US President elect Donald Trump said on his Truth Social platform that ‘the UK is making a very big mistake. Open up the North Sea. Get rid of the windmills.’ He was, it seems, objecting to the UK windfall tax on excess oil and gas profits, newly expanded to 38% and extended to 2030, and to Labours plans to build many more offshore wind projects while cutting back on new oil and gas well projects. Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist, Dr Doug Parr, said: ‘The US president-elect is speaking not on behalf of people in the UK, but his own ‘drill baby drill’ agenda and the Big Oil bosses who poured millions into his campaign.’
A UK government spokesperson said: ‘Our priority is a fair, orderly and prosperous transition in the North Sea in line with our climate and legal obligations, and we will work with the sector to protect current and future generations of good jobs. We need to replace our dependency on unstable fossil fuel markets with clean, homegrown power controlled in Britain – which is the best way to protect bill payers and boost our energy independence.’ And the director of Humber Marine and Renewables, said the industry, including offshore wind, had reinvigorated the maritime economy and created hundreds of jobs in the region. He said ‘I'd really like to invite Donald Trump to Hull... to hear first hand from countless leaders in the industry about what it means to the area, what it's delivered and what the opportunities are.’
All in all, with wind projects doing well in the UK, supplying 30% of its power, more than half from offshore sites, and with wind overtaking fossil gas, Trump’s attack was arguably pretty silly. He had evidently also raised the issue of impacts of wind projects on birds, with the Times (4/1/25) reporting that, in a phone call to Starmer, he joked that ‘Coyotes were getting so fat from eating the carcasses that they needed weight loss drugs’. There are few Coyotes off shore, but Trump had earlier said that off shore wind farms had lethal impacts on Whales. But there seems little evidence for that- Whales are certainly being impacted by humans, but not via wind turbines. And onshore, the biggest threat to birds by far is cats, and also high rise buildings and cars, not wind turbines.
However, there are other issues. As I noted in my last post, Bloomberg's wind energy forecast claims that wind turbine suppliers can't make much profit in the next five years, partly due to the high cost of materials, so that they had to charge higher prices for power. High prices certainly are a worry- for suppliers as well as users. But there may be ways around that. For example, by just supplying local users from local projects, so avoiding long distance transmission costs and losses, with zonal pricing to reduce consumer costs. Helping consumers to store energy (e.g. via batteries or heat storage units) could also be useful- that could avoid having to curtail supplies when demand was low. Although not everyone thinks that ‘locational payment’ is a good idea- zonal pricing could make it harder to fund wind projects in remote areas where wind speeds are higher. Then again, improving/extending grids and energy storage will be costly in the short term- and there are local objections to new grids.
So the debate goes on, with the likes of Trump in the US and Farage in the UK also being very committed to nuclear, as well as to fossil fuel, as the way forward, aided by claims that nuclear will be cheap and more reliable than renewables, with fossil fuel possibly holding the fort while that is developed. Labour has earmarked 5% of gas for that, and is pushing nuclear too, but it’s also backing energy storage and grid upgrades. It may initially be costly to install storage, new grids and new flexible balancing systems for variable sources like wind, but they should help make the new energy supply and use system more efficient, helping to avoid costly waste/curtailment. And, as a new study by a group of German academies says, an energy system dominated by solar and wind energy, along with storage and flexible demand management systems, need not have nuclear or fossil fuel base-load power stations to guarantee balanced supply and grid security. So that’s a big cost saving-with nuclear having very high capital cost and the mining and use of fossil fuel having major environmental costs.
Germany now gets 67% of its electricity from renewables, nothing from nuclear, and it’s been pushing ahead for much more from all renewables. For comparison, in the UK in the past 12 months renewables including wind, solar and biomass from sources such as burning wood pellets and landfill gas generated 45% of power. Nuclear supplied 13%, so the UK non-fossil total is 58%. But it is pushing ahead on renewables, offshore wind especially, although also nuclear, large and small, despite its uncertain economics.
Meanwhile, the US lags far behind the UK (and Germany) on offshore wind capacity and plans, and China has overtaken them all with its expansion programme- it already has around 50% of total world capacity. And with Trump about to be inaugurated as US president and Europe having financial problems, that may be how the ranking will stay. But while China’s expansion seems certain, otherwise, with political upheavals occurring around the world (even in Canada) it’s still all in flux- the UK may yet reach its 50GW by 2030 target and Germany its 70GW by 2045 goal. And Trump may change his view! Evidently anything is possible with him: after all he has talked wildly about taking over Panama and Greenland and even about annexing Canada....
Meantime, with US billionaire and Trump supporter Elon Musk also making controversial political statements, sales of his Telsa EV may get hit, as has already happened in Germany, where an election is due soon. Musk has backed the far right AfD. And with climate change also impacting around the world, and parts of California getting hit hard again, 2025 looks like being quite a year, with the ‘rules based’ global political and economic framework also seen as being under threat by the likes of Trump.
Comments
Post a Comment