Ban on onshore wind turbines cost you £180 last year

@chrismac – it’s easy to read “subsidy” and think that’s how it works. But companies compete to be able to build wind farms and they hit a strike price on a “contract for difference”. If that strike price comes in below the wholesale electricity price then those companies actually pay money to our government for their ability to operate. E.G.:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/200353/offshore-wind-power-cheap-could-money/

That’s very different from, say, subsidised Nuclear – which is guaranteed £96/mwh – which is more than double wind and, importantly, the UK public will pick up any decomissioning and spent fuel storage and disposal costs. Considering we have no solution to the nuclear fuel problem (because we can’t beat physics) we’re currently on the hook for £140bn – which has more than doubled in recent years, and looks like it will continue to double fairly regularly because we simply don’t know how to deal with it.

I guess the “new nuclear” thing is still a goer, despite UK taxpayer picking up the tab, forever, because we’ve already got this problem – so adding to it only makes it more expensive, rather than making it a new problem. Of course, we really have to hope Putin doesn’t simply wang a few missiles into Sellafield, or that some “bad actors” don’t decide to exploit this vulnerability sometime in the next couple of hundred thousand years.

Of course, coal, oil and gas are still receiving nearly all of the real “subsidies” that the UK grants. Of course, UK government denies that it gives subsidies, but it gives tax breaks for “exploration” (we know where it all is, more than we can ever burn if the planet is to survive, not just avoid heating) and “research and development” (what? on oil? how many advances in catalytic cracking can we make now?) – to the tune of Ten Billion per annum. – oh, and $5.9 trillion per annum globally (or $11m a minute) according to the IMF.

Sounds like a lot worse of a deal than wind – which pays us because it’s so cheap.

But if you want to believe the “wind is subsidised” line, like I say, feel free.

If the facts have knocked you, maybe you could listen to the oil industry shills line of it being unreliable – but for a less than that $5.9 trillion a year we give to coal, oil and gas, we could fix the global energy supply issues permanently.

That’s very different from, say, subsidised Nuclear – which is guaranteed £96/mwh – which is more than double wind and, importantly, the UK public will pick up any decomissioning and spent fuel storage and disposal costs.

Actually, in the case of HPC it’s exactly the same only the strike price is higher. SZC is a different case again with the UK making a direct investment in the project.

As for taxpayers being on the hook for decommissioning and disposal that’s only legacy costs from pre-privatisation, the balance is made up from the nuclear liabilities fund which a portion of all generation income (not profit) has been paid into since SNL and NG came into existence. If you want to talk numbers HNB has defueled 70% of their lead reactor since starting around this time last year, HPB 25% since ~August and DNB just started at the weekend. Compare that to the Magnox numbers and it’s a very different story to the old days.

Reading based here and not far from the earlier mentioned Green park turbine, probably see it a couple of times a week, normally not moving much.

And we’re just back from bumping up our Carbon footprint with a trip down the M4 to Pendine sands where we trundled past Port Talbot with the whirligigs up on the hills overlooking it pointed out to sea.

The thing is I really don’t mind wind turbines and all the arguments about On Vs Offshore and keeping NIMBYs happy miss the point that more sustainable leccy generation is generally needed even if every installation doesn’t manage optimum efficiency.

Some of the local bits of rural land near us are now getting used for solar farms. Several of the residents nearby absolutely lost their shit when it was suggested wind farms might be going in at some of those locations a couple of years back, but I think it was all a ruse so they’d think they’d scored a victory by not challenging the installation of a metric shit-ton of PV panels across previously green a pleasant fields.

I think it generally makes sense for us inland dwellers to use as much of our spare land and rooftops as possible for solar PV now and I would like to see more support and clearer schemes from government so that more home owners as well as commercial outfits can maximize the use of solar.

But there are still locations on land, mostly coastal where wind turbines make sense and have the added benefits of easier maintenance access and reduced transmission distance which shouldn’t be dismissed just because it changes the view a bit. Fit the generating solution to the location.

But also mostly this:

However, unless we can persuade Karen from Croydon to not have her outdoor sex pond sat at 40 degrees 24/7/365 just in case the pampas grass brings the boys to the yard, and millions of other wasteful uses, it’s all for naught. We are a long way from unlimited sustainably* generated energy so reducing our consumption is still a really important part of the journey and I’m not convinced we are are focusing enough on that aspect.

*nothing is truly sustainable

We collectively piss energy away at present, and it’s become too easy a cheap for many of us to do so. Our use of leccy is set to increase over the coming decades with more EVs on the roads and more houses heated solely by electricity. Even if we had all the renewables we needed tomorrow I think people would find a way to push demand higher by just living as inefficiency as possible. That’s a national mindset we need to change…

I don’t think PV is the solution for the UK as our geography makes they very inefficient. As was said earlier working at 1/3rd capacity is not very efficient.

As was said earlier working at 1/3rd capacity is not very efficient.

Wind turbines might manage that, solar is more like 10%. But the input fuel is free, so efficiency can be a bit misleading.

More guff @squirrelking – the “Nuclear Liabilities Fund” is worth about £4.5bn and gets topped up tiny amounts.

Inflation alone means that the growth in value of our liability to clean up our existing mess – that we don’t know how to clean up therefore meaning it’s a permanent growing debt – easily wipes up that £4.5 billion four times over.

It’s a crock. And any way you measure it Joe Public is on the end of decomissioning, storage, “disposal” of the stuff. The only bit that makes money is the generation bit – and that’s going into the pockets of shareholders or private companies would never put money in to build the things in the first place.

Privatise the gains, socialise the losses.

Wind turbines might manage that, solar is more like 10%. But the input fuel is free, so efficiency can be a bit misleading.

Anyone have the figure for wind (onshore, offshore and ‘microgeneration) my gut feeling is it’s probably the same or even lower onshore? Offshore might be more consistent.

Unless you’re Morocco then the figure for solar seems to be about 1000hours at nameplate capacity per year (makes sense, most places get ~1600-1700 hours of sun, some of which will be morning/evening rather than directly at the panels).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-energy-consumption-vs-solar-pv-capacity

The Welsh government? have allowed an experimental tidal thing in the South Stack tide race.
A travesty there are lots of breeding birds in that area. I look forward to being minced or crushed when I paddle the Stacks in my seakayak.
The thing is currently being constructed.

Surely that’s like saying, paragliders will be minced by windfarms, or urban explorers killed by spent nuclear reactors. Just don’t indulge in hobbies in excessively dangerous places.

I don’t think PV is the solution for the UK as our geography makes they very inefficient. As was said earlier working at 1/3rd capacity is not very efficient.

Not relevant, what is relevant is whether the generators make enough money to cover their installation and running costs, if they do then the generating source is a net contributor to our energy supplies. It’s not like fossil fuels which are finite and contribute climate change so being wasteful in their use is a bad thing.

Efficiency will improve as the industry continues to mature.

Anyone have the figure for wind (onshore, offshore and ‘microgeneration) my gut feeling is it’s probably the same or even lower onshore? Offshore might be more consistent.

This report has the capacity factor for Whitelee Windfarm (used to be the biggest onshore there was I think) which is on the hills south of Glasgow as 18.56% measured 2016/2017.

This one lists the UK offshore sites with the big arrays going ranging from ~30% to ~50% lifetime capacity factor.

@thisisnotaspoon – the south stack tidal race is a really bad one tbh. The company was fraudulent with the “science” on it’s impacts.

South Stack is an internationally important SSSI. It’s puffins, guillemots, cormorants – big breeding ground. These birds are water feeders – they’re swimmers.

I was approached by a teenager working for the company at Porth Dafarch (beach nearby that kayakers launch from) and administered a questionnaire that I literally could not answer in a way that didn’t give the impression I was all for the scheme, when I’m vehemently against it (what’s the point in “saving the planet” if we kill the nature when doing it? We could easily build a few more wind farms offshore, cheaper, without disturbing the precarious seabird population, and without pandering to grant-chasing companies and councils).

I was told that they’d done a study on common seals in Ireland and common seals avoid the turbines, so the birds will be OK. When I pointed out that the mammalian brain is way more complex than the bird-brains of birds so it wasn’t applicable science she almost blew her top at me.

On the other hand, I’m for the incoming tidal lagoon on the Mersey. There’s **** all nature there anyway.

As an ornithologist working in offshore renewables, there is so much complete rubbish in this thread about onshore wind, offshore wind, tidal, and the environmental impacts of all three, that there’s too much for me to correct without taking a day off work.

So I won’t, and I’ll just pick on the post above instead.

chevychase:

A SSSI is generally considered to be important at the national scale. If it was internationally important, it would receive SPA designation. South Stack is, by this definition, not internationally important for seabirds (though the Holy Island SPA is internationally for chough, but they’re not impacted by the project you’re talking about, given they are a terrestrial species).

The Mersey Estuary SPA on the other hand, which is within the Mersey Estuary (fairly obviously), that you appear to have characterised as not supporting any nature, in fact supports an internationally important assemblage of non-breeding waterbirds. These are closely associated with a further two nearby SPAs supporting similar populations of birds. Probably >100,000 of them each year in total. On that basis, to characterise the Mersey Estuary as not supporting any nature is not correct.

On the Morlais project – the impact assessment work that was done for that project was based on the best available evidence. There are large uncertainties in the predictions made because the evidence base is limited. My understanding is that as a condition of consent there was meant to be an adaptive management plan in place, giving power to regulators to prevent the project from proceeding, and potentially even to remove it, if the operational phase monitoring shows unacceptable impacts to either seabirds or marine mammals. So hopefully this will provide a mechanism for something to be done if the impacts end up being unacceptable.

I don’t think PV is the solution for the UK

Why do people say things like this as if there is one single solution? We will end up with a mix of generation, the same mix that is currently generating up to 70% of our power without direcct carbon emissions in this sunny windy weather. Solar is definitely the best solution for sites that are suited to it, and will be even better when we have cheap perovskite solar cells.

PV clearly does work as even small scale domestic installations pay back. Local generation and use will also allow us to keep our massively under spec grid from burning out sooner. Storage of energy is the biggie and it doesn’t have to be all battery although a lot of domestic installations have those now. I saw something recently where they lifting huge concrete blocks into the air when there was excess generation and letting them down again when power was needed.

That’s the main benefit of Solar PV I think – you can put it on buildings all over the place for no real downside other than the cost of installation. If you have batteries too you can make houses self sufficient fairly easily too. The government should be paying for this, of course, but you know..

I don’t think PV is the solution for the UK as our geography makes they very inefficient. As was said earlier working at 1/3rd capacity is not very efficient.

If you’ll only countenance using high/100% efficient energy sources you’re going to be waiting a very while.
30% (or even 10) is better than zero. A roof/field/shed without PV panels is still producing 0Kwh whatever it’s annual exposure to sunlight. The only real issue is up front costs and maintenance, after that it’s passive leccy generation…

As was said earlier working at 1/3rd capacity is not very efficient.

Capacity or output? Because they mean two very different things.

More guff @squirrelking – the “Nuclear Liabilities Fund” is worth about £4.5bn and gets topped up tiny amounts.

@chevychase umm, no. It was worth £8.3bn at the start of 2009, I can’t find up to date numbers but it’s pretty safe to say it’ll be a fair bit more than that now.

You’re also ignoring the fact that it was the UK government that commissioned them in the first place and EDF only bought the stations. Quite why you think anything outside of their part of the fuel route should be their responsibility when it was already established when the stations were bought is beyond me.

I looked into a turbine for my place. Site is excellent for it, we’re surrounded by commercial ones, but the cost is high in the UK due to lack of demand and planning likely to fail. In one go I could have taken myself and my neighbours all effectively off grid but instead we’ll all have to keep burning logs and gas.

Simple thing is that just about nobody will put stuff on their house if the install cost is mega and the payback period is long. It has to be encouraged, grants, building regs. Or whatever.

As molgrips said, the government needs to be paying (schemes, tax breaks, laws, whatever) but the current clown show can barely join a 10 spot dot to dot let alone do the kind of long term planning and actual investment this sort of national infrastructure change would require.

IMO, the biggest thing we could do is stop all oil and gas support / tax breaks / subsidies alongside a huge programme of efficiency for all consumers. The timeline could be along the lines of our combustion engine bans and the lifespan of any current agreements – but as of tomorrow, all the money going into carbon heavy and polluting fuels would be switched steadily over to creating the efficiency, grid, storage, and generation we need of all kinds.

@ehrob – fair point about the liverpool estuary. It was a flippant comment. The zone under consideration stretches from West Kirby to Formby (IIRC) so that’d be quite an impact wouldn’t it. And given humanity’s form I personally have doubts environment would halt progress on the project. Money counts. On that:

On the Morlais project – the impact assessment work that was done for that project was based on the best available evidence. There are large uncertainties in the predictions made because the evidence base is limited. My understanding is that as a condition of consent there was meant to be an adaptive management plan in place, giving power to regulators to prevent the project from proceeding, and potentially even to remove it, if the operational phase monitoring shows unacceptable impacts to either seabirds or marine mammals. So hopefully this will provide a mechanism for something to be done if the impacts end up being unacceptable.

There’s not a chance that we’d pull the plug on an operational profit-making power source, no matter what “plans” we put in place to show regulators have teeth. Not. A. Chance.

You only have to look at the complete failure of regulatory action (and wholesale government funding cuts to the agencies that data-gather which would enable regulators to act on an evidence base) across the board in Blighty that has lead to, to pluck a few examples that immediately come to mind – wholesale sewage discharge and farming leaching nutrients into our rivers meaning there is literally no river in the UK that isn’t subject to long-term decline, or, mind-bogglingly, a 70% decline in animal populations in just 50 years.

So, for South Stack – it’s a SSSI, if we notice that it’s killing seabirds we “might” pull the plug? No we won’t! We’ll go through years of continual monitoring, “mitigation”, claim and counter claim. Given humans have already killed 70% of animals since 1970 where’s the precautionary principle here?

We don’t need to do it! We could just not take that risk with our already-depleted seabird population. We can spin up some more offshore wind turbines, quickly, cheaply, easily and know there’s no impact. In fact, they can be a net positive to the fish population if we build in a way that creates reef space.

I ditched the environment as a career in the 90’s when it became very clear that only strong government action would improve our lot – and I didn’t want to waste my life howling at the moon whilst the environment burns around me, with me helpless to make a difference. That decision has been borne out.

My o/h has spent 25 years in a field that governs exactly this sort of environmental field at a governance level for a massive multinational construction company, doing roads/rail/ports/wind – many in the UK. She oversees the development of these “adaptive management plans”. And they’re not worth the paper they’re written on. They’re there to satisfy the minimum requirement of government regulation – nothing more.

“Adaptive management plans” are not there to protect nature. They’re there to protect the companies from getting sued. “We met what was required under regulation with our ‘adaptive management plan’“. – So the fundamental problem is the government legislation is too weak to protect nature – because mitigation under an effective management plan would be too expensive, making these sorts of schemes unprofitable.

By your own admission the South Stack impact assessment is based on a limited evidence base. So, in my opinion, we should use the precautionary principle and NOT do it – especially given humanity’s disastrous effect on nature in the last 50 years – and instead put a new wind farm in. It would be cheaper, faster to construct, it’s proven and working technology, and it doesn’t risk mashing up more animals and all the other downsides – potential or not.

Given the context it’s a joke of a project. It’s grant-chasing idiocy and profiteering. Nothing more.

As an ornithologist working in offshore renewables, there is so much complete rubbish in this thread about onshore wind, offshore wind, tidal, and the environmental impacts of all three, that there’s too much for me to correct without taking a day off work.

I enjoyed this opening paragraph and the rest of the post.

I enjoyed this opening paragraph and the rest of the post.

Makes you feel warm and fuzzy does it?

Doesn’t address the fundamental issues IMO:

1) That “adaptive management plans” is an assumption that there will be impact.
2) That adaptive management plans are a legal protection for businesses, not protections for the environment
3) That adaptive management plans are only as good as the regulations that underpin the statutory requirements – statutory requirements that have overseen a collapse in animal life in the UK
4) “Limited evidence” – so we’re experimenting on a SSSI.

You can do surveys, sure. But if the legal underpinning is worthless, then the outcomes can be devastating.

And we have a cheaper, faster to produce, proven technology that has no environmental impact we could bung in the sea, at scale, a bit further offshore.

And we have a cheaper, faster to produce, proven technology that has no environmental impact

No environmental impact?

To all intents and purposes offshore wind has the least environmental impact of any energy generating tech we can currently deploy.

I enjoyed this opening paragraph

I thought it was a tad rude.

I felt the point could have been made using more diplomatic prose.

The one thing I have learnt on STW is that whatever the subject there is always someone who has greater expertise.

But if only people at the top of their game commented there would be very little to discuss, on a forum which exists solely to exchange ideas.

Makes you feel warm and fuzzy does it?

Not really – I didn’t understand most of it. I thought it quite zippily and snippily summarised the problem about being an expert in something about which people talk an immense about of bollocks online.

But the real galaxy brain moment is when you realise that we are all bollocks-talkers about most things. 🤯

it quite zippily and snippily summarised the problem about being an expert in something about which people talk an immense about of bollocks online.

Yup, I can totally relate to ehrob, it’s quite frustrating when self appointed experts in here start spouting off and digging down despite either having zero expertise in the field or their most recent experiences being old enough to drink in the US.

Makes you feel warm and fuzzy does it?

Nah, just gave me a laugh that someone else called you out on the same page for talking utter nonsense.

@squirrelking:

just gave me a laugh that someone else called you out on the same page for talking utter nonsense.

Didn’t call me out – called this whole thread out. I stand comfortably by what I’ve said. My o/h has been in the same field for 20 years now – her role is governance of the environmental side of design and bid and monitoring oversight processes for marine and ports across the UK and Ireland for a big multinational. Multiple wind farms/Mersey Gateway, the potential mersey barrage, stuff in the Severn estuary etc. etc – it’s her job to manage the environmental SMEs. So yeah, an ornithologist who admits to having “limited data” can’t really rule out environmental impacts other than “we don’t reckon“.

Whereas I’m interested in this at a governance level – and given our form (70% of all animals in the last 50 years is a pretty big data point), it’s clear we don’t govern build projects well because there’s a pathetic legislative base.

stumpyjon
Full Member
I don’t think PV is the solution for the UK as our geography makes they very inefficient. As was said earlier working at 1/3rd capacity is not very efficient.

Not relevant,

Sadly it is because NGs models aren’t clever enough to recognise the constraints so an X MW solar farm blocks out the same capacity in the grid even though it will on average only produce ~X/10 MW annually with both a daily and seasonal profile that could be modelled to reflect more closely the production. It is (in part) this that is hamstringing bringing on line new schemes as NG say no capacity when actually there is in real life.

That and zombie schemes, there is 200GW approved but not developed capacity sitting on the grid models which is why there is now a ~15 year wait for connections in some areas.

To all intents and purposes offshore wind has the least environmental impact of any energy generating tech we can currently deploy

It’s not zero, which is what you claimed.

Yours
Ransos
Renewable energy developer.

@ransos

@chevychase Get your wife to explain to you why it’s not a trivial point. I’m sure she’ll speak slowly if you ask.

That’s 3 now, can we manage another before page 4? Ooh exciting!

@chevychase Get your wife to explain to you why it’s not a trivial point. I’m sure she’ll speak slowly if you ask.

I’m glad I’d just finished my beer, my iPad and half the floor and my coffee table would have needed mopping off with a towel! 🤣

@ransos

Get your wife to explain to you why it’s not a trivial point. I’m sure she’ll speak slowly if you ask.

It’s the lowest impact energy generation we have, you’ve clearly tacitly agreed on that, right?

Therefore, whatever impacts there are (and I’ve happily conceded there are (obviously) impacts), don’t really matter in the grand scheme of “what are we going to do”. Because we’ve no lower-impact technologies to roll-out then we’re going to roll-out loads of wind. Period.

Of course, we’ll build the industries required for recycling end-of-life turbines and their parts, and the connective infrastructure etc. etc. We’ll (eventually) lower the carbon footprint of shipping and construction.

The average payback time for windfarms (for carbon footprint) is 3-5 months. And after that we benefit from the cheapest electricity we can produce, and we’re not poisoning our kids with noxious gases and particulate emissions.

So yes – I point you back up the thread – you’re “technically” correct, but compared to other technologies – yes – it’s trivial.

Show me the data that stacks up against any other generation technology that proves otherwise.

See, this is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge tells you something is best so go all in, wisdom tells you that going all in leaves you open to failure.

Diversity of supply is the name of the game, it’s the entire tenet of renewable engineering.