Too far above my pay grade to comment in detail but worth pursuing. They remind me of medieval "indulgences" that were abused by the church and Net Zero is the nearest thing we have to a religion with the politicians. The "indulgence" abuse was a significant trigger to the Protestant Reformation. The speed of change can be amazing as we are presently seeing in Syria. The public cannot be fooled all the time.
It's funny that one of the first books I read about the Climate Change scam (Nigel Lawson's, circa 2008) made the Indulgences comparison. Plus ca change.
David, many thanks is for putting this comprehensive article together. I had just been tasked with doing something similar by our new wind farm opposition group and this will save me so much time! One thing - why is the acronym for Carbon Capture and Storage CCUS? Is the U for underground?
Ironically many of the renewable energy trusts, like TRIG, FGEN, FSFL, SEIT, DORE, NESF are all trading at steep discounts to NAV. Some of them paying double digit dividend yields. I’m not sure what their fall from grace is. Maybe a harbinger of the end of the subsidy regime? For disclosure I own shares in them.
Part of that is the era of cheap money has run out and many need to refinance debt at far higher rates that screws their economics. Of course the govt will soon realise that and adjust upwards the subsidy regimes for AR7 and beyond. I also suspect a fudge up is being worked on for ROC regime to allow extensions at a slightly lower price so they can claim they are keeping the generation on the system and saving us tuppence ha'penny.
Thank you David for this real scoop! Not for the first time, Rachel from Accounts' claimed discovery of a £20bn black hole in public finances looks doubtful shall we say. While energy is the focus of our interest here, what you have unearthed is evidence of a vastly bloated government machine that is thoroughly out of control, a dinosaur with a body the size of a lorry and a brain the size of a walnut. As long as there is a widespread belief that the answer is always more government, a paradise for lobbyists and rest-seekers, prospects are poor.
Anything involved with generation needs high accuracy metering and its well audited as its forms the basis of billing so difficult to cheat the system at ROC or CfD level. Not so sure about the FiT scheme where a neighbour of mine jumped on the lucrative bandwagon in the early years and had PVs installed but doesn't even know if their still working.
Absolutely wonderful. There are so many for Scotland and Wales when I thought they were devolved. I doubt thet the Scots would even dream of independence if they knew how many sweeties they got. I despair.
This comment is somewhat off the top of my head as I haven’t looked at national energy statistics for several years. The most topical statistical prediction on energy from Starmer and Miliband is that by 2030 the UK electricity grid will be 95% decarbonised, with the balance of 5% supplied by CCGT gas-fired generation.
Public data to check their 2030 prediction in the form of the annual DUKES report will not be available until mid-2031. At the time of the next general election the available data probably won’t go beyond 2027. We need to monitor their progress, or mostly likely the lack of it, on an ongoing basis. It would be very handy if we had a bullet-proof technical analysis to prove that 95% grid decarbonisation using intermittent renewables is impossible, regardless of date.
Thus 2023 renewables comprise 46% of generation and 42% of demand. I haven’t checked but I assume that the gap between demand and generation is made up by imports.
Even if Miliband managed to achieve logistical impossibilities such as quadrupling offshore wind supply by 2030, it wouldn’t surprise me if, to avoid regular power cuts, CCGT gas supply had to rise pro rata to perform grid balancing and backup on these intermittent renewables. See this Forties oil rig wind data showing a North Sea wind drought for about 20% of the time over the winter months: https://www.windfinder.com/windstatistics/forties_north_sea_platform.
Hence the grid share of renewables by 2030 might be not much better than it is a present.
Remember in renewables they count biomass but its subsidy regime is about to roll off (2027) although they have a consultation out to extend it which was never the point. Its UK's biggest emitter of CO2 but as we all know its built on a false premise that over a 40yr lifecycle of replanting trees it will neutralise it. Even eco evangelists can see through that but suspect that it will get an extension as even the daft DENZ has enough savvy to realise its dispatchable generation and we are getting woeful short of that the more renewables are allowed to displace CCGTs.
The 2030 goal is undeliverable unless we put the country on (i) buy up all the equipment for grid transmission and windmill production along with heavy lift vessels from the global supply chain (ii) accept the transmission lines and substations get built without any reference to planning or environmental considerations (iii) put the country on a war footing to direct all necessary resources to this endeavour (iv) ignore the cost impact on consumers. Apparently this will be addressed in early 25 with a delivery plan presumably building off NESO2030 report so will have to wait till then to see how hard nosed Millibrain wants to be or is allowed to be. Personally can't see it for 2030 but a lot of damage can still be done even if its dialled back to 75%.
Yes, the biomass scam is a national disgrace. Renewables also includes hydro and a few other odds and ends but Miliband seems to be throwing all his efforts into wind and solar. He might manage to bump up solar quite a bit by 2030, which won’t do us any good at all over cold, dark midwinter, but logistical difficulties are bound to defeat his 2030 wind power ambitions.
“In 2009, 87.3 GW of generating capacity, comprising only 5.1% of wind and solar, generated 376.8 TWh of electricity. In 2020, 100.9 GW of generating capacity, with wind and solar accounting for 37.6% of capacity, produced 312.3 TWh of electricity. Thanks to renewables, 15.6% more generating capacity produced 17.1% less electricity.”
A comment long used by Ed Miliband is the ‘vast number of green jobs’ as if this is a good thing™️
When the entire ‘economy’ is energy production & delivery you no longer have a functional economy.
When you no longer have a functional economy you can’t ever create the wealth that funds everything else, so no healthcare, no transport infrastructure, no flood defences, no social care, no education, no manufacturing, just pointless pen pushers, with imported pens and a government so bloated it cannot hope to function, with clueless politicians everywhere you look. Get a vaguely competent politician and someone in the press turns up something from their past and they get hounded out of office, and at the end of it all and despite the ongoing shitshow the UK still has the 6th largest GDP on the planet…but it regularly doesn’t seem like it.
Just imagine what we could be with very significantly lower cost energy, a country still with vast gas reserves because we didn’t piss them away in less than a generation on electricity production, a country with productive farmland not littered with imported solar panels and wind turbines, a country with properly rewilded native tree covered uplands going a very long way to stopping downstream flooding.
There are no decent green jobs in the UK we import 75% of the high value kit because we can't afford to make it here anymore not that weve ever made any nacelles for windmills despite being told we are the global leaders in offshore wind!. Its utterly disingenuous how hes allowed to get away with saying this where are the politicians and other commentators (other than ourselves) pointing this out. I really despair and by the time the chickens come home to roost it will be too late.
The capacity market subsidy is going to be the one to watch as CCGTs gets more marginalised by renewable generation forcing down their running hours they are going to want an ever increasing cost to stay available. Remember we can see the liability ahead for four years under the T-4 auctions but we still have the T-1 annual tops ups to be added. By DENZ own admission we need to hold 30-35GW of dispatchable generation to cover the 5% of hours we have no insufficient renewables (ha ha) so thats going to get very expensive. How on earth Millibrain can continue to tell us hes going to reduce bills is beyond me.
He will, but by making energy so expensive you can't afford to use it. Thus you save by not being able to afford it. See? Lefty lies are quite clever, once you expose the real meaning!
We benefitted from one of these ECO4 grants. We wanted gas, were told we could get gas, but were nobbled by incompetence. With no central heating - hell, no heating - we were either going to move or install a heat pump - moving was cheaper by far.
When I asked the gas man the cost of a mains pipe he said £100k. He also said before the climate change nonsense they'd have brought it into the road speculatively and let people choose. One of the ECO4 installers boasted about how much had been spent on all the upgrades for the numerous houses. I said 'yes, it's about a years tax rebate'. He didn't really like that. Why shouldn't people be given the choice and to pay for what they want?
That's the problem. It's about erasing choice. It's about forcing a way of living that most don't want. It's about socialising energy costs. The effort the state has made to break the energy market is ludicrous. The green con was always about socialising and controlling energy, just as the train operating fiasco is about ensuring trains remain nationalised and inefficient. The dead hand of statist socialism ruins everything.
The Green Energy Scam has seen probably the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in this country. The fact that this was kicked off by a Labour politician (Ed Miliband take a bow), nothing was done by a Conservative Government for 14 years and is now being executed with gay abandon by the same idiot that started it off is a scandal of huge proportions.
In the unlikely event that Milliband achieves his targets for the addition of wind and solar power by 2030, the UK will have spent enormous sums of money to achieve almost nothing. I explain the effects in this article:
Imagine if instead, the £328 billion of subsidies were spent on clean, reliable, nuclear power. Most of the cost of nuclear power goes to paying the interest and the payback of the capital costs of building the power stations. The operating costs are only about 1p per Kwh.
If the £328 billion were used to build nuclear power stations, that would eliminate the capital and interest cost burden from the equation, and the country could have cheap, reliable power and profit from exporting the surplus to the rest of Europe when their wind turbines fail.
As if Labour’s Net Zero wasn’t depressing enough, have a read of Richard Lyon’s latest on Peak Oil. Wasting our money on low grade, expensive, unsustainable so-called renewables is only going to make the eventual crunch even worse: https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/peak-oil-and-money.
Too far above my pay grade to comment in detail but worth pursuing. They remind me of medieval "indulgences" that were abused by the church and Net Zero is the nearest thing we have to a religion with the politicians. The "indulgence" abuse was a significant trigger to the Protestant Reformation. The speed of change can be amazing as we are presently seeing in Syria. The public cannot be fooled all the time.
It's funny that one of the first books I read about the Climate Change scam (Nigel Lawson's, circa 2008) made the Indulgences comparison. Plus ca change.
Mind-boggling numbers
David, many thanks is for putting this comprehensive article together. I had just been tasked with doing something similar by our new wind farm opposition group and this will save me so much time! One thing - why is the acronym for Carbon Capture and Storage CCUS? Is the U for underground?
Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage. Perhaps U means lots of fizzy drinks.
Yes, I believe the utilization is usually thought of as injection in to an oil reservoir to aid in higher oil recovery.
I think it stands for Unbelievable
Ironically many of the renewable energy trusts, like TRIG, FGEN, FSFL, SEIT, DORE, NESF are all trading at steep discounts to NAV. Some of them paying double digit dividend yields. I’m not sure what their fall from grace is. Maybe a harbinger of the end of the subsidy regime? For disclosure I own shares in them.
It’s a rare business where customers, shareholders and taxpayers are all suffering. Perhaps that’s what’s meant by net zero.
Part of that is the era of cheap money has run out and many need to refinance debt at far higher rates that screws their economics. Of course the govt will soon realise that and adjust upwards the subsidy regimes for AR7 and beyond. I also suspect a fudge up is being worked on for ROC regime to allow extensions at a slightly lower price so they can claim they are keeping the generation on the system and saving us tuppence ha'penny.
Thank you David for this real scoop! Not for the first time, Rachel from Accounts' claimed discovery of a £20bn black hole in public finances looks doubtful shall we say. While energy is the focus of our interest here, what you have unearthed is evidence of a vastly bloated government machine that is thoroughly out of control, a dinosaur with a body the size of a lorry and a brain the size of a walnut. As long as there is a widespread belief that the answer is always more government, a paradise for lobbyists and rest-seekers, prospects are poor.
Where are the audits ?
Anything involved with generation needs high accuracy metering and its well audited as its forms the basis of billing so difficult to cheat the system at ROC or CfD level. Not so sure about the FiT scheme where a neighbour of mine jumped on the lucrative bandwagon in the early years and had PVs installed but doesn't even know if their still working.
Absolutely wonderful. There are so many for Scotland and Wales when I thought they were devolved. I doubt thet the Scots would even dream of independence if they knew how many sweeties they got. I despair.
This comment is somewhat off the top of my head as I haven’t looked at national energy statistics for several years. The most topical statistical prediction on energy from Starmer and Miliband is that by 2030 the UK electricity grid will be 95% decarbonised, with the balance of 5% supplied by CCGT gas-fired generation.
Public data to check their 2030 prediction in the form of the annual DUKES report will not be available until mid-2031. At the time of the next general election the available data probably won’t go beyond 2027. We need to monitor their progress, or mostly likely the lack of it, on an ongoing basis. It would be very handy if we had a bullet-proof technical analysis to prove that 95% grid decarbonisation using intermittent renewables is impossible, regardless of date.
The section on Electricity in the 2024 DUKES report (covering 2023) gives summary data: Electricity demand = 316.8 TWh, Electricity generation = 292.7 TWh, Renewable generation = 135.8 TWh: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a7e14da3c2a28abb50d922/DUKES_2024_Chapters_1-7.pdf.
Thus 2023 renewables comprise 46% of generation and 42% of demand. I haven’t checked but I assume that the gap between demand and generation is made up by imports.
Even if Miliband managed to achieve logistical impossibilities such as quadrupling offshore wind supply by 2030, it wouldn’t surprise me if, to avoid regular power cuts, CCGT gas supply had to rise pro rata to perform grid balancing and backup on these intermittent renewables. See this Forties oil rig wind data showing a North Sea wind drought for about 20% of the time over the winter months: https://www.windfinder.com/windstatistics/forties_north_sea_platform.
Hence the grid share of renewables by 2030 might be not much better than it is a present.
Any comments?!
Remember in renewables they count biomass but its subsidy regime is about to roll off (2027) although they have a consultation out to extend it which was never the point. Its UK's biggest emitter of CO2 but as we all know its built on a false premise that over a 40yr lifecycle of replanting trees it will neutralise it. Even eco evangelists can see through that but suspect that it will get an extension as even the daft DENZ has enough savvy to realise its dispatchable generation and we are getting woeful short of that the more renewables are allowed to displace CCGTs.
The 2030 goal is undeliverable unless we put the country on (i) buy up all the equipment for grid transmission and windmill production along with heavy lift vessels from the global supply chain (ii) accept the transmission lines and substations get built without any reference to planning or environmental considerations (iii) put the country on a war footing to direct all necessary resources to this endeavour (iv) ignore the cost impact on consumers. Apparently this will be addressed in early 25 with a delivery plan presumably building off NESO2030 report so will have to wait till then to see how hard nosed Millibrain wants to be or is allowed to be. Personally can't see it for 2030 but a lot of damage can still be done even if its dialled back to 75%.
Yes, the biomass scam is a national disgrace. Renewables also includes hydro and a few other odds and ends but Miliband seems to be throwing all his efforts into wind and solar. He might manage to bump up solar quite a bit by 2030, which won’t do us any good at all over cold, dark midwinter, but logistical difficulties are bound to defeat his 2030 wind power ambitions.
Logistical difficulties and the electorate, with luck.
Rupert Darwall had fun with renewables numbers in his Dec 2023 article “Britain’s Net Zero Disaster and the Wind Power Scam”: https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/12/20/britains_net_zero_disaster_and_the_wind_power_scam_1000250.html.
“In 2009, 87.3 GW of generating capacity, comprising only 5.1% of wind and solar, generated 376.8 TWh of electricity. In 2020, 100.9 GW of generating capacity, with wind and solar accounting for 37.6% of capacity, produced 312.3 TWh of electricity. Thanks to renewables, 15.6% more generating capacity produced 17.1% less electricity.”
A comment long used by Ed Miliband is the ‘vast number of green jobs’ as if this is a good thing™️
When the entire ‘economy’ is energy production & delivery you no longer have a functional economy.
When you no longer have a functional economy you can’t ever create the wealth that funds everything else, so no healthcare, no transport infrastructure, no flood defences, no social care, no education, no manufacturing, just pointless pen pushers, with imported pens and a government so bloated it cannot hope to function, with clueless politicians everywhere you look. Get a vaguely competent politician and someone in the press turns up something from their past and they get hounded out of office, and at the end of it all and despite the ongoing shitshow the UK still has the 6th largest GDP on the planet…but it regularly doesn’t seem like it.
Just imagine what we could be with very significantly lower cost energy, a country still with vast gas reserves because we didn’t piss them away in less than a generation on electricity production, a country with productive farmland not littered with imported solar panels and wind turbines, a country with properly rewilded native tree covered uplands going a very long way to stopping downstream flooding.
There are no decent green jobs in the UK we import 75% of the high value kit because we can't afford to make it here anymore not that weve ever made any nacelles for windmills despite being told we are the global leaders in offshore wind!. Its utterly disingenuous how hes allowed to get away with saying this where are the politicians and other commentators (other than ourselves) pointing this out. I really despair and by the time the chickens come home to roost it will be too late.
What’s the time period so we can turn it into an approximate annual cost?
The time periods are variable. And the data quality is pretty poor, so I avoided doing that sort of calculation.
Thanks.
The capacity market subsidy is going to be the one to watch as CCGTs gets more marginalised by renewable generation forcing down their running hours they are going to want an ever increasing cost to stay available. Remember we can see the liability ahead for four years under the T-4 auctions but we still have the T-1 annual tops ups to be added. By DENZ own admission we need to hold 30-35GW of dispatchable generation to cover the 5% of hours we have no insufficient renewables (ha ha) so thats going to get very expensive. How on earth Millibrain can continue to tell us hes going to reduce bills is beyond me.
He will, but by making energy so expensive you can't afford to use it. Thus you save by not being able to afford it. See? Lefty lies are quite clever, once you expose the real meaning!
We benefitted from one of these ECO4 grants. We wanted gas, were told we could get gas, but were nobbled by incompetence. With no central heating - hell, no heating - we were either going to move or install a heat pump - moving was cheaper by far.
When I asked the gas man the cost of a mains pipe he said £100k. He also said before the climate change nonsense they'd have brought it into the road speculatively and let people choose. One of the ECO4 installers boasted about how much had been spent on all the upgrades for the numerous houses. I said 'yes, it's about a years tax rebate'. He didn't really like that. Why shouldn't people be given the choice and to pay for what they want?
That's the problem. It's about erasing choice. It's about forcing a way of living that most don't want. It's about socialising energy costs. The effort the state has made to break the energy market is ludicrous. The green con was always about socialising and controlling energy, just as the train operating fiasco is about ensuring trains remain nationalised and inefficient. The dead hand of statist socialism ruins everything.
The Green Energy Scam has seen probably the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in this country. The fact that this was kicked off by a Labour politician (Ed Miliband take a bow), nothing was done by a Conservative Government for 14 years and is now being executed with gay abandon by the same idiot that started it off is a scandal of huge proportions.
In the unlikely event that Milliband achieves his targets for the addition of wind and solar power by 2030, the UK will have spent enormous sums of money to achieve almost nothing. I explain the effects in this article:
https://johnd12343.substack.com/p/a-question-for-ed-miliband
Imagine if instead, the £328 billion of subsidies were spent on clean, reliable, nuclear power. Most of the cost of nuclear power goes to paying the interest and the payback of the capital costs of building the power stations. The operating costs are only about 1p per Kwh.
If the £328 billion were used to build nuclear power stations, that would eliminate the capital and interest cost burden from the equation, and the country could have cheap, reliable power and profit from exporting the surplus to the rest of Europe when their wind turbines fail.
As if Labour’s Net Zero wasn’t depressing enough, have a read of Richard Lyon’s latest on Peak Oil. Wasting our money on low grade, expensive, unsustainable so-called renewables is only going to make the eventual crunch even worse: https://richardlyon.substack.com/p/peak-oil-and-money.
David, Spot on! DB