Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think tank, has come out with a paper attacking the subsidies for offshore wind in the UK. Its reasoning is that offshore wind will always be too expensive and that the overseas market for British engineering is limited.

Both of these assumptions are probably wrong. One credible source sees the cost of offshore wind falling to levels competitive with gas, albeit over several decades. And foreign interest in offshore wind is growing as the best onshore sites are completed. A Chinese study estimated the potential for exploitable wind power offshore is about 750 gigawatts, perhaps ten times the UK’s likely resource. Over the next few years China plans enormous investments in sea-based turbines. Similar opportunities are available in the US. Read the rest of this entry »

Ruth Lea contends that onshore wind is ‘quite uneconomic’ in her report for Civitas. She says that although the direct cost of onshore wind is close to that of fossil fuel sources, this comparison excludes the impact of integrating renewables into the electricity grid. When these costs are added, she contends, wind becomes wholly uncompetitive.

This assertion is entirely based on the work of Colin Gibson, a former National Grid engineer, who has made some informal estimates of the cost of integrating wind power into the electricity networks. He suggests that these costs are about £60 a megawatt hour, adding perhaps 70% to the cost of electricity from wind turbines. Ms Lea fails to mention that many, many other analysts and engineers have also estimated the extra costs of adding large volumes of wind power to the electricity system. In this note I suggest that these alternative sources support a view that Mr Gibson’s estimates are wrong by about a factor of four, meaning that Ms Lea’s contention that wind is a very expensive technology is based on shaky foundations. Read the rest of this entry »

A press release today (January 3^rd 2011) from the Department of Energy and Climate Change makes the following assertion as part of the Department’s response to a campaign on child poverty.[1]

‘we’re also focusing on the causes of fuel poverty – in particular poor household energy efficiency. There’s free and cheap insulation available to low income households now from energy suppliers and the Warm Front scheme, and this will be also be a core feature of the new Green Deal from the end of the year.’

This statement isn’t true. The Green Deal proposals do not have ‘free and cheap insulation’ as a ‘core feature’. The Green Deal is a mechanism for allowing householders to improve the energy performance of their homes and pay back the cost slowly using a loan from electricity companies. Helping get people out of fuel poverty – one of the most important challenges facing the UK – is nothing to do with the Green Deal. Read the rest of this entry »

The previous post on this site looked at whether the flagship Green Deal programme was likely to achieve success. It asserted that the so-called Golden Rule – the requirement that the cost of a home energy efficiency programme be covered by the savings on utility bills – would only be met by cavity wall insulation measures.

When I wrote that piece I hadn’t read the long Impact Assessment that accompanied the recent DECC consultation document. The projections in the Impact Assessment show extremely low levels of expected takeup of Green Deal measures.[1] The number of new cavity wall insulations is projected to fall from an average of about 500,000 per annum over recent years to about 100,000 a year at the start of the Green Deal, a reduction of 80%. And cavity wall insulation is the single most cost-effective home improvement (other than loft insulation in one of very small number of homes without any at all).

These are shocking figures. In effect, the government is admitting that the Green Deal will not result in a substantial number of home energy efficiency improvements.  It would have been better to stay with the existing programme of support. Read the rest of this entry »

The UK’s houses are poorly insulated. The proposed Green Deal is the central part of the government’s plan to encourage householders to improve the energy efficiency of their homes. Instead of paying for improvements immediately, homeowners will be able stretch their payments over many years, paying less than the savings they accrue through lower energy use. What the government calls the ‘Golden Rule’ is that people will be able to borrow as much as they want as long as the energy bill savings are more than the repayments. Sounds too good to be true? It is. At the expected implied interest rates, only cavity wall insulation achieves a large enough energy efficiency benefit to meet the requirements of the Golden Rule. Except in exceptional cases, no other energy saving measures will save homeowners more than the cost of the improvements. The much heralded Green Deal will be a spectacular flop. Read the rest of this entry »

Pak choi seedlings planted in 10% biochar

As part of The Big Biochar Experiment, five weeks ago I planted 40 pak choi seeds in small plastic pots. 20 went into conventional peat-free seed compost and 20 were planted into a mixture of 10% biochar (by weight) and 90% compost. Read the rest of this entry »

Empirical evidence presented in a paper available from this website supports the hypothesis that the UK began to reduce its consumption of physical resources in the early years of the last decade, well before the economic slowdown that started in 2008. (An article about this contention was published in the Guardian on 1st November 2011).

This conclusion applies to a wide variety of different physical goods including, for example, water, building materials and paper and includes the impact of items imported from overseas. Both the weight of goods entering the economy and the amounts finally ending up as waste probably began to fall from sometime between 2001 and 2003.[1]

Summary data is provided below. The full paper is here: Peak_Stuff_17.10.11

Read the rest of this entry »

1)      About 60% of UK householders say that they have never switched suppliers.

2)      The number of switchers is tending to fall. 22% of electricity customers switched in 2006, falling to 17% last year. The gas numbers were similar.

3)      Only 13% say that they have recently checked prices.

4)      Ofgem research suggests that ‘5-10%’ of householders ‘proactively’ search for better prices. Up to 90% of people were shown by their consumer research to be ‘disengaged’ or ‘passive’.

5)      The last check by Ofgem indicated that there were about 320 different tariffs available in the UK domestic market (January 2011). This is up from about 170 four years before.

6)      In the last thirty days (to 17.10.11) there have been 18 different tariff changes, of which 15 were initiated by the Big Six domestic energy suppliers. None of these changes affected the standard tariff rates. They were all changes to the hugely complex online rate cards as the suppliers withdrew their most attractive online offers. We can only presume that the main reason for these changes was concern that press comment would pick up on the huge differentials between the best online rates and the standard tariffs still taken by approximately 65% of all UK households.

7)      But even today customers in the Southern Electric supply area would save an average of £251 by switching from the standard tariffs of the Big Six to the cheapest online supplier. As of 17.10.11, the cheapest tariff is provided by small supplier First Utility and its cost for a household using 3,300 kWh of electricity and 16,000 kWh of gas would be about 1,025 compared to about £1,275 for the average standard rate card from the Big Six. The First Utility tariff has no cancellation charge but cannot be used by customers unlucky enough to be on independent gas distribution networks.

Heat wood or agricultural wastes strongly in the absence of air and you will eventually get charcoal through the process known as pyrolysis. Charcoal is almost pure carbon. When ground up and then added to the soil as a means of improving fertility or reducing water use, it is known as ‘biochar’. An Oxford company, staffed with academic researchers who work in related fields, is sponsoring a country-wide experiment to see if biochar can help domestic gardeners improve their crops. Read the rest of this entry »