Britain Faces Green Energy Crisis, Senior Regulator Warns
In this newsletter:
1) Met Office Data Confirms Record Drop Of Global Temperatures
Mail on Sunday, 11 December 2016
2) David Whitehouse & David Rose Discuss Reactions To Global Cooling Post-El Nino
GWPF TV, 12 December 2016
3) Foreign Aid Officials Lose Track Of £274m Climate Fund Handout
The Times, 12 December 2016
4) Bombshell Report Shows UK Climate Policy Will Cost £319 Billion By 2030
Mail on Sunday, 11 December 2016
5) Matt Ridley: Climate Change Act Has Cost Us The Earth
The Times, 12 December 2016
6) Britain Faces Green Energy Crisis, Senior Regulator Warns
Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2016
Mail on Sunday, 11 December 2016
2) David Whitehouse & David Rose Discuss Reactions To Global Cooling Post-El Nino
GWPF TV, 12 December 2016
3) Foreign Aid Officials Lose Track Of £274m Climate Fund Handout
The Times, 12 December 2016
4) Bombshell Report Shows UK Climate Policy Will Cost £319 Billion By 2030
Mail on Sunday, 11 December 2016
5) Matt Ridley: Climate Change Act Has Cost Us The Earth
The Times, 12 December 2016
6) Britain Faces Green Energy Crisis, Senior Regulator Warns
Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2016
Full details:
1) Met Office Data Confirms Record Drop Of Global Temperatures
Mail on Sunday, 11 December 2016
Mail on Sunday, 11 December 2016
David Rose
New official data issued by the Met Office confirms that world average temperatures have plummeted since the middle of the year at a faster and steeper rate than at any time in the recent past.
The huge fall follows a report by this newspaper that temperatures had cooled after a record spike. Our story showed that these record high temperatures were triggered by naturally occurring but freak conditions caused by El Nino – and not, as had been previously suggested, by the cumulative effects of man-made global warming.
The Mail on Sunday’s report was picked up around the world and widely attacked by green propagandists as being ‘cherry-picked’ and based on ‘misinformation’. The report was, in fact, based on Nasa satellite measurements of temperatures in the lower atmosphere over land – which tend to show worldwide changes first, because the sea retains heat for longer.
It is true that the massive 2015-16 El Nino – probably the strongest ever seen – took place against a steady warming trend, most of which scientists believe has been caused by human CO2 emissions
However, now the drop in temperature is also showing up in the authoritative Met Office ‘Hadcrut4’ surface record, compiled from measurements from more than 3,000 weather stations located around the world on both sea and land.
To the end of October, the last month for which figures have been released, Hadcrut4 had fallen about 0.5C from its peak in the spring.
The reason is the end of El Nino. The natural phenomenon, which takes place every few years and has a huge impact on world weather, occurs when water in a vast area of the Pacific west of Central America gets up to 3C hotter than usual.
It has now been replaced by a weak La Nina, when the water becomes colder than usual. This means temperatures may still have some way to fall.
El Nino is not caused by greenhouse gases and has nothing to do with climate change. It is true that the massive 2015-16 El Nino – probably the strongest ever seen – took place against a steady warming trend, most of which scientists believe has been caused by human emissions.
But when El Nino was triggering new records earlier this year, some downplayed its effects. For example, the Met Office said it contributed ‘only a few hundredths of a degree’ to the record heat. The size of the current fall suggests that this minimised its impact. When February produced a new hot record for that month, at the very peak of El Nino, newspapers in several countries claimed that this amounted to a ‘global climate emergency’, and showed the world was ‘hurtling’ towards the point when global warming would become truly dangerous. Now, apparently, the immediate threat has passed. It would be just as misleading to say lower temperatures caused by La Nina meant the world was into a new long-term cooling.
The Mail on Sunday’s report was picked up around the world and widely attacked by green propagandists as being ‘cherry-picked’ and based on ‘misinformation’
But the big question is: what will happen when both El Nino and La Nina are over and the Pacific water returns to its ‘neutral’, average state?
Professor Judith Curry, of Georgia Tech in Atlanta, who is president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, said it would take years before it was clear whether the long-term warming trend was slowing down, staying the same or accelerating.
‘The bottom line is that we can’t read too much into the temperatures of a year or two,’ she said. ‘We will need the perspective of another five years to understand what is going on.’
Full story
2) David Whitehouse & David Rose Discuss Reactions To Global Cooling Post-El Nino
GWPF TV, 12 December 2016
David Whitehouse talks to David Rose about the hostile and irrational reactions to his article on the drop in global temperatures since the El Nino ‘spike’ in early 2016.
Click here to watch the conversation
3) Foreign Aid Officials Lose Track Of £274m Climate Fund Handout
The Times, 12 December 2016
Dominic Kennedy
Britain has given £274 million in foreign aid to a controversial climate change organisation without knowing where the money goes.
The donation to the Strategic Climate Fund was made so that the government would get closer to meeting its promise to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid.
The fund was disclosed last year to be the fifth-largest recipient among international bodies getting money from the aid budget and Britain has been its biggest donor — pledging $3 billion of its $8 billion budget.
Critics have noted that it is difficult to tell exactly who receives its money. The United States has threatened to stop giving it any cash. The Times asked the Department for International Development (DfID) under freedom of information laws: “Which organisations and individuals have received money from this fund and how much did each receive?” The department replied: “DfID does not hold the information relevant to your request. Information on the organisations involved in implementing the Strategic Climate Fund (SCF) programmes, and the levels of programme finance, is available on the Climate Investment Funds website.” [...]
Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, expressed astonishment at DfID’s admission that it had no knowledge of the recipients of the climate fund. “It’s hard to believe they can get away with this kind of answer,” he said. “Development funding in itself is highly contentious but this takes it to a different level.”
Full story
4) Bombshell Report Shows UK Climate Policy Will Cost £319 Billion By 2030
Mail on Sunday, 11 December 2016
David Rose
A bombshell report reveals today that despite years of promises by Labour, Coalition and Tory governments, the radical shift to ‘green’ renewable energy will have cost the economy £319 billion by 2030 – three times the annual NHS budget for England.
Instead of cutting energy bills, the policy will be adding an average burden of £584 a year to every household by 2020, and £875 by 2030. Yet this is only the start. By 2050, green energy policy will be costing every household £1,390 a year, based on 2014 prices.
The report’s calculations are derived entirely from official figures issued by Government departments and the Office for Budget Responsibility. They reveal for the first time the true cost of levies on bills to fund the shift to renewable energy.
The impact results from the 2008 Climate Change Act, and will be felt mainly by the poorest and so-called JAMs – those families who are ‘just about managing’.
Over the period 2014-2030, the report says, the accumulated burden borne by every household will be £10,800. The countrywide cost to the economy in 2014-2020 will be £95 billion, rising to £319 billion in 2014-2030, and an eye-watering £1.035 trillion from 2014-50, by which time the economy, thanks to the Act, is supposed to have become almost decarbonised.
The report, The Cost Of The Climate Change Act, is by Peter Lilley, the Conservative MP and former Trade Secretary. He was one of only three MPs who voted against the Act, piloted through Parliament by then Labour Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. The report will be published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the think-tank founded by Lord Lawson. Sometimes attacked for its sceptical view of climate science and energy policy, its advisory council includes some of the world’s leading experts.
Senior figures from all main parties have claimed repeatedly that green energy would be good for the economy and save money. In 2005, Chancellor Gordon Brown said most businesses could ‘easily achieve 20 per cent reductions in bills’.
In 2014, the Lib Dem Energy Secretary Ed Davey claimed ‘the impact of all the Government’s energy and climate change policies mean that household bills are currently around £90, on average six or seven per cent, lower… than otherwise’. But this, the report says, was ‘an astonishing claim to make of a policy that involves massive subsidies of costly energy sources’.
In fact, as Mr Davey spoke, the Government’s own Climate Change Committee, which sets the country’s ‘carbon budget’ targets under the Act, had quietly issued figures showing that, even then, the average household was paying out £248.
Philip Hammond echoed the claim while he was Foreign Secretary last year by insisting: ‘Renewables… will reduce the cost of energy and the risks of climate change.’
The Act is the world’s most aggressive law, imposing rigid emissions cuts: 35 per cent from the level in 1990 by 2020, and 80 per cent by 2050 – a cut so deep it will require total economic restructuring.
Yet it has so far done nothing to reduce the threat of climate change. The report says the UK’s unilateral measures are increasing its carbon footprint, because industries and jobs are being ‘outsourced’ to high-emitting countries such as China and India, and our imports from such countries are rising.
Under the much-vaunted UN Paris Agreement, India is allowed to triple its already-massive coal production by 2030, and has not said when its emissions will peak. China says it will only begin to reduce its emissions after that date.
Mr Lilley’s report says previous calculations of the cost of green energy have been massive underestimates. First, they take no account of the green levies and taxes paid by businesses, two-thirds of the total, assuming they have no impact on consumers. In fact, official figures show, the cost is passed on.
Second, they fail to take account of the huge ‘system costs’ of connecting and managing renewable energy sources by the National Grid, and of paying for back-up fossil fuel plants needed when – as during the recent still, cold spell – neither wind nor solar panels produce more than a tiny fraction of nominal capacity.
Also being hidden is the colossal cost of restructuring the entire economy: if emissions are cut by 80 per cent by 2050, not only will electricity have to come almost entirely from non-fossil fuel, but total output will have to roughly triple, to power millions of electric vehicles and heat most homes.
Full story
5) Matt Ridley: Climate Change Act Has Cost Us The Earth
The Times, 12 December 2016
The law that introduced a slew of expensive subsidies for renewable energy will leave us £300 billion worse off by 2030
We now know from three different sources that Britain’s climate and energy policy is not just too expensive but has also been dishonestly presented. Peter Lilley MP, an unusually numerate former cabinet minister, has written a devastating new report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, published today, on the costs of Britain’s Climate Change Act 2008. It reveals “at best economic illiteracy and at worst deliberate deception” by government.
It comes as the National Audit Office has rapped the government’s knuckles for “a lack of transparency [that] has undermined accountability to parliament and consumers” in its energy policy. And a non-executive director of the former Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), Tom Kelly, found a systemic underestimation of the costs of the policy as well as “weaknesses in the original governance arrangements that were not rectified over time, a lack of transparency and a tendency to groupthink.” No wonder DECC sat on the Kelly report for a year before releasing it.
Mr Lilley calculates, and this is a conservative estimate, that the Climate Change Act will have cost over £300 billion by 2030. That is a gigantic sum subtracted from the earnings of Britons. Worse, this spending has to be forced by law, which implies that there are other productive investments to which it could be put. Indeed, this spending will be largely wasted even in its own terms: Mr Lilley points out that the dash for gas, as well as the recession, cut emissions, while the rush to renewables has merely driven some abroad.
Worse, Mr Lilley finds that government sources have concealed and downplayed the cost of climate policies. For example, official figures understate the “system” costs of intermittent renewables, such as the need to subsidise fossil fuels in a grid where they are only needed as backup. The government also assumed — wrongly — that fossil fuel prices could only rise, making green subsidies look less costly. Instead they have fallen sharply.
And even the £300 billion estimate omits the cost of biofuels in transport; ignores Britain’s share of the European Union budget, at least 20 per cent of which is spent on “climate-related projects and policies”; includes nothing for international development (though Dfid will spend at least £25 billion by 2030); and excludes the cost of having made British industry less competitive. [...]
So, we have an energy policy that has imposed huge costs on the economy, failed to reduce emissions significantly and was either dishonestly or incompetently presented. That Liberal Democrats were in charge of energy policy for five years and that it was all in a noble cause — ostensibly saving the planet — may partly explain but not excuse this. Yet this does not explain the reluctance of Conservative ministers to revise these policies radically after the end of the coalition.
And where were the watchdogs that are supposed to keep an eye on this policy and check it for effectiveness? The committee on climate change (CCC) was set up by the 2008 act to ensure “a balanced response to the risks of dangerous climate change” (says its website). Yet it has wholly failed to insist on a climate policy whose costs are significantly below the best estimates of the harms of climate change, known technically as the social cost of carbon. [...]
But even on true believers’ own terms — indeed, especially on those terms — the Climate Change Act has been disastrous. In devising its climate-dominated energy policy, government has proceeded as if cost was no object. That is economically irrational, morally wrong and politically foolish. It has needlessly put climate policy on a collision course with public opinion. It is no accident that Donald Trump went from advocating strong climate action to embracing scepticism when he decided to run for president. For rust-belt Americans, just-about-managing Britons, not to mention similar constituencies in Germany, Japan and elsewhere, this is an obvious example of an elite policy that is unfair, costly and futile.
Full post
6) Britain Faces Green Energy Crisis, Senior Regulator Warns
Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2016
Peter Dominiczak
Britain’s increasing reliance on “intermittent” renewable energy means that the country is facing an unprecedented supply crisis, a senior Ofgem executive has warned.
Andrew Wright, a senior partner at Ofgem and former interim chief executive, warned that households could be forced to pay extra to keep their lights on while their neighbours “sit in the dark” because “not everyone will be able to use as much as electricity as they want”.
He warned that in future richer customers will be able to “pay for a higher level of reliability” while other households are left without electricity.
In a stark warning about the future of energy supply in Britain, Mr Wright said that consumers could be forced to pay more if they want to ensure they always have power.
Full story
New official data issued by the Met Office confirms that world average temperatures have plummeted since the middle of the year at a faster and steeper rate than at any time in the recent past.
Cooling: New Met Office world data shows a big fall from heat spike caused by El Nino this year
The huge fall follows a report by this newspaper that temperatures had cooled after a record spike. Our story showed that these record high temperatures were triggered by naturally occurring but freak conditions caused by El Nino – and not, as had been previously suggested, by the cumulative effects of man-made global warming.
The Mail on Sunday’s report was picked up around the world and widely attacked by green propagandists as being ‘cherry-picked’ and based on ‘misinformation’. The report was, in fact, based on Nasa satellite measurements of temperatures in the lower atmosphere over land – which tend to show worldwide changes first, because the sea retains heat for longer.
It is true that the massive 2015-16 El Nino – probably the strongest ever seen – took place against a steady warming trend, most of which scientists believe has been caused by human CO2 emissions
However, now the drop in temperature is also showing up in the authoritative Met Office ‘Hadcrut4’ surface record, compiled from measurements from more than 3,000 weather stations located around the world on both sea and land.
To the end of October, the last month for which figures have been released, Hadcrut4 had fallen about 0.5C from its peak in the spring.
The reason is the end of El Nino. The natural phenomenon, which takes place every few years and has a huge impact on world weather, occurs when water in a vast area of the Pacific west of Central America gets up to 3C hotter than usual.
It has now been replaced by a weak La Nina, when the water becomes colder than usual. This means temperatures may still have some way to fall.
El Nino is not caused by greenhouse gases and has nothing to do with climate change. It is true that the massive 2015-16 El Nino – probably the strongest ever seen – took place against a steady warming trend, most of which scientists believe has been caused by human emissions.
But when El Nino was triggering new records earlier this year, some downplayed its effects. For example, the Met Office said it contributed ‘only a few hundredths of a degree’ to the record heat. The size of the current fall suggests that this minimised its impact. When February produced a new hot record for that month, at the very peak of El Nino, newspapers in several countries claimed that this amounted to a ‘global climate emergency’, and showed the world was ‘hurtling’ towards the point when global warming would become truly dangerous. Now, apparently, the immediate threat has passed. It would be just as misleading to say lower temperatures caused by La Nina meant the world was into a new long-term cooling.
The Mail on Sunday’s report was picked up around the world and widely attacked by green propagandists as being ‘cherry-picked’ and based on ‘misinformation’
But the big question is: what will happen when both El Nino and La Nina are over and the Pacific water returns to its ‘neutral’, average state?
Professor Judith Curry, of Georgia Tech in Atlanta, who is president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, said it would take years before it was clear whether the long-term warming trend was slowing down, staying the same or accelerating.
‘The bottom line is that we can’t read too much into the temperatures of a year or two,’ she said. ‘We will need the perspective of another five years to understand what is going on.’
Full story
2) David Whitehouse & David Rose Discuss Reactions To Global Cooling Post-El Nino
GWPF TV, 12 December 2016
David Whitehouse talks to David Rose about the hostile and irrational reactions to his article on the drop in global temperatures since the El Nino ‘spike’ in early 2016.
Click here to watch the conversation
3) Foreign Aid Officials Lose Track Of £274m Climate Fund Handout
The Times, 12 December 2016
Dominic Kennedy
Britain has given £274 million in foreign aid to a controversial climate change organisation without knowing where the money goes.
The donation to the Strategic Climate Fund was made so that the government would get closer to meeting its promise to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid.
The fund was disclosed last year to be the fifth-largest recipient among international bodies getting money from the aid budget and Britain has been its biggest donor — pledging $3 billion of its $8 billion budget.
Critics have noted that it is difficult to tell exactly who receives its money. The United States has threatened to stop giving it any cash. The Times asked the Department for International Development (DfID) under freedom of information laws: “Which organisations and individuals have received money from this fund and how much did each receive?” The department replied: “DfID does not hold the information relevant to your request. Information on the organisations involved in implementing the Strategic Climate Fund (SCF) programmes, and the levels of programme finance, is available on the Climate Investment Funds website.” [...]
Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, expressed astonishment at DfID’s admission that it had no knowledge of the recipients of the climate fund. “It’s hard to believe they can get away with this kind of answer,” he said. “Development funding in itself is highly contentious but this takes it to a different level.”
Full story
4) Bombshell Report Shows UK Climate Policy Will Cost £319 Billion By 2030
Mail on Sunday, 11 December 2016
David Rose
A bombshell report reveals today that despite years of promises by Labour, Coalition and Tory governments, the radical shift to ‘green’ renewable energy will have cost the economy £319 billion by 2030 – three times the annual NHS budget for England.
Instead of cutting energy bills, the policy will be adding an average burden of £584 a year to every household by 2020, and £875 by 2030. Yet this is only the start. By 2050, green energy policy will be costing every household £1,390 a year, based on 2014 prices.
The report’s calculations are derived entirely from official figures issued by Government departments and the Office for Budget Responsibility. They reveal for the first time the true cost of levies on bills to fund the shift to renewable energy.
The impact results from the 2008 Climate Change Act, and will be felt mainly by the poorest and so-called JAMs – those families who are ‘just about managing’.
Over the period 2014-2030, the report says, the accumulated burden borne by every household will be £10,800. The countrywide cost to the economy in 2014-2020 will be £95 billion, rising to £319 billion in 2014-2030, and an eye-watering £1.035 trillion from 2014-50, by which time the economy, thanks to the Act, is supposed to have become almost decarbonised.
The report, The Cost Of The Climate Change Act, is by Peter Lilley, the Conservative MP and former Trade Secretary. He was one of only three MPs who voted against the Act, piloted through Parliament by then Labour Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. The report will be published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the think-tank founded by Lord Lawson. Sometimes attacked for its sceptical view of climate science and energy policy, its advisory council includes some of the world’s leading experts.
Senior figures from all main parties have claimed repeatedly that green energy would be good for the economy and save money. In 2005, Chancellor Gordon Brown said most businesses could ‘easily achieve 20 per cent reductions in bills’.
In 2014, the Lib Dem Energy Secretary Ed Davey claimed ‘the impact of all the Government’s energy and climate change policies mean that household bills are currently around £90, on average six or seven per cent, lower… than otherwise’. But this, the report says, was ‘an astonishing claim to make of a policy that involves massive subsidies of costly energy sources’.
In fact, as Mr Davey spoke, the Government’s own Climate Change Committee, which sets the country’s ‘carbon budget’ targets under the Act, had quietly issued figures showing that, even then, the average household was paying out £248.
Philip Hammond echoed the claim while he was Foreign Secretary last year by insisting: ‘Renewables… will reduce the cost of energy and the risks of climate change.’
The Act is the world’s most aggressive law, imposing rigid emissions cuts: 35 per cent from the level in 1990 by 2020, and 80 per cent by 2050 – a cut so deep it will require total economic restructuring.
Yet it has so far done nothing to reduce the threat of climate change. The report says the UK’s unilateral measures are increasing its carbon footprint, because industries and jobs are being ‘outsourced’ to high-emitting countries such as China and India, and our imports from such countries are rising.
Under the much-vaunted UN Paris Agreement, India is allowed to triple its already-massive coal production by 2030, and has not said when its emissions will peak. China says it will only begin to reduce its emissions after that date.
Mr Lilley’s report says previous calculations of the cost of green energy have been massive underestimates. First, they take no account of the green levies and taxes paid by businesses, two-thirds of the total, assuming they have no impact on consumers. In fact, official figures show, the cost is passed on.
Second, they fail to take account of the huge ‘system costs’ of connecting and managing renewable energy sources by the National Grid, and of paying for back-up fossil fuel plants needed when – as during the recent still, cold spell – neither wind nor solar panels produce more than a tiny fraction of nominal capacity.
Also being hidden is the colossal cost of restructuring the entire economy: if emissions are cut by 80 per cent by 2050, not only will electricity have to come almost entirely from non-fossil fuel, but total output will have to roughly triple, to power millions of electric vehicles and heat most homes.
Full story
5) Matt Ridley: Climate Change Act Has Cost Us The Earth
The Times, 12 December 2016
The law that introduced a slew of expensive subsidies for renewable energy will leave us £300 billion worse off by 2030
We now know from three different sources that Britain’s climate and energy policy is not just too expensive but has also been dishonestly presented. Peter Lilley MP, an unusually numerate former cabinet minister, has written a devastating new report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, published today, on the costs of Britain’s Climate Change Act 2008. It reveals “at best economic illiteracy and at worst deliberate deception” by government.
It comes as the National Audit Office has rapped the government’s knuckles for “a lack of transparency [that] has undermined accountability to parliament and consumers” in its energy policy. And a non-executive director of the former Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), Tom Kelly, found a systemic underestimation of the costs of the policy as well as “weaknesses in the original governance arrangements that were not rectified over time, a lack of transparency and a tendency to groupthink.” No wonder DECC sat on the Kelly report for a year before releasing it.
Mr Lilley calculates, and this is a conservative estimate, that the Climate Change Act will have cost over £300 billion by 2030. That is a gigantic sum subtracted from the earnings of Britons. Worse, this spending has to be forced by law, which implies that there are other productive investments to which it could be put. Indeed, this spending will be largely wasted even in its own terms: Mr Lilley points out that the dash for gas, as well as the recession, cut emissions, while the rush to renewables has merely driven some abroad.
Worse, Mr Lilley finds that government sources have concealed and downplayed the cost of climate policies. For example, official figures understate the “system” costs of intermittent renewables, such as the need to subsidise fossil fuels in a grid where they are only needed as backup. The government also assumed — wrongly — that fossil fuel prices could only rise, making green subsidies look less costly. Instead they have fallen sharply.
And even the £300 billion estimate omits the cost of biofuels in transport; ignores Britain’s share of the European Union budget, at least 20 per cent of which is spent on “climate-related projects and policies”; includes nothing for international development (though Dfid will spend at least £25 billion by 2030); and excludes the cost of having made British industry less competitive. [...]
So, we have an energy policy that has imposed huge costs on the economy, failed to reduce emissions significantly and was either dishonestly or incompetently presented. That Liberal Democrats were in charge of energy policy for five years and that it was all in a noble cause — ostensibly saving the planet — may partly explain but not excuse this. Yet this does not explain the reluctance of Conservative ministers to revise these policies radically after the end of the coalition.
And where were the watchdogs that are supposed to keep an eye on this policy and check it for effectiveness? The committee on climate change (CCC) was set up by the 2008 act to ensure “a balanced response to the risks of dangerous climate change” (says its website). Yet it has wholly failed to insist on a climate policy whose costs are significantly below the best estimates of the harms of climate change, known technically as the social cost of carbon. [...]
But even on true believers’ own terms — indeed, especially on those terms — the Climate Change Act has been disastrous. In devising its climate-dominated energy policy, government has proceeded as if cost was no object. That is economically irrational, morally wrong and politically foolish. It has needlessly put climate policy on a collision course with public opinion. It is no accident that Donald Trump went from advocating strong climate action to embracing scepticism when he decided to run for president. For rust-belt Americans, just-about-managing Britons, not to mention similar constituencies in Germany, Japan and elsewhere, this is an obvious example of an elite policy that is unfair, costly and futile.
Full post
6) Britain Faces Green Energy Crisis, Senior Regulator Warns
Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2016
Peter Dominiczak
Britain’s increasing reliance on “intermittent” renewable energy means that the country is facing an unprecedented supply crisis, a senior Ofgem executive has warned.
Andrew Wright, a senior partner at Ofgem and former interim chief executive, warned that households could be forced to pay extra to keep their lights on while their neighbours “sit in the dark” because “not everyone will be able to use as much as electricity as they want”.
He warned that in future richer customers will be able to “pay for a higher level of reliability” while other households are left without electricity.
In a stark warning about the future of energy supply in Britain, Mr Wright said that consumers could be forced to pay more if they want to ensure they always have power.
Full story
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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