Skip to main content

No to UK offshore wind- Trump

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

Popular posts from this blog

Renewables beat nuclear - even with full balancing included

A new Danish study comparing nuclear and renewable energy systems (RES) concludes that, although nuclear systems require less flexibility capacity than renewable-only systems, a renewable energy system is cheaper than a nuclear based system, even with full backup: it says ‘lower flexibility costs do not offset the high investment costs in nuclear energy’.  It’s based on a zero-carbon 2045 smart energy scenario for Denmark, although it says its conclusions are valid elsewhere given suitable adjustments for local conditions. ‘The high investment costs in nuclear power alongside cost for fuel and operation and maintenance more than tip the scale in favour of the Only Renewables scenario. The costs of investing in and operating the nuclear power plants are simply too high compared to Only Renewables scenario, even though more investment must be put into flexibility measures in the latter’.  In the Danish case, it says that ‘the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 bil...

Nuclear- not good vibrations in France

France is having problems with nuclear power.  It was once the poster child for nuclear energy, which, after a rapid government funded build-up in the1980s based on standard Westinghouse Pressurised-water Reactor (PWR) designs, at one point supplied around 75% of its power, with over 50 reactors running around the country. Mass deployment of similar designs meant that there were economies of scale and given that it was a state-run programme, the government could supply low-cost funding and power could be supplied to consumers relatively cheaply. But the plants are now getting old, and there has been a long running debate over what to do to replace them: it will be expensive given the changed energy market, with cheaper alternatives emerging. At one stage, after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, it was proposed by the socialist government to limit nuclear to supplying just 50% of French power by 2025, with renewables to be ramped up.  That began to look quite sensible wh...

Global Energy Outlooks - BP v Jacobson

The share of renewables in global primary energy may increase ‘from around 10% in 2019 to between 35-65% by 2050, driven by the improved cost competitiveness of renewables, together with the increasing prevalence of policies encouraging a shift to low-carbon energy’. So says BP in its latest Global Energy Outlook . It does see wind and solar accounting ‘for all or most of the growth in power generation’, but even at the top of the range quoted, it still falls a lot short of the renewable ‘100% of total energy’ scenarios that have been produced by some academics in recent years.  To fill the gap to zero net carbon, BP sees wide-scale use being made use of carbon capture technology, as well as some nuclear power. And it says ‘Natural declines in existing production sources mean there needs to be continuing upstream investment in oil and natural gas over the next 30 years’. You won’t find much support for these fossil and nuclear options in the scenarios produced by Stanford Universi...