FROM THE PRESS

Nov 26^th 2005   The Week

Facing an energy crisis

 To the Times

A significant drawback to renewable energy sources is the risk of ‘common-mode’ failure in unfavourable weather. For almost a week, there has been a freezing anticyclone over the UK.  Demand for gas and electricity is close to the winter peak, causing gas prices to reach 80p per therm.  The output from the 1,000 plus wind turbines in the past week has hardly risen above zero.  Solar panels are also producing little or no output in the areas with persistent freezing fog.  Wave power generators are still mere concepts, but had they been installed they would also have been incapacitated by the becalmed sea.

Will the ministers now recognise the stark evidence that these renewable technologies can all fail simultaneously and hence never provide the secure energy we need?

Paul Spare, Cheshire  

Thunderer

December 02 2005  The Times

Off with all their heads

By Philip Stott

CLIMATE CHANGE has passed Through the Looking Glass with Alice.  The Red Queen is berating us to believe ‘six impossible things before breakfast’.

This week a group of scientists from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton gave a warning that a weakening Gulf Stream will make Britain like Canada, with a cooling of 1C over the next couple of decades, leading to a deeper freeze later.  Global warming, of course, is to blame, as melting ice caps reduce the salinity of Arctic waters, preventing them from sinking and driving the ocean conveyor belt.

Clearly researchers in Southampton need to talk to each other.  In October a different lot, writing in the Journal of Applied Ecology, were busy employing computer models to calculate that fly and bluebottle populations would rise by nearly 250 per cent as Britain warmed some 2-3C, leading to more dire infections transmitted by insects.

In June we were informed by experts at a Royal horticultural Society conference that vast swaths of Britain would turn into a Van Gogh landscape, our native woods replaced byMediterranean horrors such as walnuts, sweet chestnuts, kiwi fruit, olives and sunflowers as temperatures soar by 3-6C.  ‘ It’s already happening – you can see fields of sunflowers,’ Professor Jeff Burley of Oxford University announced.

Likewise in June, the redoubtable Baroness Young of Old Scone, chief executive of the Eeyore-like Environment Agency, ever in ite boggy place, intoned: ‘Climate change and the issues that surround it are the biggest challenge – and that flows through some real pressure points for people in the future in terms of their water supply and their risk of flooding’ – basing everything, inevitably, on warming.

In reality, nobody has a fog what will happen.  This is Virtualia, not the UK.  During the last year, global warming has been predicted to lead to wetter winters, drier winters, anither ice age, blazing-hot Mediterranean summers killing thousands, greater biodiversity and less biodiversity.

Hence the impossible things to believe from the Today programme before breakfast.  But I’mwith Alice: ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said.  @One can’t believe impossible things.’

Philip Stott is Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the University of London

Press Release REF

German Expert Warns of Wind Energy’s Economic Downside

A new report on the German experience of renewable energy by Professor Wolfgang Pfaffenberger, Director of the Bremen Energy Institute at the University of Bremen, today warns of wind energy’s economic downside.

Professor Pfaffenberger emphasises that the cost of reducing emissions by the use of stochastic(randomly intermittent)generation such as wind is very high, and referring to a growing body of research in Germany, he states that the difficulties of managing wind energy make it so costly that its net economic impact is negative, a fact as yet unappreciated in the U.K.

Germany is one of the world’s leading adopters of wind energy, with nearly 17,000 MW of wind turbines installed, but contributes only 5% of total German electricity consumption.  Problems at the low level of penetration are a warning to the UK government, which is aiming to achieve roughly 7.5% of UK electricity from wind by 2010(and more to come), in a grid which is less modern and lacks significant interconnections to the European grid.

The Renewable Energy Foundation has repeatedly pointed out that the UK’s subsidy system, the Renewables Obligation, which will be costing consumers around £1 billion a year in 2010, is badly flawed and delivering very poor value for money by bringing forward wind to the exclusion of those renewable technologies which are capable of firm generation, such as biomass and tidal energy.

For further information visit the website at www.ref.org.uk  

 Wind farms planned for the North may not be as ‘green’ as developers claim. After an advertising watchdog ruled that crucial pollution figures were exaggerated.

 The Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint against Hertforshire-based Renewable energy Systems over the company’s published estimates of how far its turbines would reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

 They based their figures on the typical emissions from a coal burning power plant, but after taking expert advice, the authority determined it ‘was not reasonable’ to use present figures for calculating the reduction in emissions over a period of as long as 25 years. And it has now asked RS not to publish the results of similar calculations in the future.

 The ruling has wide-reaching for all similar developers across the UK because RES’s figures are the same as those used by the wind industry and recommended by the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA).

 In the North East, they include npower renewables, which is currently engaged in consultation over a proposed 18-turbine wind farm at Middlemoor, near Alnwick in Northumberland.

 Protester Dominic Coupe, whose family owns farms near middlemoor, said:” the review affects the rash of North wind turbine schemes and for the first time gives clear guidance on how CO2 savings from wind power must be estimated.  This more sensible estimate puts the staggering cost of wind farms into perspective.  Wind turbines are hugely costly relative to the alternatives and they offer no significant reliable capacity.”

 Dr John Constable, policy and research director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, said: ”It’s good to see that the ASA has revisited this issue and brought its ruling into line with commonsense engineering principles.

The wind industry as a whole must now revise claims which have seriously distorted debate about the value of onshore wind power.

PRESS RELEASE Renewable Energy Foundation05-01-2006

 SCOTTISH POWER SEEKS COMPULSORY PURCHASE TO DRIVE THROUGH WIND FARM PLANS.

 Ofgem yesterday announced that CRE Energy limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Scottish Power, was seeking powers of compulsory purchase to drive through the construction and connection of its projects.

 Ofgem reports “ In its application CRE explained that it intends to develop a series of windfarms at various locations in the UK in respect of which it considered it would be helpful to have the power to acquire the land compulsorily.”

 “CRE also considered that it would be helpful to have the power of compulsory wayleaves available to it for activities such as the installation and connection of associated cables, the export of power off site, construction and lay down areas and access.”

 While it is to be expected that developers will in the first seek to purchase or lease land from neighbours to their wind farm projects in the normal way, the threat of compulsory purchase will make it impossible in practice for adjoining landowners to defend their interests.  REF warned today that growth in wind power companies seeking compulsory purchase orders under the 1989 electricity act is to be expected following the successful applications of Thanet Offshore wind, and that of the Green Renewable Energy Company Ltd. which is apparently proposing biomass plants, both in October 2005.

 CRE/Scottish Power’s application is the next wave of this trend.

Ofgem has stated that it is minded to approve the grant of Compulsory Purchase powers to CRE/Scottish Power.

 In the legal and planning tradition of the country, powers of compulsory purchase are rarely granted, and this growing precedent for the automatic award of such powers to enable businesses to further their commercial ends is deeply disturbing.  Such a move would be justified only if there was a clear and unequivocal case for believing the national interest to be at stake.  REF believes there is no such case.

 Campbell Dunford, CEO of the Renewable Energy Foundation said:”The essence of Renewable energy is sustainability, co-operation and mutual benefit.  The fact that some companies feel the need to ride roughshod over individual liberties and obtain powers of compulsory purchase reveals their projects in their true, profit driven,colours.  This is a civil liberties issue, pure and simple. The unjustified allocation of these powers should be resisted tooth and nail.” 

AN adjudication by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), released on December 21 confirms that the wind power industry has duped the country, despite repeated warnings from critics. Every new windfarm, most recently the approval of the giant on Romney Marsh, is hailed as saving the emission of thousands of tonnes per year of carbon dioxide (CO2) and saving us from imminent flooding.

The new ASA adjudication tells us that during the life of these industrial monstrosities they will save only half of the CO2 emission which has been claimed. In many cases it was the promised saving of CO2 which swayed the votes of councillors and planners. Thus the Romney Marsh permission is founded on a lie.

The more realistic saving of CO2, accepted by ASA, is based on average fuel mixture use by power stations. Gas-fired generation provides an increasing amount of our electricity, with lesser CO2 output, so in future, wind power will displace less and less CO2 emission.

The Sustainable Development Commission's recent report on wind power uses a gas-fired CO2 emission factor, also used by the DTI, which is yet smaller than a mere half of the inflated claim made by developers and their trade organisation, the British Wind Energy Association.

The landscape is being raped with governmental collusion and fraudulent claims.

Dr John Etherington

Llanhowell, Pembrokeshire