From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

We’re left with demand management to keep the lights on – rewarding the rich at the expense of the poor, and all using taxpayer funds
So near, and yet so far. A couple of weeks ago, when the air was mild and the wind was blowing strongly, it became fashionable to thumb your nose at Vladimir Putin. We made it through the winter of 2022/23 without the blackouts he tried to inflict on us. Russia can keep its filthy gas and oil – we can do without it thanks to our cheap and plentiful renewables.
Not so fast. Temperatures have plummeted again, Britain is becalmed by an anticyclone, and the National Grid is warning that supply is going to be tight this evening. Coal plants are being dusted down several months after they were supposed to have closed, and the National Grid is activating what it calls its Demand Flexibility Service. This means customers signed up to the scheme can earn up to £6 per kilowatt-hour saved if they agree to turn off their appliances between 5 and 6pm.
It is not hard to spot a slight issue with this offer: the more electricity you use on a normal Monday, the easier it will be for you to cash in today. As with so many green subsidies, it perversely rewards the well-off at the expense of the poor. If you own an 18 bedroom mansion you can easily claim your fee by switching off the lights in the east wing and delaying recharging your Tesla until 7pm. If you normally use only one electric light, there will be no savings for you. And needless to say, the free electricity for some households will ultimately be subsidised through higher bills for everyone else.
But there is a far bigger problem with trying to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar power through demand management. The gaps in supply are far too big to be filled in this way. Britain already has enough installed wind and solar capacity – 38 gigawatts of it – to theoretically meet 100 per cent of average electricity demand. On a good day, such as we had a fortnight ago, solar and wind generate more than 50 per cent of our energy needs. But this morning at 10 am it was down to 19 per cent, and at times in December it fell to less than two per cent. If you are going to try to build a grid based on wind and solar, and try to manage demand by paying people to switch their appliances off, you are going to have to chuck such enormous quantities of money at people that they are prepared to spend days on end shivering in the dark.
The trouble is that that is more or less what the Government is trying to do. For years it has incentivised the green energy industry to build more and more wind and solar farms. Energy storage, on the other hand, has followed way, way behind. A few token – and very expensive – battery installations have been built, but, together with pumped storage systems built between the 1960s and 1980s, they can only store enough energy to keep Britain powered-up for less than an hour. Meanwhile, the steady baseload provided by nuclear is shrinking as old reactors shut down and new ones fail to open; Hinckley C is still years away.
At the moment we fill the gaps with gas-generated power, but once that has been removed from the grid, as the Government intends to do by 2035, all we will have to save us from unplanned blackouts is demand management – which is really just blackouts through bribery.

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Wednesday Open Thread

From MasterResource

By Julián Salazar Velásquez

Ed. note: Julián Salazar Velásquez is a geologist and petroleum engineer with a nearly 50-year career in the Mexican and Venezuelan oil industries. A leading educator and proponent of free market energy, he is author of numerous articles and Gerencia Integrada de Campos de Hidrocarburos (2020), a primer on the oil industry value chain. His four-part world view starts today and continues this week in Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

The current depiction of the oil and gas industry is not only incorrect but worrying. In the more than two years that I have been educating at conferences, in courses, in articles, and in my book—I have seen how unsound dogma threatens progress and prosperity in our countries.

Background

In December 2021 in Petroleum Magazine, I published “Energy Transition or Transgression? What to do in the face of the global campaign against the oil industry with the political threats of anti-fracking and global warming?”

I gave a talk on the article at the Venezuelan American Petroleum Association (VAPA), Venamerica, and “Colegio de Ingenieros de Venezuela—Monagas” (CIV-MONAGAS). The conference title–“The two great current threats to the oil industry: anti-fracking and global warming”–refers to legal prohibitions based on unfounded catastrophic environmental impacts.

The alleged danger of CO₂ emissions from fossil-fuel usage has been propagated in a large part of public opinion and institutions. I warned about the anti-oil and gas campaigns and demonstrations that have grown in Europe, Canada, USA, and Latin America against fossil fuels, even in support of bans which would represent devastating results for the future of humankind. In fact, mineral fuels and petrochemical derivatives have encountered prohibitions, not only for the exploration and production of unconventional shale deposits but in activities across the value chain of the hydrocarbon industry.

In the 2017 edition of my book Gerencia Integrada de Campos de Hidrocarburos, I saw these threats as something temporary. I was optimistic when I reflected on the question: Does the oil industry have a future? On that occasion I mentioned with conviction:

I can state with high probability of certainty that this sector will continue to expand to meet the growing demand for energy, so that oil and gas will continue to represent the most widely available source at the lowest cost. On the other hand, alternative energy sources will grow in parallel, sharing the market as they become more competitive.

Five years later, I now see that things have turned for the worse. Not only has the anti-oil and gas position become more radicalized, but the actions of the international political leadership are flagrantly supporting energy generated by wind and solar. Most recently, the activists are trying to establish barriers in the international financial system against oil, gas and coal, based on “net zero strategies, decarbonization, green energy, renewable energy and energy transition,” with the argument of saving the planet from the supposed negative of “global warming,” or as it is now called “climate change.”

The international protests in Europe, USA, Canada and Latin America, (Figure 1) have had the support of the governments and radical environmental organizations, supported by left-leaning political groups. Hence their radius of action has been increasing, with strong influence on governmental and non-governmental institutions of civil society, as corroborated by the following detrimental results:

• Prohibitions and moratoria on activities for the exploration and exploitation of unconventional shale deposits in Europe, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia and some states of the USA and Canada. Oil and gas are only produced from this type of deposit in the USA, Canada, Argentina and China.
• Stoppage of the 1,700-mile Keystone XL Pipeline by the US through an executive order. This project was built in order to transport 830 thousand barrels per day of crude oil from the oil sands of western Canada to the refineries in Texas.
• Promise to stop all oil exploration activities, both conventional and unconventional in Colombia by the left-wing candidate, and a ban on fracking, which is already in its implementation phase after winning the presidency in June 2022.

• Proliferation of campaigns against the industry and oil usage by radical environmental groups, financed by non-governmental organizations that have influenced the policies of countries against the use of fossil fuels. (Figure 2)
• Increases—after the pandemic and the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war—in the prices of oil, gas and its derivatives, given the decrease in production and increase in demand, with the subsequent global energy crisis; also, short-term problems for energy supply in this winter of 2022 in Europe and North America. 

(To Be Continued in Part 2)