Chris Huhne Gets Confused About Engineering and Economics

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Memo to Chris Huhne: This is Called Engineering (Part of the Proposed Severn Barrage Construction)

Chris Huhne is today rounding on the critics of wind power.

short-termists, arm-chair engineers, curmudgeons and faultfinders

he calls them.

Well, let’s see now. Mr Huhne has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Mr Huhne subsequently worked in the City, and as a journalist, before becoming an MEP and then an MP.

Armchair engineer indeed. Maybe he played with Lego as a kid though.

By contrast, real engineeers want to build the Severn Barrage. Mr Huhne stopped that. Real engineers want to build some new coal fired power stations to keep our lights on. Mr Huhne is dead against.

As well as getting confused about engineering, Mr Huhne is confused about economics as well.

At a time when closures and cuts dominate the news cycle, next-generation industries are providing jobs and sinking capital into Britain.

Real economists, as opposed to armchair economists like Mr Huhne, understand that green subsidies cost jobs and don’t create them.

But what more should we expect from the man who in 2002 told the Guardian:

The euro is living up to the highest expectations of the economists who advocated it, and Britain is missing out.

and who in 2003 told the Independent:

The freedom to set interest rates merely according to domestic needs is a cruel mirage. Monetary union protects economies from the vagaries of speculative capital flows, enabling more stable growth and investment.

The man is simply a nutcase.

Getting Energy Bills Down – Or Up – Or Something

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David Cameron and His Friend Chris Huhne – Confused About Energy Bills

David Cameron has called for action to cut energy bills.

The government needs to work “harder and faster” to bring down energy bills, the prime minister has said ahead of a summit on gas and electricity prices.

Meanwhile, “green taxes” are already adding 5% to our electricity bills, and that is expected to triple over the next few years.

Obviously, when the government itself is deliberately adding to electricity bills, it is a bit rich for the Prime Minister to be saying they need to “work harder and faster” to bring down those bills.

But it is even more stark than that. The purpose of the green taxes is to increase our bills. They are not in place to raise revenue. They are there to encourage people to use less energy by increasing bills.

The government is using green taxes to increase energy bills, to reduce consumption, while at the same time putting pressure on suppliers to reduce bills.

Even on its own terms, the government has two directly contradictory policies on energy. They want cheaper bills – and they want more expensive bills.

What is more, this is not a case of one part of government pursing one policy, while another works in the opposite direction. The Energy Secretary is Chris Huhne. It is he who has been pursuing both these contradictory policies.

Mr Cameron may get nice headlines today for standing up for hard-pressed consumers. But in the long run, as Mr Huhne’s demonstrably ridiculous policies unravel, Mr Cameron may rue the day he became drawn into the whole mess.

Huhne Passing the Buck Again

Chris Huhne – Green is Cheaper in his Wonderful World
Photo by Dept for Energy and Climate Change via flickr – Crown Copyright

Chris Huhne has been passing the buck on energy bills again, this time at the Liberal Democrats’ conference.

He has vowed to “get tough” with the big six energy companies to bring down bills.

In an amazing insight into the Alice in Wonderland world in which he inhabits, he said:

It’s not fair that big energy companies can push their prices up for the vast majority of their consumers, who do not switch, while introducing cut-throat offers for new customers that stop small firms entering the market.

That looks to me like predatory pricing. It must and will stop.

It gets worse. As well as blaming the energy suppliers for the costs of his own green energy schemes, he even tried to claim that greener is cheaper:

He also said it “makes sense” to reduce reliance on expensive oil and gas and promote instead low-carbon energy businesses.

Friends of the Earth energy campaigner Donna Hume chimes in with this:

It’s right that people should be able to switch tariffs and companies more easily, but this won’t ease householders’ pain in the long run, with all six major energy firms putting up prices and the cost of gas rocketing.

Behind closed doors, the energy companies are attempting to lock us into expensive gas power plants for the next two decades instead of investing in the home-grown clean energy that could keep our bills stable and cheaper in the long run.

Just for the record, Donna, oil and especially gas are significantly cheaper than your favoured windmills – and many times cheaper than your solar panels. Like 5 times cheaper. Solar power costs more than 50p per unit.

The green nutcases like Mr Huhne and Ms Hume think that if they repeat often enough that green is cheap, everyone will believe it.

There may be reasons to accept the higher cost of green energy, for environmental reasons. (Regular readers of this blog will know that I don’t accept those reasons, but many do.) But to actually argue that green energy is cheaper is either stupidity or, quite simply, lies.

And Mr Huhne is not stupid. Which can only mean one thing.

He is lying.

The Big Three Suppliers Who Keep Prices High

11th June 2011: After Scottish Power increase their gas and electricity prices by around £200 per household, Environment Secretary Chris Huhne attacks the energy companies:

Consumers don’t have to take price increases lying down. If an energy company hits you with a price increase, you can hit them back where it hurts – by shopping around and voting with your feet.

The big six only have a few minnows snapping at them, who are kept artificially small. By scrapping red tape for small players they can become serious challengers and help keep bills down.

5th September 2011: the Daily Telegraph carries a most interesting letter from Downing Street advisers to David Cameron, outlining the impact of government energy policies on electricity bills:

Policy costs currently make up around 10% of the average household energy bill

which equates to a cost of just over £100.

The letter goes on to say that

It is notable that supplier company costs and profits are a material, but not hugely significant, factor (around 15% of the average bill).

With the government taking 5% VAT as well, that means the government itself is adding as much as the total costs and profits of the companies who actually supply the energy.

But it’s going to get worse. The letter goes on:

[The Department for Energy and Climate Change]‘s mid-case gas price scenario sees policies adding 30% to consumer energy bills by 2020 compared to a world without policies.

So the government’s impact on our bills is going to double within just 9 years, as their “policy” impact triples.

But after all, you can vote them out, can’t you? You can, in fact, “hit them back where it hurts – by shopping around and voting”. The problem is that Labour are, if anything, even more keen on adding to our bills with “green” measures. The Big Three political parties all have much the same policies of increasing energy costs.

Of course, the “first past the post” electoral system keeps their rivals “artificially small”. In fact, the big three political parties “only have a few minnows snapping at them”. In a proportional system, UKIP, for example, would have around 20 seats in the House of Commons.

To misquote that nice Mr Huhne:

Consumers don’t have to take price increases lying down. If a political party hits you with a price increase, you can hit them back where it hurts – by shopping around and voting them out of office.

The big three only have a few minnows snapping at them, who are kept artificially small. By scrapping the unfair electoral system for small players they can become serious challengers and help keep bills down.

But of course, that’s entirely different. Isn’t it?

I Hope You Like Mr Huhne’s Nuclear Power, Because You’re Paying

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It’s the Way He Tells ‘Em

Chris Huhne has been getting upset again.

This was in response to a Sunday Telegraph article, which said that his plans for the expansion of nuclear and wind power would add 30% to household electricity bills over the next 20 years.

Mr Huhne reckoned that was based on “rubbish” calculations. Why? Because they “did not take into account the eventual savings these different energy sources would bring”.

“Eventual savings”?! Maybe he thinks the nuclear power stations will be a cheap way of turning the windmills when the wind is not blowing.

He had the gall to point out that in France, energy prices were rising by only 3%, because of “a greater use of low-carbon and renewable sources”. That is simple spin. The low carbon and renewable soources he had in mind amount in fact to just one source – nuclear power. More than 80% of France’s electricity comes from nuclear.

Those “low carbon sources” he was praising in France are nuclear power stations. And those low costs exclude most of the actual costs of nuclear power – which are in decommissioning old power stations and disposing of nuclear waste.

In Mr Huhne’s world, nuclear is cheapest. And it is – if you exclude most of the costs.

So what about Mr Huhne’s plans for the UK? He wants to build a total of 8 new nuclear stations in Britain. They will replace Britain’s current nuclear stations as they come to the end of their lives.

However, once they reach the end of their lives is when the real costs begin. Two thirds of the cost of nuclear power comes from decommissioning the stations when they are worn out, and from waste disposal. The government is picking up the tab for all of that – in other words, anything we might save as electricity consumers, we will end up paying as taxpayers.

Save? What am I talking about? Even discounting two thirds of the real costs, nuclear power is still more expensive than gas-fired power.

Regardless of the safety case, nuclear power is massively expensive. That is why private sector companies will only build nuclear power stations if the government picks up those decommissioning and waste disposal costs – and even then require the government to guarantee the price of the electricity they will produce.

Nuclear power was developed for just one reason – to make the materials for nuclear bombs during the Cold War. Electricity was a by-product, useful for defraying the costs of the ballistic missile warheads.

Don’t even start on Mr Huhne’s windmills. They’re great if consumers are nice enough to use power only when the wind is blowing at the right speed.

Wind power is also highly competitive in Mr Huhne’s world – because he imposes extra taxes on other kinds of power, and gives a subsidy to wind.

Mr Huhne is also spending £11.3 billion of other people’s (which means our) money on putting a smart meter in every home, so that we can all see that we are using less electricity if we turn our appliances off.

All this pales into insignificance, of course, compared with Mr Huhne’s master stroke of his FiT scheme, under which the government makes it worth people’s while to generate power from solar panels, at a real cost of around five times as much as conventional power.

And yet Mr Huhne himself rejected the Severn Barrage, which would have produced tidal power from the Severn Estuary at a far cheaper cost than nuclear. At the time

the [government's] feasibility report found it would be difficult to attract private investment and the project represented “high risk”.

Whereas nuclear power stations, for which the government is picking up two thirds of the bill, are “funded by private investment”.

Here is what the Telegraph itself had to say on the matter:

[The government] believes switching to nuclear and wind makes sense because European Union-led taxes on gas and coal power generation will increase the costs of fossil fuel generation.

Combined with further green taxes, such as the European emissions trading scheme, and extra upgrades to the UK’s electricity network, the measures could see Britain’s gas and electricity bills rise more like 50pc – or £500 – according to Ofgem, the energy regulator.

Thus it appears that Mr Huhne’s “eventual savings” that he is promising from his lunatic energy policy, consist of avoiding EU penalty payments that we could avoid quite easily by leaving the EU. Mr Huhne would never countenance that, of course, because as well as being an incompetent Energy Secretary, he is also a fanatical Europhile.

The government’s energy policy is an utter, complete, dog’s breakfast. And Mr Huhne is the man responsible.

How long before David Cameron has the guts to sack him? Dream on. Mr Cameron loves those windmills and those nuclear power stations, and indeed the EU, every bit as much as Mr Huhne does.

Chris Huhne’s Nuclear Power Stations

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Chris Huhne, Nuclear Power Champion

Charles Hendry, the Energy Minister, has declared that Britain is on the brink of a nuclear renaissance.

The government is planning 8 new nuclear power stations, on the sites of existing ones. Mr Hendry said that they would provide low carbon electricity as coal-fired stations close down.

That is pretty disingenuous, in fact, as he omitted to point out that the existing nuclear stations will be shutting down over the same period. In other words, these new nuclear stations will simply replace the existing ones.

More importantly, though, the decision was clearly not made by Mr Hendry. He is not the Cabinet Minister concerned. The Cabinet Minister involved in this momentous decision is Mr Hendry’s boss, leading Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne.

Perhaps he would say that the decision was made by the whole Cabinet, and not just by him. He ought to tell us, then, whether he himself supports the Cabinet decision. He won’t, though. He will wheel out Mr Hendry to take the flack for the nuclear power, while he himself goes for the photo opportunities with his beloved windmills.

Last October, the government announced that the Severn Barrage scheme was being scrapped. This was a tidal power scheme, that would have built a huge dam across the Severn Estuary, providing up to 8GW of green electricity (with an average of 2GW).

The government claimed that they were simply refusing government funding, and that the private sector would be welcome to build the Barrage if it saw a business case. Their position on the nuclear stations is on the surface similar, but all is not as it seems.

First, the government’s figure of £50 billion to build the nuclear stations does not take account of decommissioning costs at the end of their life, or of the cost of disposing of nuclear waste. Those things will be picked up by the government, using taxpayers’ money.

What’s more, the government is promising the nuclear industry a fast track planning process, to get approvals to build the stations. No such promise has been made for the Barrage.

The government is supporting nuclear, but it is not supporting the Barrage. Mr Huhne is part of the government, and the Minister responsible.

We should pin the decision to build those nuclear stations squarely on Mr Huhne. He will find it excruciatingly uncomfortable. After all, the real reason he rejected the Severn Barrage was that his good friends in the Green movement hate it (because it involves engineering and is a large scale project).

So let’s see you step up and defend this decision, Mr Huhne. Tell us why you want new nuclear power stations, but don’t want the Severn Barrage.

Mr Huhne’s legacy as Energy Secretary, it seems, will be a heap of pretty useless windmills, and a set of shiny new nuclear power stations.

Chris Huhne, Climate Change Clown, in Action Again

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Chris Huhne: Able to Believe Two Contradictory Things At Once

12th June: Chris Huhne says people should switch to a different supplier if their energy bills go up:

Consumers don’t have to take price increases lying down. If an energy company hits you with a price increase, you can hit them back where it hurts – by shopping around and voting with your feet.

22nd June: Chris Huhne criticies Poland for blocking new tougher European climate change targets (for which read higher energy bills):

I’m deeply disappointed that the only country in the EU that could not accept a good compromise on how we can move Europe to a low carbon economy was Poland…

[It is] a dark day for Europe’s leading role in tackling climate change, but the UK together with its European colleagues will continue to make the economic case for tighter EU carbon targets.

Oh, that Climate Change Clown is so funny. Until you have to pay the bill.

Fit for 1984

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Big Brother is Watching You

The Climate Change Clown has been at it again. He is changing the rules of the FiT scheme.

And no, FiT does not stand for “Fast in Traffic”. It stands for “Feed in Tariffs”.

The FiT scheme was a daft invention of the last government. Under the scheme, people are paid huge subsidies for fitting solar panels to their houses.

In fact, so huge are the subsidies that they far exceed the value of the energy generated. There are even companies that will fit a solar panel for you free, if you promise to give them the subsidy. (You keep the electricity the panel generates.)

A completely daft scheme then, but of course it’s part of the green agenda! The government wants to get people to produce electricity without producing carbon dioxide, and that is their motive for having the FiT scheme.

Isn’t it? Well, maybe not.

The Climate Change Clown’s Department for Energy and Climate Change is changing the rules of the scheme.

They are alarmed because there has been a stampede of large operators looking to install huge solar generation facilities and reap the subisidies. So they are changing the rules to exclude anyone generating more than a trifling amount.

The review of the scheme was announced in February.

Here is what the Clown said at the time:

Because of the risk of an increasing number of large scale solar farms which could push feed-in tariffs (FITs) off track, and the need to give industry added certainty to invest, the coalition is today announcing a comprehensive review into the scheme.

Large scale solar installations weren’t anticipated under the FITs scheme we inherited and I’m concerned this could mean that money meant for people who want to produce their own green electricity has the potential to be directed towards large scale commercial solar projects.

Don’t large scale commercial solar farms create carbon-free electricity just as much as a panel on the roof of your house would? In which case, aren’t those large scale farms exactly what we need to achieve big savings in emissions quickly?

So why is The Clown so adamant that only private individuals putting panels on their rooves should be eligible?

I suspect the reason is this. It is necessary to make the whole thing visible at all times to ordinary people. They want everyone to see those panels on their neighbours’ rooves. They want an atmosphere of crisis, of a continuous threat where we all must be under continuous pressure to act. They want an atmosphere akin to that during a war, where we all must spend our time re-educating ourselves, and even put moral pressure on our neighbours to join in.

War is Peace, you see. The green agenda is all about power and control, not about saving the planet. And Mr Huhne, although he is indeed a Clown, is also not as nice as he seems.

It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy – his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter – set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, quoted in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.

Huhne the Loon Strikes Again

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Destroying the British Economy – all in a Day’s Work for Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne

Given Chris Huhne’s recent problems reported by the media, calling him a “loon” may be a touch too kind. But it rhymes, so I’m sticking with it.

The Telegraph reports that the government is set to introduce even tougher “legally binding” carbon reduction targets.

The new “carbon budget” will set targets to cut Britain’s emissions of carbon dioxide by half by 2025.

Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change Clown, apparently had to fight with Vince Cable and George Osborne to get the new targets agreed.

As the Telegraph reports:

The Climate Change Act has already put in place targets to ultimately cut carbon by 80 per cent by 2050 but it is up to each Government to agree ‘carbon budgets’ that set out the policy on how the cuts will be achieved in the short term.

All this is, of course, the continuation of Labour’s policy. The Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 by the then Labour government. It supposedly binds future governments to carbon reduction targets.

It is a fundamental principle of the British Constitution that no government can bind its successors, and therefore any future government could simply repeal the Act and ignore its provisions.

But that doesn’t stop the Tories and Liberal Democrats from wanting to go further, with even tougher targets.

Well, it’s all very nice that Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are entirely agreed on the way forward on this vital issue. It saves that pesky annoyance of having to have debates, and convince the public.

Does anyone seriously still believe that the Tories and their Liberal Democrat chums are any different from Labour? Or that any of them care one jot what “the little people” think about any of this?

Make no mistake, a target of a 50% reduction by 2025 could not be achieved without destroying the British economy.

Mind you, of course, it may all be a smokescreen by that nice Mr Huhne to distract attention from his other little difficulty. Those Liberal Democrats are so nice and so moderate, aren’t they?

The Climate Change Clown’s Greatest Performance Yet

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The Government’s Star Clown Turns in a Bravura Performance

The government has decided to “guarantee prices for low carbon electricity” to encourage the power generators to invest in it.

Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Chris Huhne (stop laughing at the back, there) told the House of Commons that the proposals were:

• to increase the long-term certainty about investment in power generation by providing greater support to the price of carbon to encourage new entrants into the market
• to introduce long-term contracts for low carbon generation to make clean energy more attractive, including top up payments to low carbon generators if the wholesale price of electricity is low
• to make additional payments to develop reserve plants to ensure “the lights stay on” during periods of high demand
• to limit the amount of carbon emissions from “dirty” power stations, including reinforcing current requirements that new coal power stations must incorporate carbon capture and storage.

Mr Huhne really is extremely funny, but distressing if you care about Britain’s future.

To paraphrase, he’s going to encourage new nuclear stations by forcing their competitors to subsidise them. (That’s what “providing greater support to the price of carbon” means.)

And he’s going to pay generators to build windmills, and also pay them to build gas fired stations as well just in case people dare to turn the lights on, or in case the wind isn’t blowing. Or perhaps the subsidies to the “reserve plants” are designed to help them pay their subsidies to the windmills.

And he’s going to stop anyone following the example of the Chinese, who have been building one new coal fired station per week.

And after Cancun, he’s also going to pay the Chinese to help them handle climate change.

In Mr Huhne’s world, a generator could be building windmills, and claiming subsidies for building “reserve” gas fired plants that, surprise surprise, turn out to be used more than the windmills. And selling carbon credits from the windmills to itself to run the gas fired stations.

But Mr Huhne had more, to make us all laugh until tears stream down our faces. He claimed that electricity bills would rise by £160 a year for the next 20 years because of his proposals. And then he claimed they would rise by £190 a year if his proposals didn’t go ahead.

Mr Huhne’s interventions are designed to get generators to build more expensive green power stations, rather than less expensive fossil fuelled ones. And yet he thinks his interventions will reduce bills.

And there was yet more merriment as he declared:

We’ve got to replace about a quarter of our ageing coal and nuclear power stations anyway, and since energy companies are not the Salvation Army and are going to have to make a return if they are going to make this investment, there is going to be a rise in energy bills [anyway].

In Mr Huhne’s world of fun, Tesco would argue they needed to increase the price of Mars Bars every year to fund their capital investment.

And he said that

there would be extra support for what are described as younger technologies like offshore wind and wave power.

But that largesse does not include tidal power – Mr Huhne himself has already rejected the Severn Barrage, which could have provided 5 percent of our electricity.

You couldn’t make it up. But Mr Huhne did. He is a comic genius.

Russians love the circus. Maybe Mr Huhne should do a tour of Siberia. Preferably a very, very long tour.