The new report is the government’s first public admission of the dramatic reductions in renewable costs in recent years. It had previously carried out internal updates to its cost estimates, in both 2018 and 2019, but these were never published despite repeated questions in parliament.
The BEIS estimates are updated at regular intervals, with previous iterations having been published in 2016, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010. The department made internal updates in 2018 and 2019, with these revisions the subject of peerreview papers also published this week.
However, the 2018 and 2019 updates remain unpublished, despite numerous questions in parliament in which MPs asked repeatedly after the latest BEIS cost estimates.
Does any of this rigmarole address the awkward reality that none of the ‘renewables’ is actually viable as an industrial technology without constant inputs from non-renewable energy sources, almost invariably from fossil hydro-carbon sources?
Gail Tverberg, at her blog, lays out the reasons why in unaswerable starkness:
Excellent points as usual RG. I’ll check out the Tverberg prefer later.
If the sum is to continue this crazy neoliberal, industrial civilisation by switching over to solar and wind, then this is clearly a non starter.
But, if it turns out that smaller scale solar and wind are a lot cheaper than previously thought, this opens up some interesting alternatives for smaller community oriented efforts…
It might surprise people to hear, after all my descriptions of the fossil-fuel dependency of ‘renewables’, but I’m entirely in favour of - real - solar-harvesting renewables; the premier one, of course, being photosynthesising life-forms. I also love the sort of wind, solar and water power of former centuries, which were appropriate in scale, and were easily made and maintained using only commonly-available, hand-tool-workable materials. And I’ve had hands-on experience of things such as low-temperature direct heat harvesting systems for the Sun’s heat. They work well, and - within their modest pretensions - are entirely practical, including in a much lower-tech society.
The real bug-bear is the idea that we can run a worldwide Star-Trek, Vulcan hyper-industrial society on electricity harvested by current ‘cutting edge’ hitech systems. Those may well have a boutique future in places - oases - which happen to have all the necessary components of an industrial system within their boundaries - such as modern Russia - but more than that I doubt. It sureashell isn’t going to drive the - futile - dream of a global hyper-hitech society; which isn’t going to survive for much longer anyway…
