IN 2017 it was introduced that windfarms had agreed to promote energy to the grid at simply £57 per megawatt hour. It heralded, stated the cutters-and-pasters of press releases within the mainstream media, a brand new period of low cost renewable energy. A number of cussed souls identified that there was no signal that windfarms had been getting any cheaper to construct and run, however such naysayers had been shunned and insulted, and the institution carried on as if nothing had occurred.
5 years on, and the windfarms involved are busily promoting energy into the open market at something between 4 and ten occasions the costs they’d agreed. Their agreements have gone unfulfilled. The additional price to customers is operating into billions of kilos yearly.
We had been tricked, large time. However we reside and study by our errors. You’d must be fairly gradual on the uptake to fall for a multi-billion-pound trick like {that a} second time, wouldn’t you?
Sadly, that is exactly what Sir John Armitt, the chairman of the Nationwide Infrastructure Fee, appears to have performed. In truth, quite than being ‘as soon as bitten twice shy’, he appears to be pleading ‘Chunk me more durable, and this time do it the place is de facto hurts.’ Let me clarify.
In an article within the Telegraph, Sir John says we want heaps extra renewable vitality, and provides that the most recent auctions ‘secured costs 9 occasions cheaper than present excessive electrical energy costs set by gasoline era’. Nicely, sure, however we’ve already seen that public sale value contracts are a trick; the final spherical of agreements had been deserted the second operators discovered they might get extra within the open market. Does Sir John not know this? Can the chairman of the Nationwide Infrastructure Fee actually be so divorced from the realities of the vitality system? Furthermore, he clearly understands that the worth differential between gas-fired and wind costs is generally momentary – a perform of the conflict in Ukraine driving up gasoline costs – however nonetheless believes it ought to inspire everlasting adjustments to the electrical energy system. What can he be pondering?
Sir John’s positions on different facets of the vitality system are equally mystifying. He appears to assume there’s a world marketplace for gasoline. However a worldwide market would have a worldwide value, and that’s merely not the case: European gasoline costs are (in greenback phrases) at the moment 70 per cent greater than UK ones and 800 per cent greater than US ones (!) Does Sir John not perceive this? How can he presumably assume there’s a world market? Is there no one on the Nationwide Infrastructure Fee who can put him proper?
Neither is the public sale value trick the one instance of Sir John failing to study from expertise. In a single notable flight of fantasy in his article he says that ‘lowering costs, enhancing vitality safety and reaching web zero carbon emissions by 2050 all level in the identical course’. Huh? Between 2002 and 2020, a interval when gasoline costs had been broadly flat, electrical energy costs for customers roughly doubled, a perform of the inefficiencies that renewables impose on each different generator and on the grid as an entire. How can he assume that extra renewables will deliver decrease costs? He understands that the gasoline value spike is momentary! And as for safety, the electrical energy grid has been severely destabilised by renewables (as a result of they don’t have any ‘inertia’, within the jargon). One million folks had been left at the hours of darkness in 2019, and the grid as complete is now at risk of falling over fully. However Sir John needs extra!
In related trend, he says we needs to be furiously insulating our housing inventory. But we merely can’t get away from the truth that a lot of the housing inventory is outdated and, in our humid maritime local weather, must breathe to forestall damp and mold. Has Sir John not realized from the fiasco the final time a crash insulation programme was tried? Two million houses had been broken. Lives had been ruined. Is he even conscious that this occurred?
On and on he goes. We should always use hydrogen to retailer vitality, he suggests, with out apparently a thought to the fee concerned. Can the chairman of the Nationwide Infrastructure Fee actually not perceive that in going from electrical energy to hydrogen and again, two-thirds of the vitality is misplaced? So once we begin emptying the hydrogen retailer, it’s going to set market costs, which is able to soar in response, in all probability to ranges much like what we see in the present day, far, far greater than the financial system can bear.
In different phrases, Sir John’s concepts will ship a everlasting vitality disaster and a fantastic despair. It’s not more than you’ll count on from such an epitome of the British institution: urbane, erudite, a consummate networker. And completely incompetent.
