Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has been accused by US activists of being complicit in the pollution of a town in Mississippi by handing billions in taxpayer cash to a UK power firm that they claim is harming the health of residents.
Drax Group operates a power plant in Selby, North Yorkshire, that generates electricity by burning wood pellets. Many of these are sourced from forests in the US and shipped to the UK.
Activists from Gloster in Mississippi, where Drax runs a wood pellet factory, say pollution from its plant has caused health issues for people nearby, including heart disease, cancer and respiratory problems.
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Nonetheless, the company has received billions in green energy subsidies from the Government. In February, Miliband agreed to hand the group another £2 billion in taxpayer cash over four years.
According to the article, Drax has paid millions of dollars in fines in recent years. Local US officials also recently refused permission for Draw to increase emissions.
The town of Gloster in Mississippi is a low income mostly black community of 897 people. Drax employs around 49 people.
If Drax is forced to pull out, around 49 jobs will be lost in a community where jobs are in short supply. But the green funding provided by the British government is helping to spread pollution in a vulnerable community, and is part of the green insanity which is impoverishing British people.
Is the pollution form the Drax wood chip plant in Gloster genuinely causing problems? Who knows – these days, it’s difficult to tell the difference between fake activist pollution standards and pollution which causes a genuine problem. But it seems possible someone has been careless with waste, and woodchipping on that scale produces a lot of waste.
What a mess. I’m glad it’s not my job to sort it out.
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At energy security talks, US pushes gas and derides renewables
The US envoy to the IEA’s energy security summit criticised renewables, arguing that they cause power cuts and increase reliance on China
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While the leaders of the UK, European Union (EU) and ministers from Barbados and Colombia argued that clean energy provides energy security, ministers and officials from oil and gas producers like the US, Iraq and Egypt said that fossil fuels should remain part of the energy system.
But while his Iraqi counterpart boasted of using more renewables alongside oil and gas, the US Department of Energy’s Acting Assistant Secretary for the Office of International Affairs Tommy Joyce criticised renewables too, arguing that they cause power cuts and increase reliance on China.
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Von der Leyen argued that “clean homegrown renewables” strengthen the bloc’s resilience, while at the same time spurring new jobs and innovation. “As our energy dependency goes down, our energy security goes up. That is a lesson we have learnt in Europe,” she added.
Ministers from Barbados, Colombia, France and Spain echoed these messages. Colombia’s mines and energy minister Edwin Palma Egea saidclean energy would be cheaper in his country, where many people “have to choose between paying for energy or to eat – that is a dilemma for them”.
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Speaking to journalists in a briefing before the summit, energy experts said that relying on other countries for equipment like solar panels and wind turbines is preferable to relying on them for fuel. Ember’s Europe programme director Sarah Brown said importing fossil fuels involves “constant risk, constant cost” whereas importing machinery like solar panels is a one-off on both fronts.
Obviously there were no engineers in the room, or if there were they weren’t talking. Renewables are anything but one off investments. Alumina components corrode, especially in salty environments, glass panels are blasted by sand and other abrasives, or ripped apart by storms, and plastics, like electrical wire insulation, crumble into dust, especially under the intense ultraviolet of tropical climates.
Barbados might think they are purchasing a one off investment – but they’ll learn otherwise the first time a tropical cyclone rips through their new renewable showcase.
Not that Europe has to worry too much about tornadoes and ultraviolet corrosion of plastic – the challenge in Europe is getting enough sunlight to produce energy, especially in winter.
What about wind power?
The dirty secret of wind is in some ways it is even worse than solar, when it comes to maintenance difficulties.
Just in case you think that problem has been solved, here is another article from 2023;
Bearing and gearbox failures: Challenge to wind turbines
The review of current trends in wind-turbine bearings is important, not only for reducing the cost of energy, but also for ensuring the future of sustainable and zero-emission energy sources.
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Bearing failures in wind turbines are a major cause of downtime in energy production for unplanned maintenance, repairs, and replacements. This failure type is a primary cost and results in higher operations and maintenance (O&M) costs for the energy operator and in higher utility bills for the customer. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Gearbox Reliability Database (GRD) shows that 76 percent of gearboxes failed due to bearings, while 17 percent failed due to gear failures. [11] This shows the importance of reliable bearings and gearboxes for wind-turbine operations to the economy and society.
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Sheng noted axial cracks or WECs have attracted research attention, but “there is still no consensus on the root causes and solutions to completely get rid of this failure mode, although case-carburized bearing steel with increased retained austenite and diamond-like carbon coating appear helpful with its mitigation.” While axial cracking occurs on the surface, WECs, typically thought of as precursors to axial cracking, occur in the subsurface.
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Bearings in wind-turbine applications are known to show premature damage, typically as cracks in the bearing steel, with the crack faces often showing evidence of white etching matter. Based on their appearance, these are called WECs, and they are known to cause premature damage to the bearings. [9] WECs also are called white structure flaking (WSF), irregular white etching cracking (Ir-WEC), and brittle flaking. The cracks are thought to form first from the intensity of local shear stress, then the white etching matter is thought to form later from the rubbing of the crack faces against each other. [9,10]
If I was to hazard a guess why offshore wind has not taken off in a big way, despite billions of dollars of subsidies, that guess would be that nobody has figured out how to economically replace the broken bearings. And if you think maintaining an onshore turbine is difficult, imagine attempting a delicate engineering repair in 30ft seas while suspended from a swaying ship mounted crane hundreds of feet in the air, along with the multi-ton bearing you are trying to install.
And of course, there is the cost of maintaining all the extra power lines these uneconomical abominations seem to require.
Is the false belief that renewables are a one off investment driving renewable enthusiasm? It seems possible – after all, if renewables truly were a one off investment, it would be like magic – put a little aside every year and within half a century or so, your “one off” renewable investments would be making substantial inroads into the cost of energy.
But if the last few decades have proven anything, that is that adding renewables to a grid makes electricity very expensive indeed. There is obviously a silent cost which is driving up prices, aside from the obvious cost of keeping dispatchable generators on standby. My guess is, that silent cost is the expense of maintaining renewable energy systems.
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A recent post by Euronews, titled “Deadly floods, storms and heatwaves: Europe suffered the ‘serious impacts’ of climate change in 2024,” claims that Europe is experiencing very severe impacts from climate change, citing heatwaves, wildfires, and flooding, among other conditions. This is false. Europe experienced many different kinds of severe weather across the continent in 2024, but this is not unusual.
Although part of the story is hidden behind a paywall, the Euronews post details several examples of supposed climate-change fueled extreme weather events from last year. The main ones mentioned were the wildfires in Portugal, flooding in Valencia, Spain, and heatwaves in parts of the continent.
“Storms were often severe, flooding was widespread, and parts of the continent were gripped by record-breaking heatwaves,” Euronews claims.
Addressing the claims about wildfires first; Euronews said that “Wildfires in Portugal in September burned 110,000 hectares of land in a week – a quarter of Europe’s total annual burnt area for 2024.”
Luckily, Europe’s Copernicus service, the very group that published the State of the Climate report that Euronews based their coverage on, publishes an annual wildfire report, breaking it down by country. Portugal, according to their data, is not suffering from any long term trend in increasing wildfire size or quantity. (See figure below)
Figure 1: Portugal wildfire history from 1980-2023, charts from San-Miguel-Ayanz, J., Durrant, T., Boca, R., Maianti, P., Liberta`, G., Jacome Felix Oom, D., Branco, A., De Rigo, D., Suarez-Moreno, M., Ferrari, D., Roglia, E., Scionti, N., Broglia, M., Onida, M., Tistan, A. and Loffler, P., Forest Fires in Europe, Middle East and North Africa 2023, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2024, doi:10.2760/8027062, JRC139704.
Fire trends will vary from country to country in Europe, but satellite data does not indicate worsening fires for Europe, as discussed in detail here, globally wildfires are trending downwards.
Figure 2: Table 12.12 from the IPCC AR6 Report. Note the yellow highlighted topics, and the lack of climate attribution in the present and in the future as indicated by the white spaces.
Likewise, while it is true that parts of Europe suffered from heatwaves last year, heatwaves by themselves are not proof of any devastating impact of global warming. Rising global average temperature does not necessarily cause higher temperature spikes during heatwaves. A May 2022 peer reviewed publication, Attributing and Projecting Heatwaves Is Hard: We Can Do Better, says:
However, land use changes, vegetation change, irrigation, air pollution, and other changes also drive local and regional trends in heatwaves. Sometimes they enhance heatwave intensity, but they can also counteract the effects of climate change, and in some regions, the mechanisms that impact on trends in heatwaves have not yet been fully identified.
Even Wikipedia cites the 23/24 El Niño as the cause of severe weather events, saying, “The 2023–2024 El Niño was regarded as the fifth-most powerful El Niño–Southern Oscillation event in recorded history, resulting in widespread droughts, flooding and other natural disasters across the globe.”
Most importantly, the data show no long-term trend of extreme heat or extended heatwaves across Europe, a trend that would be necessary to suggests that climate change was behind this years heatwave.
All in all, this appears to be yet another scare story that does not take all the available evidence into account when attempting to attribute weather events to climate change. Euronews should stick to the news, rather than promoting alarmist spin for every weather event that comes along.
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