Federal Government Confirms Nearing Apocalypse -- it's very hard to dismiss this. - Page 49 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15069921
Sivad wrote:
https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/cfds? ... e_1&page=1

if I'm reading that right then most of those strike prices are way above £40 MWH, some of them are like £180?
Yes you've missed the point, historically the contract for difference involved significant payments to promote renewables.

If you are looking at zero carbon in twenty plus years then you need to be looking at renewables that will be coming online between now and then, not contracts that will have expired and fallen back to wholesale price.
#15069926
so okay I'm starting to see how this works, all the current strike prices are between 30-40, but the older prices are ridiculously high. So you have the same investors getting legacy subsidies from older projects(in some cases it's even the same developer) which allows them to underbid future projects. They're still making out like bandits but I guess they are throwing a little something back to the public.
#15069929
Sivad wrote:so okay I'm starting to see how this works, all the current strike prices are between 30-40, but the older prices are ridiculously high. So you have the same investors getting legacy subsidies from older projects(in some cases it's even the same developer) which allows them to underbid future projects. They're still making out like bandits but I guess they are throwing a little something back to the public.
I wish it was this simple.
The real killer will be the new nuclear power stations where the contract is for 35 years.

It's going to cost the consumer a fortune by the time the contract ends in 2060.
#15069931
BeesKnee5 wrote:I wish it was this simple.


it pretty much is that simple. Your article stated that the strike prices for this year were 30% lower than the last auction in 2017, and we know the costs haven't come down by 30% in that time frame so really they're just indirectly subsidizing the underbids with the previous deal.
#15069938
and another question: does carbon pricing impact wholesale prices? if so then the wholesale prices are artificially high and these CfD schemes are a massive rip-off. And if carbon taxes are applied to generators then you could make these low ball projects profitable just by raising the carbon taxes on generators.
#15070024
BeesKnee5 wrote:Firstly they use historic wind power numbers rather than current contract prices, inflating the price 4 fold.


and here is exactly why they did that:

Cheap Renewable Contracts Could Be Options In Disguise

When prices tumble for a product or service, there is generally an observable reason. It might be a cunning technological fix that dramatically boosts productivity, for instance, or the sudden slide in a key input cost. But nothing so obvious can convincingly explain why it is suddenly much cheaper to produce electricity from offshore wind turbines.

The latest round of renewable auctions has seen two big projects awarded contracts guaranteeing a fixed price of £57.50 per megawatt hour for their output when the blades start turning sometime in the next decade. That is a very big dip from the first round, which required subsidies of some £150/MWh to be profitable. Even the cheapest of previous vintages were north of £110.

It is not so long since British wind power bosses were vowing — amid widespread scepticism — that they could reduce costs to £100/MWh by 2020. Yet these auction results suggest a far steeper decline in offshore costs.

Of course, it is always worth peering behind the headlines to put numbers in context. The sums quoted are 2012 prices. The actual figure in today’s money is therefore £64/MWh; a still subsidy-rich 50 per cent above the current wholesale price of about £40.

The real question though is how the industry can support such a reduction. Take overall costs, for instance. Most studies do not yet point to projects breaking even at £57.50. According to a recent review by the UK’s Offshore Wind Programme Board, so-called levelised costs for new wind projects at the point of commitment (ie not yet built, but button decisively pressed) declined by 7 per cent annually from £142/MWh in 2010-11 to just £97 in 2015-16, driven by factors such as the use of larger turbines and better siting. But while these are impressive figures even they cannot explain a further £40 drop in such a short space of time.

What’s more, by far the biggest component of those costs is capital expenditure, and another study suggests that progress here is much more nuanced. A new report led by Gordon Hughes, a former professor of economics at Edinburgh University, and published by the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, has analysed the reported capital costs of 86 projects across Europe. These show that while technological advances are driving down costs by 4 per cent annually, this gain is being offset as the industry moves out into deeper and more challenging waters. So, depending on where future projects are sited, there may even be no clear downward trend at all.

It may be possible that the auction-winning projects have specific reasons for being able to deliver low prices. For instance, the Hornsea II project sponsored by Denmark’s Dong Energy sits next to a first farm that is also being built by the same company (at far higher rates of subsidy), offering the opportunity to share support infrastructure, as well as the link between the turbines and the grid.

But it is also possible that the promoters view the CFD contract as a pretty loose commitment. “Potentially these bids could be seen as more of an option on future capacity,” said Allan Baker, Société Générale’s global head of power advisory and project finance at Bloomberg’s New Energy Finance Summit last week.

Just three giant wind farms have taken all the capacity in the current auction, which at 3.2GW is equivalent to 60 per cent of Britain’s current offshore fleet. That means the competition is in effect shut out.

The contracts do not represent an absolute commitment. According to the UK government, the developers could withdraw were they unable to obtain financing, with only a limited penalty. What they would mainly lose was the right to pop the same project into a later auction round.

So to the extent, for instance, that contracts depend on yet-to-be developed technologies, such as 15MW turbines, or squeezing contractor prices, there would be little cost to cancelling were developers not to get the deals they hoped for.

And even beyond construction, the CFD could conceivably be revoked by the operator were it prepared to pay a significant, not ruinous, financial penalty, Prof Hughes reckons. So should wholesale prices rise well above the level of the fixed strike price in future, developers might be able to flip across and benefit from (superior) market rates. That might happen, for instance, were the government to introduce a higher carbon price.

https://www.ft.com/content/f19f4944-a11 ... 1809486fe2


So they had a perfectly good reason for using the older numbers: the current contract prices are total bullshit.
#15070025
BeesKnee5 wrote:It's not doing Denmark,


Denmark has the highest energy prices in the world. Maybe their massive welfare state has domesticated the Danes so completely that now those danishes are just a neutered bunch of breakfast pastries who don't have any riot left in em.



BeesKnee5 wrote:What is your point here?

That wholesale prices falling and strike prices below today's wholesale price is a bad thing.



yes it's a bad thing, it means the public is getting screwed paying higher prices than necessary. how could it possibly be a good thing?

That analyst in your article said those projects are gonna be collecting the levies for the life of the contracts. That's not subsidy free.
#15070046
Sivad wrote:When it comes to this shit the question isn't if we're gonna get screwed, the only question is how are these motherfuckers screwing us? When giant banks and governments and energy companies get together you know the public is about to be raw dogged right in the cornhole.


I think for once we might agree on something. Western governments are weak representatives of the commons at the moment and energy companies are trying to form an incestuous dynamic with the state in order to support a monopoly on renewables over and against the specter of a social nuclear program.
#15070050
Donna wrote:a monopoly on renewables over and against the specter of a social nuclear program.


it's insane that we're dicking around with renewables, we should be putting hundreds of billions a year into nuclear r&d and within a couple decades will have clean, safe, abundant energy that's too cheap to meter. guaranteed.
#15070087
Sivad wrote:
Denmark has the highest energy prices in the world. Maybe their massive welfare state has domesticated the Danes so completely that now those danishes are just a neutered bunch of breakfast pastries who don't have any riot left in em.





yes it's a bad thing, it means the public is getting screwed paying higher prices than necessary. how could it possibly be a good thing?

That analyst in your article said those projects are gonna be collecting the levies for the life of the contracts. That's not subsidy free.


Denmark have no higher generating costs than any other nation, their higher consumer price is through taxation. Further to this they have some of the most energy efficient housing in the world and use district heating which has a far lower energy footprint than gas boilers or electric heaters. All the scandinavian countries use the same system of higher taxation and higher government support and their economies arent exactly on the verge of collapse and their people feeling oppressed.

No energy is subsidy free.
For the UK generators bid for T1 and T4 contracts and receive a payment even if they do not supply energy, this is open to Nuclear, Gas, Coal, Oil, Hydro, Interconnectors and businesses that are prepared to curtail production when electricity demand is high.

The winning bidders for the 55GW of generating capacity receive a fixed price KWh and then get the wholesale price when they sell their electricity to the market. Renewables like wind and solar do not have access to the capacity market so do not receive this payment on top of what they generate. No one would call it a subsidy but it all adds to the cost paid by the taxpayer for electricity

Nuclear has been promising cheap electricity for 60 years and yet still it fails to deliver. The latest Nuclear plants are all late, way over budget and no new nuclear power station has been built without significant state funding. The latest at Hinkley is going to cost the taxpayer billions over the 35 year term. Why would you think that paying over £100 Mwh for nuclear when renewables are now coming in at nearly a third of that price today and set to fall further?
As for the UKs current nuclear fleet, it's a mess. Supposedly has a generating capacity of 9GW but maintenance and unscheduled repairs mean that it's currently managing 5.2GW with only 8 of the 15 reactors running.
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power- ... y-statuses

How strange it is that some are happy to spend billions on a potentially jam tomorrow solution then there are cheaper options today.

This is the conundrum for the likes of you. Denmark, Germany and UK have paid the early adopter cost to mature the technology and now we are all benefiting from the cheaper prices that are no longer at the mercy of Gas and Coal prices.
#15070089
Sivad wrote:
and here is exactly why they did that:



So they had a perfectly good reason for using the older numbers: the current contract prices are total bullshit.


The prices were on the links I supplied, both at 2012 prices and todays.

They do not have a good reason for quoting £120-£200 when the current contracts are being won at £30-40. Even your link highlights that three years ago round 2 was £57.50 and these are under construction today.

So your evidence is a three year old article that has since been proven wrong because Hornsea 2 is under construction now using 8MW turbines. the next gen use 12MW turbines and the Halide-X is already in production to supply them. Got anything more recent?

The evidence today is very different and it's doubtful whether there will be CFD auctions in future because the next generation of wind farms can make more money if they aren't capped.
https://www.maritime-executive.com/arti ... -wind-farm
https://www.power-grid.com/2019/07/29/v ... therlands/

Moving on.
If we include all the money fossil and nuclear receive in addition to wholesale, what does it cost them to produce electricity?
This is from the GWPF report
Image

How strange it must be to argue renewables will cost more in future when your evidence of choice shows the opposite .
#15070108
Sivad wrote:it's insane that we're dicking around with renewables, we should be putting hundreds of billions a year into nuclear r&d and within a couple decades will have clean, safe, abundant energy that's too cheap to meter. guaranteed.


We already did that. During the Cold war, governments invested billions into nuclear.

But western governments are not too keen on now handing this out to developing countries.
#15070118
I see no sign that significant nuclear power is going to enter the market. We've seen this hype before and the only time it's genuinely taken hold was during the oil crisis of the 1970s.

Westinghouse went bust three years ago trying to build new nuclear power stations, $9bn spent and nothing to show for it.
EDF are in financial difficulties and are begging governments for more cash, their new plants in Finland, France and the UK are all years behind schedule and billions overbudget.
#15070186
US security experts, former diplomats and military leaders produce report urging US and the rest of the world to go net zero.

https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpr ... 2020_2.pdf

"Based on our research, we have determined that even at scenarios of low warming, each region of the world will face severe risks to national and global security in the next three decades. Higher levels of warming will pose catastrophic, and likely irreversible, global security risks over the course of the 21st century."
#15072541
This winter has been by far the hottest recorded in Europe, scientists have announced, with the climate crisis likely to have supercharged the heat.The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) data dates back to 1855.

In Antarctica, the temperature rose above 20C for the first time on record in February, almost a full degree higher than the previous record set in 1982.
#15074483
The ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is tracking the worst-case climate warming scenario set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists say. Without rapid cuts to carbon emissions the analysis indicates there could be a rise in sea levels that would leave 400 million people exposed to coastal flooding each year by the end of the century.

The combined analysis was carried out by a team of 89 scientists from 50 international organisations, who combined the findings of 26 ice surveys. It included data from 11 satellite missions that tracked the ice sheets’ changing volume, speed of flow and mass.

I have a youtube video that PROVES that every one of the 89 scientists from 50 international organisations, who combined the findings of 26 ice surveys are liars :lol: .
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