Wind power is too expensive at any price, you fool

This morning, CityAM published a spectacularly silly article by Ben Goldsmith on energy provision in the UK (which is, as we know, looking pretty dicey right now).

Upon reading the first part of Goldsmith's piece—which dwells on the mind-bendingly high energy price that the government has signed us up to for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant—you might find yourself nodding along in agreement. But then you will have read a little further...

It is not surprising that, instead of setting a new competitive low for nuclear generating costs, Hinkley Point has done the reverse at £92.50 MW/h.

The costs of coal and gas power are also rising. Recent Bloomberg research has shown that the price of UK coal and gas power rose by around 17 per cent to £74 MW/h in the past year, despite downward pressure from the advent of US shale gas. Now comes the surprise. Over the same period, the costs of energy from onshore wind fell from £70 MW/h to £55 MW/h–making it cheaper than gas.

Sigh.

Look, running an energy system is not an easy job: you need to be able to keep the energy in the grid at a fairly stable voltage, but demand ebbs and flows considerably—which means that you need to be able to control the supply to the grid too.

And this is where wind power fails spectacularly: not only because it is intermittent, but also because you have almost no control over the output. Even were wind power levels consistent, because the actual output is only a fraction of the theoretical installed capacity (around 29% on average), you would need to install around four times the required capacity to be certain of keeping the lights on.

All of this is made abundantly clear in a recent report by physicist and civil engineer, David Partington (and as reported by Not A Lot of People Know That.

Derek Partington, a former Chartered Engineer, has spent a lot of time in the last six years, researching the effectiveness of wind turbines. His findings are damning:

His report runs to thirteen pages, well worth a read. But some of his tables and charts tell the story.

For instance, how capacity utilisation can vary wildly from month to month.

It's well worth reading the whole thing—but, for now, I will just repeat the conclusions.

Over the period studied, January 2013 to December 2014 inclusive, wind turbine operational capacity connected to the UK Grid has increased from 5,894MW to 8,403MW. The operational capacity in January 2011 was 2,490MW; therefore there has been an increase of almost 3.4x over the four year period.
The conclusions to be drawn from the data analysis are:

1. An increase in the operational capacity does not improve average output. In fact the average monthly capacity factor has fallen over the periods studied, dropping from 33.2% in 2011 to 28.8% in 2014.
2. An increase in the operational capacity does not reduce the periods of low or very low output as measured by the number of hours per year when output was low (less than 10% of installed capacity) or very low (less than 5% of installed capacity). There is a variation from year to year but no pattern emerges. The mean low output over the four years was 1,617 hours/year with a standard deviation of 197 hours/year and the mean very low output was 599 hours with a standard deviation of 96 hours.
3. An increase in the operational capacity does not reduce intermittency. If taken as a measure of intermittency, the average monthly minimum expressed as a percentage of installed capacity was 1.9% with no significant variation from year to year.
4. Taking maximum rise and fall in output over one hour period as a further measure of intermittency, the National Grid is now having to cope with variations in output of over 1,100MW over one hour periods, with this variation increasing by about 250MW per year. This is very significant as it represents the changes in output which the Grid has to cope with and which has to be compensated by conventional fossil fuelled power stations.
5. An increase in the operational capacity does not indicate any possibility of closing any conventional, fossil-fuel power stations as there is no correlation between variations in output from wind turbines and demand on the Grid. Often the opposite is true – when demand rises, output from wind turbines falls and vice versa. This has a significant negative effect as back-up has to be provided from conventional, fossil-fuel power stations not only to cater for increase in demand on the Grid at peak times but also to cover for any possible fall in output from the UK wind turbine fleet at the same time.

Therefore, taking the four criteria above, there is no case for a continued increase in the number of wind turbines connected to the Grid.

As stated in my previous report, it is incumbent upon the Government to ensure that the British consumer is getting value for money from industrial wind turbine installations and that they are not just paying subsidies to developers and operators (through ROCs) whilst getting nothing back in return in terms of CO2 emission reductions through the supplanting of fossil-fuelled power generation.

Based on the results of this and my previous analysis I cannot see why any policy for the continued increase in the number of wind turbines connected to the Grid can be justified.

So, to return to Mr Goldsmith's article, and his lunatic assertion that onshore wind power is "cheaper than gas"... Well, this is clearly barking insanity of the very first order: wind power does not provide stable and controllable power outputs; as such, it does not provide what we require from a power generation source and, therefore, is too expensive at any price.

So, since you would have to be an idiot not to understand all of this, one has to pose the Polly conundrum—is Goldsmith ignorant or is he stupid?

Actually, that is unfair. Because there is a third option in the conundrum, and it is this—"or is he shilling something?" And it is, of course, this last option that explains the article.

Accompanying the piece, in typical (usually decent) CityAM style, is a short biography that coyly explains that Goldsmith is "the founder of Menhaden Capital and WHEB Group". These are investment firms, of course, but what is their speciality? Well, given that Goldsmith is brother to environmentalist nut-job Zac, I think you can guess.

And you'd be right.

Ben Goldsmith, brother of Conservative MP and environmental campaigner Zac Goldsmith, is floating an investment fund backed by high-profile business figures to invest in green businesses.

Menhaden Capital will target business opportunities that specialise in saving resources such as energy and water or cutting waste.
...

Goldsmith said investment in green projects was no longer an act of faith and that there were many opportunities to make good returns from backing environmental businesses.
...

Ben Goldsmith is the founder of WHEB, an investment firm focused on energy efficiency, clean technology and sustainable development.

Can it be that "investment in green projects" is, in fact, "an act of faith". And could it be, with the government steadily rowing back from subsidising these white elephants, that Mr Ben is having trouble persuading people to invest money into his fantasyland adventures?

You might say that: I couldn't possibly comment...

Get Real!

As some of you may know, your humble Devil's brother writes songs—many of them pretty damn good—and plays with a band known as Gronk and the Body Doubles.

Here's a video made for It's Not Easy—one of the jauntier numbers* from the forthcoming (self-released) EP, Get Real.



You can hear a selection** of other tracks on Gronk's Soundcloud page.

* Actually, in your humble Devil's opinion, it's a pop treat! However, I might be biased...

** I have 663 songs written or co-written by him in my iTunes. Even allowing for duplicates, live versions, etc., there are probably about 300 original songs, spanning roughly 15 years.

The false savings of "competitive" tendering...

... are neatly illustrated by Dick Puddlecote.

To illustrate, I'll go back around a decade to when such things really did pit suppliers against each other in a cut-throat mechanism which drove down costs to provide value for the taxpayer buck. It was a time when large operators were capable of being usurped by a one-man-band offering a quality service at a homemade price. The more providers, the lower you had to pitch to be sure of getting the work.

Those days are long gone.

About five or six years ago, in our experience, the regulatory burden began increasing at an alarming rate. Health and safety was ramped up to quite absurd levels and quality thresholds were set which were impossible for small outfits in our industry to comply with. For example, a company like ours—with a tad more financial breathing space by virtue of our larger size—were able to implement all of the ridiculous (and not even mildly more protective) demands placed on the vehicles which would be acceptable to the authorities concerned. The little guy had no chance—unlike us—of throwing a load of cash at new, or adapted, vehicles to cope with the latest over-weening directive imagined by local authorities, none of which would have any effect on overall safety or provision of service.

We thrived as a result, while dozens of our competitors threw the towel in and went and did something else instead (that's if they did anything but sell their rig and roll up to the local social security office, of course). Happy days for Puddlecote Inc, but we were—as economics dictates—charging far more to the authority.

Of course, Dick fails to mention that, in many cases (especially in the NHS) if you are not a member of the "supplier framework"—for which you have to submit massive amounts of paperwork and be of a certain size (in terms of turnover)—then even being in with a chance of tendering for many public sector contracts is almost impossible anyway. The result is fewer suppliers who have to sink even more time and money into simply bidding for a contract.

For example, the other day, I was talking to a friend whose company deals with the public sector: the tenders often run into the hundreds of pages and they often have to attend at least two "pitches"—with the entire tendering process often running to six months or more.

His company recently bid for an NHS project over a period of three months: the tender response ran to 187 pages, they attended three meetings (including one "pitch"), did a considerable amount of research and product tuning to ensure that they would be able to meet the technical requirements, and were delighted that they got short-listed to the final two...

... at which point the tendering organisation in question informed them that they were terribly sorry, but they had got the tender process wrong and they would have to cancel this process and start again from scratch!

Of course, once again costs have no way to go but up, and with less competition, we are likely to get more of the proportion of work available. The taxpayer gets shafted while the public sector office fills its boots with council tax cash.

And the end result? Well, they can say that greedy private sector businesses are ripping off the taxpayer and that competitive tendering—introduced by Thatcher IIRC—just doesn't work.

Clever, huh?

Remember, our industry is just one small part of public sector outsourcing. Every supplier, in every field, is being put through this. Raising costs, and punishing your bank account with every monthly council tax instalment as a result.

Indeed. And the origin of this uncompetitive rubbish...?

You see, the whole process is run according to the Public Contracts Regulations 2006, which - as I'm sure will not in the least surprise you - is the UK enactment of European Directive 2004/18/EC.

Competitive tendering is supposed to act against monopolies and cartels, yet EU legislation is actively encouraging them in every town hall up and down the UK.

The problems here are, of course, not down to one single piece of legislation at all—however, the legislation serves as a convenient fig-leaf for those involved in the whole process. If all of the rules have been followed, then the amount of judgement required by those running and judging the tendering companies is vastly reduced.

Why?

Well, the way in which a tender should work is that anyone should be able to tender for the business. Now, many would argue that this could lead to poor outcomes—the smaller company could go bust without completing the job, or their service could be worse or just not up to the job, or the service could be delivered in a less safe way, etc. etc.

But all of these things should be assessed by those doing the tendering, those running the project. However, if these people made a fuck up then, of course, their necks could be on the line.

If they have fulfilled the minimum guidelines, however, then the potential for risk is far lower: not because the judges spend more time considering the bids, but because they know that the only bids that they can get are those that meet the minimum legal guidelines.

In other words, the onus for proving that the service is suitable is thrown almost entirely onto the tendering companies. The problem being, of course, that said companies must spend more money and time on doing the judges' work for them—resulting in higher prices.

If the project the goes tits up, the judges can point out (usually) that they have fulfilled all of the legal provisions and that it must be someone else's fault that the project is 18 months late and looking like crap.

In the meantime, as Dick points out, the only person being consistently shafted is the taxpayer...

Some points of order on PR

First up—despite the reduced output—your humble Devil has once again made it to Cision's Top 10 Whistleblowing blogs for this year. I know, I thought it was a bit strange too, but Cision describes "whistleblowing" in the following way:

Cision defines whistle blowing as the act of exposing injustice in society, government and public services.

Cision are, basically, a PR company and, above all of their lists, they print the following caveat for those wishing to get bloggers to push content. [Emphasis mine.]

The fundamentals of working with bloggers are the same as with traditional journalists at traditional media outlets: respect their schedules; take time to read their material to learn their interests; and only contact them if/when they want to be contacted.

Inevitably, this almost never happens, which is why I never publish press releases or product plugs unless I find something interesting off my own bat—and that point of interest usually differs from what the PR people want.

However, I am going to plug the new Sky News iPad application, and I'm going to do so for two reasons.

1. The first is naked greed: Sky are offering all those who plug the app the chance to win an iPad 2—and I want one.*


2. The second is a mixture of ego and a belief in plugging good practice, because the person who sent the request had actually pretended to read some of my witterings—which is a step in the right direction as far as PR people are concerned.

So, here you go: here is some blurb about the Sky News iPad app...

Sky News will be launching their brand new iPad on 17th March. The app is a completely new way of getting breaking news in your hands—allowing you to decide what you watch and how you watch it. It’s a ground-breaking service that offers live events, expert analysis and amazing graphics—all designed specifically for iPad.

... and here is a short video about the Sky News iPad app (it actually looks quite neat).

It's a bit of a pity that the video is delivered via Flash and, as such, cannot be viewed by anyone using an iPad, or an iPhone (or, to be fair, most other mobile devices**).

As an amusing aside, the Sky News iPad app PR company is called Jam, and they write a slightly tedious PR-speak blog. However, a piece on how Charlie Sheen had set a new record for gaining one million Twitter followers in the least time did amuse me. [Emphasis mine.]

Perhaps it’s the innate human interest in supporting the underdog or our love of all things taboo, but @charliesheen is set to surpass @justinbieber with the most followers by the end of the month.

Um, no. I think that you'll find that the reason that so many people are following Charlie Sheen is because there is a kind of grim fascination in watching someone go absolutely fucking hatstand right in front of you (as it were). It is, if you like, the finest example so far of car-crash Twittering.

* Since Dizzy doesn't want one if he wins, I am hoping to persuade him to flog it to me for cheap...

** Yes, I know that Flash has made it onto some mobile devices. However, in order to make it a "decent" experience (in as much as such a thing is possible) Adobe recommends that all Flash movies are recompiled for Mobile Flash. As far as I can tell, this video is not.