Place your bets now on when the lights will go off
Deepening Energy Crisis: Britain Has Become ‘Uninvestable’, Analyst Warns
Danny Fortson, The Sunday Times
The German owner of Npower is set to write off hundreds of millions of pounds on the value of its British power plants in the latest sign of a deepening crisis among the big six energy suppliers. RWE, one of Europe’s largest power companies, will reveal the British loss as part of an expected £4bn writedown of the value of its fleet of power stations.
RWE npower’s Major Power Plants in the UK (2007)
The loss arises from pollution taxes that are forcing the closure of old coal-fired plants. Big subsidies for renewable energy, meanwhile, have made even gas-burning plants, which are much cleaner than coal stations, loss-making.
The hit will alarm Whitehall, which is increasingly worried about the lights going out. Companies have stopped building new power stations amid a political and regulatory backlash, sparked last year by Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices.
RWE, for example, has not commissioned a new plant in Britain since 2009, when it broke ground on a big wind farm and a gas-fired plant in Pembroke. Since then it has sold out of a consortium to build new nuclear plants, closed down plants capable of lighting more than 4m homes, and cancelled a proposed £4bn offshore wind farm. […]
Peter Atherton, analyst at Liberum Capital, said Britain had become uninvestable as political pressure over soaring household bills has intensified. “I can think of a dozen very good reasons not to invest in the UK, and not one good one to invest here this side of the election,” Atherton said.
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h/t to The GWPF
When the light and heat (or the a/c in summer) go off because of the lack of basic solid power that can’t be met by renewables (wind, solar etc) will the populace finally rise up and toss out the politicians that created such a regulatory mess that building new power stations is next to impossible?
That might be the day the execrable Bob Ward goes back to his home planet.
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Can’t wait to see the old eatonians in a blind panic. From here it will look hilarious but from the UK …… OMG.
Well, it’s a war. So rationing is not irrational.
These sorts of regulations appeal to the rich “progressives” and their trust fund babies but pensioners on fixed incomes have to bear the costs. Often they face a choice between heat or food in the winter. These regulations are nothing more than a transfer of wealth from the poorest of the poor. These people are just plain sick.
there is no free market in uk energy. never has been. it is subsidised by the public as a way to transfer money from the many to the few. The only people willing to ‘invest’ rather than keep paying shareholders are the comminists in china who are making strategic control bets rather than economic bets.
the whole point of green taxes is to destroy industrial society so the eco utopians can role game about living in mud huts.
We are on the same path…
It will be interesting to see what follows if der Fuehrer is allowed to proceed with his Salem witch trials (oops, I meant to say war on coal) here in the US.
This was so obviously going to happen.
The left (Labour and Liberal Democrats) in the UK Is screeching for:
1. More unreliable, expensive, windmill power.
2. The rapid closure of all remaining cheap, reliable, coal fired, power stations.
3. Electricity price freezes.
4. Attacks on ‘profiteering’ by the energy companies.
This goofy, greenie, attitude will turn the UK – on the altar of dangerous populism – into a backward , impoverished, Third World state.
This idiocy is the direct result of climate alarmism over supposed ‘climate change’.
It is all so stupid and so easily avoidable. Ed Davey, red Ed Miliband and David Cameron are directly responsible for the mess which is UK energy policy, or more accurately, the lack of one.
“Stephen Richards says:
Can’t wait to see the old eatonians in a blind panic. ”
They won’t be panicking, they will be off to Monaco and Switzerland, they will invest short on British industry and then when collapse comes they will buy the cheap companies and so the natural order will have been maintained.
I can say with a huge grin on my face – at least those of us in my hometown have the good sense to have 300 gas wells and eighteen oil plants an hour and a half from my door. The UK never saw an act of idiocy they didn’t like. What can you say? The UK public voted those clowns into power and keep doing so.
I truly hope the lunatic fringe in the upper house in Australia see the light and don’t impede as Abbott and his team progress with their mandated initiative to dump the carbon tax and ‘install’ ground level CO2 consuming trees to sooth the irrational fears of the warmists.
This parliament is about as sensible as a politicians can get in reversing the nonsense and hypocrisy in so much of the RE scam.
Rock on Tony and the new upper house come mid-year, show the world how to return to sanity and an economy with a fighting chance.
Sorry Britain, we knew ye so well.
As Marie Antonnette said, “Let them eat WIND!” Or should we say, let them pass wind? I guess I’m having a very hard time sympathizing with the SMUG, “know it all” Brits. You know, generally you WON’T freeze to death in England, during much of the year. Yet, you can spend a LOT of time in the “cold” (say a 50 to 60 degree F residence) and the DARK. Too bad. You voted for it, now live with it.
Wonder if Zero is paying attention. Oh wait, maybe that’s his goal for the U.S. as well. Nevermind.
Lots of people told them so. The progressives went ahead anyway. Now its happening. The next step from the socialist / prog play book. More of the same, but harder and with enforcement. Morons.
if russia turns off the gas and oil to europe that would be a game changer.
Uk has lots of coal which will be opened when mothers are told there is no power to help their kids live and the only thing stopping it are eco utopians who think 1. there are too many kids and 2. life in mud huts in a de industrialised anarchist society will be so much better
Oh Britannia….
My heart despairs for the damage done to your nation. Do you yet have the will to cut this cancer out of your body politic? There is so little time left, before the disease overwhelms….
As a technical point, I can’t see the lights going out in the UK because of the two links to the synchronous grid of Continental Europe, the HVDC Cross-Channel and BritNed; a third is proposed, the HVDC Norway–UK.
That said, the thrust of the article is entirely correct. UK energy policy, like many UK public policies, is a mess. In the case of energy policy, the main problem is that climate change doom mongers and NIMBYs and naysayers of every variety have the ear of the decision makers.
For a range of reasons, it is appropriate for countries or groups of them to aim to be energy self-sufficient wherever possible. For the UK, I am in no doubt that investment in new modern clean-burn coal technology is the answer. This involves turning all that ‘horrible’ CO2 into a resource by pumping it into greenhouses for better growth of tomatoes.
Heck, it should also mean reopening the UK’s now-closed coal mines with lots of new jobs. That would be excellent. Win-win.
Let’s get one thing straight, this is not incompetence. This is a planned shutdown of the Western economies as part of the Globalist strategy to destroy any resistance to their planned Orwellian world government. Anyone who truly believes otherwise is extremely gullible.
Climate eco-fascist idiotic alarmism is a tool in the globalist arsenal, it’s about massive control over our economies and every aspect of our lives, along with the wealth transfer offshore.
This has nothing to do with saving the environment or ideals at the top of the hierarchy. There are useful idiots lower down amongst the population and some organisations that truly believe it’s real and base their actions on a misguided leftist ideology but the ones running the scam know it’s a scam.
Anyone with an IQ over 50 who has even a cursory knowledge of climate science knows that we’ll get at most just over 1 degree of warming per century from GHGs, which provides zero rationale for destroying economies to rush through non fossil fuel alternatives. This 1 degree is lost in the noise of natural climate variation anyway.
The only feasible option is to phase in the technologies as and when they become efficient and viable. There’s no rush.
Notice too the disaster that the treasury is worried about. Write-offs means reductions in taxes paid. Large reductions. They get offset against profit.s
energy is the reason why ukraine is doomed and why europe won’t help.
russia accounts for 32.6% of total oil import and 38.7% of total gas import.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_sector
“Peter Atherton, analyst at Liberum Capital, said Britain had become uninvestable as political pressure over soaring household bills has intensified.”
The Democratic Party in the U.S. would love to see us in the same boat. The left seems to hate the idea of the industrial revolution and relatively cheap energy. I don’t know why exactly.
“jauntycyclist says:
March 2, 2014 at 11:37 am
if russia turns off the gas and oil to europe that would be a game changer”.
Absolutely, and that’s the reason why all this European windbag rhetoric about the Ukraine is just that – a load of windy hot air. I am not commenting on Russia’s actions in this latest crisis; merely pointing out that Russia holds the whip hand as the provider of essential fuel, so nobody’s going to actually do anything to back up their lofty statements.
The lights won’t go out, as Booker & Noth have shown several times.
http://www.eureferendum.com/results.aspx?keyword=short%20term%20operating%20reserve
Article in today’s Telegraph was saying that subsidies to renewable energy sources are being cut. Developers are abandoning plans for new wind farms, because later this year, rather than getting double the wholesale price for electricity, they are going to have to sell their electricity under a competitive bidding system. Oh dear, how sad, never mind!!!!!
Our government has at last seen sense, now we need to commission new power stations to replace the perfectly serviceable ones the EU made us get rid of. We will of course have to do this fairly quickly, but as has been said above there is no confidence in the market because Milliband will freeze (pun not intended!) energy prices if, God forbid, Labour win the next election.
Fortunately the failure to build new wind farms and decommissioning the old ones will make, s*d all difference to our electricity supply
uk gets nearly half its coal for power generation from russia.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/04/decc-energy-statistics,-march-2013
When will the lights go out? The Day After Tomorrow, but not for the reasons Hollywood had in mind.