Sunday 12 August 2012 Saturday 11 August 2012The great wind delusion
We were, of course, not supposed to notice that, at one point last week, Britain’s 3,500 turbines were contributing 12 megawatts (MW) to the 38,000MW of electricity we were using. (The Neta website, which carries official electricity statistics, registered this as "0.0 percent").
And, although the utter fatuity of the "dash for wind" is well known now, it is some ten years since Booker first pointed out craziness of it all. It was pure wishful thinking then and is even more obviously so now, when the Government in its latest energy statement talks of providing, on average, 12,300MW of power from "renewables" by 2020.
What can't be emphasised enough is that this is utterly delusional. We have a government which, as a matter of policy, is declaring that cannot be done. There is no way it could hope to build more than a fraction of the 30,000 turbines required to meet that insane target.
And then, as the windless days last week showed, we would also have to build dozens of gas-fired power stations just to provide back-up for all the times when the wind is not blowing at the right speed.
But, says Booker, as more and more informed observers have been pointing out, the ministers and officials of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) seem to live in a bubble of unreality, without any practical grasp of how electricity is made, impervious to rational argument and driven by an obsession that can only end in our computer-dependent economy grinding to a halt.
The latest attempt to get them to face reality is by Prof Gordon Hughes, a former senior adviser on energy to the World Bank, now a professor of economics at Edinburgh, who recently gave evidence to the Commons committee on energy and climate change.
His most shocking finding is that the pursuit of our Climate Change Act target – to reduce Britain’s CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2050 – would cost us all £124 billion by 2020, or £5,000 for every household in the land: not just to build tens of thousands of absurdly subsidised wind turbines, but also for the open-cycle gas-fired power stations needed to provide back-up.
Yet, to guarantee the same amount of power from combined-cycle gas-fired plants would cost £13 billion, barely a tenth as much.
Furthermore, as Prof Hughes explains, ramping the back-up gas plants up and down would mean running them very inefficiently, and give off so much CO2 that we could end up increasing our overall emissions rather than reducing them. And who is expected to build them or pay for them?
Now, though, for the "killer". The likelihood that any of this will be understood by those in charge of our national policy can be measured by the fact that the chairman of that Commons committee is Tim Yeo, whose business interests show that last year he earned, on top of his MP’s wages, more than £100,000 by working – at up to £800 an hour – for firms which make money out of renewables.
When Peter Lilley MP raised Prof Hughes's figures in the Commons, he was contemptuously put down by the DECC minister Charles Hendry, saying that he did not agree with Prof Hughes (on grounds which showed he hadn't understood the points at issue at all) – and, he added, "neither does the Committee on Climate Change".
The new chairman of this committee, set up under the Climate Change Act, is Lord Deben (formerly John Gummer), whose various lucrative activities relating to the environment include his chairmanship of Forewind, an international consortium planning the world’s largest offshore wind farm, with thousands of turbines, on the Dogger Bank.
Thus, the promoters of the wind industry have managed to occupy all the commanding heights of our energy policy, and the only way it might conceivably be brought back into any contact with reality would be through a massive and well-informed counter-attack by a large number of those elected to represent us in Parliament.
But as we learn from the letters on the Climate Change Act recently sent to Booker by his readers by more than 70 MPs, they seem to be just as firmly locked into the bubble of make-believe as those who framed these delusional policies in the first place.
Interestingly, Booker has now been asked by an Oxford academic, specialising in the interface between science and politics, whether she could undertake a detailed analysis of these letters, to see what they tell us about the degree to which our MPs grasp one of the most critical issues confronting our country.
In due course, Booker hopes to report on the results but, already, we fear they will not be very encouraging. We already know that parliament has completely failed to do its job here, making this one of the reasons why we can no longer tryst MPs. If they can't be trusted on this crazy issue, how they be trusted on anything else?
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 12/08/2012 Eurocrash: Germany holds the key
And, according to Die Welt, the stresses are building to intolerable levels, the paper saying that Merkel is going to have to choose between keeping her coalition going and saving the euro. She is not going to be able to do both.
With the EU now being called, in derogatory terms a "liability union", "it is not clear" how Merkel can convince her troops to approve her rescue programme. Every additional million that flows to Athens destroys the credibility of her centre party.
Handelsblatt is basically saying the same thing although, oddly enough, this is nothing new in German politics. We were writing in similar terms in May 2004, which just goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun.
What is new, though, is talk of an EU referendum in Germany. Raised in June by Schäuble in an interview in Der Spiegel, and then by others, we find Reuters reporting that support is growing for a referendum on further European integration.
Earlier in the week, leader of the opposition Social Democrats (SPD), Sigmar Gabriel, backed the idea. And latest of the politicians to repeat the call is Horst Seehofer, the head of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, the sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU). He is saying that ordinary Germans should be consulted more on big European decisions, emphasising that the EU could not remain a "project of the elite".
Der Spiegel, which broached the referendum meme on June, is now assessing the odds, also citingThe Economist, which is offering a trivial piece, backed by an editorial which asserts that, "for all you know, Angela Merkel is even now contemplating how to break up the euro".
Greece is buckling, it says, much of southern Europe is also in pain, while the northern creditor countries are becoming ever less forgiving: in a recent poll a narrow majority of Germans favoured bringing back the Deutschmark. A chaotic disintegration would be a calamity. Even as Mrs Merkel struggles to find a solution, her aides are surely also sensibly drawing up a plan to prepare for the worst.
As always, though, the grasp of European politics is scant, and the role of the EU institutions under-played. And, while German politics are doubtless going to play a crucial part in the EU's fate in the short-term, which we ourselves acknowledge in our opening, the likes of Barroso and van Rompuy have yet to make their plays.
However, in an event that has an interesting historical resonances, on 25 July, Merkel opened theBayreuth Festival, the annual Wagner fest which offered drama every bit as gripping as that to come with the fall of Greece.
Another notable to attend the festival on the brink of great events was Adolf Hitler. On 23 July 1940 – just as the Battle of Britain was unfolding - he attended a performance of Wagner's Götterdämmerung– the last time in his life he was ever to see a live performance of Wagner.
His childhood friend, Augustus Kubizek, recalled the chancellor telling him: "I am still tied up by the war. But, I hope it won't last much longer and then I'll be able to build again and to carry out what remains to be done".
Thus year, Merkel could have been thinking much the same, with the long war for European union once again interfering with the leader's plans. What comes round goes round. The current chancellor, politically at least, may not survive the experience either.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 11/08/2012
Sunday, 12 August 2012
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