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"The climate scaremongers: Cheap wind power myth is blown away"

<https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-climate-scaremongers-cheap-wind- power-myth-is-blown-away/>

"THE myth that our energy bills would come tumbling down thanks to the abundance of cheap offshore wind power has finally been blown to
smithereens by the failure of the latest auction for the Contracts for Difference subsidy scheme to attract any bidders. The government’s price
cap of £44/MWh at 2012 prices (about £60 at current prices) was simply
not economically viable.

This follows the Swedish energy firm Vattenfall’s recent decision to
cancel its giant 1.4 GW Norfolk Boreas project before construction had
begun. Boreas had been awarded a CfD in last year’s round.

For years we have been promised that ultra-cheap wind power was just
around the corner. In 2020 Dr Malte Jansen of the Centre for
Environmental Policy at Imperial College London claimed: ‘Offshore wind
power will soon be so cheap to produce that it will undercut fossil-
fuelled power stations and may be the cheapest form of energy for the
UK.’ Last year the Guardian bragged that the cost of offshore wind had
fallen yet again, to just £37/MWh.

All these claims, of course, derived from the annual auctions for the
Contracts for Difference subsidy scheme. What the cheerleaders had not
realised was that the wind farms were under no legal obligation to honour
these contracts. Instead those companies which bid low are now selling at
the much higher market price.

In this latest auction round, however, this loophole was removed, and
bidders would have been forced to honour their contracts. As a result,
they have pulled out of the auction, and are now demanding much bigger subsidies.

There never was any evidence that the true cost of offshore wind was as
low as the auction prices suggested. Independent analysis has long
concluded that the real cost is between £80 and £100/MWh, and this does
not take account of the wider system costs of integrating intermittent
wind power, maybe as much as another £50/MWh. Gas-fired power is
currently about £80/MWh.

It is not only the UK where the wind industry is struggling to match expectations. In the US developers such as Shell and Avangrid are pulling
out of contracts to build offshore wind farms. The giant Danish wind
company Oersted has lost a third of its market value since warning two
weeks ago that it may be writing down its assets by up to $2.3billion on
its US projects. European turbine makers are also in trouble, appearing
to have woefully underestimated the costs and problems of building large turbines for operation offshore, where conditions are much more severe.

In stark contrast to the promises of the renewable lobby, subsidies for offshore wind are expected to add nearly £5billion to our energy bills
this year.

In large part, the wind industry has been hoist by its own petard, with
the government believing all of its propaganda about falling costs. Now,
thanks to the government’s obsession with renewables and its closure of
coal power capacity, it may have little choice but to cave into the
industry’s demands for greater subsidies.

Meanwhile our energy bills will continue to rocket.

September heatwaves

IT WAS certainly exceptionally hot last week, but even with thermometers
next to airport runways, main roads and in the middle of London, the
highest temperature the Met Office could come up with was 33.2C (91.8F)
at Kew.

It was much hotter in September 1906, when the temperature reached 96F at Bawtry in South Yorkshire, still a UK record for the month. That heatwave lasted five days from August 30 to September 3, and covered the whole
country, from Scotland and Ireland to the south of England.

In contrast, temperatures last week did not appear to get above the mid
80s at most for much of the country. The Central England Temperature
series, for example, peaked at only 84F.

Monthly Weather Report of the Meteorological Office


Maybe even more remarkable were the three September heatwaves in 1911,
which were the culmination of an exceptionally hot summer.


Mean temperatures in July/August were a full 2C higher in 1911 than this
year.

I have no doubt that in due course the Met Office will highlight this
year’s heatwaves in June and this month, and claim they are evidence of
climate change. I doubt that they will mention the summer of 1911, much
less explain how it could happen in the absence of climate change.

Another day, another £65billion!

WHEN the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008, and upgraded to ‘Net
Zero’ four years ago, there was no attempt to estimate the costs
involved, nor any technical plan as to how the targets were going to be achieved.

Even now the government refuses to treat the matter of costs in any
serious fashion, instead pretending that the country will end up being
better off eventually, thanks to all those lovely green jobs and a
booming, world-leading green economy.

What our economy will look like in 30 years is something nobody can know,
but it is becoming increasingly apparent that we are all going to be much
worse off in the foreseeable future, certainly the next decade or so. And
we are finding more problems which were not anticipated at the start.

This week the Daily Telegraph reported that it could cost £65billion to decommission Britain’s gas grid, a 176,000-mile network of buried pipes.
This is according to a draft National Infrastructure Report. It says that unused pipes must be removed or they risk decay and experts fear the
potential collapse of roads. At the moment the network is properly
maintained, with the cost included in our gas bills.

Quite who is expected to pay this bill which, knowing what we do about
public infrastructure projects, is probably a gross underestimate, is
another matter. It works out at £2,300 per household.

Logistically it will be a nightmare too, with districts being turned off
one by one. I could mention the traffic chaos as roads are dug up in town
after town, but I doubt whether many of us will be able to afford cars by
then.

"

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