Lord Frost ridicules Whitehall renewables cost estimates
By Paul Homewood
London, 7 August – Lord Frost has called on ministers and civil servants to come clean about the cost of renewable energy, echoing last week’s statement by Lord Hammond.
Frost’s comments come after new energy cost estimates from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero were widely ridiculed on social media.
Lord Frost said:
“Whitehall continues to obfuscate about the true costs of wind power. This time round we are supposed to believe it will get cheaper either because winds in the North Sea will conveniently grow in strength or windfarms will suddenly become at least 50% more efficient. It’s time the government produced fair comparable figures for the costs of different energy so we have a proper basis for a rational policy discussion.”
Offshore wind is central to the Government’s Net Zero plans, which will be unaffordable without very cheap renewable energy.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
“People are openly calling these new figures lies. It’s clear that the green bureaucrats are trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes. It’s so transparent as to be laughable. Grant Shapps needs to get a grip on his department.”
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The climate grift is a religion to the Greens. Forget all that science stuff, you just gotta believe–and do not peak behind the curtain of money and power fueling the grift.
It’s not a religion; it’s a sport.
Sure, all the low- and middle-level players are religious zealots, but the top elites are just doing all this for fun. A game for the ultra rich.
I do hope that Frost is not going to end up with a few other worthies, sharing the title of ‘the best PM we never had’.
Similarly with today’s immigrant crisis the ghost of Enoch Powell hovers nearby.
Politicians haven’t a clue what they are doing, so they are easily misled by the green, woke civil service. That swamp needs a lot of draining.
I think that a lot of politicians do know what they are doing , which is destroying Western economies so that the Marxist / Socialists can take over .https://www.technocracy.news/un-agenda-2030-a-recipe-for-global-socialism/
I could not agree more. The CCP doctrine of unrestricted warfare is in full swing with the climate grift. Xi Jinping is holding his sides with laughter, as his bought-and-paid-for Marxist apparatchiks in the governments of The West hollow out their economies chasing the chimera of green energy.
Forever missing from these estimates has been realistic costs for storage to cover low wind episodes, assuming gas and coal will be phased out. Other renewables are generally available only a small minority of the time.
For example for storage using hydrogen, if electrolysis is 80% efficient, amount stored 80% after losses, and conversion back to electricity 80% (all optimistic figures), overall about 50% can be recovered. Associated costs will be at least a factor of (2+1+1), four times direct wind generation costs. If a third needs to go via storage, continuous wind power will cost 2/3+4/3 times the cost of intermittent wind, so twice as much overall. Have I totally misunderstood the engineering?
Not enough space on the page for all the noughts needed to cost the storage when the wind doesn’t blow if we have no coal or gas? The cost could be zero, the same as the energy output while we all shiver in the cold and dark waiting for the power to return.
“The cost could be zero, the same as the energy output while we all shiver in the cold and dark waiting for the power to return”.
Naw – where is the gravy train in that?
Gezza,
if we have no coal or gas we will have no power at all. The grid cannot run on renewables, they are not capable of doing so, despite all you read and hear about a transition to renewables. For both practical and several technical aspects wind and solar cannot power a grid. The other sources make just a small fraction of the power we need.
“Grant Shapps needs to get a grip on his department.”
Grant Shapps is the biggest liar in his department.
I suspect he is not so much a deliberate liar but instead too intellectually challenged (ie thick) to understand ANY of the figures that his civil service officials throw at him, let alone challenge them.
A lot of the trouble is that a lot of people just don’t want to have to admit that they were wrong.
Your observation was recently seconded by Nobel Winner, John Clauser whom recently stated, “We are awash in pseudoscience…trillions of dollars have been committed (to climate) and powerful people do not want to admit they have made trillion dollar mistakes.”
Yep. Grunt Schitts is fick as mince. Who controls him is the question?
Anyone who wets their pants when they meet the Philanthropath Gates is by definition a moron.
Lord Frost has called on ministers and civil servants to come clean about the cost of renewable energy
That’ll be the day. Ducking and weaving is their policy.
Concern about cost makes the ridiculous assumption you will have money.
Net Zero = Zero economy
David Turner weighs in with a good Telegraph article titled “Don’t be fooled. There’s no such thing as cheap wind.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/07/dont-be-fooled-theres-no-such-thing-as-cheap-wind/
David Turver, that should be…
Paywalled
That’s an abridged version. The full article is on my substack, linked to in the comments below. You can access that for free.
Unpaywalled
https://archive.ph/ejZqu
Thanks for the links – good article.
It’s true. The costs of wind power will decrease the more of it is used. You see these government geniuses have figured that the more wind turbines there are the more wind they eat up and swallow which will in turn create a wind vacuum which will generate more winds! Looks like our energy problems have been solved!
More detail on the big lie of offshore wind costs here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/offshore-wind-new-big-lie
Excellent article in the Telegraph, as is the linked substack. Hopefully the public will wake up and see the lies, followed by the government. This has been a slow motion train wreck limping on for years, surely its going to come home to roost very soon?
When the sh!t finally hits the fan lets hope one of the main political parties grasps the nettle and ditches these ruinous policies and normal service is resumed.
Telling the truth? That’s an interesting new concept for government. But it will never catch on.
I doubt that they know how to tell the truth.
Off topic , but Pauls article is repeated in todays Daily Express . Online version anyway .
But is this a sign that the media is starting to tell the truth .
Excellent article – but it is the same story for all renewables (ruinables, unreliables).
They should pass a law in parliament suspending the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics – that should do the trick.
Henry makow at gab shows how deep this scam goes – his twitter feed is stuck with elon’s new rules but on gab you can still link on the sites .
Don’t give ’em ideas.
The EU wanted to do that to increase the efficiency of electric kettles to get more than 1kW of heat out of 1kW of electricity.
They really are that scientific illiterate.
Kettles can switch off at 50 degrees C – have cooler tea and coffee – save the planet
There was a rumour that the last labour government tried to repeal Ohm’s Law to enable wind farms in the Orkney’s to get grid connections to supply electricity to London.
Georg Simon Ohm–you can’t trust those crazy Germans; his law should be repealed and replaced with magic unicorns.
Oh, those pesky laws of thermodynamics. Can not we replace them with magic unicorns?
If Lord Frost was elected Prime Minister, his logic would save us all from ruination.
I’m pretty sure that n my lifetime no government has ever overestimated the cost nor underestimated the benefits of what it wants to do. Why would it? Politicians want to do what they want to do and to do so requires them to be in power. Telling the truth would risk being in power. So politicians lie about everything all of the time.
That people are still surprised that we are lied to is puzzling.
Siemens Energy hammered by wind business losses…
https://press.siemens-energy.com/global/en/pressrelease/earnings-release-q3-fy-2023
Demands for bigger handouts will no doubt keep getting louder. If all the big players throw the towel in net zero falls apart.
You were too kind to Siemens Energy management team. They are now predicting losses of 8 to 10 % on INCREASED revenues of 8 to 9 %. Climate strikes again: Take in more money from rate payers, and lose it faster–brilliant.
Just remember that Parliament voted a climate emergency very nearly unanimously.
The officials are just carrying out the will of Parliament.
I doubt that Parliament would vote any differently whatever the costs were.
Wind. Ho hum
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/europe-wind-drought/
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wind drought
Thorntonbank Wind Farm off the Belgian coast. Last year, average wind speeds in the North Sea declined by up to 10%. (Credit: Arterra / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Energy-wise, Europe is between a rock and a hard place: it needs so much, yet has so little of its own. That’s why decarbonization is an opportunity as well as a challenge.
The first goal of eliminating coal, oil, and gas as the power sources that keep Europeans warm and working is to get rid of greenhouse gases to keep the planet from boiling over. And as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has underscored, another worthy goal is weaning Europe off its dependency on less-than-friendly foreign suppliers like Vladimir Putin and others whom you would normally cross the street to avoid, geopolitically speaking.
A strategic insight
It’s a strategic insight that arrived a little too late. Putin has used Russia’s energy supply into Europe as a weapon in his war on Ukraine. With the flow of Russian oil and gas now largely cut off and the EU vowing never again to rely on it, two things will happen.
First, in the short term, Europe will face what the Germans are calling a Bibber-Winter (“shivering winter”), while the least well-off Britons will have to choose between “heating and eating,” as the tabloids call it. Second, in the long term, Europe’s energy crisis will incentive an acceleration toward a zero-carbon future. Wind and solar energy feature heavily in most of those scenarios.
Renewable, but not constant
However, there is a problem with both: They may be renewable, but they are not constant. There are plenty of days when the sun doesn’t shine, and lots of times when the wind doesn’t blow. Leaving solar to one side, one may think that it matters little when the wind does or doesn’t blow, because it all averages out in the end. But that is what this map is here for — to demonstrate otherwise.
For not only is wind inconstant from place to place, it also changes significantly over time.
wind drought
Wind speeds increased in some places, notably the Balkans and Turkey; in others, they decreased. (Credit: Les Echos, reproduced with kind permission)
In blue, the map shows the areas of Europe where average wind speeds last year were lower than in the preceding reference period (1991-2020). The map, from the French newspaper Les Echos, shows areas of greater decline in darker blue, but also, in red, areas where average wind speeds in 2021 increased.
Some notable points:
Dark blue covers large areas of the North Sea, northern Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, where wind speeds decreased by 5% to 10%.
The same goes for smaller zones in Ireland, southern France, and the German-Czech border.
However, wind speeds have increased by 5% to 15% in the Balkans and Turkey.
A drop in wind speed can have a major impact on wind turbines, which operate in a “wind speed window” between 14 and 90 km/h (9 and 56 mph).
Gone is the wind
Last year, the load factor — that is, the ratio of actual output to the theoretical maximum — dropped by 13% in Germany and the UK and by 15% to 16% in Ireland and the Czech Republic, Les Echos reports.
The 2021 “wind drought” hit Northern Europe particularly hard, especially those countries relying most on wind energy — notably Denmark, which gets 44% of its energy from wind, and Ireland, where the share of wind in total energy production is 31%. Other European countries relying heavily on wind include Portugal (26%), Spain (24%), Germany (23%), the UK (22%), and Sweden (19%). In France, which gets most of its power from nuclear, it’s just 8%.
As a result of the reduction in average wind speed, Danish energy company Ørsted reported a loss of €380 ($366) million. German energy company RWE acknowledged a 38% drop in profits last year, although this was from both its wind and solar units combined.
The coming wind drought
Unfortunately for Europe, it doesn’t seem that last year’s “wind drought” was a one-off. In its latest report, the IPCC predicts a drop of 6% to 8% in average wind speeds across Europe by 2050. As wind speeds become increasingly inconstant, the cost of wind energy will become more unpredictable and its provision more unreliable —”
A lot of common sense has been spoken. If you look at Rishi Sunak’s education, career, and experience there is enough there to suggest that he has the brains to see through the fog of lies and direct a clear path out of the NetZero farrago. But will his dozy cabinet let him and there are enough Tory MPs of limited intelligence to block any radical moves.
Problem is he is a WEF clone. Did you not see the ghastly photo of him and Trudeau fanboying Schwab? Puke making
The leaders of the West are nothing more than puppets of the globalist bankers, and that is why nothing ever changes whoever wins the elections.
Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are WEF.
https://www.weforum.org/people/rishi-sunak
https://www.weforum.org/people/keir-starmer
They read the same script on most of the main topics e.g. climate change, lockdowns, vaccines, Russia/China…..
Estimating Investments costs for wind to TOTALLY displace fossil fueled sources is an EASY calculation for any grid with wind already installed. Total investment = (Daily Peak demand / Wind’s minimum output) * Wind’s Current Investment cost
Using this formula I have seen ERCOT (Texas’s grid) investment costs range from a low of 35 fold to 5,500 fold. I have yet to see a renewables zealot address these costs estimates.
I address only wind since solar ends up with a division by ZERO error for every day the calculation is done.
Renewables are clearly not a solution without destroying the current grid and levying impossible costs to make them work. Just to remind readers this calculation can be done for any grid and will have similar results.