By Paul Homewood
AEP is off on his favourite hobby horse again!!
As usual it is full of the usual omissions and errors.
Every big recession over the last forty years has been a body blow for green energy and the climate cause.
On each occasion, the strategic abundance and plummeting cost of fossil fuels blunted the drive towards substitution. Renewable start-ups were shut out of the lending markets and typically went bankrupt – although their technologies survived.
The first reflex after the Lehman crash in 2008 was to lavish stimulus on the old incumbents and the car industry because that was the easiest way to stop the downward economic spiral. Europe’s carbon emissions contracts collapsed and ceased to be a relevant price signal for a decade.
Climate activists fear the worst again, and this time the world has no margin for error. They need not fear.
The balance of advantage now lies with the greens. The market has switched sides. Big Money is no longer aligned with Big Oil. It would take active political intervention and subsidies in favour of the fossil industry to prop up the old edifice at this juncture.
Read the full story here.
AEP does not get off to a very auspicious start, when he confuses “energy” with “electricity”.
Needless to say, his chart should say”electricity”. In terms of total energy, wind and solar only account for a tiny 3.5%.
He then goes on to repeat his claims that wind and solar are now the cheapest source of new build power, somehow ignoring the fact that when subsidies were withdrawn in the UK new build wind and solar dried up to near zero.
More fundamentally though, he fails to understand that to make a true comparison you need to allow for the indirect costs of renewables – the cost of standby capacity, transmission costs, grid balancing etc.
Showing a complete lack of expertise in the area of power supply, he tries to compare the cost of wind/solar with OCGT:
How is natural gas going to compete with this renewable onslaught? The LCOE of open-cycle gas turbines is today around $99 in the US
But OCGTs are designed as small scale peakers, not for baseload, which is where CCGTs come in.
He then compounds his lack of knowledge by claiming that batteries can solve the problem of intermittency:
With a delay we are seeing the same trajectory for battery storage. BNEF says levelized costs have halved over the last two years. They have dropped to $115 Mw/H in China. Energy storage will be so cheap by the mid-2020s that the "intermittency" problem will wither away.
Perhaps somebody should tell him that battery storage simply does not have the capacity to supply power for the days and weeks needed when wind and solar are not running at the required rates. That is why the role of batteries is limited to short term grid balancing, usually for minutes or at most an hour or so.
He then moves on to electric cars, which he assures us will be the future, even though they are pretty much useless for most of the population, and pose challenges for the Grid for which there are currently no answers.
It is true of course that the move to EVs is being driven by governments and not for economic reasons. Such an obsession though will lead to an extremely dangerous reliance on China for battery supplies and materials. Given recent experiences, pursuing such a strategy would be short sighted to say the least. In the meantime, car manufacturers in Europe are close to going under as their traditional markets are taken away.
His whole argument is really based around the Paris Agreement:
The Paris accord has shifted global politics irreversibly. So has last year’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that the CO2 risk thresholds are even lower than we feared and that we have just a decade to head off cataclysmic tipping points.
Whatever we think about the IPCC, the harsh political reality is that absolutely nothing has changed since Paris, as far as real politik is concerned. China, India and the rest of the developing world have no interest in ditching their fossil fuel powered economies.
The EU can huff and puff, but it is increasingly becoming an irrelevance on the global scene.
Which brings us on to the German industry federation, the BDI. AEP writes:
The German industry federation (BDI) is mischievously trying to do exactly that. It never liked Europe’s Green Deal. It is now exploiting the fear and economic confusion of Covid-19 to try to finish off the whole venture.
The BDI claims that the wrenching adjustments needed to comply with cuts of 50pc to 55pc in greenhouse emissions by 2030 (compared to 1990) are unachievable and must be reviewed urgently in light of “changed economic circumstances”.
A supporting chorus of politicians from Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats – the brown bloc – warn that the Green Deal is “simply not financially plausible” any longer and risks the deindustrialisation of Germany. They want an overhaul of all environmental legislation.
Whether they win their battle or not does not alter the harsh economic realities which they understand far better than AEP. With the damage from CV already mounting up, blind pursuit of the green agenda really does risk deindustrialisation, and not just in Germany.
AEP repeats Ursula van der Leyen’s economically illiterate assertion that the green deal is the motor for recovery. I’m not sure I would rely on Ursula, given her track record.
But this recession, like every other in recent decades, will be see a recovery based on cheap and readily available supplies of fossil fuels.
AEP’s proposals will make matters much worse, as they rely on government picking winners, a recipe for disaster.
Above all they will lead to massive dislocation of economies, with some sectors and jobs allowed to go to the wall.
The bottom line is that wind and solar power only supply 3% of the world’s energy. There is not a cat in hell’s chance that this will alter significantly in the foreseeable future.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
April 30, 2020 at 09:15AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 