The British government really is bonkers about renewable energy

There are times when it’s almost unbearable to see the mistakes being made about climate change and renewable energy by that British Government that claims my allegiance. Their latest pricing numbers for renewables subsidies is one such painful moment.

To start from the beginning, let’s accept, for the purpose of argument, that climate change is happening, it’s a serious problem that we need to do something about and that it is the emissions from human activities that cause the problem. Yes, I know, not all agree with this even if I do but just, for the purpose of this post, let us accept this set up.

Clearly, what we then want to do is encourage some form of non-CO2 emitting power generation. And we might well also accept that subsidies will be needed to encourage this. For we agree that, given the above, emissions are an externality that are not included in market pricing. So, either a tax on emissions or a subsidy to not emitting forms of generation is justified.

So far so good: but we’d also like to get as much of that not-emittive power as we can as cheaply as we can. After all, we’d still like to be efficient in not making emissions. So we would, if we were sensible, work out some level of subsidy that will provide the non-emittive energy that we require. And we would then be entirely agnostic as to what technologies are used to generate that power. As long as they’re non-emittive of course. This would be a level playing field, a reasonable goal in any part of any economy. So, if solar turned out to be cheaper than offshore wind then we’d get more solar than offshore wind.  Because, under our single subsidy system it would be more profitable to build the cheaper system, solar, than the more expensive one, offshore wind.

What is it that the British Government actually does?

The real outrage is the pretence of delivering at ‘lowest possible cost’, and incontrovertible proof is readily to hand in the shape of the CfD ‘strike prices’ (= guaranteed electricity prices) announced over the summer for the various technologies on offer.  Some examples:

• Landfill gas:          65 (£/MWh)
• Energy from waste: 90
• Hydro:                  95
• Onshore wind:      100
• Large scale solar: 120
• Offshore wind:      155
• Tidal and wave:    305 (sic)

Facepalm.

The more expensive your technology is then the greater the subsidy you get. The subsidy program seems to be designed to make renewable power as expensive as possible, not as cheap as possible. The net effect of this is to impoverish as much as possible while trying to save the planet not leave us as rich as possible while doing so, that being the thing we ought to be trying to do.

There are times when government and politics are both necessary but there’s clearly times when both are entirely borked and work entirely against our own best interests.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/20/the-british-government-really-is-bonkers-about-renewable-energy/?ss=business%3Aenergy