Renewable energy disinformation
Recent online entanglements with greens show that facts count for nought. What counts for greens is not the arithmetic, facts or logic of a claim, but the authority of its source.
The last few posts have been about the green economy and what seemingly drives the ‘growth’ in the green economy seen in the the year 2021. One of the biggest growers was offshore wind energy. But there is a good argument that this growth is being driven by policy and subsidy, not any essential virtue that offshore wind generation has, to make it win on its own terms in a normal market.
I’ve put a number of comments to this effect on Twitter, mostly in response to ministers claims, and had some pushback from greens. So this post is intended to explore some of those arguments. The data here that I’ve been working on is not from the LCREE data that I’ve been looking at, but is related — I’ve been trying to match up other sources against the ONS product.
The longstanding issue with support for ‘renewable’ power generation is that it is extremely expensive. The 2002 to mid 2010s subsidy regime, the Renewables Obligation (RO) still costs up upwards of £6 billion a year (£5.5 billion in 2015 prices), on top of market prices, and has cost the UK bill payer more than £60 billion in its lifetime. In 2020, 311 TWh of electricity was generated in the UK, of which ‘renewable’ sources operating on the RO scheme contributed just 86 TWh — about a quarter, for an additional cost to the consumer of £6.25 billion. Had all power been subject to the same subsidy, it would have added £22 billion to bills.
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