Britain Scales Back Wind Power

Gas prices in Britain could halve after 2030 because of the global shale gas revolution, according to a report by Navigant that is at odds with the latest government forecasts. Analysts said that the findings further undermine the Government’s economic justification for building expensive wind farms and nuclear reactors, which is based on an assumption that fossil fuel prices will keep rising so consumers will eventually save money. --Tim Webb, The Times, 18 July 2013

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The Government appeared to scale back its offshore wind programme, which spooked the industry. Maf Smith, deputy chief executive of RenewableUK, an energy trade association, warned: “The Government risks undermining confidence by scaling back on its ambitions. The scenarios set out today show that Government is still in mixed minds about the role of renewables.” --Tim Webb, The Times, 18 July 2013 The U.K.’s shale gas, an untapped resource that has polarized politicians and environmentalists, will help refiners and chemical makers be competitive by cutting costs and curbing imports from rivals, Ineos Group AG said. Britain’s shale will be “of massive importance as a protection against low-cost petrochemicals from abroad,” Tom Crotty, director of the producer that has plants in Scotland and France, said by telephone. --Nidaa Bakhsh, Bloomberg, 18 July 2013

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Thousands of dirty diesel generators are being secretly prepared all over Britain to provide emergency back-up to prevent the National Grid collapsing when wind power fails. And under the hugely costly scheme, the National Grid is set to pay up to 12 times the normal wholesale market rate for the electricity they generate. --James Delingpole, Mail on Sunday, 14 July 2013 Going green could see power bills go through the stratosphere – and many families go into the red. Yesterday energy giant npower said the Government’s environmental policies would help to cause a 19 per cent rise in fuel costs by 2020. Price comparison service energyhelpline think npower’s prediction is way too OPTIMISTIC — and say the average annual bill could soar to £2,000 by 2020, pushing many homes into fuel poverty. --Simon English, The Sun, 17 July 2013 The government has published revised planning guidelines for shale gas development which Fallon told Politics.co.uk would make the process more straightforward. Shale gas firms will pay out up to £10 million per site, totalling an estimated £1.1 billion of community benefit. An extra £100,000 will be paid out for sites where hydraulic fracturing - the controversial process known as 'fracking' - takes place. --Alex Stevenson, Politics.co.uk, 27 June 2013 'We seem to be losing the communications battle,' the Met Office's chief scientist complained six months ago. With global warming, science morphs seamlessly into political campaigning. There is the obsession with secret funding sources and with the ideological motivations of non-adherents, things the philosopher Karl Popper identified as telltale signs of a pseudoscience. Amidst all the agitprop, there is a nugget of science: no 15-year period of global temperature yields a statistically significant trend. But then, to its embarrassment, neither could the Met Office demonstrate a statistically significant trend in global temperature for the last 130 years. --Rupert Darwall, The Huffington Post, 17 July 2013 A combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) in Slovakia owned by E.ON, the world’s largest investor-owned electric utility service provider, will close in the fall of 2013. E.ON says that the reasons for closure are the low electricity and carbon prices. What’s more, according to the company, the unmanaged, heavily subsidized growth of renewables and the resulting collapse of the EU emissions trading scheme are rendering in particular gas-fired power plants in Europe—which have already been hit by the recession-driven decline in power demand—largely uneconomic to operate. --The Daily Fusion, 16 July 2013

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