{"id":31486,"date":"2023-01-29T10:33:24","date_gmt":"2023-01-29T10:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/350ppm.co.uk\/?p=31486"},"modified":"2023-01-29T10:33:24","modified_gmt":"2023-01-29T10:33:24","slug":"this-is-an-era-of-plentiful-cheap-renewable-energy-but-the-fossil-fuel-dinosaurs-cant-admit-it-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/350ppm.co.uk\/blog\/this-is-an-era-of-plentiful-cheap-renewable-energy-but-the-fossil-fuel-dinosaurs-cant-admit-it-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"This is an era of plentiful, cheap, renewable energy, but the fossil fuel dinosaurs can\u2019t admit it &#8211; The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">For a couple of days this month, wind power supplied over half the UK\u2019s electricity. You wouldn\u2019t know it from our bills \u2013 or our politicians<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The first time wind energy emerged as a serious contender in the UK\u2019s energy provision. It was 6 November 2012, and the country\u2019s electricity use from wind hit an\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2012\/nov\/30\/windfarms-bitter-fight-dividing-uk\">all-time high<\/a>\u00a0in the middle of the afternoon, at 9.3%. The casual observer wouldn\u2019t have noticed, and the expert wouldn\u2019t have been surprised, but for people between those poles, it was astonishing. Windfarms were then perceived as a nascent technology, so infant and speculative they needed endless subsidy, intervention, special pleading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To this day, it remains a mystery how a reputation for well-meant inadequacy clings to renewable energy sources: it can\u2019t all be the result of lobbying by the fossil fuel industry. Sometimes, it feels like we just don\u2019t want good news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Last week, for two days straight, wind power hit a peak of supplying over&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cityam.com\/big-fans-wind-powers-half-of-uks-energy-needs-with-new-record-generation-day\/\">half of all the UK\u2019s electricity use<\/a>. For five months last year, low-carbon electricity sources (solar, wind and nuclear) constituted more than 50% of the country\u2019s electricity use. And unbelievably, the National Grid spends&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/data.nationalgrideso.com\/balancing\/mbss\">hundreds of millions to billions<\/a>&nbsp;a year&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.current-news.co.uk\/news\/constraint-costs-could-hit-2-5bn-as-renewable-capacity-continues-to-grow\">constraining energy supplies<\/a>, that is, paying renewable suppliers when they\u2019re generating too much power for the grid to handle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s one triumph after another in green energy, but you wouldn\u2019t know it to look at our bills, nor to examine our short- and medium-term policy framework. UK energy unit prices are the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cityam.com\/revealed-brits-are-paying-the-highest-electricity-bills-in-the-entire-world\/#:~:text=Revealed%3A%20Brits%20are%20paying%20the%20highest%20electricity%20bills%20in%20the%20entire%20world,-Michiel%20Willems&amp;text=New%20research%20reveals%20that%20the,anywhere%20else%20on%20the%20planet.&amp;text=The%20UK%27s%20energy%20price%20cap,28p%20to%2034p%20per%20kWh.\">highest in the world<\/a>. Without the government price cap intervention, businesses would already be bankrupt, schools probably shut down and people freezing in their homes. Jeremy Hunt\u2019s pledge to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/business-63298057\">withdraw the price cap from next April<\/a>&nbsp;looks fanciful: sure, the words coming out of his mouth make sense \u2013 prices can\u2019t be held down forever because it wouldn\u2019t be \u201cresponsible\u201d. But there\u2019s no imaginable reality in which the \u201cunlimited volatility in international gas prices\u201d he refers to can be weathered by the average household.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Meanwhile, research by Nesta, the innovation foundation, has shown that if we meet the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2022\/nov\/15\/everything-has-changed-nothing-has-changed-whats-stopping-green-energy\">offshore wind target<\/a>\u00a0set by the government\u2019s energy security strategy \u2013 50GW by 2030 \u2013 then on an ideal windy day, that alone would provide almost\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/c703262e-5d46-47d5-a4ae-f27934ce3ec2\">twice as much energy as we use<\/a>, before you even factor in onshore and solar. There is a real prospect of limitless cheap energy, some of the time, with windless days covered by, ideally, nuclear as an alternative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The only brake on this bright future is in storage, grid capacity and interconnectivity. Research and investment are urgently needed into ways to store renewables, as well as viable exchange between us and mainland Europe and the island of Ireland. It is no longer wild to imagine a time when all the weather conditions of the continent can be pooled so that we benefit from one another\u2019s surpluses; and this is before you factor in the development in hydrogen, which is hoped to provide\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/c703262e-5d46-47d5-a4ae-f27934ce3ec2\">10GW by 2030<\/a>. Green energy insiders liken it to the vaccine quest: these things take a decade when you<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>give them a decade. Greater<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>urgency sharpens the senses, and can accelerate the most arduous discovery process to a fraction of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button has-custom-width wp-block-button__width-25\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-background\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2023\/jan\/20\/renewable-energy-wind-power-fossil-fuel-electricity\" style=\"border-radius:8px;background-color:#106b22\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Compete Articel on The Guardian<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For a couple of days this month, wind power supplied over half the UK\u2019s electricity. You wouldn\u2019t know it from our bills \u2013 or our politicians The first time wind energy emerged as a serious contender in the UK\u2019s energy provision. It was 6 November 2012, and the country\u2019s electricity use from wind hit an\u00a0all-time [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31487,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[55,60,49,219],"class_list":["post-31486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-350-ppm-ltd","tag-renewable-money-blog","tag-renewables","tag-the-guardian"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Era of plentiful, cheap, renewable energy, but the fossil fuel dinosaurs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Last week, for two days straight, wind power hit a peak of supplying over\u00a0half of all the UK\u2019s electricity use.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/350ppm.co.uk\/blog\/this-is-an-era-of-plentiful-cheap-renewable-energy-but-the-fossil-fuel-dinosaurs-cant-admit-it-the-guardian\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Era of plentiful, cheap, renewable energy, but the fossil fuel dinosaurs\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Last week, for two days straight, wind power hit a peak of supplying over\u00a0half of all the UK\u2019s electricity use.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/350ppm.co.uk\/blog\/this-is-an-era-of-plentiful-cheap-renewable-energy-but-the-fossil-fuel-dinosaurs-cant-admit-it-the-guardian\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"News and Events\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2023-01-29T10:33:24+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" 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