Essay by Eric Worrall
Are renewable energy investors in Britain about to experience financial hardship, like Spanish investors in 2010?
UK Energy Secretary Gets Power to Cap Income From Renewables
Energy Prices Bill gives government expansive new powers
Industry warns measures could threaten green energy investment
By Will Mathis
26 October 2022, 21:32 GMT+10Follow us at @BloombergUK and on Facebook, and wrap up your day with The Readout newsletter with Allegra Stratton.
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As the government focused on a change in leadership, the bill was making its way through the parliamentary procedure and completed the final stage to becoming law While providing vital support to households struggling with energy costs, it will also allow the state — if it chooses to — to override the country’s energy regulator, by capping revenues of electricity generators and regulating suppliers.
The energy industry has warned that the measures could upend the stable regulatory environment that’s been key to driving investment in UK wind power. Britain’s wind-power industry is one of the largest in Europe, and crucial to the country’s climate goals and ambitions to be independent of volatile fossil fuel markets.
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One aspect of the bill is a cap on revenues from low-carbon power generation like wind farms, solar parks and nuclear plants. The legislation gives the government the power to enact the measure, but leaves the details about the level of the cap to be decided later.
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Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/uk-energy-secretary-gets-power-to-cap-income-from-renewables
The British Government’s new power to cap green energy profits has just added to the evidence that renewables could be a high risk investment.
The 2010 Spanish retrospective renewable energy subsidy cut caused a massive wave of bankruptcies, 62,000 investors who mistakenly believed in what they thought was a stable financial arrangement with the Spanish government.
Reading my essays, you might get the impression I don’t care about people who lose money on renewables, but that isn’t the case. Many of the people bankrupted by the Spanish green subsidy debacle were ordinary people, mom and pop investors, who thought they could trust their politicians to keep their promises. Some of the victims of the 2010 Spanish green subsidy debacle ended up losing their homes.
I am not a lawyer, legal expert or investment advisor, but if the British Government exercises these new powers to slash green investment profits, and if the value of green energy investments plummets, it is possible that investors might have a path to receiving legal compensation.
Former HSBC head of responsible banking Stuart Kirk recently claimed there is a lot of pressure on advisors to talk up the prospects of green investments. If this alleged pressure led investment advisors to fail to divulge known risks when offering investment advice, British courts might rule the investment advisors and banks are legally liable for any losses suffered by green energy investors.
In my opinion the risk of severe loss due to arbitrary government profit caps or rule revisions should have been obvious to anyone with expert knowledge of the industry, after what happened in Spain.
If you are in this situation, please don’t take what I have just said as legal or investment advice. As I said, I’m not a lawyer, legal expert or licensed financial advisor. I strongly recommend people who believe they lost money because of defective green investment advice review their individual circumstances with a lawyer, before attempting any legal action to recover their financial losses.
Update (EW): h/t Griff – New British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak just re-instated the fracking ban.
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“Rules based” Anglosaxon Hemisphere: our personal chieftain’s rules that is. At least the Huns didn’t claim to be holier than the Pope, they just grabbed loot without windy PR.
Yep, in the West you have to make the expropriation look like fairness.
Yes ….like PayPal ….
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/breaking-paypal-reinstated-policy-fine-users-2500-directly-accounts-spread-misinformation/
“Rules based” Anglosaxon Hemisphere”
Rules, as we know them, were handed down mainly by the Romans (not Anglo Saxon).
The Angles, Jutes and Frisians etc came much later.
Did you not know that?
Anglo Saxon laws and the legal system completely replaced any Roman system that had been in place before the chaos of them leaving. The basis of our legal system today is the Anglo-Saxon system, not the Roman system and some of those early laws still influence modern laws.
Did you not know that?
So, we’re still armed….
The law in Scotland is based on Roman law. It is just the remainder of GB that went Anglo Saxon.
The Scottish Legal system is significantly different to that in England, as is the main Christian Church, and it is the English one that went global I think.
I don’t think there’s a direct equivalent of The Procurator Fiscal, Not Proven verdicts, 15 person jury with majority verdicts and the Court of Session in England and possibly the rest of the world.
The national Church is Presbyterian, and there were religious wars in the 17th and the jacobite rebellions were more religious than national. The so called bloodless “Glorious Revolution” was far for bloodless outside England.
So had did that happen, Oldseadog? I thought the Romans stopped at Hadrian’s Wall.
Oh hell no – look at where the battle of Mons Graupius took place (approximately). The Romans were infrequent but repeated tourists, fighting their way right across Scotland on many occasions, with mixed results.
No influence from the Normans?
That’s not true. Much of our legal and government system emanated from Alfred the Great and his successors.
Roman institutions and language had remarkably little sticking power in the British Isles. For instance, the addition of Latin words to the English language came a long time after the Romans had left. Christianity came about a century after the Romans left but the Latin it brought stayed within the confines of the church. Latin did not really enter the English language until people, other than clerics, started to become educated.
It is conventional to trace the beginning of the English legal system to the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century.
Unless you’re talking about history, the term Anglo-Saxon has precious little to do with actual Angles and Saxons.
I don’t have a problem with people milking subsidies being burned.
I don’t like when people get fat off my taxes, but many of the smaller investors at least genuinely believe they are doing the right thing. So I can still feel sad when decent people who I believe have been misled end up losing money because of politicians, even if I strongly disagree with what they did.
I only partly agree with this. My father and some associates built a “solar farm” when the Ontario gov was paying them $ 0.80 for their feed in. They knew perfectly well that this was paid for by everyone else paying higher electricity bills. They boasted about how they were leading the “green revolution”. Since none of these investors were financially fragile, the cutting of the feed left no one bankrupt. The facility sits mouldering, completly hidden by sumac now.
Greed for an easy buck that can be defended as “moral good” is just greed in my way of thinking.
I’ll get the stake 🤣
And, of course, Redge, I read your comment wrong first time, reading steak instead of stake.
Regards,
Bob Tisdale
I’ll get both, Bob
Don’t forget the pitchforks and torches….
Torches to start the BBQ, and pitchforks work well as a grill, so then the steak!
The current marginal pricing model needs fixing though (i don’t Know if this is the right way to do it or not)
But the way in which low cost wind power ends up getting billed the same as the final producer (in this case very expensive gas) is bonkers…..
Low cost wind power?
Do you have numbers to back that up?
He read it in the Guardian, so it must be true.
It is true for the East coast of Australia. Price paid to all producers is the marginal bid for that 5 minutes.
There is no “low cost” wind power; the problem is that its costs are not all being recognized, or are being hidden in the form of mandates, subsidies and tax credits that are not based on any actual income.
Actually it either gets a fixed price under a CFD, which has been pretty generous, (see chart) or it gets a subsidy on top of market prices that are already boosted by carbon taxes. It gets paid not to produce with compensation for the subsidy it would otherwise earn. It gets a bunch of other disguised subsidies too, like not having to pay for its grid connection costs which are billed straight to consumers.
Don’t forget the wind farms can delay their CfDs for up to 3 years. The Moray East wind farm has taken advantage of the current high prices for energy and delayed taking up its CfD till 2023. It will thereby earn an extra £500m in its first 12 months of operation (Should we be grateful it didn’t delay for the full 3 years?)
Until wind has to pay for the back up power that is necessary when it isn’t producing, wind is being subsidized.
It really amazes me how expensive power gets when you start adding “cheap” wind and solar.
Mark, are you in favor of wind and/or solar?
If so, why do you think so little of poor people around the world or those in modern countries on fixed or low incomes?
The waste of installing the unreliable generation capacity, around 4 TRILLION dollars worldwide COULD have built millions of homes for those living in hovels. OR built water, waste and electrical grids for those living in $hithole areas, you know, where people in this century still $hit in holes because they have no modern plumbing.
I think the mistake that conservatives have made for 30 years is NOT comparing the waste of money to crony capitalists to what COULD have been done with those funds.
Liberals are the ones in favor of funding billionaires liberal party donors to build unreliables, while CLAIMING they care about the poor. What a crock. Is that you Mark?
Wind power is very expensive .
EG . In 2020 the London array , which is a very large wind farm , produced electricity worth about £21 million , but were also subsidised with about £66 millions of taxpayers money .
But in 2021 there was a change in the Emissions Trading Scheme , which had the effect of hiding the subsidies and making it one of the biggest stealth taxes in the UK .
A massive increase in the cost of Carbon Credits meant that wind and solar systems got huge amounts of money from selling their Credits [ which the Government gave them ,] to generators who used Gas / OIl /Coal to produce their energy .
This had the effect of hiding the huge costs of Wind / Solar , and increasing the cost of all of the other generators .
This was long before the Ukraine invasion . But that was convenient as the greens were able to use that as an excuse for the huge rise in energy prices .
So the costs of wind generation are still much higher than conventional generation , but are much better hidden now .And Green taxes have caused huge price increases for everybody .
The RET needs fixing just as much. The system of forcing people to buy unreliable power whenever it happens to have enough wind or light was just designed to drive reliable power like coal out of business.
Good posting, Eric. The economic/investment disaster in Spain should be an alert to gullible investors everywhere, if it sounds too good to be true it probably isn’t. I’m not an investment advisor either, but I have been with the same one for 35 years, and his profit is based on a percent of total investment package, so he is totally in with maximizing wealth. If your green pig had some lipstick it would be extra special.
Here we see the first result of the awful day of chaos and shame when the Tory government lost the plot – when procedures in the House of Commons dissolved into screams of protests from a despicable bunch of Tory backbenchers who mocked the speaker, yelled insults at their prime minister, giggled in contempt of Parliament.
The House stopped functioning. Liz Truss should immediately have dissolved Parliament and called for fresh elections – simply because she was unable to carry out to recommence fracking which she was mandated to do by the rank and file Tory Party members.
85% of the British population want fresh elections – and only King Charles can now force this through. But has he got the guts and courage to do it??
How does he override the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011? He can’t, he’s the fig-leaf.
Elections now will guarantee one thing and one thing only: the push for net zero.
That question requires the stamp of the people in a referendum.
The fixed term parliament act (2011) was repealed by the dissolution and calling of parliament act (2022) and made 5 years the MAXIMUM time between general elections. So, yes, he could do just that (technically).
LOL
He does exactly as he is told to do.
Do you not know that?
I was careful to add the word technically in there so as to point out that, although he could, he’d be very unlikely to.
Do you not know that?
It was appalling to watch the Torys behave so atrociously and cowardly at once.
She was in an impossible situation given the polls and who knows what threats were made behind the scenes if she even remotely explored that option.
We can expect though that if this government tries to cap the sacred renewable profits the same shameful and chaotic machinations will be employed to drive them from power.
William IV was the last monarch to use the Royal Perogative and arbitrarily dissolve Parliament in 1834. Last time a monarch challenged the authority of an elected government with public support.
As the last time a UK governing party received over 50% of the popular vote was about a century ago the definition of popular support might be difficult.
“British Government Grants Itself New Powers”
That’s how the Parliamentary dictatorship works…
“… thought they could trust their politicians to keep their promises.”
Now, they know better. The UK is still under the spell…
“‘Climate change is severely impacting people’s health around the world’, says the BBC, citing a new report by the Lancet.” – https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/26/climate-alarmism-is-bad-for-your-health/
The New Scientist – a science publication? – refers to people who menstruate and even pregnant people etc, so why shouldn’t the Lancet turn health facts completely upside down?
Why is the New Scientist denying biological reality?
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/24/why-is-the-new-scientist-denying-biological-reality/
Renewable generators will be no worse off than they were in 2020, prior to the rise in energy prices.
And don’t worry about those little investors, Eric. Most wind and solar farms are owned by banks, foreign energy companies, private equity and big institutions.
The alternative is that energy consumers continue to be fleeced – I know which I would prefer
Banks might be the direct owners Paul, but it is small unit investment owners who will carry the can if it all falls in a heap – unless they can prove they were misled by their advisers.
I’m surprised that this one policy that emerged from the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Truss administration has survived but I’m glad it has. It never ceases to amaze me that on any day, on any news channel you turn to, you will be confronted by an “expert” that claims “renewables” are the cheapest providers of energy and we need to build more. Delusional. If they were contracted from the outset to be paid only for what they produce and penalised when they fail to deliver, there never would have been anybody stupid enough to “invest” in these boondoggles. They cannot and would not exist without subsidies and 100% backup from thermal generation, maybe this policy will start to make these facts more widely known.
It didn’t survive, Rishi Sunak just re-instated the fracking ban.
Yes, but the capping of profits from “renewables” has survived, which is what I was commenting on.
No he hasn’t; as before Truss, the UK has no outright legal ban on fracking. The moratorium on fracking has been reimposed but could still be reversed again if a government wanted to. Labour has been calling for a legal ban on fracking which would have to be legally repealed by parliament if it were imposed. I know it’s not a major difference in practice but there is a difference in the way it could be removed later.
Subsidy free new renewables projects given ‘strike prices’ are only paid for what they produce already
Name three Subsidy free new renewables projects…
Actually, i would be happy if he names one as there is no such thing, they all are subsidized either up front or in the rates paid or in not having to guarantee power supplied. Its like the question “name the country or subnational jurisdiction where renewables were installed and the cost of electricity went DOWN”.
Does not exist, unicorn hunting.
Nonsense.
Not so at all. Any can get paid for curtailment. Moray East gets payments a large slice of the time.
One subsidy, and one of the smaller ones at that is removed, and griff goes on and on about how renewables are “subsidy” free.
griff actually mentions the largest of the subsidies, but he’s to far in the tank to realize it.
Yes, renewables are paid for whatever they produce, whether it is needed or not. They are also paid at a rate that is well above market.
This would apply to older contracts which are under ‘Renewables Obligation’ and not to more recent ‘Contracts for Difference’ which already have fixed ‘strike prices’ and where firms already have to pay back money when electricity price goes over strike price.
Paybacks from UK renewables could cut £27 from bills by end of winter | Energy industry | The Guardian
‘Renewable energy projects typically receive payments from household energy bills to top up the earnings from the energy market to an agreed level, or “strike price”, But in return they are expected to pay cash back to consumers when market prices outstrip the set subsidy level.’
and no mention that the ban on fracking will NOT be lifted?
Just found out myself Griff.
Yep – the frivolous, illogical and, frankly, insane changes keep coming from the Cons. One imagines that investors, big and small, will be rather unlikely to trust the British ‘government’ ever again!
There’s no wind again today and the Sun gets lower by the day.
Have you got your bicycle and dynamo ready?
“This system helps to protect households from surging market prices, which are expected cause bills to soar from an average of £1,277 this winter to £1,925 from 1 April, while providing renewable energy investors with certainty too, the LCCC said.”
“ The body responsible for managing renewable energy payments, the Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC), has forecast paybacks from the industry could increase to a total of £770m by the end of winter, shaving an average of £27 from the annual home energy bill.”
Only a government agency could reduce a £648 increase by £27 and call it a successful program.
That is definitely the system that was put into place with no industry regulation that it would be followed. That the energy companies have NOT followed this system and have, in fact, been registering profits in line with gas prices is, however, a matter of some concern. As I understand it the government will step in to ensure that energy companies comply with this system as they haven’t been doing it voluntarily.
For wind farms that have not declared that they wish to start CFD payments they have the option under the contract not to do so. Cheap CFD prices are a fiction, because of that option in the contracts.
It would apply to the newest wind farms who have elected not to commence payments under CFDs that now sit well below market prices.
But they can delay taking up their CfD for up to 3 years and since the price of energy rose over a year ago no new windfarm has taken up its CfD. Moray East, for example, has delayed until 2023 and will make an extra £500m in it’s first 12 months of operation.
Are you saying 1/2 a Billion pounds profit taken from the pockets of UK voters?
For being forced to use unreliables, rate payers get to pay 1/2 billion pounds extra for their electrical power use?
I hope the green dummies why took the GREEN advice and changed out their gas heat for heat pumps are enjoying the “cheap” green electric rates.
“…upend the stable regulatory environment…”
If Britain had a stable regulatory environment they would not be in their current mess. Ad hoc finger in the wind arbitrary and capricious economy destroying fiscally irresponsible is a better description of the British regulatory environment.
Maybe the Conservatives in Parliament have been monitoring the state of natural gas supplies of late, noting how high the supply is in western Europe, with plunging prices (the Dutch spot market on NG actually went negative briefly this week) … and thus don’t want to let renewables producers keep electricity costs artificially high.
The unusually warm weather in northern Europe thus far plus greatly accelerated imports of LNG, mostly from the US, this fall resulted in the highest stores of NG seen in many years – 94% of capacity vs the average this time of year of 87%. Russian gas imports have plunged to 9% of imports on their way to zero. LNG tankers are getting stacked up offshore, unable to offload their cargoes for weeks.
In other words, the prospects of the peoples of the UK and EU freezing in the dark this winter are now old news, no thanks to renewables but all thanks to NG imports from suppliers other than Russia. This perhaps hammers home the clear message that fossil fuels are vastly more accessible and cheaper than renewables, with a much more reliable supply chain. The EU should never again allow itself to be extorted by Russia.
The supply is constricted in Spain – the processing facilities are running 24/7 flat out and still cannot process the fuel fast enough to keep the tankers unloading on a continuous basis. Some tankers have been queued up waiting their turn and some are anchored out to sea, gambling that the price will go up again in the next few months. Adding to the problems is one of supply within the EU – there aren’t enough pipelines to supply the gas from the Spanish processing facilities to the storage facilities or, indeed, the power stations. It’s a mess and may lurch along for a while but it’s going to need huge investment to get the system sorted out and fit for purpose; investment that is never going to happen as long as the EU is committed to an end to fossil fuels.
The current state of storage is what it is. Demand will surely increase as winter sets in but there is an oversupply of incoming LNG that will be offloaded.
The infrastructure to meet all EU and UK needs is being added as we speak, with the US proven a reliable supporter of LNG, unlike Russia. The demand for Russian gas will likely never revive, except for the handful of EU nation governments like Hungary who are Putin-friendly, at least for the moment until their voters throw them out.
It’s easy to transport NG by ship – it’s not new tech. These are permanent changes to energy distribution.
Now if the Brits would get going again on fracking, they could simply use pipelines to distribute their gas.
On one point you are right – it is very easy to transport LNG by ship and there are 18 or more EU terminals that could unload it, however that LNG cannot be used as is – it must be reprocessed into useable gas and for that there are very few plants available in the EU, although more are being built and may come online by the end of next year. The problem is one of processing and transmission of the useable gas – LNG storage is reaching maximum capacity now across the EU but unless it can be regassified, it is completely useless.
Unlike oil, LNG can’t be stored long term. It has to be kept cold, really, really cold. Otherwise it warms and expands. When it expands it has to be released, otherwise the tanks would explode.
Most of these ships use the expanding gas to power refrigeration units to try and keep the rest of the gas cold.
These units can slow the rate at which gas is lost, but not eliminate it.
This is also true of onshore storage. If you don’t spend energy to keep it cold, you lose it.
In the short term there is a glut. But it would not be wise to assume that it will continue if the weather gets cold and if Russian LNG supply to Europe is curtailed.
In the long term, Russia is done as a significant supplier of NG to the EU. That’s not going to reverse itself.
Maybe, as long as the supply from other areas holds out. As an aside, China is sending LNG shipments to the EU – LNG which they are buying cheaply from Russia and selling at a profit to the EU – so tell me again how Russia is done as a significant supplier of NG to the EU?
I see no sign that the Spanish, French, Belgians and Portuguese have stopped buying Russian LNG. Even been an occasional cargo into the Netherlands lately.
I am not sure what this is all about?
The option of any state to declare the max price of a free market product exists but is wishful thinking. The suppliers will simply stop supplying if the price they can ask dictated by the state is below what they are prepared to supply at.
The end result of that simple demand and supply rule is, the state will have to up the ceiling price or the supply will remain short.
The only option beyond not being involved in pricing of goods for state authorities is to nationalise the industry you wish to control. The end game then is an open ended risk on the tax payers. History tells us state control of anything is never the best/least cost option.
Hey ho.
Which is fine for a normal supply/demand graph – the market would normally stabilise somewhere around a compromise between the 2. However, this is far from a normal situation – demand has been artificially created, surplus to our needs, and supply prices have been boosted by another commodity entirely. I honestly don’t know how that could be made to fit into a normal supply/demand scenario without changing the whole setup.
The people will pay, either through exorbitant energy prices, or higher taxes to provide subsidies to the purveyors of unreliable “green energy”.
They tried to negotiate to cap prices at a very low level – rumour says £50/MWh because they believe their own propaganda that wind is cheap. Unsurprisingly the industry said no, and the whole thing is out for “consultation”. Real costs are probably double that if you look at the work of Prof Gordon Hughes. Moreover, the real cost to consumers keeps rising to cover for more transmission lines, more curtailment, and costlier backup for when the wind doesn’t blow.
(AP) Europe’s energy crisis raises firewood prices, theft fears
By VANESSA GERA, DAVID McHUGH and AUREL OBREJA
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-germany-weather-923a058f06c8a679f982824b5a337108?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_03
Years ago, I took a finance course, and we had a chapter on various types of investment risks.
There are quite a few risks to be considered; interest rate, foreign exchange rate, foreign country nationalizing, market, just for example.
The one that I was very familiar with, being in manufacturing, was regulatory risk. Many times I was sidetracked into changing things around, due to regulatory changes. Sometimes at great expense, requiring scrapping old processes and finding replacement processes that would work, often not as well.
It never happened to me directly, but there have been a few cases where a product was banned either outright or effectively by regulation. Regulatory agencies have been the demise of more than a few businesses.
Anyhow, I learned long ago that you can’t trust government to stay any particular course or hold to any particular agreement. What was perfectly legal or even subsidized today may be totally illegal and verboten tomorrow.
That applies to unreliables the same as anything else.
A sticky plaster to cover a complete shambles from when renewable contracts were drawn up.
Despite all the fine words and high ideals, about ‘the wind & sun are free’, the muppets at the time never for one instant considered that the Spot Market price (esp for Russian Gas) might rise.
Of course they trusted our Colonial Cousins to Keep On Fracking, selling their gas virtually at a loss to keep the spot market low.
(Doncha just love that, folks in the US are OK with earthquakes, poisoned water that catches fire and ground pollution – but not the precious eco-warrior little dears back here in Blighty)
Then along came Biden. Who, via well aimed blank looks, empty words and crazy sound-bites, unleashed Putin
And UK renewable suppliers were thus able, because of their crap contracts, to sell to the highest bidder.
Which so happened to be the precious little eco-warriors, who amazingly and despite insane energy costs and upcoming blackouts, still have their eco-knickers twisted.
madness
Peta: “Which so happened to be the precious little eco-warriors, who amazingly and despite insane energy costs and upcoming blackouts, still have their eco-knickers twisted.”
–
–
I guess they’ll just have to try to untwist their knickers in the dark, then.
Uh… those that still wear knickers. (I don’t really want to think about that too much. Ugh!)
“The energy industry has warned that the measures could upend the stable regulatory environment that’s been key to driving investment in UK wind power.”
I look for ‘tells’ that this Western World mass pychosis is nearing its end. This one is a beaute.
Did I read that right? Nuclear is now considered green energy?
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Very true Michael.
However, the Government taketh and taketh and taketh again.
Anybody who is not using gas for generation is getting paid a lot more than their costs, particularly windmills, and so this is the perfect answer to raising money to reduce customer bills. Tough if investors get burned, that is the risk of investing.