Wind power hit by renewable energy certificate crash

28 December, 2010 by

Up in smoke

Another disaster for the green energy brigade, as the price of renewable energy certificates, essential for investment in wind power, sinks to a new low:

AT least $1.5 billion worth of investment in wind farms is in limbo after a collapse in the price of renewable energy certificates.

There is also uncertainty about when a revamp scheduled for next month will restore prices to viable levels.

And the nation’s biggest baseload renewable energy generator, the NSW Sugar Milling Co-operative, faces receivership by February unless the price paid for RECs almost doubles in the next three months. RECs effectively subsidise renewable energy projects such as wind farms and solar schemes, which receive one certificate for each megawatt of power they produce above a baseline set by the Office of Renewable Energy Regulator.

And what has caused the dramatic price drop? Oh noes, it’s another “green energy” scheme:

The low prices have been caused by a glut in RECs issued to households that have taken advantage of government-subsidised solar-panel installations. The collapse triggered a revamp of the entire RET scheme in February and prompted Climate Change Minister Greg Combet to wind back the solar credits program earlier this month. Uncertainty over the future of the RET comes as the new Victorian Liberal government takes a tougher line on planning approvals for wind farms, increasing the buffer between houses and turbines and declaring several mountainous and coast areas “no-go zones”. (source)

Bravo to the new Victorian government for slowing the wind farm nonsense, at least. And in other news, it’s heartwarming to see two lefty environmental action groups at each other’s throats:

The Greens candidate for the seat of Clarence says she is surprised and disappointed by a campaign to help Wooli residents deal with erosion.

The national advocacy body Get Up has launched campaign to try and block the Clarence Valley Council’s proposed strategy of a ‘planned retreat’.

Local candidate, Janet Cavanaugh, says the council’s policy to relocate residents to other areas of the village is the only ‘realistic’ approach.

“I would have expected from Get Up that they would have actually consulted with their local members before taking on what is a very complicated issue,” she said.

“I disagree with the fact that they are criticising the planned retreat as a legitimate form of climate change adaptation.

“They’re calling for alternatives, though the campaign is extremely vague on what those alternatives should be.”

Ms Cavanaugh says Get Up’s stance is misguided and will further confuse residents affected by erosion. (source)

Keep it up – saves us the bother.

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UK: Wind farm hell

12 October, 2010 by

Replace “wind” with “solar” and you have the carbon-priced future in Australia, except Australia doesn’t have a nuclear power backup for when it all goes horribly wrong. A truly enlightening, and shocking, video entitled “Europe’s Ill Wind” lifts the lid on the European wind farm fiasco. Thanks to the almost incomprehensible idiocy of politicians like Chris Huhne and Ed Miliband, the UK is heading towards deep Green oblivion. Last person to leave, please turn out the lights … no wait, they’ll be out already.

[hana-flv-player video=”http://blip.tv/file/get/Europesillwind-EIWfinal720993.flv”
width=”480″
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player=”4″
autoload=”true” autoplay=”false”
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Also, pay a visit to the web site: Europe’s Ill Wind, and leave a comment to show your support.

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UK Climate madness: build more wind farms!

11 September, 2010 by

Freaking useless, and expensive

The UK is way ahead of Australia in the climate madness stakes, having already enacted crippling legislation that will hamstring its energy policy by requiring 15% of its energy to be generated from “green” [i.e. useless] sources by 2020, and committing itself to a massive 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. But unfortunately, not everyone wants ugly wind farms in their back yards, and the planning system is grinding to a halt:

The planning system must allow more wind farms or Britain will fail to meet key climate change targets, Government advisers have warned.

The UK is committed to generating 15 per cent of energy from green sources like wind and solar by 2020.

But at the moment only 3 per cent of energy comes from renewables. [Only 12% to go in less than a decade – good luck with that!]

Lord Adair Turner, Chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), said the UK is likely to miss the target unless there is massive investment in wind, wave and solar.

In a strongly-worded letter to Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change Minister, he called for the Government to “ramp up” efforts to build turbines both on land and at sea.

He said the average wind farm is stuck for more than three years in the planning system. In the last year planning approval rates fell from 68 per cent to 53 per cent.

Despite concerns about wind farms in beauty spots, he said planning permission needs to be given faster so that three times as many turbines can be installed every year. (source)

I guess common-sense will eventually prevail at some point, when the utter lunacy of all this is too obvious to ignore, but how supposedly intelligent people can be so freaking dumb is quite frankly staggering.

Until that happens, however, it’s a case of “Adios”, Great Britain.

(h/t EU Referendum)

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Electricity prices "set to soar"

30 August, 2010 by

Freaking useless, and expensive

Thanks to feel-good Green policies, such as the renewable energy targets, which mean that electricity will have to be generated by useless wind turbines rather than plain-old efficient coal. Power bills are already creeping up, and it will only get worse, good people of Australia:

THE chief executive of one of the country’s biggest energy retailers has warned that power prices are set to increase dramatically.

Origin Energy boss Grant King said that complying with the mandatory renewable energy target (RET) and network spending would put upward pressure on energy prices.

“That’s not of our making, or anybody other than policymakers,” Mr King told The Australian.

“That’s just the inevitable and logical consequences of the policies” that governments are implementing.

His comments follow both federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson and his opposition counterpart Ian Macfarlane warning in separate interviews with this newspaper that power prices were likely to double in the next five to seven years.

Mr King said that estimate was “possibly conservative” and added that many consumers of utilities faced “a real come to Jesus moment” as suppliers were forced to re-price energy, water and other essential services.

The RET seeks to ensure that 20 per cent of Australia’s energy consumption by 2020 is derived from renewable sources.

Wind farms would cost between $100 and $125 per megawatt hour, compared with $30 to $40 per MWh for coal.

Moreover, the intermittent nature of wind means that it would need to be backed up with big-ticket investment in gas turbine power plants.

Mr King said he suspected that policymakers “didn’t truly know the cost” of policies that had been introduced.

Really? You don’t say.

Read it here.

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UK climate madness: Huhne wants more wind farms

29 July, 2010 by

Expensive, inefficient, ugly. Like Huhne.

Here in Aus, we haven’t yet got to this level of lunacy, but we’re well on the way. So as we watch the lights slowly fizzle out in the country formerly known as Great Britain, but which should now be known as piss-weak Britain [and I should add it is the country of my birth, so I don’t say that lightly], it is a salutary lesson to the rest of us.

The Conservative/Liberal coalition has only been in power for five minutes, but has already demonstrated that it is as nauseatingly deep green as the outgoing Labourites, if not worse. Christopher Booker is incredulous:

The penny is fast dropping that by far the most disastrous appointment made by David Cameron to his Coalition Cabinet was that of the ultra-green, Lib Dem millionaire Chris Huhne as our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

Yesterday, after Mr Huhne issued his first annual statement on Britain’s energy future, it was clear that we should all be very, very concerned about the future of Britain.

As was only too predictable, the overall theme of Mr Huhne’s message was that ‘climate change is the greatest global challenge we face’.

We must do everything we can and more to cut down very drastically on our ‘carbon emissions’, as we are now legally committed to do by the Climate Change Act – at a cost of £18 billion a year.

But in the real world, the £100 billion-plus energy question that confronts us all in Britain today is how we are going to fill that massive, fast-looming gap in our electricity supplies when the antiquated power stations which currently supply us with two-fifths of the power needed to keep our economy running are forced to close.

The headline answer given by Mr Huhne is that we must build thousands more giant wind turbines.

As a 24-carat green ideologue, he is viscerally opposed to replacing the ageing nuclear and coal-fired plants which currently provide us with more than half our electricity.

Like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown before him, he dreams we can somehow fill that gap by erecting 6,000 wind turbines in the seas around Britain’s shores, and thousands more across many of the most beautiful parts of our countryside.

What is truly terrifying about Mr Huhne as our energy minister is that he seems so astonishingly ignorant about even the most basic principles of how electricity is produced.

He boasts about how the 3,000 wind turbines we have already built have the ‘capacity’ to generate 4.5 gigawatts of electricity.

Capacity is the crucial word here. As he could see from figures on his own department’s website, thanks to the fact that the wind blows only intermittently, the amount of power these windmills actually produce is barely a quarter of that.

In other words, the amount of electricity generated by all those turbines put together, at a cost of billions of pounds, is no more than that provided by a single medium-size conventional power station – equivalent to a mere two per cent of the electricity we need.

The lights will be going out in the UK pretty soon.

READ IT ALL.

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Gillard wants more renewables to tackle climate change

28 June, 2010 by

Pushing renewables

Which means more money wasted on subsidising solar panels and wind farms, both hopeless for baseload electricity generation. But at least she talks vague sense on an ETS and acknowledges that there isn’t a consensus for a price on carbon… yet.

Labor sources have confirmed the focus of her pitch for the environment vote will be on renewables — boosting the use of solar and wind power to help meet the government’s pledge to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

But arguing that community consensus is “not there yet” on an ETS, Ms Gillard yesterday backed the need to put a price on carbon to encourage businesses to change their practices; she offered no timetable on delivering one.

The newly-installed Prime Minister said yesterday she accepted “my fair share” of the responsibility for the decision to delay the introduction of an ETS, a policy backflip that coincided with a collapse in Kevin Rudd’s polling.

Asked if it were true she had argued for the ETS to be dumped as part of the Rudd government’s powerful kitchen cabinet, Ms Gillard confirmed she had.

“I was concerned that if you were going to do something as big to your economy as put a price on carbon, with the economic transformation that implies, with changing the way in which we live, you need a lasting and deep community consensus to do it,” she told the Nine Network.

“And I don’t believe we have that lasting and deep community consensus now.

“Now, I believe we should have a price on carbon, and I will be prepared to argue for a price on carbon . . . so that we get to that lasting and deep community consensus, but we are not there yet.”

Ms Gillard pledged that she would soon be making further statements on new policy measures to “address the challenge of climate change”.

“I am not a denier — I am not a denier, but I’m someone who believes that you have got to take the community with you when you make lasting and deep changes,” she said.

All I can say is that it’s extraordinary to hear Gillard use the word “denier” in the context of her own beliefs, especially after her post-ETS vote down speech (see here).

Read it here.

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UK windfarms being paid to turn off turbines

21 June, 2010 by

Spectacular failure

No, you did read that correctly. Wind farms are being paid to turn off their turbines – even when the wind is blowing! But hang on a minute, isn’t wind power a key plank in the whole “green economy” that we’re seamlessly transitioning towards? Aren’t we supposed to be able to decommission our coal and gas fired power stations and rely on wind and solar instead? From the UK Telegraph:

Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing.

Critics of wind farms have seized on the revelation as evidence of the unsuitability of turbines to meet the UK’s energy needs in the future. They claim that the ‘intermittent’ nature of wind makes such farms unreliable providers of electricity.

The National Grid fears that on breezy summer nights, wind farms could actually cause a surge in the electricity supply which is not met by demand from businesses and households.

The electricity cannot be stored, so one solution – known as the ‘balancing mechanism’ – is to switch off or reduce the power supplied.

The system is already used to reduce supply from coal and gas-fired power stations when there is low demand. But shutting down wind farms is likely to cost the National grid – and ultimately consumers – far more. When wind turbines are turned off, owners are being deprived not only of money for the electricity they would have generated but also lucrative ‘green’ subsidies for that electricity.

The first successful test shut down of wind farms took place three weeks ago. Scottish Power received £13,000 for closing down two farms for a little over an hour on 30 May at about five in the morning.

Can we finally abandon this nonsensical “green economy” myth now please?

Read it here. (h/t WUWT)

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Bird shredders to blight "one in six beauty spots" in UK

17 January, 2010 by

Bird shredders at work

Gotta love them wind turbines. The moonbat Labour government of Gordon “On the Way Out” Brown is planning to spend GBP 10 billion on wind farms in order to “tackle global warming,” despoiling the British countryside in the process:

One in six of the UK’s officially-designated beauty spots could soon be blighted by wind farms, an investigation has found.

Out of 89 sites given special protection due to the quality of their landscape, planning permission for turbines has been approved or sought at 14.

Affected areas range from Cornwall and the Isle of Wight to the Lake District, the Outer Hebrides and the Shetland Islands. Campaigners claimed that the projects would spoil much-loved views and called for clearer rules on where wind farms can and cannot be built.

In England, out of 35 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs), four are the subject of a planning application for turbines. In one case the development would be within the AONB boundaries, in the other three it would be just outside but close enough to have a dramatic impact on the view enjoyed by visitors.

Among Scotland’s 40 designated National Scenic Areas (NSAs), six have already had turbines approved, one inside its boundaries and five just outside. One more is the subject of a planning application for a development inside its boundaries.

Out of nine AONBs in Northern Ireland, three are the subject of planning applications to build turbines within their boundaries.

Another kind of “dark satanic mills” on England’s green and pleasant land.

Read it here.

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