Have we hit a climate tipping point? Green power attracts big money The world has reached a major tipping point in the transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy: 2022 was the first year global investments in low-carbon technologies matched spending on the fossil fuel industry. Or so claims BloombergNEF, whose Energy Transition Investment Trends report was released Thursday. In it, BNEF …
As someone mentioned the other day, established and more wealthy economies can afford to "go green" while emerging economies such as much of Africa, large parts of Asia and South America can't, so are still investing heavily in the "cheaper" fossil fuels. Obviously there's still a level of hypocrisy in the 1st world governments, but not as much as you imply.
"For the low-carbon power sector, in which BNEF includes "renewable energy, energy storage, electrified transport, electrified heat, carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen and sustainable materials,""
Electrified transport and electrified heat are ways of consuming electricity, which still could be produced with fossil fuels, so I don't think that should count. So if you count only, renewable production, storage and CCS, new investment is still lagging behind new investment in fossil fuels. Of course that's a global amount and I guess a large part of the fossil fuel investment is going on in places like Russia, China, Middle East and other oil-rich countries, but that is being done on the back of money pumped there by the west.
Policy in US and EU should really be directed to 90% plus investment in renewable energy, nuclear energy, and improving the grid, to get to minimal fossil-fuel use ASAP. It shouldn't even be about climate change, although that is of course a big consideration, but for me it's mainly to eliminate dependency to Russia for gas, and the Middle East and other assorted twatocracies for oil. Oil should be limited to a strategic reserve, and to produce materials that we can't produce otherwise.
Policy in US and EU should really be directed to 90% plus investment in renewable energy, nuclear energy, and improving the grid, to get to minimal fossil-fuel use ASAP. It shouldn't even be about climate change
Climate change isn't a problem. This is why the target shifted from 'preventing 2C' to 'preventing 1.5C'. Basically exceeding 2C warming is pretty much impossible given the physics of CO2 and current knowledge concerning ECS (Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity). That's basically how much warming for how much CO2. Preventing 1.5C is both more alarming, and more achievable given it's well within the bounds of natural variability in the Earth's normal climate cycles. Especially if you rig the market to start measuring from the end of the Little Ice Age, when you'd rather hope we'd be warming.
What it does do is provide pressure to demand billions get diverted into lobbyist's pet projects. Bloomberg's one of these lobbyists and makes a lot of money promoting 'renewables'.
So the UK's 'invested' in around 65GW of windmills. Today's demand is around 42GW, so we've already got far more wind than we need. Except of course it's not windy, so they're only producing around 5GW. Oops. I guess if we increase windmills to 546GW, we could meet current demand. Except because 'Net Zero' and decarbonisation, expected electricity demand is going to increase 2-3x. But look on the bright side, the UK could claim to be the first country in the world to have installed over 1TW of windmills!
There's also another.. slight snag. The Russia thing's given a nice boost to the 'renewables' lobby, both in cash and publicity. We must stop using gas because Russia!. Ok, so we never really used much Russian gas in the UK, and produce our own. We could produce more, and make a ton of money exporting surplus to our neighbors in Europe who also went full retard in the services of the 'renewables' industry's bottom line. Like Germany. The country that's really struggling. Largely thanks to their cuddly, peace-loving Greens that just announced we'd declared war on Russia.
But the real problem is we've only got an energy 'crisis' because our leaders have created one. They got suckered into investing into 'renewables', and sanctioning Russian gas. All without any economically viable means of producing electricity. So Germany's fired it's reactors back up, and is frantically building coal power again. And now..
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/01/25/gas-fired-power-is-now-cheaper-than-offshore-wind-again/
There are increasingly strong signs that European gas prices are back to pre-war lows and may stop that way. [TTF is the European benchmark]. As Timera explain, part of the reason is demand destruction in Europe and Asia, with gas replaced by coal and slowing economic growth in China. Gradually as well LNG capacity is starting to expand.
Catalyst Digital Energy, the UK energy consultants, agree, with day ahead UK prices down to 178p/therm at the end of December.
Naturally this has an effect on consumer prices for gas, but there is also an effect on power prices too, and these are back down to £160/MWh on the wholesale market.
You won't of course see this being reflected in your energy bills. You will of course be told that energy bills are going to continue to increase. Reality is it just means profits increase, in line with cost of living increases and rapid declines in the rest of our economy and standard of living. You certainly won't see this from the 'renewables' industry's chief publicists like the Bbc or Grauniad, even though the Bbc shows some of the evidence-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cxwdwz5d8gxt/natural-gas
Eventually though, more people are going to start asking why our energy bills are still so massively inflated, when costs have fallen so rapidly back to typical levels. Especially as it now means gas is back to being cheaper than 'renewables', and far, far cheaper than the massively and unjustifiably inflated prices the 'renewables' scumbags have been charging for the last 6 months. Gas isn't an input cost to 'renewables', so the only justification for the massive profits they've generated is because the useless shower of shite we have in office are allowing the energy companies to rip off the UK businesses and consumers.
Especially as CO2 isn't a problem, and the UK's 'Net Zero' policy won't make any measurable difference to global temperatures anyway.
If we had 1TW of offshore wind it would certainly help the little Englanders, no-one would be able to get close to the shores of this fair isle without getting sliced up by a wind turbine :) (yeah yeah I know the blades are at a safe height...)
As you say this energy crisis is very much manufactured and many of the ones calling for more spending are ultimately the ones who will profit. Germany has spent untold billions on its renewable energy and is now the dirty man of western Europe.
The time, cost and energy needed to make enough renewable power sources and storage devices will be ordered of magnitude higher than if went for nuclear. The UK has a huge stockpile of potential fuel at Sellafield that needs dealing with so we can either bury it as is or use it in new gen4 reactors and bury it when it is well and truly spent.
"Climate change isn't a problem. This is why the target shifted from 'preventing 2C' to 'preventing 1.5C'..."
Actually climate change / warming was never the problem in and of itself, the problem (mainly for flora and fauna) is the *rate* of change. many plants are very sensitive to 1 or 2 degrees difference. If the change happens over thousands or even hundreds of generations, they can adapt to the changing conditions. That same change in less than 100 years, which is a few dozen generations for small plants and a handful of generations for bigger trees, means that there could be massive negative effects on flora (cascading down to the fauna that depend on them, and eventually to us humans)
Actually climate change / warming was never the problem in and of itself, the problem (mainly for flora and fauna) is the *rate* of change. many plants are very sensitive to 1 or 2 degrees difference
Actually, they're not. Otherwise they'd die every night. Or they'd have died many, many years ago given temperatures have varied by more than that amount for prolonged periods. Plus many plants evolved when atmospheric CO2 levels were far higher than today. They're far more adaptable than reality deniers-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma#Agricultural_implications
The CO2 fertiliser effect has been greatly overestimated during Free-Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment (FACE) experiments where results show increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere enhances photosynthesis, reduce transpiration, and increase water use efficiency (WUE).[35] Increased biomass is one of the effects with simulations from experiments predicting a 5–20% increase in crop yields at 550 ppm of CO2.[38] Rates of leaf photosynthesis were shown to increase by 30–50% in C3 plants, and 10–25% in C4 under doubled CO2 levels.[38] The existence of a feedback mechanism results a phenotypic plasticity in response to [CO2]atm that may have been an adaptive trait in the evolution of plant respiration and function.
The IPCC reports actually discuss these benefits, ie higher CO2 levels can mean less water is required to generate equivalent yields. It's also widely used in agriculture to optimise.. err. greenhouse efficiencies to tweak CO2, water and yields.
Unlikely-
The Coventry-based company provides energy to 1.4 million homes in the UK and broadband to around 500,000 people.
So it's a retail business. Lots of costs, lots of regulation, not much in the way of profits. Hence why retail operations have been busily going bust or flogged off to the nearest sucker. The real money is on the supply side. There, you get to sell 'renewable' electricity at inflated gas prices, plus trouser sales of ROCs, REGOs, constraint payments and the billions in subsidies that are the reason why our energy costs are so high. If you own both retail and generation, it's easier to use accounting tricks to make it appear as though retail business isn't making money by doing stuff like creating '100% Rewable' tariffs, and flogging the REGOs you generate to the retail business for however much you need to eliminate profits.
As I've said before, the scam should be obvious. The 'renewables' scumbags claim their electricity is the cheapest, yet ever since we've been 'investing' in their snake oil, our energy bills have rocketed, and inflation along with it. If it truly was cheaper than gas, coal or nuclear, our bills should have been falling as our 'renewables' capacity increased.
Stuff like this
Facts just ain't what they used to be.
But then Greenpeace takes a lot of money from 'renewables' interests, so will happily do PR for it. I like the way a lot of the replies question the 'Facts' when they don't see the 'facts' reflected in their energy bills. So Greenpeace claims 'renewables' are so cheap, they no longer require subsidies. We have a Budget coming up in March, so let's fact-check this one by eliminating those subsidies.
Oh, I didn't realise they were multi-purpose. They mill grain too? Good oh!
Gearboxes usually. Then sometimes catching fire and spilling lots of oil.
But they're the same technology that's been used for around 1,000 years, with exactly the same drawbacks. They can't perform useful work when the wind isn't blowing. Hence why our ancestors replaced windmills with more reliable power sources. Then again, unlike classic windmills, the modern versions can't be as easily converted into quaint character homes. The nacelles are probably large enough and secure enough to serve as jail cells for 'renewables' lobbyists who've lied repeatedly about their benefits.
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