Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 27 Jun 2017

The Curse of Hinkley Point

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

The contract for the proposed Hinkley Point nuclear power station is so heavily loaded with penalties that the UK government is unlikely to cancel. Rising costs and other project risks, on the other hand, mean that EdF is in no hurry to build it. This results in a stagnant uncertainty that further clouds prospects for what would otherwise be the technology of choice, Combined Cycle Gas Turbines, and even for renewables.

One of the UK government’s subsidiary aims in supporting EdF’s proposal to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley, in Somerset, was, in the words of the National Audit Office’s new and extremely critical appraisal, “to generate wider investor confidence and pave the way for other new nuclear projects” (p. 6). In this ambition the government has not only failed comprehensively, but already produced outcomes that are likely to be counterproductive. With only preliminary works completed, the Hinkley project already deserves its own chapter in the record of government mishandling of nuclear energy. Indeed, if Greenpeace moles had been manipulating Departmental policy with the aim of scotching a nuclear future, they could not have been more successful.

This matters, not because Hinkley C itself is essential to UK energy security – it simply isn’t and Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGTs) are a much better bet in the medium term – but because nuclear energy is very likely in the far future to be the only attainable means of replacing fossil fuels and at the same time maintaining very high levels of global wealth. Nuclear fuels are extremely dense, low entropy stocks of energy, and they have the potential, so far only imperfectly realised anywhere in the world, of yielding a very high Energy Return on Energy Invested. The higher that return, the larger the rest of the non-energy sector economy, making for general prosperity. Renewable energy has no such prospects.

Paradoxically, therefore, with an eye on the long term welfare of the United Kingdom, government should have cancelled the obviously misbegotten Hinkley scheme before issuing a contract. This was clear in June last year (see my blog “Hinkley C and the UK Power Market”), but unfortunately Mr Clark allowed himself to be hustled into granting a contract and, crucially, a very detailed Investor Agreement setting out terms for compensation in the event of changes of policy. The two parties, the British government on one side, and, in effect, the French government on the other, now find themselves locked into a project for which neither has any enthusiasm.

What should the UK’s Secretary of State do? Thanks to the absurdly generous Investor Agreement it seems that he cannot now cancel the project, even at this early stage of construction, without paying EdF compensation for lost profit over its lifetime (the calculation is complicated, see p. 46-7). The National Audit Office estimates this compensation at £22 billion (in 2012 prices, see p. 7).

Alternatively, one might think that Mr Clark and his successors could simply sit on their hands and wait for for EdF’s problems at Flamanville to come to a head, for Hinkley’s costs to steadily escalate and its timetable to slip, all in the hope that the French state will eventually blink. However, that is unlikely to happen. EdF is in no hurry to complete the scheme, and has generous allowances for time overruns. Furthermore, the escalating construction cost estimates (reported as an additional 3 billlion Euros, for example in The Times 27.06.17) are probably not of overwhelming concern, since Her Majesty’s Treasury is under an obligation to guarantee a £2 billion bond issue in 2018, to finance construction. With just the faintest perceptible irony, the NAO comments on this bond issue that “EdF has said it does not expect […] to use this facility” (p. 6). Perhaps EdF meant this when it was said, but in the current situation it would not be surprising if the board see things differently.

Thus, neither party is likely to bail out. The British government is tied down by the contract that it foolishly granted, and even if EdF has secretly abandoned realistic expectations of ever generating electricity at Hinkley in the foreseeable future, or ever, it will probably be easier on the balance sheet to maintain the appearance of proceeding with construction. This marriage will go on, not for the sake of the children, who will be paying for this mess, but for the sake of appearances.

There are two undoubted casualties from this debacle. The first I have already noted, the harm to the long term future of nuclear energy. Organic growth and refinement in this sector is highly desirable, but all over the world it has suffered from governmental mishandling. Hinkley makes this problem worse.

The second casualty is the development of a new generation of Combined Cycle Gas Turbines. These are fundamentally economic, and are, in truth, the benchmark by which to measure the bad value both of Hinkley and its almost identically evil twin, the renewables programme. In an undistorted market investors would be building more modern CCGTs, with very high thermal efficiencies, low fuel consumption and low emissions. But while Hinkley remains even a vague possibility, and so long as the UK continues to pretend to adhere to the renewables targets, the future market for electricity in the United Kingdom will appear so uncertain in scale and unattractive in character that there will be little appetite for investment in CCGTs.

This grim mess may yet result in a third casualty, and far from celebrating this outcome, supporters of wind and solar should be worried. The need for low cost firm generation is not yet quite acute, but will become more pressing. With the market hemmed in by the punitive Hinkley contract on one side, and commitments to EU renewables targets on the other, government will choose to clear space with least effort. This could easily mean abandoning renewables to their fate by loudly declaring them a glorious success while quietly cancelling further support and allowing nature to take its course.

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

June 27, 2017 at 08:58AM

Uncategorized 27 Jun 2017

Sign a petition for Australia to pull out of the Paris Agreement

via JunkScience.com
https://junkscience.com

We did it, Australia. Now you do it.

via JunkScience.com https://junkscience.com

June 27, 2017 at 08:21AM

Uncategorized 27 Jun 2017

Glenfell: Clad In Climate Change Politics

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

Might CO2 targets be behind the fad for flammable cladding?

After the Grenfell disaster, local authorities are busy checking their housing stock for fire risks. Rightly, they are looking at the estates and blocks that have been retro-fitted with external cladding, which has been identified as a probable key factor in spreading the fire at Grenfell. Particular attention is being paid to those estates refurbished by Rydon, the building firm that developed the aluminium cladding used on Grenfell Tower.

But few people have asked why so many tower blocks and housing estates in the UK have been clad in recent years. Some have argued that the refurbishments were cosmetic, added to appease private investors by prettifying housing estates. But this is not the main reason for the cladding. In fact, it was added to meet the government’s targets for reducing CO2 emissions.

Just last year, Kensington and Chelsea Council proudly announced the completion of the £10million refurbishment project at Grenfell, which included ‘the installation of insulated exterior cladding’, new boilers and double glazing. The council said that the reason for the project was to ‘enhance energy efficiency and help reduce residents’ living costs’.

Here Kensington and Chelsea Council was following government instructions. As the 2008 Climate Change Act made clear, ‘it is the duty of the secretary of state to ensure that the net UK carbon account for the year 2050 is at least 80 per cent lower than the 1990 baseline’. The act also created the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme, which presented the refurbishment of social housing as one quick fix to cutting CO2 emissions.

Responsibility for meeting the government’s CO2-emissions targets was invested in the Community Energy Savings Programme (CESP). CESP, which lasted from 2009 until 2012, was run by the big energy providers, British Gas, E.On, Scottish Power and others. Its success was limited but, tellingly, its final report states that ‘almost all CESP measures were delivered through partnerships with social-housing providers’.

In May 2012, the government’s committee on climate change (CCC) published its ‘advice on how local authorities can reduce emissions and control climate risk’ under the 2010 Climate Change Act. The CCC identified social housing as one of the key areas where CO2 emissions could be reduced by improved energy efficiency from greater insulation. The problem, as the CCC put it, was that ‘the very slow turnover of stock’ makes ‘[housing] relatively energy inefficient’. The CCC’s solution was to reduce emissions in existing housing stock through insulation and new boilers. As the CCC explained, ‘local authorities and housing associations have been the key partners, driven largely by their role as social landlords’.

Professor Julia King, a member of the CCC, said in May of 2012 that ‘local authorities have the potential to impact significantly on the UK’s scale and speed of emissions reduction’. At the top of King’s list for action were ‘energy-efficiency measures for existing buildings’ – insulation, such as cladding, and new boilers. While local authorities struggled to get funding for other things, austerity did not apply to the CO2-reduction scheme. Indeed, a 2010 National Audit Office report identifies 20 estate refurbishments with funding of £1.5 billion from the Department of Communities and Local Government under ‘private finance initiative’ schemes.

The programme of refurbishing local-authority and social-housing stock was augmented by the ‘green new deal’, under which local authorities and companies could get government funding to insulate houses. Householders were bombarded with phone calls and visits touting loft insulation, under the green-deal home-improvement fund. This was the small-scale equivalent of the cladding fad in social housing.

There is nothing wrong in principle with cladding. But it is a piecemeal solution to the question of energy efficiency put forward by a state that has put severe limits on new building. The glacially slow turnover of the UK housing stock is a problem created by the planning restrictions on development and construction. Greater energy efficiency could be achieved alongside new building, with a greater commitment to growth.

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

June 27, 2017 at 06:57AM

Uncategorized 27 Jun 2017

More Evidence of the Great 21st Century Warming Pause

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

Those who continue to deny the existence of the current warming pause would be wise to accept the reality of the data presented here by Xie et al. and elsewhere by so many others. It does exist, and it does add to the ever-growing mountain of evidence that warming due to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations is unlikely to be dangerous.

Paper Reviewed

Xie, Y., Huang, J. and Liu, Y. 2017. From accelerated warming to warming hiatus in China. International Journal of Climatology 37: 1758-1773.

One of the many conundrums facing climate alarmists — who predict that dangerous future global warming will result from increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 — is the existence of the aptly-named “warming hiatus.” Also referred to as the “warming pause,” this phenomenon describes a nearly two-decade-long leveling off of global temperatures despite a ten percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1998. The significance of these observations resides in the fact that all climate models project that temperatures should not be levelling off, but should be increasing (despite interannual variability) in direct consequence of the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2.

The fact that a warming hiatus does exist does not bode well for the Climate Industrial Complex, which requires dire projections and global warming scare stories to maintain its multi-billion dollar strangle-hold on the federal budget. Any hint that the model projections are off and that dangerous global warming is unlikely to occur is a threat to their theory and livelihood; and, therefore, there have been a number of attempts by die-hard climate alarmists to deny, deride and destroy any and all discussion of the great 21st century temperature pause (see, for example, Karl et al., 2015 and Lewandowsky et al., 2015). Yet despite such efforts, researchers continue to document the existence of the hiatus (see, for example, Koska and Xie, 2013 and Guan et al., 2015), as well as the most recent scientific team of Xie et al. (2017).

Focusing their attention on Asia, it was the goal of these three Chinese researchers to examine “the robustness of the warming hiatus in China.” To accomplish their objective, they performed a series of analyses on both monthly and daily mean surface air temperature data, which they obtained from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (Harris et al., 2014) and the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), respectively.

And what did those analyses reveal?

In the words of Xie et al., they say that “using the CRU grid data and CMA regular surface meteorological observations, we showed the robustness of the warming hiatus that occurred in China,” which “was mainly induced by the cooling trend during the cold seasons.” Indeed, as shown by the black lines in the figure below, the annual mean temperature of both datasets increased through 1998, but thereafter a warming pause is evident (see the gray-shaded portion of the record). And, as revealed by the solid blue lines in the figure, this pause is clearly dominated by a cooling trend during the cold months of the year (November through March).

Those who continue to deny the existence of the current warming pause would be wise to accept the reality of the data presented here by Xie et al. and elsewhere by so many others. It does exist, and it does add to the ever-growing mountain of evidence that warming due to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations is unlikely to be dangerous. It is time for policy makers around the world to wise up to this reality and shut down the climate-warming cabal by cutting climate change research funding and pulling out of the Paris Accord and the Rio Framework Convention.

Figure 1. (Left Panel) Surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly time series averaged over China relative to the 1981-2010 reference period from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) database. The solid lines are the linear trend lines based on the least squares estimator for 1998-2013 for warm (May-Sep) and cold (Nov-Mar) seasons, respectively, while the corresponding thick dashed lines are results from Mann-Kendall analysis. The gray shaded area indicates the recent warming hiatus period 1998-2013.. (Right Panel) Same as the left panel, but for results from China Meteorological Administration (CMA) dataset. Source: Xie et al. (2017).