COVID-19 RESOURCES
LIT CAMS (200 Free Tokens)ADULT TOYSVOD MOVIES

England, Scotland & Wales about to be hit with massive increase in electricity prices

...



A promise by Britain’s opposition leader Ed Miliband to freeze gas and electricity bills provoked warnings last night of blackouts, job losses and a threat by one leading energy company to leave Britain.
–Francis Elliott, The Times, 25 September 2013

___________

Shares in leading energy firms dropped by up to five per cent today as the markets reacted to Labour’s 1970s-style plan to freeze power bills. Energy firms said capping prices would halt the investment needed to avoid blackouts and lead to gas and electricity shortages.
–James Chapman and Matt Chorley, Daily Mail, 25 September 2013

___________

In our April 2013 report ‘A Crisis in UK Energy Policy Looks Inevitable’ we argued that the inherent contradictions and implausibility of UK energy policy would eventually trigger a crisis. We pointed out that the political risk faced by the sector would undoubtedly rise as these forces played out. Yesterday those concerns crystallised with the announcement by the leader of the Labour party of a 20 month price freeze for power and gas bills across both the domestic and business sectors should Labour win the May 2015 General Election.
–Peter Atherton & Mulu Sun, Liberum Capital, 25 September 2013

___________

Centrica’s largest shareholder has accused Ed Miliband of “economic vandalism” and said that energy companies should pull investment out of the UK, putting the country at risk of the “lights going out”. Neil Woodford, the head of equities at Invesco Perpetual and one of the UK’s most influential fund managers, said that Labour plans for a price cap on energy bills would damage the investment case for the UK and block the billions of pounds of new money the Government admits it needs. “If Centrica and SSE cannot make any money supplying electricity to the retail market then they won’t supply it. The lights will go off, the economy will shut down.
–Kamal Ahmed, The Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2013

___________

Ed Miliband wants to cap gas and electricity prices for 20 months. Yet price controls have been tried thousands of times throughout history in hundreds of different markets and always fail. And what would happen were wholesale prices to shoot up, bankrupting firms? What would happen to competition? Wouldn’t companies all hike their prices on the last day before the new rules came into place? And why should firms assume that the cap wouldn’t be permanently extended? Why would anybody want to bother investing in Britain?
–Allister Heath, City A.M. 25 September 2013



...
 
The US electrical grid system is even more fragile than the UK's.

The report is a warning that successive UK governments have delayed approval of new conventional and nuclear generation, while EU regulation closes older plants early.

The successive governments have known for a decade that the electricity demand would be close to, or beyond, maximum generation capacity in the winters of 2013/14 and 14/15 - but have delayed decisions.

'Green' generation is growing, but will not bridge the gap. However, many local people will be laughing because their solar and/or wind generation systems make them largely independent of the National Grid (except at night if there is no wind!).
 


“We’re spending money that we don’t have, to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, at the behest of people we didn’t elect.”
​
-Douglas Carswell, Tory MP for Clacton, UK​


 


As a measure of how successful the likes of Friends of the Earth have been in misinforming the public, take a look at Ipsos-Mori's latest poll on public attitudes to science, and in particular the section on energy (p.31 here: http://www.ipsos-mori.com/Assets/Docs/Polls/pas-2014-topline.pdf ):
◾76% of adults support offshore wind, 36% support shale gas
◾58% think that offshore wind will have a positive effect on the UK economy (about the same percentage as for shale gas)

I wonder how much of UK industry will be shut down before we see those figures change.
​
-"Bishop Hill" (nom de net of Andrew W. Montford)
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2014/3/14/energy-poll.html​



 
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...ower-plants-threaten-u-k-shortage-energy.html




Green Rules Shutting Power Plants Threaten U.K. Shortage


By Rachel Morison
March 19, 2014


The U.K. risks power shortages because utilities may react to Europe’s toughest carbon-emissions rules by closing plants without replacing them.

The amount of electricity available over peak demand may drop below 2 percent next year, the lowest level in western Europe, the nation’s energy regulator says. Centrica Plc, the biggest U.K. supplier, says investment in new generating capacity has “ground to a halt.”

U.K. closures, already running at a record pace, may accelerate after a 2016 deadline to cut carbon emissions from old coal-fired generators. While Germany now gets 24 percent of its power from renewable energy after government policies encouraged the building of everything from wind farms to solar panels, in the U.K. the proportion is 12 percent.

“We will be skating on very thin ice and there won’t be the resilience or the flexibility on the system to cope with demand shocks like cold weather,” said John Roberts, the London-based counsel for the Royal Academy of Engineering. Uncertainty over policy means “generators are going to sit on their hands and not invest,” he said.

Coal-fired plants totaling 13 gigawatts are at risk of closing by 2019, according to the Confederation of U.K. Coal Producers in Wakefield, England. That’s in addition to the 8.2 gigawatts shut in the past 15 months. One gigawatt can supply about 2 million European homes.

Power Prices

U.K. power prices, already the highest in western Europe, are poised to jump 39 percent in the next five years, according to Deutsche Bank AG. The next-month contract was trading at 45.95 pounds ($76.39) a megawatt-hour at 3:27 p.m. London time, according to broker data compiled by Bloomberg.

German benchmark prices are at their lowest in nine years and the equivalent contract was trading at 30.85 euros (25.81 pounds) yesterday. Deutsche Bank expects 47.50 euros in the next five years.

The capacity margin, or the amount of excess supply above peak demand, may drop below the 2 percent level in 2015, according to data from the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets in London. Demand typically jumps at times of lower-than-average temperatures. Under normal weather conditions, the margin would drop below 4 percent in the winter of 2015 to 2016, from more than 6 percent now.

U.K. utilities are already paying the most in Europe to emit carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels. The nation was the first to introduce a tax on such activities, on top of the regional carbon trading system with emissions caps for 12,000 power plants and factories from 2005.

Coal Fired

The tax level, that was frozen from 2016 through 2020 by Chancellor George Osborne today, has been one of the main uncertainties for generators making investment decisions about keeping coal-fired plants open, according to Andy Houston, a principal consultant at Poeyry Oyj, the energy adviser based in Vantaa, Finland.

Utilities also need clarity over how a proposed market for backup electricity will work, Houston said from his office in London. Producers will be able to bid in an auction in December this year to offer backup power from 2018, according to the Department for Energy and Climate Change. The mechanism should start before 2018 to give utilities more certainty, said Steve Waygood, the Swindon, England-based head of environment and chemistry at the U.K. unit of RWE AG.

The program, known as a capacity market, will ensure sufficient capacity and security of supply, a spokeswoman for the DECC wrote in an e-mail March 12. The British power industry needs about 110 billion pounds of investment in the next 10 years, according to the department’s estimate.

December Law

The U.K.’s Electricity Market Reform, which came into force in December, includes mechanisms to bring new power plants onto the system, Rebecca Watson, a spokeswoman for National Grid Plc, said yesterday by e-mail. “We should also see new low carbon and renewable generation built.”

“Political uncertainty is the enemy of investment,” Centrica CEO Sam Laidlaw said March 5 at a speech in Houston. “Investment in new U.K. generating capacity has virtually ground to a halt.”

The U.K. is targeting a 15 percent share of power from renewable sources by 2020, according to the DECC. Consumers will pay 120 pounds a year to fund the move toward greener power generation, on top of their current average energy bill of 1,420 pounds, according to Which?, the consumer-lobby group in London.

‘Bad News’

“Tightening margins are not a good news story for customers,” Richard Hall, the director of strategic infrastructure at Consumer Futures, which is funded by levies on utilities and postal services, wrote in an e-mail. “As we see a reduction of surpluses, we’re likely to see higher prices.”

EU rules starting in January 2016 oblige utilities to equip plants with technology to cut emissions, or close them by 2023 or when they have run for 17,500 hours. The equipment costs at least 100 million pounds per gigawatt of capacity, according to Peter Atherton, an analyst at Liberum Capital Ltd. in London.

EON AG is the only producer to have installed the technology in the U.K. Germany’s biggest utility is carrying out the work at its 2,000-megawatt Ratcliffe plant, according to Scott Somerville, a company spokesman in Coventry, England.

The U.K. only built one coal-fired power plant since the early 1970s, so most are already reaching the end of their lives, said Houston of Poeyry, which advises the U.K. government. By 2023, “there will be very little coal left on the system in the U.K.,” he said by phone from London.

Kingsnorth, Didcot

Plants closed last year included EON’s Kingsnorth station and RWE AG’s Didcot A. Both generators shut under earlier EU emissions-cutting rules.

Companies invested $55.1 billion in U.K. renewable sources in the past five years, compared with $124 billion in Germany, Europe’s biggest producer of solar and wind power, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance in London.

Even as nations boost the share of intermittent renewable energy, the need for backup capacity remains. The most flexible alternative is gas-fired capacity, which produces power within minutes, while a coal plant may take as long as six hours, according to RWE.

“You can see the car crash happening,” said John Feddersen, the chief executive officer of Aurora Energy Research in Oxford, England. “There has been very little investment in combined cycle gas turbines for a long time. It is partly about profitability and partly about policy uncertainty.”




http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...ower-plants-threaten-u-k-shortage-energy.html
Click to expand...
 


...Germany provides a warning example of its growing green energy insecurity. Last December, both wind and solar power came to an almost complete halt for more than a week. More than 23,000 wind turbines stood still while one million photovoltaic systems failed to generate energy due to a lack of sunshine. For a whole week, conventional power plants had to provide almost all of Germany’s electricity supply.

Germans woke up to the fact that it was the complete failure of renewable energy to deliver that undermined the stability and security of Germany’s electricity system...



​
 
trysail said:


...Germany provides a warning example of its growing green energy insecurity. Last December, both wind and solar power came to an almost complete halt for more than a week. More than 23,000 wind turbines stood still while one million photovoltaic systems failed to generate energy due to a lack of sunshine. For a whole week, conventional power plants had to provide almost all of Germany’s electricity supply.

Germans woke up to the fact that it was the complete failure of renewable energy to deliver that undermined the stability and security of Germany’s electricity system...



​
Click to expand...


Those two quotes are in conflict.
 
Those energy companies are nearly as bad as those bloody bankers! ;)
 


"...the head of NATO has said that the Russians are funding a sophisticated plot to undermine shale gas development in the west."


...Russian agents are secretly working with environmental campaigners to halt fracking operations in the UK and the rest of Europe, the head of Nato warned yesterday.

Vladimir Putin’s government has ‘engaged actively’ with green groups and protesters in a sophisticated operation aimed at maintaining Europe’s reliance on energy exports from Moscow, said Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

He said the Russians had mounted a highly developed disinformation campaign to undermine attempts to exploit alternative energy sources such as shale gas...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ontinues-reliance-Russian-energy-exports.html
Click to expand...


"...it's surprising that NATO have come right out and said so."

​






http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ontinues-reliance-Russian-energy-exports.html
 
this is the problem with a "socialist" style government ... the more government is involved with the data to day operations of the country, the more expensive that country becomes
 
JohnnySavage said:
Those two quotes are in conflict.
Click to expand...



German and EU encouragement of wind and solar power and closure of nuclear power plants has been an unmitigated disaster, resulting only in substantial market distortions and a massive misallocation of capital and resources. It has been a comedy of the sort that only a massive, crazed bureaucracy can orchestrate.

If anything could have been done wrong, that's exactly what they did.

First they encourage the construction of intermittent, unreliable and expensive sources of electricity (wind and solar) through the use of massive subsidies and government mandates.

Then, they allow delusional fools (the eco-crazies) to force the closure of reliable, low-cost, baseload (non-carbon emitting) generators of electricity (nuclear).

Then they panic because the lights are about to go out and build a massive new fleet of reliable, low-cost baseload generators of electricity (coal) but continue to coerce the use of intermittent and unreliable wind and solar electricity.

An idiot couldn't do worse. You can't make this stuff up.




​
 



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...s-bail-out-electric-grid-at-wind-s-mercy.html


This is a preview of what's to come in California. Meanwhile, German electricity consumers pay 40% more for their electricity than the EU average.




German Utilities Bail Out Electric Grid at Wind’s Mercy
By Julia Mengewein
July 25, 2014


Germany’s push toward renewable energy is causing so many drops and surges from wind and solar power that the government is paying more utilities than ever to help stabilize the country’s electricity grid.

Twenty power companies including Germany’s biggest utilities, EON SE and RWE AG, now get fees for pledging to add or cut electricity within seconds to keep the power system stable, double the number in September, according to data from the nation’s four grid operators. Utilities that sign up to the 800 million-euro ($1.1 billion) balancing market can be paid as much as 400 times wholesale electricity prices, the data show.

Germany’s drive to almost double power output from renewables by 2035 has seen one operator reporting five times as many potential disruptions as four years ago, raising the risk of blackouts in Europe’s biggest electricity market while pushing wholesale prices to a nine-year low. More utilities are joining the balancing market as weak prices have cut operating margins to 5 percent on average from 15 percent in 2004, with RWE reporting its first annual loss since 1949.

“At the beginning, this market counted for only a small portion of our earnings,” said Hartmuth Fenn, the head of intraday, market access and dispatch at Vattenfall AB, Sweden’s biggest utility. “Today, we earn 10 percent of our plant profits in the balancing market” in Germany, he said by phone from Hamburg July 22.

Price Plunge

In Germany’s daily and weekly balancing market auctions, winning bidders have been paid as much as 13,922 euros to set aside one megawatt depending on the time of day, grid data show. Participants stand ready to provide power or cut output in notice periods of 15 minutes, 5 minutes or 30 seconds, earning fees whether their services are needed or not.

German wholesale next-year electricity prices have plunged 60 percent since 2008 as green power, which has priority access to the grid, cut into the running hours of gas, coal and nuclear plants. The year-ahead contract traded at 35.71 euros a megawatt-hour as of 3:54 p.m. on the European Energy Exchange AG in Leipzig, Germany.

Lawmakers last month backed a revision of a the country’s clean-energy law to curb green subsidies and slow gains in consumer power prices that are the second-costliest in the European Union. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s energy switch from nuclear power aims to boost the share of renewables to at least 80 percent by 2050 from about 29 percent now.

Power Premium

Jochen Schwill and Hendrik Saemisch, both 33, set up Next Kraftwerke GmbH in 2009 to sell power from emergency generators in hospitals to the power grid. Today, the former University of Cologne researchers employ about 80 people and have 1,000 megawatts from biomass plants to gas units at their disposal, or the equivalent capacity of a German nuclear plant.

“That was really the core of our founding idea,” Schwill said by phone from Cologne July 21. “That the boost in renewable energy will make supply more intermittent and balancing power more lucrative in the long run.”

Thomas Pilgram, who has sold balancing power since 2012 as chief executive officer of Clean Energy Sourcing in Leipzig, Germany, expects the wave of new entrants to push down balancing market payments.

“New participants are flooding into the market now, which means that prices are coming under pressure,” Pilgram said. “Whoever comes first, gets a slice of the cake, the others don’t because prices have slumped.”

Increased Competition

German grid regulator Bundesnetzagentur welcomes the increase in balancing market participants.

“That’s in our interest as we want to encourage competition in this market,” Armasari Soetarto, a spokeswoman for the Bonn-based authority, said by phone July 18. “More supply means lower prices and that means lower costs for German end users.”

The average price for capacity available within five minutes has dropped to 1,109 euros a megawatt in the week starting July 14, from 1,690 euros in the second week of January, Next Kraftwerke data show. Payments for cutting output within 15 minutes dropped to 361 euros from 1,615 euros in January.

The number of participants has increased as the country’s four grid operators refined how capacity is allocated. In 2007, the grids started one common auction and shortened the bidding periods. Since 2011, power plant operators commit their 5-minute capacity on a weekly basis instead of a month before.

Balance Payments

Balancing-market payments to utilities totaled 800 million euros last year, similar to the amount in 2012, grid data show. Utilities were asked to reserve 3,898 megawatts this week, which compares with Germany’s total installed power generation capacity of 183,649 megawatts as of July 16. One megawatt is enough to power 2,000 European homes.

Tennet TSO GmbH, Germany’s second-biggest grid operator, told power plant operators to adjust output 1,009 times to keep the grid stable last year, compared with 209 times in 2010. The interventions, used alongside the balancing market, are expected to be as frequent this year as in 2013, Ulrike Hoerchens, a spokeswoman for the Bayreuth, Germany-based company, said by phone on July 23.

To adapt to volatile supply and demand, RWE invested as much as 700 million euros on technology for its lignite plants that allow the units to change output by 30 megawatts within a minute. The coal-fired generators were originally built to run 24 hours a day.

RWE’s lignite generators, which have a total capacity of 10,291 megawatts, are flexible enough to cut or increase output by 5,000 megawatts on a sunny day, when power from solar panels floods the grid or supply vanishes as skies turn cloudy, according to Ulrich Hartmann, an executive board member at RWE’s generation unit.

“Back in the days, our lignite plants were inflexible, produced power around the clock and were always earning money,” Hartmann in Bergheim, Germany, said in a July 9 interview. “Now they are as flexible as gas plants.”
Click to expand...




http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...s-bail-out-electric-grid-at-wind-s-mercy.html




​

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...-poised-to-upset-130-billion-green-drive.html



UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE

The goddamned morons accomplished absolutely nothing and consumers ended up paying at least $134 BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS for the failed experiment of the dumbass motherfuckers.

I swear to god; you can't make this shit up. It's something right out of Kafka or Joseph Heller.

​






Merkel’s Taste for Coal to Upset $130 Billion Green Drive

By Julia Mengewein
September 22, 2014
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...-poised-to-upset-130-billion-green-drive.html

When Germany kicked off its journey toward a system harnessing energy from wind and sun back in 2000, the goal was to protect the environment and build out climate-friendly power generation.

More than a decade later, Europe’s biggest economy is on course to miss its 2020 climate targets and greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants are virtually unchanged. Germany used coal, the dirtiest fuel, to generate 45 percent of its power last year, its highest level since 2007, as Chancellor Angela Merkel is phasing out nuclear in the wake of the Fukushima atomic accident in Japan three years ago.

The transition, dubbed the Energiewende, has so far added more than 100 billion euros ($134 billion) to the power bills of households, shop owners and small factories as renewable energy met a record 25 percent of demand last year. RWE AG, the nation’s biggest power producer, last year reported its first loss since 1949 as utility margins are getting squeezed because laws give green power priority to the grids.

Confronting Coal

“Despite the massive expansion of renewable energies, achieving key targets for the energy transition and climate protection by 2020 is no longer realistic,” said Thomas Vahlenkamp, a director at McKinsey & Co. in Dusseldorf, Germany, and an adviser to the industry for 21 years. “The government needs to improve the Energiewende so that the current disappointment doesn’t lead to permanent failure.”

Slumping Prices

While new supplies sent wholesale power prices to their lowest level in nine years, consumer rates are soaring to fund the new plants. Germany’s 40 million households now pay more for electricity than any other country in Europe except Denmark, according to Eurostat in Brussels. A decade ago, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy all had higher bills than Germany.

“Politicians are often trying to kid us,” Claudia Fabinger, a 65-year-old self-employed marketing manager, said in between shopping for groceries on Leipziger Strasse in Frankfurt. “Our power bills keep rising and rising to fund clean energies; on the other hand, we are still polluting the air with old coal plants.”

The annual increase in residential rates has accelerated since 2011, when the nation boosted solar and wind subsidies in response to closing down eight of its oldest nuclear reactors. The annual increase is now 7 percent, compared with 4.3 percent between 2005 and 2010, according to Eurostat.

Consumers paid 106 billion euros between 2000 and 2013 to renewable energy producers, according to the nation’s four grids. To stem gains, the government cut green subsidies last month by 29 percent on average to 120 euros a megawatt-hour, according to the Economics and Energy Ministry’s website.

2008 Peak

German power for next year, a European benchmark, traded at 34.95 euros a megawatt-hour today in the wholesale market, or 60 percent below its 2008 peak, broker data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The average day-ahead German power price will probably drop to the lowest in 12 years this year amid the boost of renewable energy and a glut of capacity at conventional plants, Johannes Mayer, researcher at Fraunhofer-Institut fuer Solare Energiesysteme ISE, said today by phone from Freiburg, Germany.

The contract has averaged 31.40 euros this year and is at its lowest level since 2002, adjusted for inflation, Mayer said.

The price slump -- coupled with the surge in renewable energy into the market where the biggest power generators also sell the output from their coal, nuclear and gas plants -- cut the average operating margin at the eight biggest producers in Germany to 5.4 percent on average last year from 15 percent in 2004, company data compiled by Bloomberg show.

‘Black Gold’

Even as margins slid, the burning of coal rose 68 percent from 2010 to provide a steady supply of electricity. Fossil-based power plants, including those fired by hard coal and lignite, are “indispensable for the foreseeable future,” reads the agreement between Merkel’s conservatives and the Social Democratic Party that helped form her current government. “The ‘black gold’ is still an important factor in the energy generation mix,” the government says on its website.

While utilities make around 5 euros a megawatt-hour by burning coal, they lose more than 17 euros generating power from gas, according to Bloomberg calculations based on current prices for the electricity, fuels and emissions costs. On the other hand, gas only emits about half as much carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas scientists say cause global warming.

‘Dirtier and Dirtier’

“The share of renewable energy is rising and is at nearly 30 percent now, but the remaining 70 percent is getting dirtier and dirtier,” Carsten Thomsen-Bendixen, a spokesman at EON SE, Germany’s biggest utility, said Aug. 20 by phone from Dusseldorf. “That’s an obvious flaw in the system that needs to be put to an end.”

With nuclear plants typically running at full throttle all the time, gas is the only other large-scale alternative to coal. At current prices, gas-fired plants will lose money until at least 2018, Bloomberg calculations show.

“Yes, we are burning more coal; on the other hand it is also true that Germany still plays a leading role when it comes to emission reductions in Europe,” Beate Braams, a spokeswoman for the German Economics and Energy Ministry, said by phone on Sept. 4.

Germany reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 through 2012, according to the European Commission. The U.K. and Denmark also reduced pollution by the same percentage, more than any other major European economy.

Nuclear Phaseout

The nation’s current green ambitions date back to June 2000. The decision to boost renewable energy amid plans to phase out nuclear by about 2020 was forged by the coalition between Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats and the Greens.

Among the lawmakers who worked on that first version of the renewable energy act was Juergen Trittin of the Greens, then Germany’s environment minister. Still a member of parliament, he now says that while the government has the means to meet its greenhouse-gas reduction target of 40 percent by 2020 from 1990’s levels, it lacks the will.

As well as taking the lead in reviving Europe’s market for emission permits, Germany could introduce a national minimum price for the securities as an emergency measure, he said by phone from Berlin on Aug. 27. That would increase costs for coal generators and make gas more attractive. The government could also boost energy efficiency in buildings or cars, he said.

“But nothing is happening right now because there are some decisions Germany doesn’t want to make,” he said. “It would take some courage to take on sectors such as the car or construction industry and I currently don’t see this courage in the government.”

Missing Target

The country’s carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants fell one percent on average every year between 2005 and 2010, only to rise by the same number from 2011 through last year, data from the environment agency UBA in Berlin show.

The 40 percent target may be missed by as much as 7 percentage points if no further steps are taken, the government said last year. The Environment Ministry said in April it would seek additional means of cutting emissions.

“It’s true that not enough has been done so far and we said that in April after taking stock of Germany’s progress,” Nikolai Fichtner, a spokesman for the Environment Ministry said by phone from Berlin Sept. 8. “All ministries have to do their share and make suggestions as the emissions reduction target is part of the government’s coalition agreement.”

No Suggestion

The Economics and Energy ministry, which oversees the Energiewende and the German power market design, hasn’t made any official suggestions yet, according to Braams.

“We can’t exit coal and nuclear plants at the same time,” she said. “We need to consider the security of power supply.”

The share of power from hard coal and lignite plants in Germany rose to 45 percent last year, the highest level since 2007, according to data from AG Energiebilanzen e.V., a group of energy lobbies and economic research institutes.

Germany can lead the way and help revive the emissions market, according to Vattenfall AB, the Sweden-owned utility and Germany’s second-biggest emitter after RWE.

Over time, the market will direct investments toward low-emission technologies, Stefan Dohler, head of asset optimization and trading at Vattenfall in Hamburg, said Aug. 22 by phone. Until then, coal plants will still provide power in Germany at times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, he said.

“Lignite is the only cheap, domestic source available in great quantities in Germany that delivers power around the clock,” Dohler said. “Every day, every night, every week and every weekend.”





​
 
Last edited:


...Emergency supplies of electricity are being sought by the National Grid for this winter because of the threat of shortages of output from the UK’s coal, gas and nuclear power stations.

National Grid said on Tuesday it was extending its search for additional sources of temporary supplies, blaming emergency shutdowns at two nuclear power stations operated by EDF of France and unexpected fires at two key coal-fired stations during recent months – Ironbridge in Shropshire and Ferrybridge in Yorkshire...





http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2d3c0786-329b-11e4-93c6-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=uk#axzz3CAZn18u0


​
 


Andrew W. Montford ( proprietor of the blog "Bishop Hill") writes:

...As we look at UK energy policy now, DECC has had the country make a massive financial gamble on the back of a prediction that was wholly unfounded and which has been obviously so for many years. We now learn that DECC has also distributed this astonishing wave of public money in a manner that can only be described as monstrously incompetent, and which many will assume to be monstrously corrupt. And to top it all, no lessons have been learned at all, as the preposterous contract for the new Hinckley Point nuclear power station clearly demonstrates.

Any reasonable person would close down DECC right now and lay off all the environmentalists who staff it. This being the public sector, it goes without saying that nothing of the sort will happen: nobody will be held responsible and no lessons will be learned. The department will simply award everybody involved a bonus for good performance and they will carry on as before. There is simply nothing anyone involved in UK energy policy can do that will have any repercussions for them...




http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2014/10/3/close-down-decc.html

​





It will be a miracle if the lights don't go out in the U.K.



​
 
at least if I have to resort to burning idiots i'll have plenty of fuel :)
 
attachment.php


Solar farm near my village.
 

Attachments

  • IMG_20141003_144211808.jpg
    IMG_20141003_144211808.jpg
    90.1 KB · Views: 37


...if the UK doesn't develop an indigenous shale gas industry then Grangemouth is toast...





​
 


New government will have to address capacity shortfalls to avoid blackouts. Avoiding a power blackout will be one of the first priorities for whoever forms the next government, a leading consultant has suggested. Critics argue that a focus on renewables has left Britain’s power network now dangerously short of spare capacity.
–Andrew Critchlow, The Daily Telegraph, 8 May 2015​



​
 


UK electricity bills are more than twice as high than they would have been had there been no deployment of renewables.

A couple of years back the outgoing chairmen or financial director of SSE explained that the cost of energy supply is less than 50% of the bill. Some 25% of the bill is infrastructure upgrades. This is connecting the windfarms to the grid (and possibly managing the grid with backup diesel generation). About 25% of the bill is green subsidies; the green deal (subsidising home insulation, double glazing, boiler replacement etc) and assisting those in fuel poverty (and probably also provision for bad debts which is increasing as energy gets less and less affordable).

Of the 50% that pertains to the cost of energy supply, this too is more expensive than it needs to be since included in the cost of supply is the carbon floor tax put on coal/gas, and the fact that the energy supplier has to buy wind/solar when available at the high guarantee strike price paid for such energy. If there had not been the deployment of renewables, and coal had formed the bulk base load generation, it is likely that the cost of supply would be at least 10 to 15% less than it now is.

The government are not telling you the full story as to how the energy price is made up.






​
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Counselor706
Workers in these states would pay most under Biden’s new business tax
Replies
1
Views
94
Beachbum18966
B
K
Paul Krugman: "In Defense of Obama"
5 6 7
Replies
155
Views
5K
IrezumiKiss
IrezumiKiss
K
The Coming Realignment: Cities, Class and Ideology After Social Conservatism
2 3
Replies
72
Views
2K
KingOrfeo
K
Obama_2012
Obama accomplished nothing? Here Are 206 Obama Accomplishments, With Citations!
2
Replies
26
Views
2K
Cade Is Here
Cade Is Here
busybody..
Congressional Report: Obama Deliberately Causing Oil Prices To Spike
Replies
16
Views
323
busybody..
busybody..
Back
Top