When the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog post an item devoid of citations, one should be suspicious of its veracity. And so it has proved with the latest effort from “Gaia Fawkes” (laugh? I thought I’d never start) entitled “Greenpeace’s Wind Spin”, which veers across the dishonesty line in no style at all.
Behold the ultimate source of Fake News
“Greenpeace, the Green Party and Caroline Lucas are celebrating a 50% drop in the price of offshore wind power with tweets galore using the graphic above. It sounds like great news for electricity bill payers that the price of wind power has dropped 50%. It is not quite as good as it sounds” tells the anonymous author (neither Staines, nor teaboy Alex Wickham, nor apprentice sandwich monitor Ross Kempsell, would own up to it).
Do go on. “The government’s guaranteed price to wind power producers has dropped 50% in 2 years. The price to the consumer will still be set in the energy market place. A welcome saving to taxpayers it may be, it is not a 50% drop in the price to the consumer”. No-one said it was. But the claim sneered at by the Fawkes mob is correct.
As the BBC has reported, “Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a guaranteed price of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23 … In the auction in 2015, offshore wind farm projects won subsidies between £114 and £120 per megawatt hour”.
So let’s take this nice and slowly, for the benefit of all those Delingpole-delighting climate change deniers out there. If the 2015 auction resulted in offshore wind projects winning a “strike price” - the guaranteed amount paid for their output - of between £114 and £120 per megawatt hour, and this year’s auction resulted in a strike price of £57.50 per megawatt hour, that is a 50% cost reduction.
From Gridwatch yesterday evening
Moreover, £57.50 per MWh is way cheaper than the strike price of £92.50 her MWh previously agreed for the output from the new Hinkley Point C nuclear station, something the Fawkes mob manage not to tell their readers.
But then The Great Guido overreaches himself and has to add a little blatant lying to the spin: “wind power produces less than 5% of the UK’s energy needs and the output is basically zero for 64% of the time”. Shall we inject a little reality here?
Also from Gridwatch yesterday
At 1730 hours yesterday, wind power was providing almost 8GW of energy, or more than 22% of the total UK demand.
By 2020 hours, wind accounted for almost 25% of total demand, with more than 8GW of output.
At no point in the 24 hours before that 1730 hours mark had wind power been generating less than 5GW of power.
So that's what The Great Guido brings you
At 1025 hours today, wind power was still generating just under 5GW of energy, which was almost 16% of total demand.
The Fawkes rabble - fake news at its finest. Another fine mess, once again.
3 comments:
You have confused electricity supply and energy supply. E.g. heavy industries like steelworks use other energy sources.
Ranting righties in support of privatised thieving energy and oil companies shocker.
Or maybe not.
@Unknown
Do you honestly think that Staines and his rabble are aware of coke-fired blast furnaces? btw: Although the furnaces at Port Talbot use coke as fuel, the steelworks consumes as much electricity as the nearby City of Swansea.
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