The answer, according to Ed Miliband in an infamously toe-curling rendition of the Bob Dylan song, is blowing in the wind. But no longer, it seems, if you are on the board of SSE. The energy company, which was one of the first UK electricity companies to commit in a big way to renewable energy, has just pulled £3 billion worth of investment in renewables, citing the ‘changing macroeconomic environment’ and delays in the planning system. For that read that the projects it had intended to build have become economically unviable now that we no longer have near-zero interest rates, and that the national grid is struggling to absorb so much intermittent green energy.
To put that figure into context, SSE is still planning to invest £17.5 billion in renewables and associated transmission projects over the five years to 2027. Nevertheless, it still represents a significant pull-back on the Net Zero Acceleration Programme that it announced in November 2021. This comes at a time when Miliband is trying to speed up the decarbonisation of the electricity grid. His 2030 target (he kept saying that the Conservatives’ target of 2035 was hopelessly unambitious) is looking more and more impossible by the day.
Miliband is trying to speed up the decarbonisation of the electricity grid
Miliband is beginning to lose support from people he really ought to be able to count on backing his net zero plans. Labour donor and founder of green energy company Ecotricity Dale Vince has been warning for several months that heat pumps are not a solution for every home – contrary to government policy, which is that they should become our main form of domestic heating. Jo Bamford, founder of electric and hydrogen bus company Wrightbus, has also warned that government policy is too directed towards electrification of everything and ignores the possibilities of using hydrogen as a store of energy. Current policy, he argues, is boosting China, which makes a lot of the kit for solar and wind farms; Britain, he argues, is not in a good position to compete in those fields, but it could, with more investment, take a lead in hydrogen.
There is another big blot on the horizon of government green policy: the growing realisation that wind power is not infinite. The Netherlands this week has accused Belgium of stealing its wind. It ought to be obvious that wind turbines help to slow wind speeds – their whole purpose, after all, is to extract energy from it. For years there has been ample evidence that this effect is great enough to seriously deplete the performance of wind turbines which are placed downstream of others.
The Netherlands’ misfortune is that it lies to the east of two countries which are enthusiastic builders of wind turbines – Belgium and the UK – when the prevailing winds are from the west. But even without wind turbines to steal your wind, there is little less wind energy to extract year on year because the world is steadily becoming a less windy place. Contrary to the assertion of many climate alarmists that climate change is threatening us with ever more destructive wind storms, real world data shows a trend very much in the opposite direction, with a gradual stilling of wind speeds over much of the globe.
That is not good news if, like SSE, you are trying to make money from harnessing wind power. The good news is that the same real-world data shows that Britain, and the world in general, is becoming a little sunnier. That should, as least, help to aid Miliband’s plans to cover the countryside with solar farms. However, wind remains a bigger part of government plans to decarbonise the grid.
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