Guest “the math is simple” by David Middleton
Energy poverty in Europe is linked to expensive renewables
It appears that policymakers are gathering in Glasgow to speed up killing fossil fuels, precisely what already led to massive energy poverty in Europe.November 6, 2021
By Mark Milke and Ven Venkatachalam
With the recent rise in the price of natural gas in Europe to five times where it was in early 2021, expect to see many more Europeans and those in United Kingdom plunged into what’s known as “energy poverty.”
From Greece to Great Britain and everywhere in between, the European electricity grid has increasingly been delinked from reliable affordable fossil fuels and hooked up to more expensive and intermittent wind and solar projects.
One result is Europeans pay twice for generated electricity: once for the existing sunk costs of existing fossil fuel (and nuclear in some countries) projects and again for renewable-based electricity projects. Another result is when wind and solar are not available, multiple nations in Europe and elsewhere are chasing the same available oil, natural gas and coal, pushing those fuel prices dramatically higher.
Canadians — and indeed everyone else around the world — should pay attention. That’s because what Europeans are enduring and will suffer through again this winter will intensify thanks to what governments worldwide are pushing at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 26) at Glasgow, Scotland: An even faster assumed “phaseout” of fossil fuels.
But it’s just that past policy preference that has caused substantial energy poverty in Europe even before the price spike this autumn. (For those unfamiliar with the term, energy poverty is all about citizens too poor to pay their utility bills on time and/or keep their homes adequately warm).
Stephen Bouzarovski, a University of Manchester professor and chair of an energy poverty working group, estimated pre-pandemic, 80 million Europeans were already struggling to adequately heat their homes. Meanwhile, at least 12 million European households were in arrears on their utility bills.
[…]
Western Standard
Stephen Bouzarovski’s energy poverty estimate was actually from a CNN Business article, which went on to quote an idiot from Friends of the Earth Europe…
Europe’s poor suffer as energy prices surge
By Walé Azeez, CNN Business – Oct 1Millions of people across Europe may not be able to afford to heat their homes this winter as gas and electricity prices soar.
Experts, anti-poverty organizations and environmental campaigners are warning that the coronavirus pandemic and rising prices have intensified a longstanding problem tied to a combination of high energy costs, low household incomes and homes that aren’t energy efficient.
Recent research led by Stefan Bouzarovski, professor at the University of Manchester and chair of energy poverty research network Engager, found that up to 80 million households across Europe were already struggling to keep their homes adequately warm before the pandemic.
The European Union describes energy poverty as being unable to afford “proper indoor thermal comfort.” Only four European countries — France, Ireland, Slovakia and the United Kingdom — have official definitions, but experts say the problem is widespread.
[…]
“We should be seeing access to energy as a human right in the same way as we see access to water as a human right,” said Martha Myers, climate justice and energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, which is part of the Right to Energy Coalition.
[…]
CNN
Of course, the morons who demanded that Europe transition away from fossil fuels and nuclear power would demand that energy be treated as a “human right” and doled out free-of-charge. According to Ms. Myers LinkedIn page, she has a bachelors degree in “political anthropology” (WTF?) and a masters in “sustainable development and anthropology.” Clearly the only way to make a total goat-frack sustainable is to make it free…
Energy Poverty in Four Easy Charts
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PNGASJPUSDM#0
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html
Any questions?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Paul Homewood has explained that in the UK renewable electricity (solar and wind) is being subsidized to the tune of about £470 per household.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/01/29/renewable-subsidies-reach-record-high/
And he gives a detailed breakdown showing the derivation of this number. Its not open to serious question.
Much though not all of this comes from what is essentially a tax on electricity. In another post Homewood has explained this:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/02/15/homeowners-fleeced-by-renewable-subsidies/
And he refers to the Ofgem statistic on the makeup of a home electricity bill which can be found here:
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-data-and-research/data-portal/all-available-charts?keyword=electricity%20bill&sort=relevance
What’s going on in the UK is that the Guardian and BBC triumphantly welcome ever increasing percentages of electricity supply being generated by renewables.
However there are two things wrong with this that they leave out totally. One, as you can see from the above, is the costs, much of which are in the form of a regressive tax levied on a necessity. This directly produces fuel poverty. There really are people in the UK who hesitate to make a cup of tea or boil a kettle to fill a hot water bottle because of the cost of electricity.
This is made worse in its effects because the poorest already often buy electricity in the most expensive way, in the form of prepayment plans.
The second is that the measure of production is not real. The numbers measure how much is being produced. However there is a renewables obligation – the supply companies are obliged preferentially to take and pay for renewable generation whether they need it or not.
So what the numbers show is not in any useful sense the contribution of renewables to the energy supply. They rather show that if by law you make the companies buy something they do not need, they will indeed pay for it, and they will pass the costs on to consumers. But this does not show that at the point of supply there was any need for it.
I don’t know and am not sure how you could calculate how much of the renewable supply would actually have been bought if there were no renewable purchase obligation, and if prices for renewables and conventional were equivalent. That is, if the renewable supply was only bought when needed and when competitive in terms of quality of supply.
We can be absolutely certain however that it is much lower than what the BBC and Guardian are reporting as the contribution of renewables to UK supply.
We are in fact producing fuel poverty among the old and the poor by means of a regressive tax on a necessity, which has the result of delivering expensive and unreliable electricity which the grid does not need at the times when its delivered. The costs of this can be measured by the higher death rate in the UK every winter.
Its a religious mania we are dealing with. Just as in the case of Grenfell cladding, the mania was to insulate with cladding with the top priority being reduction of heating energy, not particularly to save cost, but to reduce CO2 emissions. The fact that this created serious safety issues for the buildings in question was brushed under the carpet. Similarly at the moment the fact that we are increasingly taxing a necessity by a tax which falls disproportionately on those who can least afford it is also ignored or obfuscated.
And we are doing it in order to install on a grand scale generating equipment which is simply not fit for the purpose of supplying the grid, which even were it fit for purpose would not materially reduce UK carbon emissions, and where even were it to do that, would make no measurable impact on global emissions.
Its about as sensible a policy as looking for witches to explain the failure of crops.
“Paul Homewood has explained that in the UK renewable electricity (solar and wind) is being subsidized to the tune of about £470 per household.”
Subsidies applied by the UK Gov to the fossil fuel industry …..
https://cdn.odi.org/media/documents/11787.pdf
“The UK’s transparency and reporting on fossil fuel subsidies remains relatively poor compared with other European countries including France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. The fossil fuel estimates in this study are therefore likely to be an underestimate.
• In recent years the government has significantly reduced the tax rate for North Sea oil and gas production. Overall fiscal support to oil and gas production was £665 million (€850 million) per year between 2014 and 2016.
• Subsidies to households include reduced VAT on fuel and power consumption, resulting in £3.6 billion (€4.7 billion) per year in foregone government revenue.
• Subsidies to the transport sector, including tax breaks for diesel, amounted to £7.4 billion (€9.5 billion) per year on average between 2014 and 2016.
• The UK’s public finance institutions and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which is 73% state- owned, together provided financing to oil, gas and coal at home and abroad worth £1.3 billion (€1.9 billion) per year between 2014 and 2016, with RBS accounting for £937 billion (€1.2 billion) of this support.“
so you expect renewables to compete with no subsides given that?
Not to mention their unfunded asset retirement obligations. Norway has cash put back to pay for their share. The UK? FYI, don’t know how many of these $ have been properly bonded, but the tax exemption for P&A’s and platform abandonments is clearly, merely, just another form of corp. welfare. I.e., a subsidy.
https://image-src.bcg.com/Images/BCG-The-North-Seas-%24100-Billion-Decommissioning-Challenge-Mar-2017_tcm56-149950.pdf
https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/uk-north-sea-decommissioning-the-17-billion-challenge/
Almost 23% of every UK electricity bill is for environmental reasons mainly subsidies for unreliables and these amounted to £11,2 billion in 2020/21 and will rise to £12.5 billion in 2024/25.
Vat is charged at 5% on fuel and power consumption because if it wasn’t the number of households in fuel poverty would rocket and fuel poverty charities say around 10,000 people a year already die because they can’t afford to keep their homes warm.
To then imply that the financing banks make available to oil,gas and coal is some kind of subsidy is ridiculous.
Of course the VAT “subsidy” applies to wind turbines every bit as much as it does to a coal fired power plant. Even more for the solar panels on a roof: no VAT at all is charged on consumption, and indeed it is effectively rebated off exported kWhs.
Banton seems to think a reduction in VAT (tax foregone by the State) is equivalent to a subsidy (a direct cash payment to the oil industry).
Since everything belongs to the state, when the state allows you to keep a portion of your paycheck, the state is subsidizing you.
Exactly what is the definition of communism?
None of that is subsidy. Its common in the Green lobby to claim that depletion allowances are subsidies. They are not. A lower rate of VAT on fuel purchases for home heating than on (for instance) wine or clothing is also not a subsidy. The rate of taxes on gasoline is also irrelevant to the question of subsidy.
Yes, the correct thing to do with wind and solar is to have the companies generating power through these technologies simply conform to GAAP. That is, depreciate their assets on a reasonable schedule.
This is how we treat the oil and gas industry.
What you’re calling a subsidy in the above passage is simply an accounting treatment of their earnings which is necessary, because to do otherwise would be false accounting. if you do not have a depletion allowance you are pretending that supplies of oil and gas which are being extracted are infinite. People go to jail for that sort of thing.
And the wind and solar sell their product on a free market to whoever will buy it, with all renewable purchase obligations abolished. If intermittency is a problem, fine, let them buy some batteries or gas generators. If connecting the wind farms to the grid is a problem, fine let them install transmission capacity.
The renewables lobby manages to argue at the same time that wind is now cheaper than conventional generation, and also that its super important that the power companies be compelled to buy it at a premium over wholesale. Its nonsense.
And when it taxes the poor and old for electricity, its wicked.
Typical, any tax rate less than 100% is a subsidy.
While Government lie lie lies about it
A lovely example of the work of the Office of National Statistics and Lies went past just yesterday
We were informed that Christmas Lunch this year will cost 3.4% more than last year’s lunch did.
(Doncha love the precision)
Any quick internet search will tell you that turkey will cost ‘tween 10 and 12% more this year than last and that potatoes (Maris Piper) now cost £300 per tonne compared to £200.
Creative or what? Folks get jailed for less.
Hideously cross-threading here but in a way Elon has a point – but it’s Over Statisticisation, not Overpopulation, that will end the world.
Lying basically.
“Meanwhile, at least 12 million European households were in arrears on their utility bills.”
In France, if your unpaid electricity bill falls between the 1st of November and the end of March, EDF will not cut you off. Outside of the winter months you have around 2 months from the unpaid date before they flip the switch. Same for gas.
And in France they let u eat all the cake u want!!
When the renewables fail to meet the needs of countries like Germany, and the backup is buying natural gas from Russia, what cost value is put in the column of arming Europe’s enemy?
Not an unintended consequence—or as they say at Microsoft, it’s a feature, not a bug.
A long time ago, Friends of the Earth was a pretty sane organisation. Now, it appears to me, it is in the grip of swivel-eyed eco-loons and graduates who have been educated beyond their natural level of intelligence.
Once again, it all goes back to the old bumper sticker from the 1970s, often seen in geology department parking lots:
BAN MINING
LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE
IN THE DARK
Cross national domestic energy prices are difficult to compare as it depends on how much of the cost is collected via the energy supplier and how much via hidden taxation and subsidies etc. Consumers and taxpayers are the same people when all is said and done.
I have just made a bet with myself by going onto a two year fixed price tariff which involved a more or less doubling of the direct debit required!! It will be interesting to see what happens but whatever; if do win out on this it will be a pyrrhic victory.😱
Looking at the last graph, with European gas consumption well above production, Vlad the Paler (Putin) must be smiling. It also helps him that our President’s son sits on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, so that the Big Guy approves a gas pipeline to Germany while cancelling oil pipelines in the USA.
I’m never one to defend Dementia Zhou but the Brandon Admin lifting sanctions on Nordstream 2 is a setback for Crackhead’s Ukrainian partners. That pipeline runs under the Baltic Sea bypassing Ukraine. The idea being to starve them of transit income and be able to cut off their energy supplies without losing the lucrative German and Western European markets.