New research from Carbon Tracker on stranded assets - those resources that cannot be used by extractive industries companies if the planet is to survive - is fascinating.:
This is the summary of findings:
Why any rational investor or bank, let alone government, thinks that providing more resources to develop the fossil fuel sector in the light of consistent research findings utterly defeats me. But that still requires that we must ask these companies to account for how they are going to manage this risk. That is what sustainable cost accounting is all about.
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As it stands, without them the national Grid couldn’t sustain the power supply to the nation. Power cuts would be the norm. Wind and solar is too unpredictable. More nuclear may be the answer. Or of course we have power rationing. The recent hike in energy prices is nasty but partly reflects the fact it can be switched on and off to meet demand. Building more solar or wind farms doesn’t help that much until someone invents a process where natural energy can be stored.
This is boring
This issue has debated so many times to show what you say is pure nonsense
And bad economics
You are making the mistake of looking at the current energy transiton and thinking it is an end-state. With respect to renewables, the Uk has a long way to go down the track. As you may know (although your comments suggest otherwise), PV and wind complement each other on a seasonal basis. What the UK needs is vastly more of both, coupled to electrolysers, this will provide all the energy resources the country needs. Taking one example, the off-shore wind resource that can be economically exploited in the UK is in the range 650 to 1200GW – enough to power the UK and export a great deal to the EU. Fossil stations have a role now in the transition. However, in the future those that are CCGTs will be converted to hydrogen. Note that 450MW CCGTs that can burn H2 already exist. I think you will find that the renewable future is much closer than you realise. What is delaying it in the Uk is the Mendacious Fatburgs government.
None of the above are assertions – 1 minute on the Internet will demonstrate the reality of all of the above.
Thanks Mike
We have a small PV installation on an office roof. The usual setup aims to maximise gross output by putting all the panels as near south-facing as practicable. Couldn’t do that, so it’s split over two roof slopes, one east, the other west facing. That gives less total output, but the logs show a remarkably close match with the working day. Result is that a very high proportion of the output can be used on site. There’s no special compromise on usage and demands on storage and/or transmission plant and their associated losses are minimised. A crude calculation might have said ‘don’t bother’. Diversity in action – a ‘sub optimal’ installation works rather better (at system level) than a ‘go for max’ allocation of resources would have done.
The psychology at work is purely that which is emotional – it’s about getting their hands on the last stocks of natural resources and monopolizing them for their own benefit.
And of course the other factor at work is path dependency – they know what they like and they’re too lazy and timid to ‘dare to know’ something else because what they know keeps paying albeit increasingly short term (but that’s OK, because they can whack up the price).
For me, the greatest concern is that petrochemical companies continue to seek to explore new fossil reserves at all. I don’t expect businesses to undertake development such as this without realistic expectation of ample returns. So am I to conclude that they have already been assured in secret that there is little or no intent to regulate their new projects out of existence, as is clearly necessary?
In addition to the excellent psychological explanations above we must surely allow for the certainty among industries that are ‘too big to fail’ that the government will buy them out if shit really gets that bad. And I think a rational government would see the value in doing that. Have we not recently just finished paying for the abolition of slavery?