Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

JKenH wrote: »

Now it’s Big Wind’s turn to reap the profits

Nope, that's a blatant misrepresentation of my comment.

The point about Big Oil is that they made large profits because they weren't accounting for the externality costs of their product. Had CO2 costs, pollution costs etc been included in the price, then they'd have sold less, we'd have bought less, and RE alternatives would have rolled out faster and sooner.

Do not be against RE getting £bn's in contracts and business, we need them to get trillions. The more of our energy monies going to RE, the less that goes to FF's. It is that very market shift that we need, and as soon as possible.

JKenH

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Nope, that's a blatant misrepresentation of my comment.

The point about Big Oil is that they made large profits because they weren't accounting for the externality costs of their product. Had CO2 costs, pollution costs etc been included in the price, then they'd have sold less, we'd have bought less, and RE alternatives would have rolled out faster and sooner.

Do not be against RE getting £bn's in contracts and business, we need them to get trillions. The more of our energy monies going to RE, the less that goes to FF's. It is that very market shift that we need, and as soon as possible.

So it is ok for shareholders of RE companies to get £bn’s in subsidies but not for Big Oil to earn £bn’s for shareholders without subsidies?

The £4.5bn is £1.5bn more than analysts were expecting and that is for only half the wind farm so Ørsted have a £3bn windfall courtesy of subsidies. That is about £50 for every man woman and child in this country or say £150 per household. That is for just one wind farm!

Where do these £bn’s of subsidies come from?

It is the poorest households who have to pay a disproportionately higher part of their income in fuel costs subsidising the wind farms as well as making FiT payments to those of us who are lucky enough to have had a few bob to spend on solar panels. With my panels and battery I can now maybe save a third of my £900 a year leccy bill so I will save a third of my contribution to the RE subsidies pot. That means everyone else pays a little bit more as well as paying me FiT.

Being green should not therefore be conflated with being ethical. Thankfully I am not a Guardian reader so won’t have to wrestle with that.:)

You also referred to externality costs. You have argued in other threads that batteries are not worth investing in but (applying your logic) you aren’t accounting for the externality costs of the alternative (i.e. grid sourced power not available from RE). If CO2 costs, pollution costs are included then surely you should be buying a battery and helping to save the planet.

Martyn1981

JKenH wrote: »

So it is ok for shareholders of RE companies to get £bn’s in subsidies but not for Big Oil to earn £bn’s for shareholders without subsidies?

The £4.5bn is £1.5bn more than analysts were expecting and that is for only half the wind farm so Ørsted have a £3bn windfall courtesy of subsidies. That is about £50 for every man woman and child in this country or say £150 per household. That is for just one wind farm!

Where do these £bn’s of subsidies come from?

It is the poorest households who have to pay a disproportionately higher part of their income in fuel costs subsidising the wind farms as well as making FiT payments to those of us who are lucky enough to have had a few bob to spend on solar panels. With my panels and battery I can now maybe save a third of my £900 a year leccy bill so I will save a third of my contribution to the RE subsidies pot. That means everyone else pays a little bit more as well as paying me FiT.

Being green should not therefore be conflated with being ethical. Thankfully I am not a Guardian reader so won’t have to wrestle with that.:)

You also referred to externality costs. You have argued in other threads that batteries are not worth investing in but (applying your logic) you aren’t accounting for the externality costs of the alternative (i.e. grid sourced power not available from RE). If CO2 costs, pollution costs are included then surely you should be buying a battery and helping to save the planet.

The FF industry gets an estimated $5tn pa in subsidies. Who do you think pays most of that, spoiler alert ....... the poorest people.

Fossil fuel subsidies are a staggering $5 tn per year

A new study finds 6.5% of global GDP goes to subsidizing dirty fossil fuels

JKenH wrote: »

You also referred to externality costs. You have argued in other threads that batteries are not worth investing in but (applying your logic) you aren’t accounting for the externality costs of the alternative (i.e. grid sourced power not available from RE). If CO2 costs, pollution costs are included then surely you should be buying a battery and helping to save the planet.

When you've read everything I've posted about batteries feel free to lecture me on morals.

Till then I'll give you a short summary.

At the moment we need more RE, we don't have enough, and we can cope with a lot more before spill/curtailment is at all significant.

PV and wind needed an artificial boost (subsidies) to get production up, to get costs down. In the case of PV Italy and Germany did the heavy lifting, the UK was a little late to the game, but we've contributed.

Batteries also need to come down in price, before they become an economic part of the energy solution, but at present we do not need much, just some for frequency response.

But, battery development and production scale is being driven (literally) by the automotive industry with production scaling up rapidly.

So ........ for the energy sector we can be a bit complacent and sit back, since by the time a large amount of grid scale storage is needed, costs will have fallen. Also with V2G there is the potential to have enough grid scale storage as a by-product of the switch to EV's, perhaps 1,500GWh in the UK just from cars. [The Uk needs around 500GWh of storage for a very high RE percentage leccy grid.]

I have mentioned many times over the years my ethical thoughts and opinions on batteries. I am genuinely torn about helping promote and drive them by buying one myself, but I believe that investing my money in other RE schemes (via Abundance) is more productive at this time - You can be excused for not knowing this, but I have mentioned it before, so again, be careful before you pass judgement on people and issues that you only know a small amount about.

Back to domestic batteries. Time shifting excess PV (or any RE) to other times, especially peak demand times, will help the environment, however at the moment the grid still has a large amount of flexible gas generation even during peak PV generation times, so time shifting will not make an environmental benefit (yet) but will result in a net loss of RE generation due to battery efficiency losses. Again, I don't expect you to know all of this, but I have posted it all already.

So, in answer to your question:

If CO2 costs, pollution costs are included then surely you should be buying a battery and helping to save the planet.

I believe the answer is no, I should not be buying a battery, your calculations are incomplete, and your conclusion therefore lacking.

However, from a personal point of view, I have nothing against the deployment of batteries now, and nothing against the early adopters who choose to invest their money in what is an important future issue.


Some time back you said:

JKenH wrote: »

T (I am not going to get into an argument about that as I believe everyone is entitled to a view so I won’t be offended or reply if someone calls me a climate change denier).

and I feel the same, but I've noticed that your posts seem to be making lots of arguments and judgements, all of which are old and tired, the chief one perhaps being this:-

JKenH wrote: »

I entirely agree that we should reduce pollution wherever possible and conserve our resources when there is no down side. This is why I am a supporter of RE where it does not require subsidy.

If FF's accounted for all their costs, renewables would not need subsidies.

Focusing on RE subsidies is like attributing all costs to the cure, not the disease.

GreatApe

JKenH wrote: »

So it is ok for shareholders of RE companies to get £bn’s in subsidies but not for Big Oil to earn £bn’s for shareholders without subsidies?

The £4.5bn is £1.5bn more than analysts were expecting and that is for only half the wind farm so Ørsted have a £3bn windfall courtesy of subsidies. That is about £50 for every man woman and child in this country or say £150 per household. That is for just one wind farm!

Where do these £bn’s of subsidies come from?

It is the poorest households who have to pay a disproportionately higher part of their income in fuel costs subsidising the wind farms as well as making FiT payments to those of us who are lucky enough to have had a few bob to spend on solar panels. With my panels and battery I can now maybe save a third of my £900 a year leccy bill so I will save a third of my contribution to the RE subsidies pot. That means everyone else pays a little bit more as well as paying me FiT.

Being green should not therefore be conflated with being ethical. Thankfully I am not a Guardian reader so won’t have to wrestle with that.:)

You also referred to externality costs. You have argued in other threads that batteries are not worth investing in but (applying your logic) you aren’t accounting for the externality costs of the alternative (i.e. grid sourced power not available from RE). If CO2 costs, pollution costs are included then surely you should be buying a battery and helping to save the planet.

Also a lot of the greens ignore the positive sides of !!!!!! some nations run their whole economies/heathcare/education off fossil fuels

And generally fossil fuels allowed humanity to speed up development quite quickly especially I would argue the coal/oil planets built from 1940-1970 without them the west would not have developed at anywhere near the speed it did

And without mass fossil ramp of 1940-1970 it is unlikely wind or PV would have taken fossils place most likely nuclear and less development would have happened probably much less development. And in the east the mass fossil ramp of 2000-2020 without it would have also meant much less development

The greens dont care much about development because they already live in a developed nation. Try living in an undeveloped nation and see how fun it is

More or less the world has moved in a positive direction and will continue to do so
Now fossils will be slowly replaced by green primary because fossils made us rich and productive enough to be green.

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

The FF industry gets an estimated $5tn pa in subsidies.

This is just propaganda

If saudi pumps oil for $1 and sells oil to its citizens at $2 rather than a benchmark on a stock exchange half way around the world which states oil is worth $75 why do you call it a subsidy? Why must the saudi use an american or british benchmark?

Fossils receive no net subsidy. Fossils pay a huge net taxes to nations.
This is clearly obvious else you would have nations like norway shut their oil fields down tomorrow they dont because despite propaganda pieces saying it needs subsidy they know full well oil pays the bills

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

If FF's accounted for all their costs, renewables would not need subsidies.

Most of the costs of FF externalities are grossly inflated.
We had this discussion with Generali he was good enough to accept that was true.

If you recall one of the externalities was done on a price of ~$10 million per life lost which is a gross overestimate but that is propaganda for you

But none of this matters, not everything in life is a cost benefit analysis and the richer nations are rich enough not to need every last drop of productivity so they have and will continue to go green. Hopefully EVs can be done at petrol/diesel prices as EVs will help RE progress much better and faster than without EVs

JKenH

Martyn1981 wrote: »

When you've read everything I've posted about batteries feel free to lecture me on morals.


You can be excused for not knowing this, but I have mentioned it before, so again, be careful before you pass judgement on people and issues that you only know a small amount about.

Hi Mart,

I certainly wasn’t trying to lecture you about morals nor pass judgement and apologise if I gave that impression. I was only applying similar logic as you had applied in the spirit of a lively forum debate. Although we do not always share the same views on AGW or the FF industry I very much respect your experience and depth of knowledge in all things solar and once again I can only apologise if I caused offence.

Ken

zeupater

GreatApe wrote: »

Most of the costs of FF externalities are grossly inflated.
We had this discussion with Generali he was good enough to accept that was true.

If you recall one of the externalities was done on a price of ~$10 million per life lost which is a gross overestimate but that is propaganda for you ...

Hi

Odd really, I seem to remember following those discussions closely at the time and I don't actually remember you being involved at all - incidentally, the discussions seem to have happened before you registered under your current profile which probably raises plenty of questions or provides oodles of answers for a number of current forum members! ...

Z

silverwhistle

Blaming Big Oil for our continued use of FF is somewhat hypocritical. We must take responsibility for our own consumption of FF. I doubt that many (though I am sure there will be the odd one or two) of the contributors on this forum get by without any use of FF.

What a strawman argument. Many of us on here try and reduce our usage but we're not in a position to go completely FF free at the moment. I drive a 9 year old Korean hatchback but have solar panels because I've made certain choices.



Your argument reminds me of the rejoinder "why don't you take a refugee into your own house", when such matters are always best dealt with collectively.



It's the same with your lamentations of how RE subsidies impact the poor: we've seen such crocodile tears on these boards before, and there is never any acknowledgement that there are other answers to that particular issue. Putting the brakes on RE is not the solution.

JKenH wrote: »

BThankfully I am not a Guardian reader so won’t have to wrestle with that.:)

Well, I don't think that would surprise anyone reading your posts, but I find it strange that you then feel quite prepared to comment on what they do and do not include in their paper.



Why aren't you a Guardian reader then? I would read The Times and Telegraph more but they charge too much so only manage occasional articles. I think we can ignore The Express and Mail as whatever your viewpoints they exist to raise blood pressure with all their SHOCK HORROR headlines and who has been showing the most cleavage recently.

Martyn1981

JKenH wrote: »

Hi Mart,

I certainly wasn’t trying to lecture you about morals nor pass judgement and apologise if I gave that impression. I was only applying similar logic as you had applied in the spirit of a lively forum debate. Although we do not always share the same views on AGW or the FF industry I very much respect your experience and depth of knowledge in all things solar and once again I can only apologise if I caused offence.

Ken

I appreciate your response, but I think my warning was appropriate, my position on batteries is, I believe, solid. It's well considered, and I've explained it in detail. Your approach, based on a small fragment of information failed to see the big picture, and that's where many discussions on these matters go astray. If you don't see the big picture, then you will fail to see the whole context.

I believe that you have the issue backwards regarding your complaints about subsidies towards the RE industry. These subsidies are needed to deal, as soon as possible with an enormous and growing problem, on which the scientific community is virtually unanimous, and national policies across the globe are also close to unanimous.

So I'd suggest you need to stop raising concerns about RE support for a while, and first deal with the underlying issue of AGW.

If you can successfully prove that the science is wrong, then you would be in a position to criticise the response to the science which is the global response to AGW.

This may sound cheeky, but it really is that simple, first get a peer reviewed scientific paper that contradicts the 50yrs of solid science on this matter, then we can discuss the merits, or not, of promoting/supporting low carbon technologies - especially given the far greater annual support that the FF industry still gets..