Monday 14 January 2013

Wind powered Indian bicycle marketing.

Compiled by Bob E.

Exhibit One:

Ed Miliband’s controversial scheme to encourage homeowners to install solar panels and wind turbines is set to cost families an extra £1billion in higher bills, figures reveal... Tory MP Dominic Raab said the scheme was another example of Labour profligacy. He added: "Ed Miliband’s flagship green subsidies have proved a ludicrously expensive way of backing inefficient technology."

Exhibit Two, from Private Eye 1331 published 11th January 2013 - Page 9 - Keeping The Lights On

Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, slipped out an announcement just before Christmas unveiling a plan to fund uneconomic windfarms by forcing the Government Procurement Service to buy electricity from them at above market rates.

The PE piece continues for a further 4 paragraphs, one of which mentions the GPS being instructed by Ministers to sign up to 15 year contracts and that the policy means "[the GPS] will now be forced to underwrite projects so uneconomic they cannot attract finance even with the lavish level of subsidy already available" but sadly none of them contain a quote from Dominic Raab moaning about Coalition profligacy or ludicrously expensive ways of backing inefficient technology.

Exhibit Three:

Under a scheme agreed by Labour leader Ed Miliband during the last Labour government, but implemented by Coalition ministers, the contracts guarantee that the power firms will be paid even if they fail to deliver energy to households.

Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the PAC, described the contracts as a “licence for the private sector to print money at the expense of hard-pressed consumers”.


To summarise that for the benefit of Margaret "Memory Loss' Hodge, it was her government which issued the licence to print money and the "private sector" has now started using it.

14 comments:

Bayard said...

"To summarise that for the benefit of Margaret "Memory Loss' Hodge,..."

Come on Mark, you know that the "Opposition"'s job is to pick holes in the policies of the government of the day, whether they espoused those policies when in power or not. Those Are The Rules. It's not as if anyone takes any notice, or does anything about it.

Ms Hodge may have thought this policy was a licence to print money when her government was introducing it, but she couldn't say so at the time, because Those Are The Rules, too.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, yes, Those Are The Rules of Indian Bicycle Marketing, I was just giving an example of the technique.

Dr Evil said...

I dispair at this or any govrnment acting with common sense and prudence. Renewable energy in the cold and dark UK is only viable by using wave power. It's as regular as clockwork twice a day, every day. We are also sitting on a vast coalmeasures forest of coal. What are we waiting for? Is it the dead hand of the EU causing this nonsense?

Mark Wadsworth said...

Dr E: "Is it the dead hand of the EU causing this nonsense?"

Superficially, yes of course, but our pol's love this sort of thing because they can then get their snouts in the subsidy trough.

Bayard said...

Dr E, don't you mean tidal power? If so, I wholeheartedly agree. I'm faintly surprised that there aren't lots of companies milking the Government for subsidies for tidal power, too. Possibly because the engineering is more experimental and you can't just buy the stuff from abroad and stick it on a formerly worthless piece of land.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Dr & B, a quick Google tells me that wave and tidal power needs massive subsidies as well, so thanks but no thanks.

Bayard said...

Mark, what I meant was that if you are going to put public money into alternative energy, then tidal power is the way forward. Of course, if you are not going to subsidise power gneration at all, then it is no more the way forward than wind power. However, if it wasn't for past subsidies, all farms and isolated villages would still be relying on generators, although by now I suppose a lot of them would have solar power and batteries.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, tidal and wave might be the least bad, what do I know? But it's not as if the UK is the only country subject to tides etc, how come nobody else is doing it, and if they are, can't we just copy them?

Bayard said...

I think, apart from Canada, France is the only other country with tidal flows similar to ours and they've already been there and done that ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_tidal_power_plant )

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, ta for link. The economics of that look pretty marginal to me, payback period 20 years, it says. And if even the French gve up after the first attempt, that gives us a bit of a clue.

Bayard said...

Contrary to what the proponents of tidal power say, there aren't a huge number of places where the flows are sufficient to make economic sense and Britain just happens to have quite few of them, by virtue of its position.
One fun thing about tidal power is it sets greenie against greenie: the global warmmongers are for it and the tree-huggers are against it. Canada has one of the best places on earth for tidal power, but the greenies have always scuppered any attempts to harness it.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, amen to all that. But I thought that the Canadians didn't care about that Greenie stuff, haven't they got all the tar sands and so on?

Bayard said...

Dunno, I was only going on what I read in Wikipedia. Possibly the tidal range (14.5m!) in the Bay of Fundy is so great that tidal power is economically possible without subsidy.

Anonymous said...

The Severn Barrage is only thought to be uneconomic because the government study assumed the price of energy is going to fall over the next few decades.

Personally I think it will rise significantly (even without the silly green subsidies).

The Barrage would last at least 100 years, so building it is essentially a bet on energy prices over that period. That's why the private sector would need price guarantees to build it. The problem is the uncertainty.

I say build it, and the sooner we start the better.