Tory minister: Let's exploit our rich resource of mud, er, wind

"Other than a wealth redistribution scheme from the poor to the rich - what exactly is the point?"

Of what ?

wind farms...

...are such a load of hot air.

Mud? What about poo?

Cow poo could be used to heat houses too, it burns quite well when dried out. There's an abundance near my house.

Pence per watt, nothing else matters. Environmental effects have a mitigation cost that you include in those pence. As do fuel shortages. As does everything else.

I once priced up a small top-of-the-range "home" wind-turbine that I saw in B&Q. The thing was as big as my car. It required planning permission to install. It required electrical expertise that involves calling in your electricity company. It cost more than I've ever paid for anything, ever, except my house.

I worked out that, at theoretical maximum output, you could probably pay its costs back by "savings" on your electricity within about 30-35 years, if you INCLUDED subsidies and took into account how much it would cost to install (even based on doing as much as possible yourself). It had a design life and warranty for 5 years (and considering it would have to weather outside storms for more than 5 years and not degrade it's production capacity in that time one iota, it was unlikely to last). So if I ran the thing for the majority of my adult life, in a force-9 gale that didn't damage it, I would just about break even, even if I included the subsidies in my utopian wind-generating environment. Me blowing on a pound-shop cooling fan, or winding up a "clockwork" torch, was actually more profitable per watt.

Sadly, those figures pretty much match up to everything else I've seen deployed from small ones on boats to huge ones in fields in Belgium. You can make money off them - if you ignore most of the actual costs (i.e. where the hell did you get that plastic from and how would you do that if we'd run out of oil?), run them for decades and have the government pay you lots of money for doing so. Otherwise, it's a complete waste.

Pence per watt. The reason our electricity keeps going up is partly oil-price rises and partly these nutty schemes that actually make things worse. I've always wondered what the pence-per-watt would be in a country entirely powered by nuclear.

Using the same argument....

....there appears to be rich supply of bullshit in Westminster. We should be using that for something.

Is this the Daily Mail?

What else are you supposed to do with resources? A better jibe might have been a reference to Dilbert's Elbonia but seeks to make use of resources such as dampness.

Yes, there is cross-subsidy of renewables just as there is cross-subsidy for nuclear. The decision to go with renewables is a political one based on the expected shortage of affordable conventional fuel; the costs and risks associated with nuclear; and the debatable risks of climate change. Independence from fossil fuels has been a political aim since the oil crisis of the 1970s. Peak North Sea oil has passed and the availability from other sources such as tar sands, the Arctic or extremely deep sea is dependent upon a high price and political stability. Shale gas is indeed a welcome introduction to the gas market, not least because it breaks the bond between the price of oil and the price of gas.

If you want some really large figures you might take Germany as example: around € 100 billion has been made available to renewables via the feed-in tariff with solar being the disproportionate beneficiary. However, future price rises are no longer likely to be due to feed-in tariffs but to exceptions given to industry including coal mining! Due to drastic cutbacks in tariffs last year the projected cost of more solar in 2012 is 0.06 %, exceptions 0.6 % Germany is ahead of its renewables target, primarily through wind generation which is already below the spot price from gas powered stations with the difference likely to grow as the price of gas goes up.

When comparing such figures it is important to factor in the subsidies available to the other generators: coal is subsidised as is nuclear and no one really knows what decommissioning and storage nuclear waster will cost.

Give it a rest

Suggest you start your articles with 'foldee-roll' in future.

Buh - very funny.

Even though I agree that Hendry is talking arse-mud it's a daft title for the article.

Bollocks

"coal - which the UK can exploit for several hundred years using current technology." NOT.

UK coal production peaked in 1913. Its decline since then is due as much to seams being worked out as to changes in technology and the fuel du jour. At current usage rates in 2008 there were said to be 250-300 years global reserves of coal.

- New Scientist, vol 197, no 2639, 19 Jan 2008 page 38

Those global reserves are known to be overestimates, but lets use them. The kicker is 'at current usage rates' : kick in a 2% year-on year increase and suddenly all that coal will be gone in 80 years. Now consider that the reserves are over-estimates and that annual usage growth probably exceeds 2% and where's your "several hundred years of coal for the UK" gone, Andrew?

We could of course extract the heat from the mud with GSHP's.

(were it not, unfortunately, massively expensive)

this subject really winds me up