Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
SEPTEMBER 25, 2021
By Paul Homewood
One of the delicious ironies of the current energy crisis has been the collapse of some of the small green energy companies that have sprung up in the last few years.
I say irony, because it is the very same green policies, which they espoused and hoped to make money out of, that have directly led to this crisis and their demise.
Some of them, such as a company known as “Green.” have been lashing out right, left and centre, blaming their problems on government, the weather, Brexit and goodness knows what else.
The reality is that most, if not all, of them have been poorly run and under capitalised from the start.
Green. , registered as Green Supplier Ltd, is one such tinpot company. Even last year, before the crisis started, their Accounts show they were to all intents and purposes broke:
Hardly surprising then that they could not manage their way through the crisis now. Most of these new entrants have tried to enter the industry on the cheap, hoping to undercut the big companies and make a fast buck.
In Green.’s case, share capital was just £10, and they appear to have relied on upfront customer payments for their cash flow. (Normally, when you sign up as a new customer, the energy company takes your direct debit straightaway, so you are always paying a month in advance.)
The whole business model of these sort of companies has been a scam from the start, pretending to supply renewable electricity to gullible consumers. But when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine, they have to buy power from other sources.
If they were only buying wind and solar power, of course, they would not be exposed to gas price rises!
But their scam has been even worse. Wind and solar power have for years cost much more than conventional electricity, but the subsidies paid out for it have been added onto everybody’s bills. If customers of these green energy suppliers had to pay the full cost of wind and solar, they would quickly take their business elsewhere.
Yet, for some strange reason, the likes of Green. think taxpayers should be bailing them out!
The whole ‘Green Energy’, “Renewable Sources”, and ‘Climate Change’ movement is just another giant Ponzi Scheme relying on gullible politicians and naive consumers to bail it out of foreseeable disasters. Consumers are made to pay for their own disaster.
Consumers are made to pay for what has been foisted on them – whether they like it or not.
I was just having that very thought, fretslider. In October you will see the newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau stand up in Glasgow in front of admirers and sycophants saying that Canadians just chose to be an important part of solving the climate crises and to reduce CO2 and less fossil fuels, to 1850 levels, to save the planet and support efforts around the world with billions of dollars.
Of course, only 20% of Canadians voted for him and fewer than that voted for his green policies. But we will all have to pay for his extravagant expenses and economically ruinous policies.
Non of the wind / solar generators would exist without massive subsidies .
On average , every consumer in the UK is paying over £400 per year extra on top of their energy costs for these scams to carry on , so it is not surprising that people are finally seeing how much they are being ripped off , and rebelling against it .
True but rooftop solar systems are primarily to virtue signal. I have neighbors who have rooftop solar and they don’t face toward the Sun, the panels face the street so they can be readily seen by others. My own mining company has done precisely the same thing. They’re just for show.
And a costly, subsidized show at that.
After the Australian Federal Government announced an end date for subsidies to wind and solar businesses, from memory it is 2030, and investors had to rethink their plans because business ventures starting after the end date was announced had not many years left to benefit from subsidies, the “crony capitalists” consisting of investors, merchant bankers, business owners banded together (many did) to fund candidates masquerading as independent candidates to stand against the Coalition Liberal-National Government’s sitting MPs who are centre-left of the political spectrum.
Their candidates campaigned as “the sensible right” and other deceptive descriptions suggesting that they were a safe alternative to vote for. Only one candidate succeeded at the 2019 Federal Election.
Considering the heavy discounting being offered here by rooftop solar installer businesses it is obvious that they too are under stress from falling sales. The Australian Energy Market Operator has been talking about changing the rooftop solar rules by removing feed-in tariffs or credits on electricity accounts for households and to confine them to on the premises use of solar energy.
Same in Australia. Australia has one of the highest percentage of roof top solar, subsidised by state governments, by Federal governments. Any house can get all their light bulbs changed to LED for $40.solar and wind electricity gets preference on the GRID and has to be brought up to GRID standard by the base load generators or by another layer of categories…batteries. Lunacy.
In grade school, the joke was: stop hitting yourself. As adults, it’s a sadomasochistic kink. People… persons also sacrifice virginal human lives for social progress and climate stasis. Roe, Roe, Roe your…
Mr. n.: Just used that old line on a low-end tr0ll here two days ago, fancies himself a bigoil guy but proves he’s a bigfool in every string. As a leftie, he can’t avoid tripping over his own words.
Green energy failures are about abortion??
Once people believed the lie that a baby in the womb is not a person, then it’s easy for them to believe anything. Really, the same union of left wing politicians and media propagandists that made legal abortion a reality, is the same thing that makes euthanasia, draconian covid restrictions and mandates, and of course ‘the sky is falling’ climate stupidity possible. People believe everything that the government and media tell them even when it doesn’t make sense.
Indeed, Ponzi standardized a working model.
One “green” company, Gevo, has been very good at surviving via raising equity through stock offerings and harvesting various government credits and subsidies. Their initial IPO was in 2011, raising over $100 million and achieving a market cap of around $1 billion back then.
It’s surprising that the stock fell from an equivalent of well over $100,000/share to under $10/share today and yet through new offerings got its market cap up to near $3 billion in 2021.
This company was one of several in the “green” space initially backed by billionaire Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems). Almost all are belly up now, with Gevo and LanzaTech being survivors.
Gevo’s technology is like so many “green” schemes where 10 units of energy in yields 5 or so units of useful energy out and the remainder being waste. It will never fly in a sane world, but oh are they good at financing and harvesting shareholder wealth.
https://www.investing.com/equities/gevo
Technically it’s a Pyramid Scheme, unless it is illegal. An illegal pyramid scheme in the US is referred to as a Ponzi Scheme. Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi Scheme as he intentionally misled and defrauded his investors and lived a lavish lifestyle on OPM.
What would make it illegal (at least under US law, I’m not sure about UK law) would be an intent to defraud by intentional misrepresentation of material facts about the business or its investments or returns on investment. There are Pyramid Schemes all around us, everyday. It’s just that the owners are not intentionally defrauding their customers even though everyone is acting naive to the risks.
All it takes is one out of a million chance, I suppose.
The Real Green Climate fraud was letting companies “lease” the solar panels to the building/land owner. The companies keep any federal, state, and local subsidies. In the meantime, the electricity is priced lower than actual power companies have to charge. The property owners are stuck paying off the lease on the panels and get a small decrease in their electric rates.
The leases have ironclad clauses that allow the “Climate Company” to prevent selling the house or other properties without permission. That generally means a buyer has to pay total cost of the installation in addition to the cost of the house or the owner making or sharing the payoff.
The original buyer is trapped by a legal contract with essentially no out.
We installed solar panels,the best US produced ones at the time from Sunpower- 250 watts I believe. We paid about 20% of the cost mostly for installation and the rest was subsidies, state, power companies, federal, and even a couple of banks. The rules on subsidies netted us almost the full price of electricity from Sept. 2006 to Ja%n. 2010, 16 months. New subsidies were used 100% to install another row of the same panels.
Through the shenanigans of the Mid-Atlantic Power consortium we were able to sell electricity at full price, no subsidies, as it was auctioned off. That has resulted in check of $100/month from a company that handles all the paper work.
This all worked because we had some savings and we collect collect the subsidies written into the electricity by subsidies.
The false boom in solar installations is a petard many greedy customers paid for, with no benefit, only problems.
In the meantime, thank all of you for your subsidies of our electric power. A big round of applause!
PS, no virtuous feelings here, just offsetting the hubris of others.
An IPCC official, Dr. Eidenhoffer, told us way back in 2010 that Climate Change was about the redistribution of wealth and had almost nothing to do with environmental policy.
In Canada the CPP spent $6.1billion on Pattern Energy.
https://financialpost.com/news/fp-street/cppib-makes-significant-step-into-renewable-energy-with-pattern-purchase
How Canadian pension’s US$6.1 billion bet on Pattern Energy fits with ‘energy transition’ investing
“Gullible Politicians” who are convinced that their policies can change the climate (weather).
and what’s so poor/crap/sad/worth getting angry about, is that all the suppliers of the Green Tat are in on the same scam..
The Whole Thing is one huuuuuge pile of stinking shyte, mendacity and money-grubbing
## Mine is EON and their haha ‘selling point‘ is that 100% of the elcetrkery they supply is ‘green’
What sort of brain-deads actually believe that can be possible, even before EON rub it in by insisting on installing Smart Meters. = Grotesque little quilt inducing & finger-wagging spies, with fingers in your bank acount and constantly reminding you that, by it being ‘smart’, you are = ‘dumb’
So, you’re saying that Elecktrickery is substituting for electricity? And it costs more? And a segment of the society thinks it is ‘smart’?
I see nothing (go along to get along).
A little secular lucre makes the toxicity go down.
A niche, minority solution.
Funnily enough my energy supplier also supplies 100% renewable electricity as do a lot of companies, I often wonder who are the nasty people using the ungreen electricity
I invented the quantum verde meter, it installs on the line coming into your house. It can differentiate between renewable and fossil fuel electrons and keeps the latter out.
Problem solved.
Only $5000 each, am taking advance orders.
Actually, that’s merde not verde
The filter that keeps the fossil fuel electrons out of your house – do you just shake the filter out into the garden or do you send the dirty filter back to the utility?
“What sort of brain-deads actually believe that can be possible?”
Environmental journalists.
Why?
Because they are in on the same scam too.
If the “Green” alternative isn’t practical then all their editorials are worthless. And nothing distinguishes them from the Science journalists whom we need anyway.
Ther is one Green thing I like,
Frankfurt Green Sauce.
https://www.frankfurt-tourismus.de/en/Discover-Experience/Cuisine/Green-sauce
The sooner all these rent-seeking bogus businesses go belly up the better. It will soon become apparent to even the most ardent snowflake that there is something very amiss in the Climate Emergency rhetoric.
This article shows the absolute scam of wind, solar and battery systems in the US Northeast
HIGH COSTS OF WIND, SOLAR, AND BATTERY SYSTEMS IN NORTH EAST US
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/high-costs-of-wind-solar-and-battery-systems
The Heat PUMP scam is associated with the wind, solar and battery scam
HEAT PUMPS ARE MONEY LOSERS IN MY VERMONT HOUSE, AS THEY ARE IN ALMOST ALL HOUSES
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/heat-pumps-are-money-losers-in-my-vermont-house-as-they-are-in
In Maine the state keeps trying to con poor people like myself into signing up for a “free” heat pump hot water heater. They never explain how replacing a simple tank containing a heating element that lasts many years with a complicated noisy contraption prone to failure from voltage surges will make my life better/easier.
Don’t do it. Instead, hold out for the hydrogen pipeline to come through.
LOL
Heat pumps work fine from the Mason-Dixon Line (south of Pennsylvania for you non-Americans) on south. My 30-year home is on its second heat pump since being built, and my house stays at 74F year round. Everything in the house is electric, and my bill is $163/month. (I’ve been on a 12-month averaged plan for most of those 30 years)
Nobody from Pennsylvania northward should have heat pumps. They’re not very efficient when the temp drops much below 20-25F, and Vermont spends a lot more time there than Maryland does.
All our utility bills: Electric- $35/mo, Nat.Gas- $33/mo, Water- $30.mo, Sewage, $29/mo. Minus $100/mo in subsidies. Overall, no more than ~net $35/mo.
Here in Phoenix, heat pumps are a good idea for the entire house. As our lows rarely fall much below freezing, heat pumps can cost less than gas heat. It also has the additional benefit that it keeps you cool in the summer. Vermont would be a different story and unless you use a ground well as a source of heat, heat pumps could be quite costly to operate. On the very rare day that the high is less than 50F, the heat pump is only able to blow warm air so I wouldn’t expect a hot shower some of the time in Vermont.
One big disadvantage is my house is completely electric. Fortunately power is reliable, but I still keep plenty of charcoal should I need to cook something during a power failure. I also have a pile of blankets as there is no way to safely burn anything other than a candle inside.
It appears that the UK electricity “market” is designed such that undercapitalized “suppliers” (actually aggregators) will fail. They must buy “market” priced power to serve their contractually fixed rate customers. When the green component (artificially forced low price) of that “market” (frequently) fails for any significant period of time, they cannot sustain the cash drain from “buying high and selling low.” In this case, with constrained and high-priced gas, the extremely negative cash flow is prolonged and a killer to the undercapitalized “supplier” that can’t find quick cash.
In my neck of the woods there hasn’t been any wind for a couple of weeks or so.
Of course that’s just where I am – isn’t it? No, apparently not.
Sept 18th
“Calm weather over the past two weeks has cut output from the country’s 11,000 turbines, which account for more than 20% of electricity generation. “
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/world/europe/2021-09-18-becalmed-wind-energy-sector-has-uk-turning-to-coal/
May as well make that no wind for the month. And just to rub salt in the wound…
Sept 24rth
“Wind farms were paid more than £1.8 million to shut down this week – at a time when consumers face huge rises in energy bills because of the spiralling cost of natural gas….”
Wind farms paid nearly £2m to switch off – even as customers face soaring energy bills (telegraph.co.uk)
The reason for this lunacy is the change in policy priorities.
“In the past, the principal factors determining energy policy were reliability, security and cost. We want power when we flick the light switch. We want to make sure that if one source of energy is in short supply, there will be plenty of others to turn to. And we want energy to be as cheap as possible because our living standards and the wider economy are dependent on keeping energy costs down.
But in recent years another factor has come into play: sustainability. Successive governments have set tougher and tougher targets for decarbonising the UK’s energy supply – all in the name of tackling climate change. This has led to the phasing out of coal and the spending of billions on ‘renewables’, like wind and solar.
However, as we’ve seen more than ever this year, renewables are not the answer.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/18/our-eco-obsessed-government-is-sleepwalking-into-an-energy-crisis/
Welcome to blackout Britain.
If only we had lots of gas of our own… Oh wait…
If there was no appreciable wind why pay the companies to shut them down? Weren’t they effectively already shut down? It’s time to break out the tar cauldrons and start plucking the chickens….
You’re making the fundamental error of looking at the problem sensibly.
“An analysis by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a charitable think tank that has criticised wind energy over its reliability and cost, found that 38 wind farms – all in Scotland – received payments totalling £1.85 million over the course of three days not to generate electricity.
The constraint payments are made by the National Grid to balance supply and demand across the electricity network. Payments tend to be highest on warm, windy days when turbines can produce a lot of electricity that is not needed.”
Wind farms paid nearly £2m to switch off – even as customers face soaring energy bills (vnexplorer.net)
It’s a win-win, whatever the weather. That’s how the best scams work.
Time to head off to the beach, this is making my head hurt!
Why don’t gas generators get constraint payments when they have to switch off, or throttle back, while waiting for the windmills to have a wind drought?
Because gas isn’t subsidised. It pays taxes…
Transition capacity issues.
What “transition?”
In the new economy, there’s money in not working, the less work the better.
Yeah but we are not supposed to notice that there are a lot of people living quite nicely while not doing any productive work.
GND requirement to pay people who “can’t or won’t” work.
The juice was being generated in the Highlands of Scotland. The demand was in Southern England. There is inadequate transmission capacity between the two.
“And we want energy to be as cheap as possible because our living standards and the wider economy are dependent on keeping energy costs down.”
That’s not the goal anymore because it makes no economic sense.
Today governments and power companies want energy to be as expensive as possible, and i don’t blame them. The more expensive the power, the more revenue they generate. Its as simple as that. They’re both in bed together on this.
The power companies are not owned by the British, well the ones that folded were, but the really big ones – the ‘big 6’ – are all owned by foreign companies.
EDF: France
Green Network Energy: Italy
npower: Germany
Octopus Energy: UK/Australia
ScottishPower: Spain
Shell Energy: UK/Holland
It isn’t as simple as you suggest
In the past, there were snow days, with many people staying home
In the future, there will be lack of wind days and lack of sunshine days, with many people staying home, plus curtailments, rolling blackouts, and blackouts
I could do with a day without climate doom news.
Intermittent energy, redistributive change, lowered expectations, and a Green blight.
And soon no doubt the Electric Vehicle implosion as consumers realise they cost at least twice as much as a conventional vehicle, have less range than sales pitches claim and they are not as convenient to use/recharge, and drivers cannot carry a spare can of electricity.
One thing I will never see in my area (the average nighttime low in January is 0F) is an electric snow plow to move our average annual nine feet of snow. We don’t have many college degrees around here but we know what actually works – and what doesn’t.
The problem is, the Greenie Slime is everywhere, and is continually tightening their slimey grip on everything, for which we all pay. Here in the Northeast US, EverFarce continually peddles Greenie ideology, and crows about how “green” they are. Anyone with a functioning brain cell knows that a chunk of what we are paying now for our electrickery is for “saving the planet”. We have no choice in the matter. And it gets worse. They are currently scheming about plastering the offshore coast with wallet-draining, blackout-producing “wind power”. I can hardly wait.
One of the companies is Avro. Read somewhere that directors awarded themselves £2.8m, even though opersting at a loss. No claw-back possibility I assume.
Yep. That’s standard operating practice.
The logic is this: The folks who got the company into trouble in the first place are talented and irreplaceable. You have to pay them big bonuses or they’d flee the sinking ship and then where would you be?
Consider the optics of the giant Nortel going down in flames, giving substantial bonuses to management while the pensioners got ripped off.
In poor Griffland they are having a series of emergency meetings as everything is unravelling with the cost of power
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-20/energy-firm-green-warns-it-may-not-survive-winter-power-update
Bojo has ruled out removing the green levies .. so grab your popcorn and settle in
Buld energy is another renewable energy retailer that is likely to hit the wall soon.
Bojo has ruled out removing the green levies
As Boris would say
Cor phwoar woar what’s £450 to a poor household?
About 15 years ago, a smart lawyer (yes, there are a few) representing venture capitalists visited me at my university system office. During the course of the conversation, he said that they had evaluated a wide array of energy and environmental technologies and had concluded that one, only one, could be reliably profitable on its own with no governmental intervention. Landfill gas. The rest are scams.
His investors were quickly trying to get contracts with municipal solid waste landfills across the country to capture their methane. He said it would be either cleaned, dehydrated and fed into the gas pipeline system or used directly by on-site gas-fired generators. A well-designed landfill will generate a reliable stream of gas for about 20+ years.
(This further gives the lie to much of recycle-mania. If a landfill is designed right, degradable organic waste is not permanently entombed, but it is slowly digested returning useful energy.)
Of course, this is only a niche technology, making use of what is otherwise waste. The investors had no illusion that their profitable venture would or could supply an appreciable amount of the energy needed to power society. At the farm level, some (such as Rud Istvan if I recall correctly) are using digesters to supply a substantial amount of on-farm energy, but that is not an option for the Londoner or Manhattanite living in a high rise 600 sq ft flat.
The problem is that a landfill for 100,000 households only produces enough methane to heat 1000 or so households….so a sustainability shortfall same as burning garbage to produce electricity….
Just leave people alone. An entire market for electricity is made up of many individual suppliers. Every technology has its own niche, large or small. If it is profitable, people will do it. Government just screws up normal decisionmaking, distorting markets and raising costs and engendering shortages.
One of the major reasons why these so called green energy suppliers evolved goes back to the weird legal concept that the purchase of an expensive Offset Certificate would DEEM the energy supplied to be green. It was this that enabled these companies to market the scam without fear of legal consequences.
Unfortunately these certificates are unable to boil a kettle and tend to get stuck in the wall socket from time to time, let alone charge up an EV. Hence valueless.
it is difficult to know whether this is deliberate or mere incompetence; but suspect it is both.
How the legal profession allowed this to happen beats me.
“How the legal profession allowed this to happen beats me.”
Really?
“WHAT IS MY DIESEL CLAIM ABOUT?”
My Diesel Claim | PGMBM
Ambulance chasers have diversified.
Its fascinating how a legal system can claim a harm to an individual and payment to the individual for damages from a practice that saved the individual money and had no harm to the individual. It was the government that was deceived and “harmed.”
9 small UK energy companies have gone under in the last couple of weeks… nothing to do with green or renewables, all to do with natural gas prices, and fixed term fixed price contracts and UK ‘energy cap’
Avro Energy has (or rather had) nearly 600 000 customers – hardly small.
Thanks Bahgdad Bob.
The ruinables failed to produce. Given their subsidies and guaranteed payments despite actual delivery levels, any shortage automatically results in higher prices in the distorted “market” by their absence. Government-caused gas price spikes just made the ruinables’ impact more obvious.
Keep spewing those lies, lie spewing liar. Lies are all you are or ever will be.
I think thei business model of most green companies is a scam from the start, the only green they are seeking is government subsidy green. When it ends or is reduced, they fold.
Any company with $15k in total assets and shareholders’ equity of negative $6.2 million is a modern Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff would proud of this. Bernie had considerably more than $15,000 in assets.
Here are some more scam enterprises harming investors and the grid.
Contractors Burned By Texas Solar Farm File Claims for $16.7M | Levelset
Workhorse Group suspends deliveries, recalls C-1000 electric delivery van (yahoo.com)
Odessa Disturbance highlights troubling gaps in solar reliability | Your Solar News Aggregator (so-solar-news.com)
Ya gotta love the story on Workhouse Group’s electric delivery vehicle. The circumstances of their vehicle recall were completely opaque, cloaked in lots and lots of regulatory gobbledygook the type of which the Left so loves. I just find it sweet that the NHTSA nannies have, for no discernible reason, thrown this bunch of frauds under their own buses. They don’t need a reason. A former colleague of mine at FAA worked at NHTSA for 20 years. When I asked him about the fact that “55 [mph speed limit] Saves Lives” actually cost lives due to forcing people to drive at unsafely low speeds on highways designed for 70 mph, he said “Yeah, they knew it was killing people. They didn’t care, because they thought saving gas was more important than saving lives, even if it didn’t really save gas or lives. They just thought it should.” And he is a liberal, who favors federal regulations.
Want renewable electricity production? No problem, use coal, gas, nuclear and hydro. They are the only renewable energy on the table, solar and wind is a toy that fails to even produce enough power to operate themselves much less supply a high energy society.
There has been a spate of salesmen coming around my neighborhood promising free solar panels and cheaper electric rates, if I would only agree to put them on my roof. At first I told them the city and the HOA does not allow anything on the roof that is visible from the street. They replied they can mount them on the north side of the roof. I told him that he was retarded. The next salesman came and said the law changed and they can be mounted street side. I asked, what about the two large trees that overhang the roof? He replied that it would not be an issue. They will work in partial shade. The last one that came by started his spiel with it being a solution to the February grid outages. I told him, that was stupid. Why would anyone double down on one of the main causes of the power outage? – Unreliable energy sources. Plus, since they were not providing transfer switches, or battery backups in the deal, the house would still be without power when the grid goes down.
They always end with trying to convince me that because an imaginary neighbor down the street is getting it, I should get them too before the prices go higher.
I was with Green and I am not gullible since I knew that they were not going to supply 100% renewable energy since it is impossible to do so. I signed up with them as they were the cheapest supplier which is all that matters. I have been transferred to Shell Energy now which will obviously cost more but it will be pretty pointless to switch I think. there are a few very expensive fixed deals out there but who is going to risk offering a fixed deal in the current situation.
My gas supplier went down last week and now EDF is taking over. You should see the bullshit in their email claiming that they are truly a 100% renewable energy generator but that relies on buying bits of paper and using their nuclear plants in France.