2024-05-17
It's pretty obvious that the assertions of cheap renewable power are somewhat adrift from reality when such assertions coincide with ever rising fuel bills, despite ever more "renewable" power installations, not to mention opaque subsidy schemes.
Either some middle-man is making a killing between power generation and delivery, or some cherry-picking of the definition of "costs" is involved, or total incompetence, outright fraud, or maybe all four ...
The continuing need for subsidies to make it all compatible with gas-powered generation (itself not exactly becoming any cheaper since the machinations around the Ukraine war), and the somewhat opaque government power pricing scheme that could have been designed to confuse the uninitiated, and one begins to see the scale of the deception.
David Turner (Daily Sceptic) puts it all into the realm of facts and figures for us.
It seems that most of the subsidies go to wind, which seems somehow appropriate, but we are still subsidising the burning of "biomass" - "trees" to normal people (perhaps they don't like to admit it?) which if left undisturbed could have reduced both costs and atmospheric carbon dioxide rather than increased both - I guess it takes a politician to understand how that "works".
Did I mention opaque government pricing?
"It should be noted that FiTs, ROCs and CfDs are all index-linked, so prices will continue to rise with inflation. It is clear our bills are going to continue to rise for the foreseeable future as cheap gas is forced out in favour of expensive renewables"
Did I mention the cherry-picking of figures to claim falling cost of renewables?
Oh, and of course the national grid will need to be remodelled to cope with connecting a vast array of highly dispersed intermittent renewable stations which by their nature will be operating neither reliably nor necessarily predictably, so the grid will have the additional task of shuffling the power to wherever it is actually needed, from whatever direction it may be available:
" ... the National Grid ESO has announced £54 billion of spending on the electricity network infrastructure up to 2030 and a further £58 billion in the 2030-2035 period, a total of £112 billion, or over £10 billion per year for more than a decade"
Naturally neither this nor the need to build excessive generation redundancy to mitigate intermittency / unpredictability is nothing to do with the "costs of renewables" even though in a gas-powered grid only a fraction of this work overall would be necessary.
Read the whole miserable story.
