grid properly, lets look at the cost of backup vs the cost of wind power.
80 GW of offshore wind at £2.7bn/GW is £216bn. 50 GW of CCGT at £700m/GW is £35bn. So the backup increases costs by 35/216 = 16%.
In China now, grid batteries are coming in around $100/kWh, so 160 GWh would cost $16bn or about £13bn, adding another 6% to total costs. So far we have added 22% to the raw capital cost of wind. That is not unreasonable.
In practice you would need more than 80 GW of wind, of course, to match variable demand and enough provide green hydrogen to fuel the CCGT during back up. But no matter how much wind (and/or solar) you choose to install, you still only need 50 GW of gas turbine backup. So clearly it is not 1 to 1 wind GW to backup GW. And clearly the additional capital costs are manageable if wind power is pretty cheap anyway.
Further, the backup gas plants are just the existing gas plants - which are partially or fully depreciated. So they won't even add 16% to the capital costs of the wind.
Your 50GW of hydrogen powered CCGTs if thats even possible without massive conversion costs will need around 150GW of electrolyser capacity so thats another couple hundred billion on the bottom line.
For green hydrogen firing apparently you need to change the burners on the CCGT plants, and sometimes make other tweaks. Clearly the generator and secondary steam cycle CCGT stuff don't need to be changed at all. So the conversion costs are not that big.
The more recent CCGT plants are already capable of handling any defined mix of hydrogen and methane - the suppliers have been working on this one for a decade - https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fueled-gas-turbines.
The backup gas turbines would surely not be operating more than 10% of the time, so generating an average of 4 GW in my mythical 40 GW average supply grid. The power to hydrogen to power cycle efficiency is ~45%. Assume you can only operate electrolysers with a load factor of 60% - just when there is surplus offshore wind.
So 4 GW / (0.45 * 0.6) = 15 GW of electrolysers are required. Nel was expecting electrolyser cost by 2026 to be £320m/GW so the total electrolyser capital cost would be $5bn or £4bn. That adds another 2% to the capital cost of the offshore wind (£216bn). All very back of the envelope stuff, of course.
I suggest you read and try to understand the papers supporting the Llewellyn Smith study on storage for the Royal Society. Your toy examples are exactly the kind of muddled thinking it was attacking.
Well i'll take it as a positive that you at least recognised that some form of fulled generation will be necessary even in high renewable penetration grid.
I have scanned the Royal Society paper a couple of times now. It seemed more or less in accordance with my understanding of hydrogen backup. From memory, the Royal Soc tended to favour man made salt caverns for storage for some reason, while I can't see any reason why depleted oil and gas wells can't be used, similar to the UK Rough natural gas storage. For 2-3 months of grid supply of green hydrogen you need around 8-10 depleted wells with the volume of Rough, but it might be a few more because of the necessity for additional "cushion gas" which you can't use for backup because it is too low pressure to flow fast enough.
You talk about those multi £Billions as if it’s small change - where do you envisage these £Billions (nay £Trillions) coming from? Having to build in vast over capacity (because of generation intermittency) as well as vast amounts of unsourceable, unaffordable amounts of storage, is technically and economically comical - apart from all the additional kit for new builds, you also have to source additional materials for lifetime change outs, or to repair / replace defective kit
If unlimited money wasn’t an issue, we could afford everything we could wish for, but we can’t and natural resources such as lithium and rare earth metals (increasingly owned by BRICS+ nations) will become ever more difficult to obtain, either at reasonable prices, or indeed at all
We have hundreds of years worth of natural gas beneath our feet that could be very economically retrieved and piped into new CCGT power plants, giving 24/7/365 reliable (no matter the weather, or day or night) affordable electricity for all, with no back up required, whilst building out new nuclear / SMRs as a path to a completely nuclear powered future
SMRs or CCGT power plants can be better installed near to large load demand centres, thereby negating expensive overhead line infrastructure too (e.g. the new overhead line / subsea cable infrastructure required to get far Scottish North Sea or Welsh wind power down south)
The money to pay for capital expenditure on a green UK grid will come from the reduced amount spent on purchasing fossil fuels and investing in new fossil fuel production capacity. Currently the world spends at least $2.5tr per year on fossil fuels (one entry on Google was saying subsidies for it were $7tr per year, but maybe overstated). Divert some of that to installing renewables, instead of capital sums on oil and gas production, and you find eventually you have lower annual costs (including replacement capital costs) for the renewable solution.
The gas beneath your feet is supposed to be enough to supply 3-11 bcm per year for 30 years (90-330 bcm total), according to a Warwick university report at https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/what-potential-reserves-of-shale-gas-are-there-in-the-uk/.
Great, you say!! Let's do it.
But now look at one alternative. Install 10 GW of offshore wind as one year's capacity contracted in a CfD auction. Likely lifetime 30 years.
Take a mid point of 7 bcm per year for the fracked natural gas, which contains 7 x 11 = 77 TWh of heat. Factor in a 60% CCGT efficiency and you get 46 TWh of electricity from it.
Each year 10 GW of offshore wind at a CF of 55% would produce 5.5 GW average output or 48 TWh of electricity.
So one year's worth of expanded CfD auctions of 10 GW of offshore wind will deliver the same quantity of electricity as allowing UK fracking - i.e. 46-48 TWh of electricity.
So is it really worth doing any onshore UK fracking for gas? I don't believe it is. The gas would be sold at European market rates which have fluctuated hugely recently. By contrast the offshore wind is on a fixed price contract. So UK consumers would probably be a lot better off with the offshore wind, which can be used in heat pumps with a COP of 3 or 4 to provide a lot more building and water heating each year than 7 bcm of natural gas will.
If you are going to firm up the offshore wind power for inflexible loads (electric arc furnaces do not need firmed up power), then maybe you want to increase 10 GW to 12 GW of capacity.
The UK 2030 target for offshore wind is for another 36 GW to be installed - which is far more than would be needed to replace all the fracked gas from GB mainland.
Why bother with fracking? Just go straight to the offshore wind which is just not as politically sensitive. UK fracked gas just provided too small quantities of energy to upset people over.
Thanks David - a great rebuttal
Neither National Grid or Chas are climate accredited scientists or academics, that in itself precludes them from offering unbiased guidance - the fact Chas just regurgitates AGW peddling source material precludes him from offering any unbiased factual scientific facts
NG have paid this idiot to produce a childish piece of plagiarised nonsense, exactly as the climerati pay modellers and corrupt scientists for the right kind of result, one that fits the narrative
The narrative is slowly, but surely, falling apart before our very eyes, resulting in stranger and sillier claims from the globalist billionaire funded climate mob - the masses are not buying into technically and economically incompetent battery cars and heat pumps, whilst they see their electricity costs rocket higher and higher because of perversely subsidised renewables
Reality will end net zero, as it is doing and I hope to see the day the whole scam comes tumbling down like a house of cards
"Reality will end net zero, as it is doing and I hope to see the day the whole scam comes tumbling down like a house of cards" sadly won't happen anytime soon and with Labour looking most likely to be in power by the end of the year they will perpetuate this mess if not worsen it. Thing is Reeves keeping banging the growth drum as our only way to fix public services yet she has yet to make the link that ever more expensive energy won't help that cause.
Good work, Mr. Turver. That the article in question relies on data from Rocky Mountain Institute is enough to discard the entire thing. Glad to see the data from the UNECE on land use. That's helpful.
The elephant in the room is the contrived nature of climate alarm. The aim of climate alarmism is complete control of population and resources, in a rebranded form of eugenics.
In Conversation with Dr Niall McCrae about his seminal book, 'Green in Tooth and Claw'. Niall and Christopher from the Bruges Group's expose the Malthusian beliefs of climate extremists. This unique, timely and important book on the claimed climate crisis analyses the misanthropic designs of the globalist elite, who are using a contrived ecological emergency to create a totalitarian technocracy dubbed the 'Great Reset'.
The real aim of climate alarm is complete control of population and resources, in a rebranded form of eugenics. Pseudoscientific policies in pursuit of Net Zero are a tightening ratchet on the lives of ordinary people. It is vital to challenge the brainwashing in schools and media and to spread the word that the real danger to the future of humanity is not carbon dioxide but a cabal of tyrants who want to 'save the planet' for themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTCTb3DQ8G8
Neil Oliver explains it all very well in his latest:
'WORLD WAR III is HERE!' - Neil Oliver warns of incoming FALLOUT over Israel and Iran:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPLYfZUL5O0
The US, Brazil, India, Russia, Mexico and Peru account for half of the global C-19 deaths and a third of the cases. WTF kind of GLOBAL pandemic is that? The US leads the ENTIRE globe w 16% of the deaths and 15.6% of cases. And WTF is wrong with US medical care??
Since 1/20 there have been over 11.5 MILLION deaths from ALL causes in the US, 8.9% attributed to C-19. There were 12.6% unnatural deaths, i.e. suicide, drug O.D., murder, accident. And cancer (18.0%), heart disease (20.8%) and assorted C-19 comorbidity deaths (10.2%) were EACH a greater share than C-19 alone. Ordinary flu/pneumonia/respiratory each were under 1.5%.
Would not know that from the lying, race baiting, fact free, rabble-rousing, anti-democratic, fake news MSM that rebranded the ordinary flu/pneumonia/respiratory as C-19 pandemic so they could stampede the electorate into deposing Trump.
Over 80% of C-19 CASES are among those UNDER 65.
75% of C-19 DEATHS are among those OVER 65 at 15% of the population.
26% of C-19 DEATHS are among those OVER 85 at 2% of the population.
33% of C-19 DEATHS have been in hospice, nursing homes, residence, DoA.
Per CDC data.
What kind of widespread pandemic is that?
C-19 is just Mother Nature and the Grim Reaper culling the herd of the too old, too sick, too many, too crammed together as Medicare/Medicaid cash cows in contagious badly run (BLUE) eldercare warehouses.
More like "big lie" scam-demic foisted on the public by the lying, science illiterate, race baiting, fake news scumbag press and NWO politicians.
Earth is cooler with the atmosphere, water vapor, 30% albedo not warmer.
Ubiquitous GHE heat balance graphics use bad math & badder physics.
The kinetic heat transfer modes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules render impossible a BB surface upwelling and looping “extra” LWIR energy for the GHE.
Consensus science has a well-documented history of being wrong & abusing those who dared to challenge it. (Bruno, drawn & quartered)
GHE & CAGW are wrong so alarmists resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship & violence.
The chart of EROI and land use has a few misleading values in it.
Firstly, the consensus view on EROI for wind and solar PV is upwards of 10. Both technologies have become much more efficient to produce over the years. You can only get values as low as are quoted in the table if you ignore current production efficiencies and go back to figures from a decade ago.
Secondly the land use figure for onshore wind is totally misleading. It comes from the source figure for the total extent of a wind farm. However, within that total extent, less than 2% is used for wind turbines bases, access roads and supplementary buildings, leaving 98% of the area free to be used for whatever it was used for before. Cows don't mind wind turbines on their fields.