THOMAS J SHEPSTONE

A website by the great name of “Not A Lot of People Know That” has republished a letter to the editor of the Shetland Times that perfectly describes the Rube Goldberg system Meredith Angwin details in her great book “Shorting the Grid,” (emphasis added).

Energy regulator Ofgem oversees UK energy supply arrangements. The Scottish wind farm constraint payments scandal is one of its many failures.

The inadequacy of cross-border grid connections was well known however Ofgem blithely sanctioned ever more Scottish wind farms.

Responses to their 2020 Viking Energy(VE)/grid link consultation, including my own, highlighted the issue:

“The Scotland-South inter-connectors have already proved inadequate with constraint payments currently at record levels,…….”

“Adding to existing cross-border problems with new generation…..would seem ill-advised, begging the question, why invest in such remote areas, behind inadequate links?”

“Expert commentators have observed that developers are incentivised to build behind grid constraints, giving them market power to boost their income by entering high constraint bids, leading to higher income for being constrained off than for actually generating.”

Indeed, that is exactly what has happened. Some wind farms have made more money from being switched off than from generating and in less than six months operation VE is third in the UK constraint payments league table’. Table leader Seagreen offshore wind farm received £104 million for generating and £262 million for switching off, costing consumers 27p/unit(kWh) supplied (per Renewable Energy Foundation).

The 260km Shetland cable passes through busy shipping lanes, prolific international fishing grounds and stormy seas, and with the recent spate of subsea cable sabotage in the Baltic Sea, the risk of failures, already high, is increasing.

The project cost is over £1.5 billion and rising as frills like the battery park and underground cables from Gremista to Sullom Voe are added.

Clearly, installing renewable energy in remote locations is neither secure nor cheap, yet plans for vast offshore wind farms are advancing, with more to come onshore.

Ofgem, meanwhile, has asserted a “high degree of confidence” that a second subsea cable to Shetland will be needed.

Given the above, how on earth can that be justified?

Constraint payments are, of course, a small fraction of actual renewables costs. Contracts quote 2012 prices so add 40 per cent, future inflation-adjusted. Then add costs for conventional generation to stabilise the grid and provide cover for low wind, and installing transmission lines to southern England (SSE and Scottish Power, alone, plan to invest some £64 billion over the next 5-10 years).

Alex Armitage is right. Ofgem has failed UK consumers – dismally – and “a complete overhaul of the way the energy network is regulated” is desperately needed.

John Tulloch
Aberdeen

So, as we see, the renewables scam is the same everywhere: a system that earns more money from gaming it than in producing anything useful and adds cost to consumers every step along the way. An utter disaster, in other words, and corporatism on full display for those who bother to look.

#UK #Scotland #Subsidies #Energy #Solar #Wind #Climate #Grid

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Net Zero Watch ridicules ‘fantasy’ Carbon Budget

PAUL HOMEWOOD

London: 26 February 2025

Net Zero Watch ridicules ‘fantasy’ Carbon Budget

Net Zero Watch has ridiculed the Seventh Carbon Budget, which was published today, saying that ‘it doesn’t rise much above the level of fantasy’. The campaigning organisation says that the spending estimates are unaffordable, and are lowballed, because they are based on figures that bear no resemblance to anything seen in the real world.

The Climate Change Committee, which prepares the budget, says that capital expenditure on Net Zero projects will have to rise from around £18 billion today to over £40 billion by 2029, a level of expenditure that will then have to be sustained for a decade. But Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford says this is unaffordable:

The Chancellor of the Exchequer is already running out of spending headroom. For the Climate Change Committee to commit the country by law to a financial excess on this scale shows that the whole Net Zero project is not grounded in reality.

And Mr Montford has discovered that even these figures are gross underestimates, because the Climate Change Committee is assuming dramatic reductions in the cost of renewable energy, despite the fact that the ongoing trend is upwards.

Andrew Montford said:

The Climate Change Committee are telling us that Net Zero is going to save us money, but it’s clear that they have simply invented numbers that will lead to that conclusion. This report is not worth the paper it’s printed on.

Notes for editors

1. Real-world estimates of the cost of offshore wind (levelised costs) have been prepared by Net Zero Watch from audited financial accounts of windfarms.

2. Strike prices may be slightly lower than levelised costs because they are index linked and because windfarms can earn prices above their strike prices in various ways.

3. Ed Miliband is currently consulting on the possibility of extending windfarm subsidies to 20 years (from the current 15 years). This comes after the introduction of extra subsidies for windfarms in the shape of the Clean Industry Bonus scheme. These two factors are further indications that windfarm costs are rising, not falling.

SOURCE: Not a Lot of People Know That

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The Dirty Little Climate Secret: CO2 Reductions Are So Costly, Very Few Climate Policies Can Survive Cost-Benefit Tests!

THOMAS J SHEPSTONE

The great Ross McKitrick, who famously helped break the hockey stick, has a wonderful post up on Judith Curry’s site. It’s about the Social Cost of Carbon and how it doesn’t work at all for the folks who came up with the concept.

Read the whole article here, but the following are the critical points made by McKitrick:

I have a new paper out in the journal Nature Scientific Reports in which I re-examine some empirical work regarding agricultural yield changes under CO₂-induced climate warming. An influential 2017 study had argued that warming would cause large losses in agricultural outputs on a global scale, and this played a large role in an upward revision to the Biden Administration’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) estimate, which drives regulatory decision in US climate rulemaking…

In 2023 a team of economists working for the Biden Administration concluded the SCC needed to be increased by a considerable amount. The higher the SCC, the costlier the regulatory burden that can be justified by the agency. This not only affected US regulations but Canada’s as well since our own environment ministry adopted the new US values when justifying a sweeping set of new greenhouse gas regulations.

I wrote an op-ed about the SCC change in May 2023 in which I drew attention to the important role played by a revision to projected agricultural yield damages. While it is difficult to trace where, precisely, all the changes came from, I estimate about $50 of an approximately $100 increase in the 2030 value of the SCC (holding the discount rate constant) was attributable to the revised agricultural yield damage estimates…

Of course, the topic has now been rendered somewhat moot by the Trump Administration’s January 20 Executive Order suspending the SCC on the grounds that it is “marked by logical deficiencies, a poor basis in empirical science, politicization, and the absence of a foundation in legislation.”

The EPA has until mid-March to issue guidance on how to address these problems including possibly scrapping the use of the SCC altogether. I have had no contact with people working on that undertaking but if any of them were to ask me I would tell them the following.

Measuring the SCC is not a scientific procedure akin to measuring the weight of an atom or the speed of light. The SCC is based on so-called Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that contain countless assumptions and yield complicated “if-then” statements. If the following assumptions are true, then a ton of CO₂ emissions will cause $X worth of damage to the world.

Whoever gets to pick the “If” statements determines what the “then” statement will be. And you can pick studies that guarantee any SCC value you like, although some are more plausible than others.

Ultimately the SCC is determined by the political and social process of choosing who gets to write the report. The Biden-era SCC report was written by people whose antennae were up for any reasons whatsoever to boost the SCC estimate, and who ignored evidence pointing in the other direction.

The report even warns the reader that they probably overlooked many reasons why the SCC is even higher than they have estimated because surely there are many other damages associated with CO₂ that they have not yet thought of…

From an economic perspective, the dirty little secret of climate policy is that CO₂emission reductions are so costly, even if the US government accepted the Biden SCC estimate very few climate policies would survive a cost-benefit test, and if the SCC were lowered to something more reasonable none of them would. So, in that sense climate activists will get no joy from hanging onto the SCC.

But beyond the question of what the magic SCC number should be, the bigger question is how you convince a bureaucracy not to rig the report-writing process.

The 2013 Interagency Working Group SCC report boasted of consulting 11 separate government agencies, and the 2023 report additionally boasted of input from the National Academies of Science and outside expert reviewers.

Yawn. The more agencies involved, the less scrutiny a report gets. It is all but certain that no one checked any underlying data or undertook any replication work. And, I know from experience in the IPCC and other bureaucratic processes that review comments going against a chapter author’s biases are ignored or argued away, while comments confirming an author’s biases are welcomed at face value.

The scientific establishment has resisted all attempts to fix climate assessment processes because they always got to pick the authors. But, now, a very different team is going to do the picking. If the establishment grandees suddenly decide they don’t like the process, they should have said something sooner.

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This article (The Dirty Little Climate Secret: CO2 Reductions Are So Costly, Very Few Climate Policies Can Survive Cost-Benefit Tests!) was created and published by Energy Security and Freedom and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Thomas J Shepstone

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