Issue of the week: all power to windpower?
Cheap renewable energy is no longer the stuff of fantasy. Should Britain rip up its current energy strategy?
It was billed as “a huge step forward in the energy revolution”, and for once the hyperbole wasn’t out of place, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. News that the cost of subsidies for Britain’s offshore windfarms has halved in two years – making wind energy cheaper than electricity from new nuclear power for the first time – prompted a euphoric reaction from renewables fans. Not even the greenest Green had expected quite such “a dizzying drop”. Following the latest auction for government subsidies, in which the lowest bidder wins, the guaranteed price for wind energy from two big contracts will fall to £57.50 per megawatt-hour (MWH) in 2022-23. That compares with subsidies of £92.50/MWH for the new Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant. Opponents of wind farms point to the harm they cause seabirds, but surely “there’s an even bigger casualty in the animal kingdom than our feathered friends... nuclear white elephants”?
“Sceptics have always denied that renewable energy could be costcompetitive with old-fashioned fuels,” said Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph. But the industry is “clawing its way into contention, moving ever faster towards a day when it will no longer require a subsidised price”. Onshore wind is already “costcompetitive” (though understandably unpopular with those who have to live near it); and “some solar farms are already operating in the UK without subsidy”. Costs are forecast to fall even further in the coming years as technology improves – particularly in battery power storage. The big problem, as the nuclear lobby is quick to note, is that “renewable energy is heavily intermittent”: you can’t rely on wind to provide the “baseload power” Britain needs. All the more reason to create a new electricity system “designed with flexibility in mind”. Renewable power may be unpredictable, but the Government can still have “a predictable energy policy”. We badly need one to manage these big changes in power provision.
Successive governments “swallowed the line” that Hinkley Point C represented a plausible answer to the UK’S threefold energy conundrum: “keeping the lights on, reducing carbon emissions and producing the juice at affordable prices”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Yet it’s becoming ever clearer that the costs involved are “obscene”. There are surely limits on how far the nuclear industry can push the argument that “we must pay up for reliable baseload supplies” – with wholesale energy prices below £50/MWH, gas can provide baseload power far cheaper than nuclear. Last year, Theresa May “bowed to pressure” from Hinkley’s supporters to give the project the green light, said James Moore in The Independent. “Reversing that decision won’t prove easy,” but she should bite the bullet and admit she was wrong.