AEP’s Green Juggernaut
By Paul Homewood
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Isn’t this the same load of old twaddle we get every year from AEP?
The dogs bark, the caravan moves on. Beyond a superficial wobble in Europe, there has been no retreat from the post-fossil fuel transition across the world.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) estimates that capex investment in clean energy was $1.2 trillion in 2021, $1.5 trillion in 2022, and $1.8 trillion in 2023, despite a stiff rise in interest rates and a credit crunch for green start-ups. The total is now over three times as much as upstream capex on oil and gas.
You would scarcely know it from the political noise but the pace of decarbonisation accelerated last year, and has crossed a critical threshold.
The renewable energy roll-out is running near 800 gigawatts (GW) a year, greater than the 700 GW annual increase in power consumption.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/02/13/worlds-green-juggernaut-unstoppable-clean-tech/
Poor old Ambrose is getting confused between GW CAPACITY and GWh GENERATION! So I don’t have a clue what he is trying to say in that final sentence.
The world consumes about 29000 TWh of electricity every year, of which wind and solar account for about 10%. Demand for electricity has been increasing at a rate of about 600 TWh.
Despite increasing sixfold since 2011, the share of wind and solar is still tiny, at 12%:
BP Energy Review
We can get a better idea from the year-on-year changes:
Apart from the lockdown year of 2020, generation from non-renewable sources has carried increasing each year. However renewables have supplied most of the increased demand since 2019. There is therefore nothing new in AEP’s claim that they will do so again this year.
However AEP is still under the illusion that a modern electricity grid can simply run on intermittent renewables. It can’t, regardless of how cheap solar power might be.
No doubt the share of renewables will continue to slowly grow, but the idea that we will soon see the end of fossil fuels is a fantasy. He rattles on about all of the hundreds of billions being spent on renewables. But as John Hindraker pointed out last year, the return on all of these billions is tiny. Without all of the subsidies thrown at renewables, it is questionable whether any of this investment would have taken place:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/07/there-is-no-transition.php
AEP’s comments about storage show how little he understands about our electricity grid:
He clearly does not understand that batteries are not capable of storing the power we need for weeks on end when the wind stops blowing, regardless of how cheap they are.
As for “carbon capture and some green hydrogen”, yes we could certainly build a 100 GW fleet of CCGTs fitted with CCS, (though whether they would work is another matter!). The capital cost would probably be more than £100 billion, which is a lot of money for plant that will be sat idle for weeks on end. And if you are going to spend that money, why bother wind farms?
Indeed why even bother with carbon capture which needs a lot of energy?
As for hydrogen, he obviously does not have a clue about the incredibly large amounts which would have to stored, or the amount of extra wind power we would need to produce it. And of course you would also need to build hydrogen-fired CCGTs.
In his little dreamworld, AEP thinks that the home made €20,000 EV is just around the corner. Maybe he imagines we’ll all be driving golf carts!
If all of this has not convinced you that AEP has totally lost the plot, just read his final paragraphs:
How much longer can the Telegraph let AEP carry on writing this drivel?
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
It sure is AEP’s usual twaddle, and 80% of his readers are telling this dummy that he lives in cloud cuckoo land. Ambrose Eternally Pontificating.
I’ve never read such twaddle, is China writing his utter gibberish? The THOUSANDS of comments following tell a very different story; people with real expertise know what’s going on, not fooled by the Tories’ Nut Zero.
Thanks Paul, I skimmed his article earlier, knowing not to waste too much time on it.
Critical threshold; tipping point; no turning back; get on the band-wagon or fall under it; one last heave; it will be all over by Christmas…
Squire Haggard, as recorded in his Diary*, had the right approach to such humbugging salesmen, but he sometimes took it too far:
“A.M Howling storm. Seth and his entire idiot family died of the purulent strangles. Sent for Vicar to arrange paupers’ burials. Sent for more port wine.
P.M. Shot two approaching scarecrow figures.
NIGHT TIME. Roof blew off. Vicar never came. Not properly drunk, due to lack of port.”
I like “Tories Nut Zero.” Had not heard that one.
*Edited and Annotated by Peter Simple.
“The renewable energy roll-out is running near 800 gigawatts (GW) a year, greater than the 700 GW annual increase in power consumption..“
As this is wind and solar the combined capacity factor is probably around 25% of nameplate capacity: ie only 200 GW.
Assuming his consumption figure is the increase in demand spread over the hours of the year then the additional capacity is only equivalent to less than 30% of the demand increase. Then there’s the intermittency issue……..
And there’s the key point. If demand is increasing at 700 and renewable supply by 200, then non renewable supply is increasing by over twice that of renewables! That he fails to understand this basic point demonstrates he is a fanatic.
Even his own graph shows that renewables are not making any real dent in the total of >25000TWh, as as “Ren” grows, so to does “Others”.
Fortunately I will not live long enough to see this all go badly wrong (ten years if I am very lucky). But my grand daughter will.
How will these people make amends?
I am in exactly the same position but I would rather like to live long enough to see it all go wrong, primarily to see the culprits pilloried. And I would extend that to the jab-perps, war-hawks and the build-back-better-with-fewer-people psychos.
I would rather we sceptics created enough fuss and noise now to try and prevent it all going (further) wrong, as it won’t be fixed for decades after that realisation, so our grandchildren will still likely suffer the consequences.
Wholly agree. Or aims are not mutually exclusive.
I don’t understand why the Telegraph continues to employ AE-P. He writes rubbish and doesn’t understand that power is not the same as energy (a bit like the BBC and Grauniad). Most commenters at the Telegraph agree that he is an idiot and that he writes a load of nonsense.
All these institutions know that power comes from a nozzle of a gun.
This is likely an ego problem, having backed wind power early on he just won’t admit defeat. Him and Warner of the DT are very similar, Warner won’t let go on Brexit being bad, AEP supports it, now Warner is anti net zero, even a broken clock is right sometimes.
“Isn’t this the same load of old twaddle we get every year from AEP?“
As - still – a regular reader of the Torygraph, I’d say – ‘No. More like every month!’
I don’t read AEP much beyond the first couple of paragraphs these days – he’s practically unhinged. Nor The ‘Sitwell’ character, brought in for some reason on Saturdays: I suppose they couldn’t get anyone who hasn’t done a creative writing class: any point he had originally being lost in the flowery over-use of adverbs and adjectives. Sad.
Auto
I agree, it seems to be every month. I never fully read his articles, the comments are far more informative.
Impressed that you can get that far….
“Well, he’s just an excitable boy“
‘Beyond a superficial wobble in Europe, there has been no retreat from the post-fossil fuel transition across the world.‘
Wut? Petitio principii.
The world isn’t playing your silly game. China producing for your market doesn’t make it worldwide.
Please find out what the author is drinking, unlike Absinthe induced comas, these dreams and fantasies are seriously worrying- he obviously believes that unknown technology will suddenly appear from nowhere. The World is changing, we are moving towards a period of shared generation- Wind, Solar, Hydro, Tidal, Gas, Coal & Nuclear all will contribute but we must stop the subsidies to non Fossil generators as this is distorting the Energy market.
Carbon Capture is interesting but we need to work out what to do once captured- this is the challenge we should concentrate on – but let’s not lose sight of the simple fact – CO2 is plant food and we need to ensure a minimum CO2 level of at least 600ppm.
“The renewable energy roll-out is running near 800 gigawatts (GW) a year, greater than the 700 GW annual increase in power consumption.“
That the editing staff allowed such gibberish to be printed in the DT says a lot about how low the quality of the paper has fallen
Those millions without electricity burn ‘traditional biomass’ ie local wood and dung. This produces THREE TIMES the global energy than all the solar panels and windmills on the planet. NOT very creditable.
Billions.
https://energypedia.info/wiki/Cooking_with_Dung#:~:text=More%20than%202%20billion%20people%20across%20the,planet%20burn%20dried%20animal%20dung%20for%20energy.
More than 2 billion people across the planet burn dried animal dung for energy[1].
I should think “local biomass” produces way more than 3 times solar. Like 300,000 times more.
Indeed, an illuminating statistic I spotted.
Solar panels in California 40.5TWh, solar panels in whole of Africa 18.5TWh, 2022 figures, luxury, niche electricity.
Meanwhile Africa sells coal to Europe while IMF and World Bank deny loans for real power stations in Africa to exploit the abundant hydrocarbon deposits.
Unreliable energy means unreliable water supplies and unreliable food and medicine storage.
Peoples Climate Jury .
This appeared in my you tube recommendations. It is a presentation made today to the Preston Peoples Climate Jury. All about flooding and how we are all going to die because of climate change. The presenter is a former Chief Exec of the Environment Agency. As an example of how bad it is it he gives as an example of the increasing flood risk as Canvey Island and the upgrading of defences without mentioning at any time the 1953 storm surge (nothing to do with climate) which was the reason for the upgrade.
Preston People’s Climate Jury | Session two, John Curtin. “Climate Change and flooding in England” – YouTube
What made me laugh is in the text below the video on you tube where it gives details of the presenter it says “John has also held the roles of Executive Director of Flood and Coastal Risk Management at the Environment Agency and Director of Indecent Management and Resilience”. my bold.. what is indecent management??
what a load of b*ll*cks and a waste of money
But its not being driven by the people, the consumer or industry …its driven by WEF and governments
“It is more likely than not.”
That is simply false. There is virtually no evidence it MIGHT happen, let alone that it probably will. And “latest research” means it hasn’t been reproduced or replicated, nor has its predictions been shown to be correct. So “latest” means least valuable.
The AMOC is just twaddle from models that has been taken to pieces on WUWT.
Fiat has stopped 500e production as sales drop to join other companies who have paused production of cars that are proving hard to sell. As to this mythical £20k car – where is this coming from? China could dump cheap cars here for a while to kill off the European industry.
Of course AEP is too stupid to see that Kneeler ‘How many U-turns?’ ‘How many more MPs will be suspended’ Starmer’s 100% clean energy by 2030 – less than SIX years – is utterly impossible to deliver.
Reading AEP is like visiting a parallel universe. Bizarre.
3 could in tfirst couple of lines in the last paragraph
Yes, the Climate Change Juggernaut is unstoppable. Too many elites are behind it.
But its destination never gets any nearer.
Ambrose Evans Pritchard surmises that NetZero is now so far advanced that it cannot be stopped. How many times have we heard of an acceptance of theories that have subsequently been proved false. From the global belief in the cause of stomach ulcers till Marshall and Warren’s discovery of Heliobacter pylori. To Darwin’s pronouncement of natural selection which destroyed centuries of erroneous thought. How long will it be before the World accepts what the Chinese know that the comforting theory of manmade dangerous global warming is wrong and that the climate is changing naturally and very gradually.
Last year Bill Gates estimated that it would cost $200 trillion for the world to achieve net zero, almost certainly a massive underestimation of the true cost. If current investment in renewables is $1.8 trillion a year and slowly increasing, as AEP claims, the world might reach net zero by roughly 2100, not 2050 as is claimed to be essential to stop us all frying/drowning or otherwise dying hideously.