LAST week, as reported here, the Danish wind company Orsted announced it was cancelling its Hornsea 4 offshore wind project in the North Sea, which was awarded a Contract for Difference last year and would have been the biggest wind farm in the UK, with a capacity of 2.4GW.
The withdrawal, made because it would not have been financially viable, has left Ed Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 plan in tatters. Labour promised to increase offshore wind power from its current level of 15GW to 50GW. We do have another 10GW under construction, but there is no possible way that an extra 25GW can be added in just five years.
Nevertheless Miliband is determined to rush through as many new offshore projects as he can, regardless of the cost to billpayers.
Orsted’s decision has destroyed the myth that renewables are cheaper than gas-fired power. The contract price for Hornsea 4 was already higher than the market price, yet was still not enough to cover costs. Indeed Orsted will have to take a half a billion pounds hit in write-downs to pull out, yet still deemed this to be better than carrying on.
Orsted are one of the largest wind businesses in the world, but have been facing many problems in the last few years as project after project is cancelled or runs at a loss, particularly in the US. The days of obscene subsidies which made offshore wind farms profitable are long gone, so Orsted does not have the capital to splash any more.
Orsted are not the first to feel the heat. The Swedish giant Vattenfall pulled out of the 1.4GW Boreas wind project off the coast of Norfolk two years ago for the same financial reasons.
Indeed, in the last two years only one scheme, East Anglia Two, has actually gone forward, with a capacity of just 0.9GW.
The bottom line is that there is very little interest in or capital available for offshore wind projects in the UK. In desperation Miliband has therefore decided to massively increase the prices on offer for this year’s auction. Reading between the lines, a 20 per cent rise could be on the cards.
Miliband needs an extra 25GW, and at that sort of price the extra cost to energy bills would add up to £22billion over the 15-year contract period.
Could Miliband survive the charge that he is handing £22billion of your money to his chums in the wind industry?
Too much sun!
WE’RE all too familiar with the likelihood of blackouts in the near future when there is not enough wind power to meet demand.
But too much electricity is also a problem. Last Sunday solar farms were supplying 40 per cent of our electricity at midday – 11GW against demand of 28GW. Miliband wants to triple solar farm capacity within the next five years, so on a sunny day in 2030 we would have more generation coming from solar farms than we could use. Add to that all the solar panels installed on rooftops, which Miliband plans to make compulsory on new builds, 4GW coming from nuclear which cannot simply be switched on and off, and plenty of wind power, and we will soon have extremely serious overloading of the grid on sunny days.
Electricity cannot be stored, except in the tiny quantities of battery and pumped storage we have available. Generation and demand have to be perfectly balanced second by second. Too much electricity and grid frequency will spike, leading to a domino effect of trip-outs across the grid.
This is exactly what happened in the Spanish blackouts last month.
Currently when there is too much wind power in certain areas, the National Energy System Operator NESO pays one or two big offshore wind farms to switch off at short notice. But this cannot be done with the myriad small solar farms which are embedded in the local distribution network and are out of the control of NESO.
The situation would be exacerbated in the sunnier parts of the country. Renewable proponents naively think we would be able to export our surpluses to Europe, but they will be in the same boat with too much solar power. The last thing they would want is to import more.
The scandal is that power experts have known about these problems for years, but have been ignored by the Net Zero zealots who are now in charge of our energy policy. Thirteen years ago the National Grid published a briefing paper stating that once solar power reached 60 per cent of total generation ‘the situation would be difficult to manage’, and warned that wind plus solar should never be allowed to exceed 60 per cent.
Just last week Dr Capell Aris, one of the country’s leading grid experts, wrote that ‘it is hard to imagine that we won’t start to suffer complete national blackouts like the Iberian one’.
Miliband can’t say he has not been warned.
