From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Paul Kolk

Scotland’s last remaining oil refinery – Grangemouth – is to shut, we learned last week, with the loss of 400 jobs.

The plant – co-owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos – is closing due to the UK’s incoming ban on new petrol and diesel cars to hit net zero targets.

Grangemouth produces most of the petrol, diesel, heating oil and aviation fuel used in Scotland, Northern England and Northern Ireland. The closure, said Ineos, reflected lower fuel demand given the “ban on new petrol and diesel cars due to come into force”.

While Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, accused Grangemouth’s “billionaire owners” of “industrial vandalism”, she also highlighted the car ban. “The road to net zero cannot be paid for with workers’ jobs,” said the boss of Britain’s second-biggest union.

Along with Grangemouth, the Government recently confirmed the closure of the last two blast furnaces at the iconic Port Talbot steelworks, resulting in 2,500 more layoffs.

Labour’s green policies are “hollowing out working-class communities”, said Gary Smith, the leader of GMB, Britain’s third-biggest union. The Government, he said, must stop “decarbonisation through deindustrialisation”.

At last week’s Trades Union Congress conference, Unite and GMB highlighted union concerns about the route to “net zero” – a journey Labour is determined to pursue more doggedly than the Tories.

The two unions pushed through a joint motion opposing Labour’s incoming ban on new North Sea drilling licences, championed by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.

They want “cast-iron” guarantees for the workers affected – some 30,000 off-shore North Sea oil and gas jobs, plus another 200,000 or so along the UK’s oil and gas supply chain.

Graham evoked the coal mine closures of the 1980s. “Unite will not stand by and watch those workers becoming the miners of our generation,” she said, one of Britain’s most powerful union barons raising the spectre of Thatcher-era industrial relations, marred by chaos and violence, barely two months into the first Labour Government for 14 years.

Attention has lately focused on the row between Downing Street and the Labour Left over the means-testing of pensioners’ winter fuel payments – complaints Downing Street has largely waved away.

But there are signs of a much more substantial, long-term conflict, as the existential industrial cost of the UK’s bid to hit legally binding “net zero carbon emissions” target by 2050 comes into sharper focus.

Grangemouth and Port Talbot are just the latest in a growing list of closures linked to net zero at plants that have long provided decent, well-paid jobs in parts of the country where such jobs are hard to come by.

The destruction of the UK’s North Sea oil and gas operations, and the huge range of related activities, will cause enormous industrial tensions – exposing the chasm between Labour’s relatively wealthy, often urban-based “environmental” voters and its traditional base.

Already, there is growing awareness among voters that “net zero” is aggravating the cost of living crisis. Yes, the UK boasts a relatively high share of what Miliband insists on calling “cheap renewables” – which produced around two-fifths of our electricity over recent months.

But the subsidies involved, added to bills, mean despite the growing use of renewables, or even because of it, UK firms and households are paying almost the highest electricity prices in Europe.

Unless net zero starts delivering soon for ordinary people, instead of just adding to their financial burden, the consensus to pursue the 2050 targets – taken for granted by much of our political and media class – could come under serious pressure.

And as trade unions fight for tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs during Sir Keir Starmer’s “first term”, the resulting environmental-industrial conflicts could tear the Labour movement apart.

The first big test is the incoming ban, from 2035, across Britain and the European Union, on new petrol and diesel cars – with second-hand sales remaining legal.

The Labour manifesto pledged to bring that forward to 2030 – which I strongly suspect won’t happen. I predict the 2035 deadline will slip as well.

Why? Because consumer take-up of electric vehicles (EVs) is far lower than forecast and imposing the planned ban could destroy much of the UK car industry, which employs around a million people – while handing vast swathes of our car market to massively subsidised EVs made in China, which already accounts for around 60pc of global production.

UK car sales, up around 3pc over the last year, remain 15pc lower than before lockdown. Within that, EV sales have slumped, with their market share stuck at around 18pc for the last three years.

Last week I interviewed Robert Forrester, co-founder and chief executive of Vertu Motors – one of the UK’s biggest car retailers – for The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast. He described how the incoming petrol and diesel ban is already impacting sales.

That’s because manufacturers, since January, face fines if 22pc of the cars they sell in Britain aren’t fully electric – paying £15,000 for every vehicle by which they fall short. The target ratchets up to 28pc next year and is expected to hit 80pc by 2030 – even if the complete ban remains at 2035.

Forrester describes how this will lead to the “rationing” of petrol and diesel cars as the ban approaches, with prices soaring as low EV sales mean manufacturers can only avoid ruinous fines by dramatically curtailing petrol and diesel car production.

He is just the latest senior car industry figure to highlight the dangers of a rapid switch to EVs – joining bosses at Ford, Stellantis and Renault.

Governments in the UK and across Europe face a mighty industrial battle over the coming years to push through net zero policies, in the teeth of trade union and popular resistance which is certain to grow.

With each high-profile plant closure, the intensity of that fight ratchets up.

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The inherent absurdity in our headline is precisely the point. No one in touch with reality expects wind power during calm weather or solar power when the sun sets. No one believes that wind and solar generators can simply ‘turn it up’ on a calm night. Oh no, that responsibility is always left to conventional generators: coal, gas or nuclear plants that, properly maintained, never miss a beat, and which can always turn it up, on demand.

Australia’s Eastern Grid has the most geographically dispersed wind turbines operating within the same interconnected system, anywhere in the world. The cult claims that ‘the wind always blowing somewhere’, so, you’d think it would be reasonable to expect that those turbines – with a combined capacity of 11,409MW – will always be producing some meaningful output.

However, every time a large High Pressure System wedges itself across this continent, there will be periods of a day or days when those turbines are producing less than 5% of that capacity: Chaos Rules: Massive Wind Power Output Collapses Threaten Total Grid Failure

Back in June, the entire fleet was producing a trifling 88MW – representing 0.77% of billions of dollars worth of ‘capacity’: Totally Risible: Wind Industry Couldn’t Power Australia’s Toasters & Kettles

Of course, rent seekers and their propagandists play a game of bait and switch – always pointing to perfectly reliable conventional generators as the real villains, accusing them of being solely responsible for mass output collapses, and the associated grid instability, load shedding and, ultimately, mass blackouts.

It’s a theme that Isacc Orr and Mitch Rolling unpack below as yet another effort to dress up the chaotic intermittency of wind and solar as a problem caused by everybody else.

Why Don’t They Turn the Wind Turbines Up? Your guide to debunking the myth that it’s not the wind’s fault
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Isacc Orr and Mitch Rolling
27 July 2024

There is a truism among wind and solar advocates that these resources are never to blame for anything bad that happens on the electric grid.

During Winter Storm Uri, for example, wind advocates claimed low wind output was not even partially to blame for rolling blackouts in ERCOT. Jesse Jenkins of Princeton University famously tweeted that the wind is “reliably unreliable.”

Inevitably, wind and solar advocates will point to problems with every other resource, arguing that coal piles can freeze, natural gas pipelines can malfunction, interrupting supply and causing gas units to go down, and nuclear units can unexpectedly trip offline.

These arguments are correct – any power plant technology can experience problems – but they also reek of Whataboutism.

When dispatchable power plants go offline, it is a bug with identifiable steps that can be taken to mitigate outages in the future. When wind and solar underperform expectations, it’s a feature resulting from the intermittency of the resource that can result in a shortage of electricity on the system.

If resource planners didn’t rely on wind and solar for reliability, arguments such as Jesse Jenkins’ would be more accurate. However, that isn’t the case.

Why Don’t They Turn the Wind Turbines Up?
Rather than hold wind and solar accountable for the inherent intermittent energy they produce, wind and solar advocates want you to believe that not planning for thermal outages is the real culprit behind power shortages in renewable-heavy grids like ERCOT and CAISO. What they fail to admit is that “reliably unreliable” energy is the plan and has been for some time.

In every Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) around the country, wind energy is given some kind of capacity accreditation value—which is the percentage of total installed capacity that is expected to be available during peak demand. In ERCOT, for example, wind turbines have capacity values of 19 – 43 percent in the winter and up to 61 percent in the summer, depending on where it’s located in Texas (coastal, panhandle, etc.).

This means rather than expecting the wind to be reliably unreliable, ERCOT and other RTOs expect wind energy to reliably serve a percentage of peak demand.

In fact, in the summer, the reserve margin in ERCOT—which represents a safety net in case of unplanned plant outages or unexpected higher demand—is made up entirely of intermittent wind and solar. As you can see in the graph below, the red line is the projected peak demand and everything above it represents the reserve margin.

In other words, because the reserve margin is entirely made up of wind and solar resources, ERCOT is dependent on intermittent energy sources showing up in the summer, which is a far cry away from planning for them to be “reliably unreliable.” By 2031, ERCOT reports show that this trend will hit the winter reserve margin, as well.

Wind Energy Underperforms Expectations
The problem with this is that wind energy routinely underperforms capacity accreditations.

As the graph below shows, wind energy was producing nowhere near its capacity accreditation during Winter Storm Uri when the rolling blackouts ensued in Texas. At no point during the initial blackout was wind operating above its combined capacity accreditation of 24 percent (capacity-weighted) at the time.

This begs the question, “Why don’t they turn the wind turbines up?”

Obviously, they can’t, which is why giving wind any capacity accreditation for meeting peak demand is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette on the energy grid. This is why we refer to the capacity accreditation given to wind and solar as “phantom firm” resources. Maybe they show up, maybe they don’t.

A National Concern
Grid operators frequently warn that the continued rapid pace of resource retirements, EPA regulations further accelerating resource retirements, and an increasing reliance on wind and solar threaten grid reliability.

The problem here is that system operators are increasingly reliant upon wind turbines and solar panels showing up to work to meet their peak demands by giving them capacity values. In layman’s terms, they are expecting wind and solar to show up in some capacity to meet peak demand.

However, wind generation often experiences droughts, and it has been especially paltry in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) region over the last two weeks.

The graph below, constructed with U.S. Energy Information Administration data, shows the hourly wind capacity factors in the region and compares it to the 18 percent capacity accreditation given to wind turbines by MISO.

Essentially, it shows that wind has been underperforming the grid operator’s expectations for 133 consecutive hours. Thankfully, the region has seen low electricity demand relative to the expected peak demand, allowing the lights to stay on despite the wind’s underperformance. Grid operators take huge gambles hoping that these droughts don’t occur during higher demand periods.

As we pointed out in our article Wind Drought Blackout, these are not isolated incidences.

As you can see below, already in 2024, two major wind droughts occurred in different seasons. In January of this year, wind in MISO was performing at less than 18 percent of its potential output for 123 straight hours – or over 5 days – despite grid operators assigning it 52.2 percent capacity credit in winter months. Then, from July 7th to July 10th, wind was operating below its accredited capacity of 18 percent for 71 straight hours.

Thermal generation served over 90 percent of the system’s load during each wind drought.

While summer underperformance for wind and solar will be inconvenient, winter underperformance could be deadly. Currently, much of the nation experiences its peak electricity demand in summer for air conditioning. In the future, electrification of home heating will cause winter electricity demand to skyrocket, raising the stakes of relying on renewables to heat our homes.

For example, ERCOT is expected to be a winter-peaking system by 2032 due to the ongoing electrification of new homes.

Removing Roadblocks to Reliability
The situation looks grim, but there may still be time to head off the worst effects of our growing reliance on wind and solar generators.

The obvious solution to this problem is to acknowledge the limited capacity value that wind and solar provide to the grid, as Jesse Jenkins did below, and greatly reduce the amount of accredited capacity these resources receive—perhaps to zero—from RTOs for purposes of system planning.

Another common sense solution is to require our electric grids to have enough dispatchable capacity on their systems to meet the projected peak demand, plus a margin of safety of more dispatchable capacity to account for frozen coal piles and nuclear plants tripping offline.

Natural gas plants should also be required to store fuel on-site, whether that be fuel oil or liquefied natural gas (LNG). If nothing else, wind and solar facilities should be required to pay for the cost of firming the grid to make up for their intermittency.

These changes, not the addition of more wind, solar, and battery storage, will enable grid planners to affordably “plan around the likelihood of significant simultaneous thermal plant outages” and ensure that disruptions in the natural gas supply don’t cascade into blackouts.

Conclusion
Our current energy policy can be described as “all gas and no brakes” in favor of wind and solar. At some point, the chickens will come home to roost. We will have more rolling blackouts if we continue to shut down reliable power plants and become increasingly reliant upon wind and solar showing up to work when we need them most.

When these blackouts occur, we can expect wind and solar advocates to turn on the spin cycle, pointing fingers at everything but the failure of their preferred resources to get the job done. When this happens, we encourage you all to pose the question: “Why don’t they turn the wind turbines up?”
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