It’s been an encouraging week for RenewableUK, the trade body for windmills and sunshine. The effective moratorium on building the triffids in England has been overturned, and it seems that we don’t really mind watching them at work across our green and pleasant land, after all.
There is nothing like the prospect of a bribe to encourage compliance, and in this case it is the idea that the locals will get a discount on their electricity bills in return for putting up with the turbines. This was widely reported as an offer of “cheap energy.” It would be no such thing. A saving of a few pounds per quarter will be completely swamped by the rising cost of green subsidies and transforming the national grid for the dash to net zero.
In the context of the UK’s total energy use, onshore wind will never be more than a rounding error, even if windmills cover the country. A more serious source is offshore wind, which on breezy days in summer can already contribute 40 per cent of the current demand for electricity. Yet even here, the skies are darkening, and even the fervently green FT has noticed that the generation costs are going up, not down, as had been generally assumed.
Energy in the UK is already among the most expensive in the world. The country’s only factory producing ammonia, a vital ingredient in fertiliser, has been forced to close as a result. The damage to the motor industry is becoming ever more apparent, with Chinese cars built with energy from coal set to swamp the market here and in mainland Europe. No amount of government subsidy to the likes of Jaguar Land Rover or steelworks in Wales will guarantee continued production once they run out. Other manufacturers will not be so politically favoured, and will simply stop making things in Britain.
British energy may be expensive, but it may not yet be dear enough for the wind farmers. In July, Vattenfall, one of the largest operators of offshore arrays, admitted that it had booked a half-billion pound impairment charge and suspended its latest project, 1.4GW off the Norfolk coast, after the projected costs had risen by 40 per cent. The inevitable cry, led by the UK’s Carbon Trust, was for more subsidies to encourage the likes of Vattenfall to keep going.
This week, it seems that there were no bids in the latest round of five offshore concessions, because the subsidies on offer were not attractive enough. Overall, the development of green energy has the familiar smell of “system working well, send more money” from players trying to beat the house at roulette. In this case the house is the laws of thermodynamics, which are as iron as those of chance.
Even if the operators get their way (and our money) the windfarm output from the North Sea only helps for electricity consumption. Oil and gas will remain the feedstock for the production of fertilisers and farm chemicals without which the yields from our fields would collapse. Processing food so we can eat the output needs energy, while the NHS could not function without plastics.
We must, as a nation, aspire to use oil and energy more efficiently, and most of the easy gains have been made. So far, no politician in power or with a reasonable prospect of it has dared to tell the truth – that we cannot do without gas and oil, and that all forms of energy are going to become dearer.. It might help us to come to terms with this reality if the likes of The Carbon Trust and RenewableUK did.
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