Net Zero Watch urges UK government to stand up to the wind lobby’s blackmail
By Paul Homewood
London, 8 March – Net Zero Watch has urged the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to resist the renewables industry’s demands for additional subsidies and has denounced its blackmailing tactics.
Its new briefing for MPs and ministers exposes a systematic campaign to deceive the public over the real cost of wind farms.
Author Andrew Montford explains that wind lobby claims of a dramatic fall in costs, repeated incessantly since 2017, were deliberate falsehoods.
"If it were true, costs could double and they’d still make extraordinary profits at current market prices. The truth is that they deceived the public when they said there had been a cost revolution."
And claims that wind farms have suffered input price inflation since bids were submitted a year ago are also untrue. Most key commodities used in the production and deployment of wind turbines have reduced in prices, and the bids are inflation-indexed in any case.
Net Zero Watch director, Dr Benny Peiser said:
"Wind farms are awash with billions of subsidies every year, making energy bills more expensive year on year. To blackmail the government and demand even more handouts, at a time when households are struggling to make ends meet, is reprehensible and should be categorically opposed by ministers."
Andrew Montford: The economics of wind power (pdf)
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
With millions in their coffers there is ample money to pay lobbyist’s, make political contributions and grease the palms politicians, quangos and politicians. In the USA they use the offence of “racketeering” to go after these people and the Wind farms fit the bill of racketeering just as Al Capone did.
It’s not so much the need to stand up to blackmail, but the need to re-cast energy policy entirely so as to reflect the real costs of attempting to incorporate more and more wind into our system. Some of those come from the real costs of the investment itself, but increasingly cost will come from grid connection and interconnectors, balancing (including the provision of backup capacity) and curtailment, as well as from other costs of intermittency.
It’s Net Zero itself that must be cancelled, not merely the handing out of subsidy to wind farms.
Does anyone really expect the socialist govts for all of this century to get the energy policy even remotely correct ? There is NetZero evidence they are capable of even the simplest tasks.
I’m willing to offer a response to that @wheewiz.
For all its faults (and there were faults), the CEGB gave the UK the capability to build a power industry (coal and nuclear power stations, integrated with a transmission business) which had a reasonably well engineered balanced of primary energy resources.
This was passed into the private sector, and the private sector had the opportunity to show how it could improve upon the CEGB’s record.
The last 30 years in the private sector isn’t exactly a shining example of the invisible hand of Adam Smith.
One sad experience was a bunch of US companies who piled-in by purchasing UK power assets and other businesses. In typical ballsy fashion, they were going to show us the way, and I admit they were quite scary at the time. But they proved their uselessness. Some went bust. One shamed itself by making itself an example of how not to report its worth (bringing about a crisis in the big accountancy firms in the process.) The ones that survived sold up and went home, nursing huge losses.
Now the UK power industry is going through the eventual end to the legacy CEGB assets, and we are witnessing another industry crisis.
So here is my challenge once again: if the private sector is so good, why are we in the present position?
If anybody wishes to blame all today’s problems on the government, it is hardly a case to say the private sector is better. It is more of an admission that the private sector is failing to manage a key element of their business environment. An admission that the private sector is not very good after all.
Let’s not forget that all those wind assets were provided by the private sector, and now there are people who are levelling accusations of blackmail and fraud. There are others (not necessarily me) who would acknowledge that what we are all objecting to is rational profit-maximising behaviour from organisations who owe their existence to maximising profit.
It’s regrettable, but I hold that the private sector is simply not sophisticated enough to deliver the secure an cost-effective power supplies needed by modern first-world economies.
I offer this as food for thought. We should all be careful not to be too dogmatic with the private-versus-state models in the power sector. Neither of them are particularly good, and we are left to choose the least worse.
At the moment, the momentum in the UK is swinging towards the public sector. And it is a political desire to have a civil nuclear industry that makes it so.
Whilst I am aware of some of the more questionable actions by some of the US companies who came into the market, I see no sign that matters were improved by introducing progressively heavier regulation and takeover by EU state sponsored behemoths. We did get cheaper power before that came to be, although it would be reasonable to point out that the main driver was an export surplus of gas that evaporated 20 years ago.
Support for nuclear is still very half hearted and incoherent. Kwarteng regarded it as an almost irrelevant afterthought. Politics with France still dominate the Sizewell decision, and nuclear policy is effectively deferred until 2040 otherwise.
The EMN and the need to run emergency coal coupled with the high clearing price for the T-4 auction are a wake up call that the government and its quangos have ignored the need for dispatchable capacity. The disagreements over REMA hardly presage a well thought out way forward. The government has created a renewables industry that now expects government to insulate it from market realities in perpetuity, at whatever cost to consumers. That is meant to be progress?
Would legal action for misinformation or something else be an option to highlight this in the public sphere?
It looks as if wind power projects are in trouble around the world:
https://gcaptain.com/offshore-wind-farms-fall-victim-to-global-inflation-fight/?subscriber=true&goal=0_f50174ef03-57c7ca2498-170410014&mc_cid=57c7ca2498&mc_eid=9275323244
Seems reckless if they have submitted bids without tying down their input costs and financing.