Rural communities are sick and tired of becoming roadkill for the wind industry, and that includes the nomadic Sami – who graze and herd reindeer across northern Europe’s frozen tundra, ranging across the north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula.

The fact that chaotically intermittent wind power can’t be delivered as and when power consumers need it means the wanton destruction of pristine wilderness, bucolic landscapes, rural communities, and millions of birds and bats (including plenty of species on the brink of extinction) is pretty hard to justify.

In the frozen North, the Sami are fighting back, in an effort to prevent their homeland from being overrun by the industrial onslaught that is the wind industry. Instead of buying the usual lies and hollow promises from the wind power outfit concerned, they’re heading to Court, in an effort to protect their ancestral homes from becoming an industrial wasteland – and prevent their reindeer grazing enterprise becoming a thing of the past.

Reindeer herders say they will sue to halt Norway’s largest wind farm
Artic Today
Kevin McGwin
1 July 2020

A group of Sámi reindeer herders in Norway say they intend to seek legal action against the owners of what is to be that country’s largest wind farm for violating their rights by hindering reindeer migration between winter and summer feeding grounds.

The announcement on Friday from the herders of the Jillen-Njaarke district in Nordland County, with the backing of Motvind, a Norwegian anti-wind-power group, comes amid increasing tensions with Eolus, the Swedish-German owner of the Øyfjellet project.

Eolus, which was granted permission in 2016 to erect 72 turbines across an area measuring 40 square kilometers, was cleared in December to begin construction, provided the firm could reach an agreement by March 11 with reindeer herders that would allow passage of their 2,000 reindeer this past spring as they migrated the 12 kilometers to their spring grazing areas.

That has not happened, according to the herders, who also complain that Eolus violated the terms of its agreement with the Norwegian state granting it permission to build the wind farm when it failed to stop construction of a 11-kilometer access road passing through a migration route to let reindeer pass this spring.

According to Eolus’ version of events, the herders were initially told that construction would be halted between April 10 and 16, in connection a series of public holidays. When the herd had not migrated past by that point, Eolus was given permission by regulators to resume work.

When the firm was informed on April 27 that the reindeer were ready to move through, construction was stopped that evening, and resumed again on the evening of April 29, after the main herd had passed through.

The herders say being told when and how much time they have to move their animals is a violation of their rights. Their complaint is supported by county officials, who told regulators that migrations are determined by weather and grazing conditions, and that they could not be planned ahead of time.

The herders demand that construction of the wind farm stop immediately and that plans for the wind farm be canceled.

Due to come on-line in 2021, the Øyfjellet wind farm would [on those occasions when the wind was at an optimal speed] produce energy for a nearby Alcoa aluminium smelter, which has pledged to purchase all of the power it produces for a period of 15 years [but will have to look elsewhere on the hundreds of occasions each when the wind farm will be producing absolutely nothing].

A crowdfunding campaign launched on Sunday to raise funds for a lawsuit was more than 90 percent towards meeting its goal of 500,000 kroner on Tuesday. Motvind, however, reckoned it would need 10 million kroner to cover legal fees and to be able to pay any compensation, should it wind up losing.

The threatened lawsuit comes after repeated attempts, most recently in June, between Eolus and the herders to reach an agreement that would allow them access or secure them compensation.

According to Eolus, the herders are the last of about a hundred groups affected by the wind farm that it has not reached an agreement with regarding access.

The herders say the burden of coming up with a viable agreement remains with Eolus.

“[Eolus] admitted they didn’t see a solution. To that I would say that the project owner has the responsibility to come up with a solution, not us,” Torstein Appfjell, a spokesperson for the Jillen-Njaarke herders, told NRK.

Earlier this year, a group of herders in Trøndelag were awarded 90 million kroner in compensation when they lost access to their grazing areas entirely due to construction of a wind farm. Appfjell, however, also underscored that Jillen-Njaarke herders said the point of their suit to prove that setting conditions on when their reindeer could pass through the wind farm violated their constitutional rights.
Artic Today

Norway’s Sami: take the wind industry by the horns.

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July 31, 2020 at 02:31AM

Ebru Kirezci, University of Melbourne and Ian Young, University of Melbourne

Over the past two weeks, storms pummelling the New South Wales coast have left beachfront homes at Wamberal on the verge of collapse. It’s stark proof of the risks climate change and sea level rise pose to coastal areas.

Our new research published today puts a potential price on the future destruction. Coastal land affected by flooding – including high tides and extreme seas – could increase by 48% by 2100. Exposed human population and assets are also estimated to increase by about half in that time.

Under a scenario of high greenhouse gas emissions and no flood defences, the cost of asset damage could equate up to 20% of the global economy in 2100.

Without a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, or a huge investment in sea walls and other structures, it’s clear coastal erosion will devastate the global economy and much of the world’s population.

In Australia, we predict the areas to be worst-affected by flooding are concentrated in the north and northeast of the continent, including around Darwin and Townsville.

Our exposed coasts

Sea levels are rising at an increasing rate for two main reasons. As global temperatures increase, glaciers and ice sheets melt. At the same time, the oceans absorb heat from the atmosphere, causing the water to expand. Seas are rising by about 3-4 millimetres a year and the rate is expected to accelerate.

These higher sea levels, combined with potentially more extreme weather under climate change, will bring damaging flooding to coasts. Our study set out to determine the extent of flooding, how many people this would affect and the economic damage caused.

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Read more: The world may lose half its sandy beaches by 2100. It’s not too late to save most of them

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We combined data on global sea levels during extreme storms with projections of sea level rises under moderate and high-end greenhouse gas emission scenarios. We used the data to model extreme sea levels that may occur by 2100.

We combined this model with topographic data (showing the shape and features of the land surface) to identify areas at risk of coastal flooding. We then estimated the population and assets at risk from flooding, using data on global population distribution and gross domestic product in affected areas.

Alarming findings

So what did we find? One outstanding result is that due to sea level rise, what is now considered a once-a-century extreme sea level event could occur as frequently as every ten years or less for most coastal locations.

Under a scenario of high greenhouse gas emissions and assuming no flood defences, such as sea walls, we estimate that the land area affected by coastal flooding could increase by 48% by 2100.

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Read more: Water may soon lap at the door, but still some homeowners don’t want to rock the boat

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This could mean by 2100, the global population exposed to coastal flooding could be up to 287 million (4.1% of the world’s population).

Under the same scenario, coastal assets such as buildings, roads and other infrastructure worth up to US$14.2 trillion (A$19.82 trillion) could be threatened by flooding.

This equates to 20% of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2100. However this worst-case scenario assumes no flood defences are in place globally. This is unlikely, as sea walls and other structures have already been built in some coastal locations.

In Australia, areas where coastal flooding might be extensive include the Northern Territory, and the northern coasts of Queensland and Western Australia.

Elsewhere, extensive coastal flooding is also projected in: – southeast China – Bangladesh, and India’s states of West Bengal and Gujurat – US states of North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland – northwest Europe including the UK, northern France and northern Germany.

Keeping the sea at bay

Our large-scale global analysis has some limitations, and our results at specific locations might differ from local findings. But we believe our analysis provides a basis for more detailed investigations of climate change impacts at the most vulnerable coastal locations.

It’s clear the world must ramp up measures to adapt to coastal flooding and offset associated social and economic impacts.

This adaptation will include building and enhancing coastal protection structures such as dykes or sea walls. It will also include coastal retreat – allowing low-lying coastal areas to flood, and moving human development inland to safer ground. It will also require deploying coastal warning systems and increasing flooding preparedness of coastal communities. This will require careful long-term planning.

All this might seem challenging – and it is. But done correctly, coastal adaptation can protect hundreds of millions of people and save the global economy billions of dollars this century.

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Read more: Just how hot will it get this century? Latest climate models suggest it could be worse than we thought

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Ebru Kirezci, PhD candidate, University of Melbourne and Ian Young, Kernot Professor of Engineering, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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July 31, 2020 at 12:55AM

In 2017 GWPF published a paper by Gordon Hughes, Capell Aris and John Constable reporting data on offshore wind construction costs that suggested the industry’s claim to have achieved dramatic reductions was unlikely to be true, and that the low strike prices bid in the Contracts for Difference auctions had other explanations.

The authors wrote:

We infer that developers see the CfD as a low-cost, no-penalty option for future development, and that, because the contract is easily broken once the windfarm has been built, they regard the price as a minimum not a ceiling. Should the market price rise above the contracted price, because of rising fossil fuel costs or a carbon tax, they would cancel the CfD contract and take the higher price that would become available. (Offshore Wind Strike Prices: Behind the Headlines 2017)

Professor Hughes confirmed these findings in 2019 with a subsequent study also published by GWPF and showing that subsequent data on additional wind farms confirmed the earlier findings, and suggested that developers were gambling on being bailed out of their unsustainable Contracts for Difference bids at the consumer’s expense.

Professor Hughes wrote:

The UK Government is being pressed by lobbyists to adopt low-carbon policies, justified by reference to CfD auction prices that are patently unsustainable on the terms presented, but which are really a one-way option on higher market prices in future. In other words, low CfD prices are a way of creating positive public relations, and are offered in the expectation that developers can get out of the contracts, because the Government is committed to the future of offshore wind and will therefore have to bail out the industry with a high carbon price in order to save face. (Who’s the Patsy: Offshore Wind’s High-Stakes Poker Game)

Other papers on offshore auctions in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands have highlighted the option structure of bids and the effects of differences in auction design. For example, the paper by J. Kreiss et al, “Auction-theoretic analyses of the first offshore wind energy auction in Germany”, Journal of Physics Conference Series, Vol 926, 012015 (2017), examines bidding strategies with minimal reference to costs.

These studies created a good deal of interest amongst thoughtful parties, and in 2019 Aldersey-Willliams, Broadbent and Strachan published, in Energy Policy, their own analysis of offshore wind capex as part of a study arguing that Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) calculations for all technologies should be grounded in data from a study of audited accounts for the holding companies involved (“Better estimates of LCOE from audited accounts – A new methodology with examples from United Kingdom offshore wind and CCGT”, Energy Policy, 128 (2019), 25–35.), rather than the public domain data widely used, and in fact used by Hughes, Aris and Constable (2017). Aldersey-Williams et al. showed that this public domain data tended to underestimate the capital cost, and that higher costs were found in audited accounts in 15 of 21 projects examined. Aldersey-Williams et al. confirmed the Hughes et al. finding, but strengthened certain aspects of the conclusion, writing:

offshore wind farm costs are still much higher than those implied by recent bids for UK government financial support via Contracts for Difference (CfDs)” (p. 25)

very significant reductions are required to wind farm costs to offer economic projects in the context of current strike prices.” (p. 34)

Taken together these studies and the data sources they presented raised important and troubling questions about the effectiveness of the Contracts for Difference auctions in reducing decarbonisation costs, and indicate, as Hughes et al. have observed, that the system was being gamed.

It is therefore as surprising as it is disappointing that Nature Energy has chosen to publish a study, (M Jansen et al, “Offshore wind competitiveness in mature markets without subsidy”, Nature Energy, 27 July 2020), that attempts to take the discussion back to a more primitive and inadequate level of analysis, in which the bid prices at various auctions in Northern Europe are taken as a reliable indicator of underlying cost.

Though they cite Aldersey-Williams et al. they fail to engage with the empirical facts presented in that paper, which includes both the audited account data and the public domain data on capital costs reported by Hughes et al.

Indeed, Jansen et al. write that their modelling exercise to harmonize auction bids “creates a proxy for the actual costs of offshore wind”, when in point of fact both Aldersey-Williams et al. (2019) and Hughes et al. (2017) show that such an assumption is straightforwardly, empirically unsound.

It is also, it must be said, naïve from standard theoretical perspectives. After all, the distinction between prices and costs is fundamental to any introductory course in economics, where a first year undergraduate is taught that the conditions under which it is correct to interpret auction bids as indicators of costs are very restrictive. Should we believe that the cost to Apple of producing a modern iPhone is over £1,000? Of course not, since we know that Apple makes a margin of close to 75% for each iPhone sold. In the opposite direction, was the cost to Amazon of selling books and goods in the early 2000s reflected in the prices they charged. Again, no because their whole business model was – and is – based on selling items as loss-leaders for their cloud computing business.

There are whole sub-branches of economics devoted to exploring the reasons for and the consequences of divergences between prices and costs precisely because it is well known to be a matter which significant implications for the parties involved. For example, as most of the participants in the 3G spectrum auctions from 1999-2002 learnt with considerable pain auctions are a notoriously unreliable guide to costs and revenues.

In this context it is striking that Jansen et al (2020) have not examined any financial models of the offshore wind bids. If they had done so their arguments might be better grounded in financial reality.  Take, for example, the Kriegers Flak project in Denmark – one of their prime pieces of evidence. The contract is structured as an option on future power prices in Denmark and Germany. Vattenfall – the operator – has placed a bet of more than €500 million which they will only recover if real power prices in the 2030s are 3 to 4 times their current level. Vattenfall is a state-owned company with a large cash flow from its distribution and generation businesses in Sweden. Rather than returning this money to it owners or customers through dividends or lower charges it is choosing to place large bets on high risk options. Again, elementary economics tells us that under-pricing risk and capital is a standard way of providing disguised subsidies for politically-favoured projects.

Anyone who wants to make claims about costs – whether of renewable energy or any other infrastructure service – must first collect and analyse data on actual costs, as Hughes et al (2017) and Hughes (2019) and Aldersey-Williams et al. (2019) did. The fact that Jansen et al. (2020) actually cite this work but ignore its implications is extraordinary, and raises questions about the quality of peer-review at Nature Energy. 

The topic of wind power costs and particularly offshore wind costs is a live and important area of serious concern. Jansen et al’s paper is a retrograde step both methodologically and in its conclusions, and government cannot take comfort from its optimistic assertions. On the contrary, government should note that if enthusiasts for the offshore wind industry can do no better than Jansen et al. (2020) then there is clearly a serious problem with the underlying cost trends of this sector.

The post Offshore Wind Costs and Auction Price Bids: A Comment appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

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July 31, 2020 at 12:44AM

Remember when Imperial College London and UK newspapers recently announced that “offshore wind power is now so cheap it could pay money back to consumers”?

The Global Warming Policy Forum is today publishing a critique of the new paper behind the headlines which claims that computer modelling of offshore wind subsidy auction bids around Europe provides sound evidence of falling capital costs.

The paper neglects much more reliable empirical data in the public domain and in audited accounts that suggests that offshore wind costs are still high and unlikely to fall.

The Nature Energy paper has been produced by analysts at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy, jointly with institutions in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

The authors of the GWPF critique, Professor Gordon Hughes, Dr Capell Aris, and Dr John Constable, were the authors of the GWPF’s ground-breaking study of the disconnection between actual offshore wind costs and the very low bid prices being made in subsidy auctions.

Professor Hughes and his co-authors write in their comment:

The topic of wind power costs and particularly offshore wind costs is a live and important area of serious concern. Jansen et al’s paper is a retrograde step both methodologically and in its conclusions, and government cannot take comfort from its optimistic assertions. On the contrary, government should note that if enthusiasts for the offshore wind industry can do no better than Jansen et al. (2020) then there is clearly a serious problem with the underlying cost trends of this sector.”

Dr Benny Peiser, GWPF director, said:

This paper from Imperial College London is yet another example of the way that elaborate computer modelling displaces empirical research based on hard data and misleads the public in thinking they will be paid back money on their energy bills.”

Professor Gordon Hughes, Dr Capell Aris, and Dr John Constable: Offshore Wind Costs and Auction Price Bids: A Comment

The post Critics Rebut Computer Modelling Exercise On Offshore Wind Costs appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

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July 31, 2020 at 12:44AM