Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Let me invite you to consider the Scottish coast, where the tides are large and the headlines are gushing—much like the capital outflow—over the MeyGen tidal project, a four-turbine, six-megawatt marvel whirring away beneath the waves. The headlines scream  Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland’s coast is a breakthrough for tidal energy.

Me? I’m just a suspicious sort with too many years in the accounting trenches and a soft spot for arithmetic. So I thought I’d take a peek at the math behind the green curtain and see what’s really going on.

First, the basics. The capital cost for the four-turbine Phase 1A MeyGen project was £51 million at construction—call it £66 million in 2025 pounds, or about US$90 million at today’s exchange rate. No one seems keen to publish the total operation and maintenance (O&M) bill for Maygen, but industry estimates for similar tidal setups run 2–4 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). For 51 million kWh generated so far, that’s a ballpark $1–2 million for O&M.

So, $91 million spent, 51 million kWh produced. That’s $1.78 per kWh—over thirty times the US grid price for gas-fired power, which hovers around $0.04–0.06 per kWh. Ouch.

Now I can hear you thinking, “But that’s just the first seven years! The costs are front-loaded! Surely it gets better over time?” And you’re right. So let’s squint into the always-misty future.

Over the projected 25-year lifespan of the four turbines, the array is expected to generate about 164 million kWh. There’ll be two major overhauls—$3 million each—and 25 years of O&M at around $0.03 per kWh, totaling around $6 million. Add it all up: $90 million (capital) + $6 million (overhauls) + $6 million (O&M) = roughly $102 million.

Divide by the lifetime output, and you’re looking at a cool US$0.62 per kWh. That’s about ten times what gas power costs in the US.

Why are the costs so high? Well, in part it’s the “capacity factor”. That’s the percentage of the nameplate rating that they are actually generating. The individual turbines are rated at 1.5 megawatts. One has been operational for nine years, one for eight years, and two for 7 years. That’s 31 turbine-years, times 1.5 megawatts/turbine, times 8,766 hours per year, yields 407 gigawatt-hours (GWh) if they were running full-tilt.

But in the real world, they only put out 51 GWh, so their capacity factor is a pathetic 13% …

And that cost and capacity factor are assuming that there are no unexpected breakdowns in the next 18 years. Is that realistic, given that the ocean is one of the most corrosive natural environments on the planet.?

Well, a popular saying of my youth had it that “What goes around, comes around.”

But as a lifetime blue-water sailor, surfer, sport and commercial diver, and commercial fisherman, I can assure you that when the ocean is involved, the true saying is:

What goes around …

…

… stops.

And not only is the cost ludicrously high, but the output varies widely. There are two high and two low tides each day. So every 6 hours or so, at slack tides these megabuck machines are putting out exactly zero watts. That’s the reason for the low capacity factor. As a result, they require natural-gas-powered backup to balance them out by providing power for the four times daily when they wimp out.

And here’s where it gets truly Scottish, in the tragic sense of the Scottish Play. Scotland sits atop trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, but drilling for gas is banned in the name of meaningless virtue signaling.

The truth is that instead of tapping their own gas resources, the Scots import about 4 billion cubic meters of gas every year. They’re paying premium prices plus shipping costs for the same amount of gas, and they’re making zero difference to the amount of gas burned. It’s merely virtue signalling because they’re just burning Norwegian gas instead of Scottish gas. The only real gusher in Scotland these days is the steady stream of cash leaving the country.

How can the people pushing this madness think it’s a great plan? Don’t they own a calculator? I feel like the doctor in the Scottish Play when the Queen went mad, who said “This is a disease beyond my practice” …

And here at the end of the story, my question is … how did the Scots ever get a reputation for being financially canny and tight with a pound?

My best to all, even those mistakenly pushing Net Zero and the Green Nude Eel,

w.

You know the drill. When you comment, quote the exact words you are discussing. Makes things far clearer.

References: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

In a recent article titled “Climate change making it harder for us to sleep, study says,” ABC News claimed that climate change is now not just responsible for hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding—it’s also robbing us of our sleep. This evidence for this is at best scientifically flimsy and at worst flatly false. Data does not show that heat waves or nighttime temperatures are increasing globally in a way that would significantly disrupt human sleep patterns.

“If temperature keeps rising the way they project it to, the burden and prevalence of sleep apnea may double, increasing by 20-100%, depending on greenhouse gas emission reduction,” Bastien Lechat, the lead author of the study that ABC News based its story on, told the news service.

First, it’s important to note that a large portion of the measured temperature rise in cities is due to the well-known Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, not long-term climate change. Studies show that local temperatures, particularly nighttime temperatures, are elevated in urban areas because of concrete, asphalt, and heat retention from human activity. This effect can easily be mistaken for broader climate warming if not properly controlled for in studies. As noted by Climate Realism, the UHI effect significantly skews local temperature readings and has not been adequately accounted for in many of the studies used to bolster claims of increasing nighttime heat waves.

The article’s alarm about rising nighttime temperatures is further undermined by the fact that global average temperatures have risen by mere tenths of a degree over the past several decades. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), global nighttime minimum temperatures have increased by only about 0.15°C per decade since 1950. Even if this rate continued, the changes would be too small to create the sort of sweeping health crisis ABC is forecasting.

Most of the year is well below the extreme nighttime temperature pegged by the authors of the Nature study as leading to increasing incidences of sleep apnea. Winter nighttime lows could rise from 30℉ to even 50℉ and not have an impact. During the summer, average nighttime low temperatures across the U.S. and China, for example, even in July, are in the 60s and 70s. So temperatures there would have to rise regularly by more than 10 degrees, to meet or exceed 81.4℉ temperature cited in the study as problematic, but temperatures have only risen less than 2℉ since 1950. ABC missed this fact entirely.

Attributing the rise in sleep apnea to climate change is a medical misdiagnosis. The primary causes of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are well-known and have nothing to do with ambient temperatures. According to the Mayo Clinic, the main risk factors for sleep apnea include obesity, thick neck circumference, narrowed airways, family history, use of alcohol or sedatives, smoking, nasal congestion, and certain medical conditions such as high blood pressure. Nowhere in this list does “climate change” appear. And nowhere in the study does it indicate that it controlled for these known risk factors to tease out any additional suffering from warming.

Additionally, a systematic review in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews confirmed that weight gain and anatomical factors are the dominant contributors to sleep apnea worldwide. It is simply not credible for ABC to suggest that a few tenths of a degree in nighttime temperature could double sleep apnea cases globally.

ABC also misses the mark when it tries to link restless nights to warmer temperatures. According to Harvard Medical School, the most common contributors to insomnia and poor sleep include stress, anxiety, depression, irregular sleep schedules, and lifestyle factors such as caffeine or alcohol use. Temperature can play a role, but as a relatively minor factor when compared to these well-documented causes.

Even studies that explore the relationship between temperature and sleep quality, including the one cited by ABC, acknowledge that the observed changes in sleep duration and quality are often minimal—sometimes amounting to a few minutes per night. These small statistical changes are hardly the public health emergency ABC is suggesting.

Furthermore, the claim that a 40 to 45 percent increase in sleep apnea episodes on hot days is contextually void. This claim, that ABC News pulled from the Nature Communications study, is based on comparing extreme heat days to cooler ones, but this does not establish a causal relationship over time. It also does not account for confounding variables like UHI effects, indoor climate control (air conditioning is common in most of the developed world), and individual health status.

On top of this, the article’s sweeping predictions rely heavily on speculative future warming scenarios, specifically the high-emission RCP8.5 pathway, which is now widely regarded by climate scientists as implausible. Basing health projections on worst-case emissions scenarios that climate science itself has walked back is scientifically suspect if not invalid.

Also, global access to air conditioning is increasing steadily, particularly in regions where warmer nighttime temperatures might otherwise cause discomfort. If temperature impacts sleep apnea, indoor air temperatures are what matters, not outdoor air, and with air conditioning indoor air can be controlled. A report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) highlights that the growing adoption of air conditioning will continue to mitigate heat-related health risks, including poor sleep. Ignoring this technological adaptation is yet another oversight in the ABC article.

To summarize: urban heat islands skew local temperature readings, medical literature firmly identifies lifestyle and anatomical factors as the primary causes of sleep apnea, and modern adaptation technologies like air conditioning can mitigate heat impacts. The global warming trend, when properly accounted for, is insufficient to explain any significant increase in sleep apnea cases or widespread sleep deprivation.

In the end, ABC has cobbled together a tenuous connection between climate change and a growing health concern—sleep apnea—while ignoring the substantial medical and social factors that contribute to the problem and technological factors that could mitigate or reduce it regardless of outside temperatures.

ABC News should be embarrassed by this piece that borders on the absurd. Climate change is causing sleep apnea. Really? Next, they’ll tell us climate change is making our toast burn in the morning.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

Originally posted at ClimateREALISM