The Bill For The Renewables Obsession Hits £198 Billion
By Paul Homewood
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65500339
In this BBC report which I covered the other day, there was this statement:
The government and private investors have spent £198bn on renewable power infrastructure since 2010
I assume this includes the costs incurred by the National Grid in upgrading the network, on top of the cost of wind farms etc. Nevertheless I suspect the figure is understated, as a lot of what the National Grid spends goes under the radar.
Even so, this is an extraordinary amount, nearly £20 billion a year, and most has come in the last ten years, when renewable capacity really began to take off. Add on interest costs and profit margins, and you are looking at triple that number, all of which we will have to pay for in years to come, whether via taxation or higher energy bills.
And all for what? Most of this renewable capacity has to be backed up by existing dispatchable capacity.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I would like to know the cost of renewing or refurbishing an offshore wind farm at the end of its working life
They will just 3xode them and leave all the rubbish and then get extra government credits for providing eco reefs
Explode
“…providing eco reefs…”
Something good, then, for the effort.
Near-infinite, and ALL a waste simce they were a predictable failure from before their installation.
How much is the fault of Ed. Milliband whose motivation must be suspect?
In the case of Kirkby Moor they put up 12 new turbines.
https://www.pegasusgroup.co.uk/projects/kirkby-moor-wind-farm-life-extension/
Originally the council had refused permission to keep the site in use. Overruled by government.
One of the problems with wind/solar is that it is not synchronous .
The grid has to be kept at 50 hertz ,[ plus or minus a half hertz ,] or all sorts of damage can occur .Such as destroying lots of electronic equipment or even burning out substations .
The more non synchronous generation is put into the grid , the harder it is to maintain the necessary frequency .
Inverters and other small devices will not handle grid scale currents and it comes down to very large DC motors , [ to control speed ] driving AC generators .
I remember reading up a few years ago the they had spent about £230 million on such devices will were capable of coping with about 5% of the then wind /solar generation . The total amount of which has now increased by a lot , so the cost of just balancing the grid with small amounts of non synchronous generation is now probably in the £ billions .
But unless they invent some magic , I do not believe the grid can possibly work for very long at all with over about 50% non synchronous
In The Real World – thanks for your comment. Could you recommend a good source for discussion of the synchrony problem? It is obviously important, and as you say little discussed; I assume this is because it is a real problem which the energy fantasists do not wish to acknowledge. I would like to understand it better.
Maicolm Chapman.
It does get very complicated , which is probably the excuse why the media etc will not say much about it .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser
This link , [ yes , I know it is wiki ,] gives a vague idea , and the picture shows the size of one unit .
But under high demand conditions on the grid , the normal generators will slow a fraction under heavy load , causing the frequency to drop .If it drops by more than half a hertz for many seconds , the RoCoF controls will shut the grid , or part of it , down because of the damage that might be caused .
Inverters or other devices filtering non synchronous generation into the grid can only follow what is happening on the grid and not do anything to adjust frequency .
Which is why a very large , expensive DC motor is used because the speed is controllable and it can maintain the correct frequency .
But I still doubt the media will mention the costs of grid balancing .
There is a very informative discourse on the problem of reactive power, frequency control and grid balance caused by “unreliables” here:
catweazle I was the coauthor of that post. The two preceding ones should also be read as they link.
We didn’t get into harmonics and the waveform stability issues which are potentially even a bigger threat. Those are hard to write about at a level the 12th Grader could understand which was where we were aiming at. Most people’s knowledge of AC is not past the hydraulic analogies. Even the Part 3 went through numerous rewrites conveying the complex ideas at a level Judith was happy with. And from the comments, we lost some people’s understanding.
“And from the comments, we lost some people’s understanding.”
Heh, I wonder who that was…
Not!
No – not JJBB or DA. They were too ignorant to understand from the start. Progressive legislation overrides physics in their eyes. They just Googled things and posted them without reading. The trouble with a lot of armchair experts (which includes many academics) nowadays.
Thanks Chris Morris,
I have been looking for the reason that the SA Electronet installed 4 synchronous condensers, supposedly for the new interconnector to NSW (not yet build). Apparently I saw the Hornsdale “big battery” had paid off its battery in 2 years from synchronous effects and assumed Electronet would rather have that money to pay off the $160 million for their units, but it seems that they didn’t want another blackout which the politicians would blame on them, rather than their own fantasies.
And I would if the expense for 6% of australian grid would be included into the comming “cheap electricity”.
Graeme, Hornsdale and syncons address slightly different issues. AEMO has mandated that GTs stay on, even at minimum load, to provide grid inertia. The SA consumer covers the cost which is higher than market price. The syncons are so they can switch the GTs off yet still have enough inertia.
Hornsdale is there to provide very fast reserves (what it made most of its money on) so the grid can quickly pick up any shortfall in generation/ interconnector loss if and when it occurs. They are there until the slower responding reserves come up. These may be GTs or the diesels. They need to be fast responding because the inertia is so low. SA RoCoF looks like it could be as high as 1Hz/sec. That is scary and tiptoeing on the edge of a precipice stuff.
The predictable forecast shortfall in generation, especially the afternoon to evening increase out of the canyon, often has to be picked up by the GTs or the engines, but that is dispatch, not reserves. Same with no wind or a cloudy day.
The sum equals $246,505,608,945.30 (USD, current conversion).
Anyone reading this post could do more good with 1% of this than has been accomplished by the combined wisdom of the government and private investors.
I will be happy to try. Send to me at …😊
Note that ‘now there are 1,100 projects in the queue’. Load the renewables cash machine with plenty more £billions 🙄
That figure must be nonsense. There can’t possibly be 1,000 actual projects waiting for connection.
Follow the money as they say but also follow the agenda. What is the end game? Look at the great reset. What is the end game there? Electricity is the enabler to bring on the great reset because it is easy to ration, stop or control ATMs, bank accounts, credit, access etc.. The great reset is all about controlling the population in to doing as the rulers, often termed as the elite, dictate. The renewables progression is merely a tool for the control of us. Make everything dependant on electricity, heating, transportation etc., and you have the population within your grasp. Fossil fuels represent freedom to obtain energy from anywhere in the World. That’s bad for the great reset. Freedom would only make the reset more hard to progress to and give the population choice, another bad idea.
And freedom pisses off communists.
What makes our politicians, many of whom are jokers and crooks, persist with these shameful wastes?
Money…
“What makes our politicians, many of whom are jokers and crooks, persist with these shameful wastes?”
Answer: your vote.
It’s what governments do. Since 1945, governments everywhere have dominated the economy, deciding where 25-50% of resources are used. Most of the time they have done that extremely badly and extremely inefficiently, wasting trillions on their own priorities and what they think should be done. We have allowed for some reason, a handful of largely mediocre or worse, self-serving fools to sequester half of what we produce to spend on their own agendas. This is not new, it is simply a bit bigger than before.
“…half of what we produce…”
Professor Parkinson , of ‘Parkinson’s law’ fame, comforted himself with the view that (thank the Lord) the people would revolt when one QUARTER of production was sequestered or siphoned off.
However, he over-estimated the ability of people to see beneath the surface of things. Possibly he fell for the Victorian myth that ‘an educated population’ is a good and a wise one. WE know that
12 years of modern ‘schooling’ just softens you up to swallow whatever snake-oil the bought-and-paid-for ‘experts’ have to sell.
Hot on the heels of the theft of all that nice valuable copper in EV charging cables that you have to leave outside, now thieves have discovered several £k of heat pump sat outside unguarded is another nice free gift.
https://notrickszone.com/2023/05/14/theft-of-heat-pumps-installed-outdoors-spreads-in-germany-insurances-refuse-to-cover-loss/
Must stop sniggering…
I have to type something otherwise I cannot select “notify new comments”
Can anyone clarify something for me please. The BBC recently reported that wind turbines were the UK’s largest source of electricity generation in Q1 2023. They refer to a University College London report but supply no link.
The only reference I can find is to a Dr Iain Stafell and a report for Drax Electric Insights. My issue is that I do not accept his figures nor quite why any UCL individual should be deemed authoritative in this matter. He seems to claim data only from Elexon, National Grid and Sheffield Solar as his sources and those sources do NOT support his claim.
Anyone got anything on this?
The BBC use witchcraft!
Actually I have been looking at the methodology that Dr. Iain Stafell of UCL has used for DRAX and I am pretty sure he is not the full shilling and has probably through lack of competence (almost certainly not intent) simply ballsed up.
“I am pretty sure he is not the full shilling”
He should fit in well at UCL then, probably a mate of Pantsdown.
Ray Sanders , if you were to take just the nameplate ratings of all of the wind farms , it is possible you could get a high figure .
But wind farms only ever produce about 20% of their rating , so the actual total output is 5 times less .
But that is the sort of lies and propaganda you should expect from the BBC and UCL.
This link has the UK grid data.
https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
Looking at 1st quarter 2023, natural gas was slightly greater that wind (10.8 GW vs 9.0 GW) on average. At least that is what I calculated. This was because Jan was very windy. It has been a lot less windy since march or so.
Joel, Gridwatch does NOT show in real time the output of those wind turbines that are connected to the low voltage District Networks (“embedded” supply which are principally those onshore in England and Wales) and only shows those connected to the high voltage transmission networks which are principally in Scotland or offshore. Leo Smith (the Gridwatch site owner) acknowledges this by pointing out the wind data is likely approx. 30% under represented on his site where it only registers as lowered demand.
The claims of wind turbines outperforming gas plants in Q1 is based on very poor and outdated methodology. Firstly Dr Iain Stafell conveniently omits Open Cycle Gas Turbines output on the basis that annually (back in 2016 when the methodology was established) they produce very little in percentage terms. Of course this is absurd as most OCGT run mostly when prices are high, demand/supply margins are tight and/or synchronous grid stabilisation services are required… i.e. the first quarter of this year! So his data deliberately ignores some gas generation.
Furthermore he appears to add in to the wind generation the embedded supply on the generation side but does not include onto the demand side figure thus artificially increasing the wind supply percentage. Again conveniently he specifically include the wind on the demand figure when dividing the gas generation figures.
There are lots of other (relatively minor) discrepanciesbut basically an awful lot of smoke and mirrors are operating to contrive figures.
In broad terms this is several thousands pounds per household per annum. All such cost rattle down to be met inevitably by end users, much of it collected indirectly by way of the supermarket bill, lawyers bill, car servicing, entertainment spending and what have you, rather than appearing honestly on the actual energy bill. Energy system investors operate to recover their capital spend in not too many years, and these disguised costs may well account for a good part of the current cost of living escalation.
You also have to remember that the £198bn does not cover the costs in time and money of many thousands of people who have fought against renewable energy developments, the lives ruined by them, the businesses forced to close and the loss of food-producing farmland.
Small wonder that the economies of the UK and Europe in general are in such a terminal mess of their own making.
Global CO2 emissions rose by 62% between 2000 and 2021 despite falling emissions in Europe and the USA. And, of course, negigible CO2 emissions in poverty-stricken Africa!
AsiaPacific emissions rose by 124% during these years and most of the economies in this area, led by China, bounded ahead, not least because they don’t feel bound in any way by the Paris Agreement nor the cr*p agreed year after year at successive COP meetings.
Putin’s idiotic, gangster regime needs early defeat so that Russia can hopefully re-enter the Global economy and hopefully save Europe from its also idiotic and technically ignorant politicians!
What times we are living in!
Just a thought!
If you really think about it, the infamous “emissions” are negligible for all countries added together: three percent of zero point zero four percent.
>>negligible CO2 emissions
I think your definition of ‘early’ is somewhat at odds with reality as the military operation in Ukraine is 15 months old. With ground conditions improving the situation will be changing soon and there is pressure coming from current supporters of Ukraine, if not of its dictator, to bring the fighting to an end so the refugees can go back.
Do not forget that half of any added CO2 is effectively* absorbed straight into the sea. It also follows that any attempt to actually reduce CO2 in the atmosphere would be 50% thwarted. Just basic facts about the actual balances in the environment.
*Of course, it is senseless to ask where any particular molecule comes from or goes to. Everything is dynamic (on different time scales**), and sometimes only net quantities should be considered – like snapshots of a tennis rally.
**The deep ocean works slowly. Here it is perfectly sensible to say that it contains the CO2 from the Little Ice Age and that at upwelling locations gas from that time is being added to the present atmosphere.
The story behind this is paywalled, but you can read just enough to see that no longer accepting EU greenwash certificates has driven up the price for UK REGOs to £9/MWh.
On the one hand we have seem Octopus call for an end to REGOs, but on the other this looks like another way to ramp up renewables subsidies. REGOs used to trade for a few pence apiece to cover admin costs not so long ago.
Epower were sufficiently excited to actually publish the results after quite some time of only making them available to auction participants.
Click to access e-REGO_Track_Record.pdf