Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

zeupater

Hi

... Yet, instead of modernising, introducing efficiency measures & looking to operate on lower gross margins in order to maintain or even build market share ... the EU approach has been to cry 'dumping' far too often and play the protectionist game ... in the meantime the economies of scale for massive production in modern plants in an economy which isn't driven by the need for fast capital return by the financial markets have pushed global prices down to levels where the only market for EU steel is in a highly protected EU market, leaving manufacturers higher up the product added value chain at a global disadvantage ...

... so what options do they have? .... support EU material suppliers whatever the effect on their bottom line? - contract, forget their global potential and only operate within the EU protective market themselves? .... or purchase materials at global market prices?

... it's not as easy as first impressions suggest ... protectionism has it's costs, one of which is to discourage investment in competitive advantage and that's what we're really seeing if the shroud of excuses for poor decisions & incompetence is set aside ...

HTH
Z

GreatApe

michaels wrote: »

I lik ethis idea of carbon vat.

The food problem could be solved by offering a reduction (subsidy) on low carbon food so the overall impact is zero. It would need a bit of thought as no doubt different beef sources have very different footprints etc.

I wonder if it would turn out that we are currently paying too much tax for some carbon sources - perhaps petrol - and too little for others (domestic gas, food obviously)

If something is unproductive to do, it is still unproductive to do if force by tax arbitrage and doing so will still make the nation poorer

What this means is, if it costs £100 billion to insulate homes to the max and the saving is £1 billion in national gas a year ie a 1% return that is to say a bad decision.

Thus increasing gas prices via taxes and or subbing insulating home costs does not change the actual equation. Sure maybe it costs now only £30 billion to insulate homes (due to gov grants) and the saving is £3 billion in gas (due to increased tax) a year ie 10% return so great!! but all you have done is play accounting tricks. The true cost is the same 1% return

GreatApe

silverwhistle wrote: »

At the moment the government seems to be going in the opposite direction with the proposed large increase in VAT on solar panel installations..

The UK does not need any more solar PV

Take this Sunday the mid day fossil fuel generation was 4GW. Monday was about 7GW and today was about 15GW

Fast forward 5 years and the UK will have about 5GW more inter connectors and about 10GW more wind power

So a day like this sunday would already be 100% green. Why do we need more solar panels then? Just to curtail them?

A day like this Monday would be 100% green. Why do we need more solar panels then? Just to curtail them?

A day like today would be about 80% green. Sure some additional PV would have helped but that PV would be curtailed about half the week

Going forward from 2023-2030 we have committed to even more wind so even more of the time your excess PV will be curtailed

Simply put
The UK does not need more PV
Or more nuclear
With just what is under construction and what we have committed to we will be mostly green and since PV is uncontrolable if we are 90% green there is a good chance any large PV deployment will be 90% curtailed

Things could change if we see mass deployment of EVs but until that is guaranteed the UK should not be building any more PV or nuclear

GreatApe

Piddles wrote: »

So true. But most people are already doing it via an extra 10% or so on their energy bills for the FIT, etc. That priming of demand has meant the cost of PV has fallen dramatically. Success. Offshore wind has been effectively subsidised, but because the market has been distorted to produce the massive investments, so the costs of this heavy engineering has fallen dramatically. Success. OK, wind and solar don't yet pay their systems costs and backup costs (when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), but it's getting there and we still need to place some more big bets on hydrogen, batteries, etc. (and yes, GreatApe, hybrid boilers )

We like to claim we're the birthplace of the industrial revolution (remember the London Olympics opening ceremony?). But what that means is that we got rich the dirty way. Climate change is truly global. So, in today's context it's probably true to say we have a moral obligation to help the global economy to jump straight to the _clean_ way by contributing to the development of competitive low carbon technologies.

In economic terms, by 2040 there will be four Asias, four Indias and four Africas.

(pause for effect)

This is a HUGE task and something that we can, are and should make a huge contribution to.

I am not saying your are wrong or right

Just like someone who wants more spending on education or healthcare or defense or pensions or police or mental health or addiction.... I am not saying those arguments are wrong or right that one thing goes or does not deserve more funding.

I am only pointing out that if you want more spending on say healthcare then realistically you have to not lie, that you have to tell the truth that more healthcare spending will have to mean less in schools/pensions/police/etc than otherwise would have been the case

Green power is attainable but it will cost. It isn't free despite the protests of some green cheerleaders (who also object to the removal of subsidy so with one breath they say it is cost-less and also that it needs subsidy, figure that)

So is lower fossil fuels better for the uk than higher spending on healthcare?
I dont know, just like I dont know if more healthcare and less defense spenidng is better

But I do know we cant magic !!!! up and pretend things are free when they are not

GreatApe

Piddles wrote: »

This is a HUGE task and something that we can, are and should make a huge contribution to.

Just to make my position clearer. I think the world is going to go green quite rapidly over the next 30 years mostly thanks to software and mostly thanks to the yanks

The big one is going to be self drive EVs and they will be cost negative (ie make/save money)
What I expect to happen is that once self drive software is developed the taxi fleets of the future will be so cheap people and governments will get rid of human driven cars. These EVs I think will be half the size of todays cars. Instead of a tesla model 3 which is 185 cm wide and has a 50KWh battery pack and gets about 4.5 miles per kWh, imagine a self drive taxi that is 85cm wide and is a two seater one at the front one at the back and with a 20KWh battery pack. Such a car is more or less half the size and cost of a model 3 and importantly gets ~10 miles per kWh

Software solves transport and solves EVs
This could mean the UK needs as little as perhaps 35 TWh of electricity to replace all the car miles and perhaps the same again for goods transport etc so just 70 TWh to fix transport which is 1/10th the energy currently used in transport

These will be even more energy efficient than trains and probably take a lot of the domestic flights market too. At least 10 miles per KWh perhaps even upto 20 miles per kWh as aesthetics is less important on a taxi than a personal car so aerodynamics can be maxed out for the high speed long mileage routes/versions.


The grid for the UK is more or less already solved with what we have and what is under construction (so long as we can extend the existing UK nukes lives rather than retire them). This year will be about 50% fossil fuel grid
2024 will be about 25% fossil fuel grid (3 links to France of combined 3.4GW under construction two of which come online in the next 6-12 months so we will import a lot more nuclear power from France and also a 1.4 GW link to Norway under construction so we will import a lot of hydropower too. These are negative cost projects. Plus likely another 2GW link to France and another 1.4GW link to norway will start construction soon)

We have also committed to another 20GW of offshore wind by 2030 so the grid is more or less solved.

Really the only thing that remains is heating
This one I dont see a cheap solution to
But the overall cost will probably be affordable
With a mix of resistance heating for smaller properties, heat pumps for bigger properties and hybrid boilers for the rest.

Overall the costs will be okay and I can see a viable effective path towards >90% decarb
Grid a little more expensive (wind power adds cost but inter-connectors lower cost)
Self drive half sized EVs save transport and energy costs big time
Heating expensive but we will be able to afford it especially if dont post the wealth/productivity of half sized self drive EVs

So while some here paint me as negative I am pretty positive and see a clear pathway its just very different from the blunt (we need more pv we need more wind and nothing else mantra)

Martyn1981

Piddles wrote: »

I suspect there's actually very little we disagree on.

The short term problem with green levies or carbon tax/price is that it puts our economy at a competitive disadvantage. We're seeing this play out in the steel industry. British Steel seems to be going bust. So what happens? We buy Chinese steel made a less carbon efficient way using massive amounts of coal that then has to be shipped from the other side of the world. Which we can all agree, actually makes global climate change worse....even it makes our local carbon numbers look better.

Sorry, disagree about it putting our economy at a disadvantage, since almost all countries are acting, especially China, and I seem to recall that the impact of levies on steel costs was very small (their total leccy costs represent about 6-8% of production costs), and seemed to just be a scapegoat for bigger problems.

Piddles wrote: »

I'm absolutely not saying don't do it. I'm not saying that the price of not doing it is anything short of hideous. I'm saying we have to stop this perverse incentive to make climate change worse. The universal carbon price could be the mechanism to do that. If your consumption generates carbon, you have to pay for it. Whether it's internally OR at the border.

Totally agree, I've always been a supporter of a 'proper' carbon price. What we and Europe now have is low, and I recall the UK saying that they won't be raising it till post 2025?

It'll never happen, but some sort of international tariff based on action against the UN Paris Accord might be 'fun'. The US' withdrawal automatically triggering a significant fee!

Piddles wrote: »

Now ask those steel workers what they think of green levies and you'll get an ear full! That's not just perception, it's their hard reality. The government has a truly gargantuan task to convince the wider public that fighting climate change is such a good idea.

I think it's mostly perception, with blame being placed on green levies which back then were getting blamed for everything.

Green policies are not responsible for the Tata steel crisis

Analysis of the figures show Port Talbot may actually have been profiting from efforts to reduce carbon emissions

In Tata Steel’s press release last week, the company blamed “global oversupply of steel, significant increase in third country exports into Europe, high manufacturing costs, continued weakness in domestic market demand in steel and a volatile currency” for its intention to sell off the Port Talbot steel works. Part of steel’s manufacturing costs is, of course, electricity. Which is how we come to be talking about climate policies.

There is no doubt that the Port Talbot steelworks is a big energy user. According to reports, it uses as much electricity as nearby Swansea and each year the power bill runs to £60m. But in Simon Evans’ excellent Carbon Brief article, he finds electricity to be between 6 and 8% of the plant’s total production costs. Of this, perhaps 2-3% is due to green policy costs. But because the UK compensates energy-intensive industries for about two-thirds of the impact of these levies, the real cost of green levies at Port Talbot is about 1% of production costs.

I agree that the government has a big task explaining green levies, but given that the majority of the public support renewables, I wouldn't call it gargantuan. Also note that RE subsidies have tumbled, such as off-shore wind CfD's down from £160/MWh to about £60/MWh, closing in on average wholesale costs of ~£50/MWh.

Piddles wrote: »

Politicians look to the next election. Business leaders to the next set of financial results. All the decision makers have been focused on the short term forever.

Yep. But politicians are also supposed to make the hard decisions for us, such as tax and spend to avoid significant hardships ahead.

It would be nice to see all parties get together and say - "this is needed, we have to do it", lifting the pressure of any sitting government.

Piddles wrote: »

GreatApe's post may be forthright, but it's difficult to say he's totally wrong.

He's totally wrong. A drop in living standards would require higher future prices, but projections are for energy costs to fall lower due to cheap RE and storage reducing waste, curtailment and standby costs.

A drop in living standards would require a shortage of energy, but there is simply no scaleability issues with RE. Off-shore wind alone could supply 10-100 times our future high leccy needs.

A drop in living standards would result from pollution issues on health, and the serious economic costs expected from AGW if it's not tackled, predictions as high as -25% on global GDP by 2100.

He's totally wrong.

Martyn1981

Piddles wrote: »

The government has a truly gargantuan task to convince the wider public that fighting climate change is such a good idea.

I haven't mentioned the quarterly public attitude survey (now 7yrs old) for a while now, so here's the latest figures from wave 29:

"Do you support or oppose the use of renewable energy for providing our electricity, fuel and heat?"

Wave one
Support 79%
Oppose 5%

Wave 29
Support 84%
Oppose 3%


"Renewable energy industries and developments provide economic benefits to the UK"

Wave one
Support 69%
Oppose 7%

Wave 29
Support 74%
Oppose 5%


And whilst we are on the subject, one of my favourite stats looking at on-shore wind, which is one of the least supported technologies, showing the change in public support after the technology has 'impacted us' both financially and visually:

Wave one
Support 66%
Oppose 12%

Wave 29
Support 79%
Oppose 6%


Basically, we have to be careful not to listen to the loud and negative voices, as they can drown out reality.

JKenH

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Basically, we have to be careful not to listen to the loud and negative voices, as they can drown out reality.

Sorry Mart I don’t agree with that and I suspect that on reflection you will probably realise that wasn’t quite how you intended it to sound.

It is important to maintain an open mind and consider alternative views in an open debate. The orthodox view cannot remain unchallenged. Reality changes as society progresses; it is not absolute. The world was once thought to be flat and heretics were burnt at the stake.

Forty years ago green protestors would have been considered loud and negative voices and still are by some. The fact is for some societies and some people in our society there are more pressing realities than going green.

Everyone is entitled to see the world from their own perspective and we cannot presume that our values are better than theirs.

Piddles

JKenH wrote: »

Everyone is entitled to see the world from their own perspective and we cannot presume that our values are better than theirs.

For me, it all started in 2010 with Gillian Duffy and Gordon Brown in 'Bigotgate". Remember that one? If not, The then Prime Minister went on a photo-op walkabout and came across Labour supporter Mrs Duffy. In a cordial wide ranging conversation she briefly touched on some concerns about immigration. As a significant proportion of the population did. Later Gordon Brown drove off with his TV microphone still attached and he was heard angrily dismissing her as a bigot. It may well have cost him is job.

It's ended up with Brexit and a polarised society.

To an extent it doesn't now matter what anyone says, a significant proportion of the wider public will dismiss any "green" tax as a cynical method to get more money out them.

But maybe Brexit could be a climate change opportunity. Change VAT into a Carbon Price and the government could legitimately say "Work with us to tackle climate change. Avoid this tax by making carbon free purchasing decisions." Or something MUCH pithier.

zeupater

JKenH wrote: »

Sorry Mart I don’t agree with that and I suspect that on reflection you will probably realise that wasn’t quite how you intended it to sound.

It is important to maintain an open mind and consider alternative views in an open debate. The orthodox view cannot remain unchallenged. Reality changes as society progresses; it is not absolute. The world was once thought to be flat and heretics were burnt at the stake.

Forty years ago green protestors would have been considered loud and negative voices and still are by some. The fact is for some societies and some people in our society there are more pressing realities than going green.

Everyone is entitled to see the world from their own perspective and we cannot presume that our values are better than theirs.

Hi

.... However, Mart's position addresses the highly subjective 'gargatuan task' the government would face to convince the public by introducing some objectivity , suggesting that the public not only have a high degree of support already, but the level of support is demonstrably increasing .... despite the viewpoint of various loud voiced & often well funded protest groups, it is those with a high degree of negativity that seem to be losing public support ....

Bring on on-shore wind & large scale tidal schemes ... they're long overdue!

HTH
Z