From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

At least the Telegraph is starting to dismantle Mad Miliband’s crazy agenda:

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Sir Keir Starmer has promised that a new Labour government would decarbonise the UK’s electricity system by 2030 and would, at the same time, reduce average energy bills by up to £300 or roughly 20 per cent of their current level. We know that senior politicians and lawyers see visions that not granted to mere mortals. But is there any connection between this vision and reality?

Accelerating the current decarbonisation strategy would imply building about 35 GW of new offshore wind plants, 10 GW of new onshore wind plants, and 55 GW of new solar capacity in six years. As context, between 2009 and 2023 the UK built 14 GW of offshore wind, 12 GW of onshore wind, and 16 GW of solar plants. The vision implies building new plants at rates between two and six times what was achieved in the last 15 years. Where would the skills, other resources and finance come from?

Recent experience tells us that crash programmes of this kind incur costs that are anything from 50 per cent to 100 per cent higher than “normal” costs. Since Britain is not alone is trying to build lots of new wind and solar plants in next five years, it is a certainty that the costs will be much higher than claimed. Even at current costs, such a program is likely to require investment of £200-£250 billion. Adjusting for probable cost inflation, actual costs are likely to be £300-£350 billion. The sum of £8 billion promised for GB Energy is a rounding error in such a programme.

This is only the start. Huge investments are required in both transmission and distribution to deliver the large increase in electricity generation. National Grid has announced that it needs to spend £50-60 billion over five years in England and Wales to enhance its transmission network to meet decarbonisation targets. Scaling that up to cover the rest of the UK and allowing again for cost inflation yields an estimate of investment in transmission at least £150 billion by 2030. Roughly the same amount will be required to expand the distribution network.

Financing such investments will only be possible with strong government guarantees which means that, setting aside accounting fictions, real public debt will increase by 20-25 per cent of GDP for the decarbonisation programme. The cost of servicing that debt under current arrangements plus operating and maintaining the assets will about £40 billion per year for generation and about £25 billion per year for transmission and distribution.

Households account for a little more than one-third (36 per cent) of final electricity consumption. The same share of the cost of decarbonising the electricity system would be about £23 billion per year. To put that sum in context, in mid-2024 there are about 28.7 million households in the UK with an average electricity bill of £850 per year giving a total cost of electricity for households of about £24 billion per year.

In broad terms, electricity bills would have to double by 2030 to achieve Labour’s goal of decarbonising our electricity system with the costs incurred being passed on to electricity customers. The extra costs could be met in other ways but these are variants of robbing Peter to pay Paul – using taxes or deferring payments.

In addition, it is very unlikely that manufacturing and other industries would be willing to pay a 100 per cent increase in their electricity bills. Either such businesses must be protected in some way or they will simply close down. The result will be larger increases in bills for households.

No-one should believe that decarbonisation of the electricity system means literally that. Solar and wind power are highly intermittent sources of generation. Detailed modelling of the electricity system using many years of weather data suggests that some gas generation would be required for 50 per cent to 60 per cent of hours in the year even after the heavy investments outlined above and allowing for potential imports from other countries.

The options for preventing power blackouts in the early 2030s are either storage – mostly batteries – or carbon capture and storage (CCS). The first option is extremely expensive. It is only economic for load shifting from the middle of the day to the evening, so that gas generation would still be required for 40 per cent to 50 per cent of hours in the year. CCS is an experimental technology which up to now has failed everywhere it has been deployed on a commercial scale. Still, visions being what they are, this is the get-out-of-jail card for Labour policy.

Stepping back, there is an underlying trend that few appreciate. When we discuss energy prices most assume that the major component of what we pay is the market cost of energy – electricity or gas. That is wrong. In the period 2005-10 the wholesale price of electricity was an average of 38 per cent of the retail price paid by households. The figure for 2024 is 21 per cent, which reflects the typical value since 2019 excluding the 2021-22 when prices were subsidised. The share of the wholesale price of gas in the retail price paid by households is currently 36 per cent but has also been falling.

Over nearly two decades governments have used levies on energy prices as a form of taxation, both to subsidise investments in renewable energy and to fund a variety of programmes. A Labour government is likely to go further down this road. It could reduce energy bills by removing levies on energy consumption. That is about as likely as any of us being struck by lightning, because it would have to raise taxes to fund the change.

Instead, the prospect is for a very large increase in energy levies and bills to pay for the very high costs of pursuing the vision of rapid decarbonisation. 

By Emily Arthun

In March, PJM Interconnections, a regional electricity transmission organization (RTO) serving the greater Mid-Atlantic region, released its annual load forecast report outlining forecasted electricity demand for its service area. The report indicates PJM expects demand in their service area to increase as much as 40% over the next 15 years.

PJM manages the transmission of wholesale electricity across 13 states and the District of Columbia – including major data center hotspots such as Virginia and Ohio.

Meanwhile, a neighboring RTO, the Mid-Continent Independent System Operator (MISO) painted an even gloomier picture in its recent “Reliability Imperative Report.” MISO manages electric transmission across 15 states throughout most of the Midwest, Mississippi Valley, and Great Plains regions as well as the Province of Manitoba in Canada.

In their report, MISO forecasts a demand increase of 60 GW, or 32%, by 2042. At the same time, MISO expects much of their current baseload capacity to retire. And despite new renewable generation planned for construction, MISO expects to see a net capacity decline of 32 GW (@18%).

“Because new wind and solar resources have significantly lower accreditation values than the conventional resources that utilities and states plan to retire in the same 20-year period, the region’s level of accredited capacity is forecast to decline by 32 GW by 2042” MISO stated.

 PJM expects 58 GW of current capacity to retire by 2032, which is approximately 30% of the total current capacity of 196 GW). This amount of capacity loss is despite peak forecasted demand increasing by 43 GW above current capacity.

The story continues to repeat itself across the country. The nation’s existing electric grid is straining to meet the current demand – often nearing the point of failure during the heat of summer and coldest parts of winter. Yet, the Biden Administration remains determined to shut down coal-fired baseload generation facilities — one of the only sources of electricity that has proven itself time and again capable of meeting any demand the grid requires.

Last month, the Biden Administration’s radicalized EPA released its “New Source Performance Standards for GHG Emissions from New and Reconstructed EGUs; Emission Guidelines for GHG Emissions from Existing EGUs; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.”

The Rule mandates a 90% reduction in carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants that choose the use of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology and is expected to further reduce coal-fired steam generating unit capacity from 181 gigawatts (GW) in 2023 to 52 GW in 2035, of which 11 GW includes retrofit carbon capture and storage (CCS).  This reduction in generation capacity is the result of the probable loss of 660,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of coal-fired steam generating units — from 898,000 GWh in 2021 to just 236,000 GWh by 2035. At present, coal-fired generation provides about 20% of the nation’s electricity – but that percentage increases dramatically during the summer and winter months being the peak seasons.

Anyone with even a basic understanding of math or economics can see that forced shutdowns of so much baseload capacity and its replacement with intermittent (read unreliable) wind and solar is sheer insanity. As we have noted in the past, even the Biden Administration’s own energy experts have warned time and again that these closures are already putting our grid at risk of not only short-term blackouts and brownouts – but outright collapse.

In fact, MISO modeling indicates that the region that widespread “load interruptions” of 3-4 hours day for up to 26 or more days a year is possible (perhaps likely), and would happen during the hottest days of summer and the coldest periods of winter, when millions depend on electricity to simply survive.

Biden’s policies are so egregious that 25 states have joined together in a federal lawsuit to stop the plan. They have been joined by labor unions, farmers, manufacturers, and countless others who understand what this reckless policy will do to our economy and the danger it imposes on the American people.

Recently, West Virginia Public Service Commission Chair, Charlotte Lane, explained this concern in a brief filed with the US Federal Court supporting the lawsuit.

“The Final Rule does not simply encourage, but effectively mandates, early retirement of coal-fired, baseload, dispatchable generation that is necessary to maintain the reliability and resilience of the electric power grid,” Lane wrote. “…Steam-powered generation [is required] to provide the dispatchable base load power supply to assure constant and consistent electricity supplies twenty-four hours a day, year around, the entire interconnected electrical system will be relying on unreliable intermittent generation sources that cannot be dispatched because the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow 24 hours per day, 365 days a year.”

“I cannot overstate the reliability concerns that are just as critical as the concerns over the costs…” Lane continued. “The EPA’s downplaying of the problem notwithstanding, this move to intermittent resources will be unsafe and unreliable without online reserve resources necessary to provide the constant balance of supply to load when wind and solar resources are intermittent.”

This rule will also drive-up costs for families and businesses across the country – inevitably causing energy poverty on a scale never seen in this country as families are faced with the hard choice of putting food on the table or buying needed medicines or paying their electric bills.

The bottom line is that solar and wind resources are not the panacea radical environmentalists claim them to be. Despite their claims, wind and solar are not less expensive relative to thermal resources. 

First, the current thermal generation plants (coal and natural gas) that the rule would close, are up-and-running generation units. Replacement renewable generation capacity, as well as transmission capacity would have to be build (at significant cost). And adding this new capacity is not comparing apples to oranges. It will take multiple times as much replacement generation capacity to replace thermal generation capacity with intermittent and limited-duration wind and solar generation resources.  

As Lane noted in her brief, “PJM has quantified the ability of wind and solar resources to serve load for delivery years 2026/27 through 2034/35: replacing 1,000 MW of coal-fired capacity will require either 4,200 MW of onshore wind, 2,500 MW of more expensive offshore wind, 21,400 MW of fixed solar, or 15,500 MW of more expensive tracking solar.”

So, any supposed advantage in costs claimed by the renewables industry and their supporters quickly, flies out the window in the face of reality. Frankly, the policy decisions in the Biden White House are detrimental to the wellbeing of the United States citizens and economy.  

Emily Arthun is CEO of the American Coal Council. 

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

From Polar Bear Science

Susan Crockford

We are just into the 2024 sea ice melt season in the Arctic with no signs of any big, dramatic changes despite claims that 2023 was the warmest year on record (since 1850). There is still abundant sea ice habitat for polar bears ahead of the summer months (July-September) when Arctic ice melts back considerably.

Polar bears in Western Hudson Bay are still on the ice despite vast open water levels normally signaling “breakup” has happened: the wind-driven ice is packed tight against the western shore and the bears are still on it.

Arctic sea ice overview

In 2024, sea ice extent at 21 June was estimated at 10.5 mkm2:

Compare the above to 2022 (below), when it wasn’t the “hottest year on record,” and ice extent was 10.4 mkm2:

Canada

Despite an early-summer “heat wave” in Eastern North America there is still abundant sea ice:

As I discussed earlier this month, the enormous area of open water in eastern Hudson Bay was caused by winds, not ice melt. This has caused the region to have the lowest ice coverage since 1979 for this time of year (see graph below):

The ice is not showing up on the satellite images as thick as it has been in past years, as the chart below shows: usually ice thickness is showing as dark green at this time of year (first year ice >1.2m thick). However, this may be an artifact: wind-driven ice is almost always buckled and compressed into a thick mass, so the ice that’s left in Western Hudson Bay may be much thicker than it looks (and therefore, slower to melt over the summer):

But according to University of Alberta researchers, polar bears tagged earlier are all still on the ice and there have been no reports from Churchill of polar bears onshore. As far as I am aware, there have been no reports of problem bears ashore in NW Hudson Bay, like Arviat, where bears often come ashore earlier than further south.

Many bears seen earlier in the season were said to have been in good condition (see below, courtesy Andrew Derocher, 24 April 2024), suggesting a successful spring feeding bonanza, it’s likely they are waiting around until the ice literally rotting under their feet forces them ashore.

Barents Sea

Ice is receding from the Svalbard area but there is still plenty of polar bear habitat to the north and around Franz Josef Land to the east, where most “Barents Sea” polar bears make maternity dens and spend the summer: