Bad Energy Policy In The UK

See Quintuple whammy by Matt Ridley of "The Rational Optimist." Excerpts:

"The industrial revolution, when Britain turned to coal for its energy, not only catapulted us into prosperity (because coal proved cheaper and more reliable than wood, wind, water and horse as a means of turning machines), but saved our landscape too. Forests grew back and rivers returned to their natural beds when their energy was no longer needed. Land that had once grown hay for millions of horses could grow food for human beings instead – or become parks and gardens.

Whether we like it or not, we are now reversing this policy, only with six times the population and a hundred times the energy needs. The government’s craven decision this week to placate the green pressure groups by agreeing a unilateral tough new carbon rationing target of 50% for 2027 -- they wanted to water it down, but were frightened of being taken to judicial review by Greenpeace -- condemns Britain to ruining yet more of its landscape. Remember it takes a wind farm the size of Greater London to generate as much electricity as a single coal power station – on a windy day (on other days we will have to do without). Or the felling of a forest twice the size of Cumbria every year."

"The RO (Renewable Obligation) already adds an astonishing £1.1 billion to the electricity bills of Britons per year already; by 2020 it could be £8 billion, or 30% extra. Unlike the poll tax, which was merely not progressive, this tax is highly regressive. It robs the poor – including those too poor to pay income tax – and hands much of the money to the landed rich in three different ways: higher wheat and wood prices; rents for wind farms; and the iniquitous `feed-in tariff’, by which the person who produces electricity by `renewable’ means is paid three times the market rate. As a landowner myself I refuse to join the feeding frenzy of the last two, but I cannot avoid the first."

"Driving up the price of electricity this way destroys jobs. One Spanish study suggests 2.2 jobs lost for each one created by green energy schemes, another Scottish one finds 3.7. If you don’t believe the numbers, ask a local widget maker if the size of his electricity bill affects his ability to take people on or lay them off."

" Does any of this actually lower carbon emissions? With the single exception of hydro, not one of the renewables has managed to save an ounce of carbon. Wind is so unreliable that coal-fired stations have to be kept spinning in the background (powering them up and down wastes even more energy and carbon). Wheat for ethanol is grown using tractors running on almost the same amount of diesel – and is anyway full of carbon itself (infra-red rays do not distinguish between carbon atoms from plants that grew yesterday and from plants that grew 300 million years ago). Solar will always be a statistical asterisk in cloudy Britain.

As for wood, consider the effect of a simple rule passed by the London borough of Merton in 2003 and slavishly emulated by planners all over the country. The Merton rule requires all developers who build a building of more than 1,000 square metres to generate 10% of energy `renewably’ on site. The effect has been to make it worth my while to thin my woods in Northumberland for the first time in decades.

How so? Faced with the need to find an energy source sufficiently dense to fit on site, developers have turned en masse to wood (or biomass as they prefer to call it). This has led to convoys of diesel lorries chugging through the streets of London to deliver wood to buildings – how very thirteenth century! Delivering, drying and burning this wood produces far more carbon dioxide than delivering gas would."

"According to one estimate, Britain is producing about six million extra tonnes of carbon dioxide each year as a result of redirecting its wood supply from current use by the wood-panel and other related industries into energy supply."