Great article from James Delingpole at Breitbart:
WIND: STILL TWO OR THREE TIMES THE COST OF CONVENTIONAL ENERGY, WHATEVER THE GREENIES CLAIM
Wind power now UK’s cheapest source of electricity – but the Government continues to resist onshore turbines.
That was the headline in the Independent this time last week. I’m not suggesting for a moment that you’re an Independent reader but suppose for a moment you were: what do you think your reaction might have been?
Mine, I suspect, would have been not dissimilar to that of the eight thousand readers who decided it was worth sharing – and indeed that of the two or three who used it to needle sceptics on Twitter.
“Take that, evil deniers!” I would have gone in my smug, Independent-reading way. And it would never have occurred to me to question the premise for a number of reasons.
James lists the three sources of fact published in the news article and then proceeds to write the following:
Well, since the story ran, Paul Homewood has been doing a bit of homework. And guess what? Yes, that’s right. Wind power isn’t the cheapest source of electricity in the UK or anywhere else in the world. Not by a long chalk. It’s at least twice the price, for example, of electricity generated from that hated but remarkably cost-effective fossil fuel, gas.
How then did Bloomberg New Energy Finance manage to concoct so flagrant a lie?
Why, of course, by doing what cunning financial types will refuse ever to admit is a lie. They prefer the phrase “creative accounting.”
Basically what Bloomberg’s analysts have done is to pretend that all the subsidies paid to the wind industry are effectively free money which comes from a magic money tree and that all the levies imposed by government on fossil fuel industries in order to level the playing field for renewables aren’t really a tax but are more like lovely little bunnies with cute floppy ears which bounce up and down harmlessly outside the headquarters of Shell and BP and Exxon contributing nothing but wholesome springtime joy to the companies’ balance sheets and shareholders’ dividends.
The link to Paul's article has links to the government data and show the actual costs of the major forms of energy production. Nuclear is one of the more expensive "conventional" production methods - about the same as advanced coal and about three times the cost of natural gas turbines. However, when you look at the total lifetime cost including fuel, it is very competitive - Geothermal comes in as cheapest.
Leave a comment