There’s an estimated 10 million dead mammoths buried in the Arctic permafrost. 

But they are mere pussy cats compared to the real danger – 1,700 Gt (billion tonnes) of carbon – representing over 50 years worth of current greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

And according to a new study in Nature Climate Change, if we let it all melt it will cost us dear. The researchers calculate that the economic damage that would flow from loss of permafrost and the increased GHG emissions would add up to US$43 trillion. 

This is very nearly the estimated combined gross domestic product last year of the US, China, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, and Brazil, roughly equal to the entire world’s economic product in 2005.

And the damage doesn’t stop there – this would be in addition to at least $300 trillion of economic damage linked to other consequences of climate change.

The attempt to put a cumulative economic value on natural changes in climate that have yet to happen is part of the bid to inform governments of the real  costs of climate change – and maybe even persuade them to take it seriously.

And no part of the planet is warming faster than the Arctic, arousing the curiosity of the study’s authors, economist Chris Hope of the University of Cambridge and the polar expert Kevin Schaefer of the University of Colorado, as to the environmental and economic impacts of the melting permafrost.

1.7 trillion tonnes of carbon locked up in Arctic permafrost

The two scientists report in Nature Climate Change that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise as they are doing now, the thaw of the permafrost and the loss of the ice caps could release the 1,700 Gt of carbon now locked in as frozen organic matter.

It’s there because the Arctic has been much warmer than it is now for long periods of time, with rich vegetation and even temperate rainforests. The result is that its now frozen soils contain huge quantities of organic material that never had a chance to decompose.

Now its release in the form of the GHGs CO₂ and methane (CH₄) would increase the chances of catastrophic floods, wind storms, heat waves and drought, the accelerated melting of the Greenland (and West Antarctic) ice sheets, rising sea levels, the loss of agricultural land and rising energy demand as more and more people began to depend on air conditioning.

So the total cost of permafrost thaw would be $43 tn. The predicted total cost of climate change by 2200 could reach $369 tn, an increase of 13% on all calculations so far.

Governments – and industry – have tended to resist steps such as a switch to renewable resources and greater care for the remaining forests, on the grounds that change on such a scale imposes economic costs. So estimates of the economic costs of climate change are part of an attempt to persuade nations that to do nothing would be far more expensive. 

Researchers have tried to derive the true social costs of, for instance, fossil fuels and the economic setbacks associated with specific climate events such as heat waves in single countries, or even the possible costs in lives and income of multiple impacts across a continent.

Cost of action: $6tn. Net saving: $37 tn

The two scientists used a computer model to simulate the impacts of what is now known as the ‘business as usual’ scenario, in which the world goes on burning more and more fossil fuels, until the concentrations in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide reach 700 parts per million. Right now, the concentration has just tipped 400 ppm. For most of human history, it has hovered around 270ppm.

“The Arctic is warming roughly twice as fast as the global average”, they conclude. “If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at current rates, this warming will lead to the widespread thawing of permafrost and the release of hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO₂ and billions of tonnes of CH₄ into the atmosphere …

“The extra impacts of the permafrost CO₂ and CH₄ are sufficiently high to justify urgent action to minimize the scale of the release.”

An aggressive strategy to limit thaw in the permafrost, they estimate, could cost $6 tn. That’s a huge amount of money – but represents a $37 tn saving against the $43 tn cost of letting it happen.

“We want to use these models to help us make better decisions – linking scientific and economic models together is a way to help us do that”, said Dr Hope.

“We need to estimate how much it will cost if we do nothing, how much it will cost if we do something, and how much we need to spend to cut back greenhouse gases.”

The paper: ‘Economic impacts of carbon dioxide and methane released from thawing permafrost‘ by Chris Hope & Kevin Schaefer is published in Nature Climate Change.

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network. Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

There’s no doubt about it. The Government is spreading untruths about the price of renewable energy.

Is it deliberate? One can only assume so owing to the consistency of the pattern and the equally consistent refusal to explain or correct its misleading statements.

The context is also significant: it’s always in the context of supporting nuclear power over renewable energy sources.

One example came a few weeks ago when the Chancellor told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee in their ‘annual evidence session’ that the agreed ‘strike price’ of £92.50 per MWh (in 2012 money, RPI indexed) is “substantially cheaper than other low-carbon technology like offshore wind or onshore wind.”

This statement is palpably untrue. After RPI indexation £92.50 is actually £96.24 today’s money. Onshore wind and ground-based solar projects have bid for ‘contracts for difference’ (the main current support mechanism) and been awarded them at a price of around £80 per MWh.

Hello?? Is anyone at home?

Pressed on the justification for the claim the Treasury issued a statement: “Nuclear energy is an important part of the UK’s energy mix as we move towards a low carbon future. It is also the cheapest low carbon technology that can reliably generate electricity at such a large scale.”

Was this a genuine retraction or correction? No. Did the Treasury contact the Lords Commitee to correct any false impression given to its noble members? We asked, but received no reply. Did anyone care? Apparently not.

Because on Monday George Osborne made a very similar claim when accouncing a £2 billion finance guarantee for planned Hinkley C nuclear plant: “Nuclear power is cost competitive with other low carbon technology and is a crucial part of our energy mix, along with new sources of power such as shale gas.”

Come again? “Nuclear power is cost competitive with other low carbon technology“. Alright, so it might be cost-competitive with some low carbon technologies – but only the more expensive ones like offshore wind. But it clearly is not competitive with either onshore wind or field scale solar PV.

So back to the Treasury. What is the justification for the claim? Another statement: “A new generation of nuclear power stations is a key part of our future low carbon energy mix providing safe, reliable and affordable energy for the future. As one of the cheaper forms of low carbon electricity, new nuclear will have a key role meeting our goal to cut carbon emissions.”

So now nuclear is “one of the the cheaper forms of low carbon electricity” – a somewhat weaker claim. But equally untrue. It is no such thing.

It’s a whole lot worse than you think

Take that figure of £80 per MWh for the bids to build onshore wind farms in the UK earlier this year. It’s actually a whole lot higher than it should be, for reasons set out in June by Andrew ZP Smith of UCL.

In Germany, wind farms are being built for between £36 and £79 per MWh, although the UK is much windier, providing – in principle – much cheaper power. So why does it cost more here? Because the UK’s unfavourable policy environment is putting off investors and forcing them to seek higher returns:

“Many years of policy uncertainty and persistent meddling with the revenue schemes presents higher risks to investors. Planning regulations in England and Wales have created further uncertainty, with unpredictable local decisions. Often, rulings will be reversed on appeal, only for the energy secretary to step and reject the application. Investors, faced with higher risk, will require higher rewards …

“Even more significantly, investors in wind farm supply chains can choose to locate instead in jurisdictions which offer far greater long-term clarity and security. This is why both Denmark and Germany have strong wind supply chains, and Britain’s is still nascent.”

With a committed and supportive government, onshore wind prices should drop well below the German level – in the region of £30 to £60 per MWh – making the lowest cost wind directly competitive in the wholesale power market, where current prices average just below £40.

This is broadly in line with the findings of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, whose UK-specific calculation (page 42) indicates a raw cost of about £55 per MWh for UK wind. That rises to £80 with the additional costs of managing intermittency and grid integration at a penetration level of 30-40%. “For lower shares”, IRENA notes, “integration costs would be much less.”

Nuclear power, by contrast, ‘socialises’ its considerable integration costs onto the grid as a whole. For Hinkley C this will require the commissioning of a full 3.2GW of spinning reserve in case the whole power station suddenly drops out – something nuclear stations are prone to do.

The forgotten dimension: time

But the biggest fiddle the Treasury is trying to pull on us is in the fourth dimension – time. EDF recently announced that it will be unable to complete Hinkley C in 2023 as planned, and has given no new target date. Let’s assume a completion year of 2025 – bearing in mind that it could well take until 2030 given the abysmal example of other EPR sites in France and Finland.

So we should not be comparing Hinkley C’s £96.28 per MWh cost in today’s money against today’s renewable power prices. We should be looking at renewables prices in 2025 and through the full 35 years of its CFD period to 2060.

As far as solar power is concerned, the UK’s Solar Trade Association believes that UK solar generation can be fully cost competitive with fossil fuels, with no subsidy at all, by 2020.

According to its Solar Independence Plan, domestic rooftop solar installations could, by 2020, be as cheap as buying power off the grid, while large solar farms will compete directly on wholesale power markets. All with no subsidy at all. And after 2020 as the scale of worldwide solar deployment keeps on increasing, the cost will only continue to plummet.

With onshore wind, prices will also continue to fall, but less dramatically. For example BVG Associates estimate a 5-6% price fall from 2014 levels by 2025.

As for offshore wind, BVG estimate that prices will drop to about 73% of current levels by 2025. Offshore wind prices in the last CFD auction in February were between £114 and £120 per MWh. And 73% of that means prices of £83.22 to £87.60 by 2025 – considerably less than Hinkley C’s £96.24.

The way is renewable!

So the four main sources of renewable energy that the UK can quickly bring on stream – onshore and offshore wind, domestic and field-scale solar – are all going to be much cheaper than nuclear power by 2025, and some will even be undercutting fossil fuels as well. While Hinkley C – if it is ever built – will be forcing its overpriced power on UK energy consumers for another 35 years.

Nuclear power benefits from government largesse in another ways too. Hinkley C is being promised a 35-year CFD contract when renewable technologies get just 15 years. It’s also getting £17 billion in Treasury guarantees for bondholders in the project. Renewable energy financiers get none.

What does all this add up to? The government, its Treasury department, its Chancellor George Osborne and its energy department, DECC, are grossly and presumably knowingly misrepresenting the relative costs of renewable energy and nuclear power.

And it’s all part of plan to force upon us a new generation of hyper-expensive nuclear power plants that will cost energy users through the nose until 2060 and beyond, putting the country on a ‘back to the future’ path to the 1950’s, while wiser nations reap the benefits of cheap, clean renewable energy.

They must be stopped. And shame upon them! 

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

There’s no doubt about it. The Government is spreading untruths about the price of renewable energy.

Is it deliberate? One can only assume so owing to the consistency of the pattern and the equally consistent refusal to explain or correct its misleading statements.

The context is also significant: it’s always in the context of supporting nuclear power over renewable energy sources.

One example came a few weeks ago when the Chancellor told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee in their ‘annual evidence session’ that the agreed ‘strike price’ of £92.50 per MWh (in 2012 money, RPI indexed) is “substantially cheaper than other low-carbon technology like offshore wind or onshore wind.”

This statement is palpably untrue. After RPI indexation £92.50 is actually £96.24 today’s money. Onshore wind and ground-based solar projects have bid for ‘contracts for difference’ (the main current support mechanism) and been awarded them at a price of around £80 per MWh.

Hello?? Is anyone at home?

Pressed on the justification for the claim the Treasury issued a statement: “Nuclear energy is an important part of the UK’s energy mix as we move towards a low carbon future. It is also the cheapest low carbon technology that can reliably generate electricity at such a large scale.”

Was this a genuine retraction or correction? No. Did the Treasury contact the Lords Commitee to correct any false impression given to its noble members? We asked, but received no reply. Did anyone care? Apparently not.

Because on Monday George Osborne made a very similar claim when accouncing a £2 billion finance guarantee for planned Hinkley C nuclear plant: “Nuclear power is cost competitive with other low carbon technology and is a crucial part of our energy mix, along with new sources of power such as shale gas.”

Come again? “Nuclear power is cost competitive with other low carbon technology“. Alright, so it might be cost-competitive with some low carbon technologies – but only the more expensive ones like offshore wind. But it clearly is not competitive with either onshore wind or field scale solar PV.

So back to the Treasury. What is the justification for the claim? Another statement: “A new generation of nuclear power stations is a key part of our future low carbon energy mix providing safe, reliable and affordable energy for the future. As one of the cheaper forms of low carbon electricity, new nuclear will have a key role meeting our goal to cut carbon emissions.”

So now nuclear is “one of the the cheaper forms of low carbon electricity” – a somewhat weaker claim. But equally untrue. It is no such thing.

It’s a whole lot worse than you think

Take that figure of £80 per MWh for the bids to build onshore wind farms in the UK earlier this year. It’s actually a whole lot higher than it should be, for reasons set out in June by Andrew ZP Smith of UCL.

In Germany, wind farms are being built for between £36 and £79 per MWh, although the UK is much windier, providing – in principle – much cheaper power. So why does it cost more here? Because the UK’s unfavourable policy environment is putting off investors and forcing them to seek higher returns:

“Many years of policy uncertainty and persistent meddling with the revenue schemes presents higher risks to investors. Planning regulations in England and Wales have created further uncertainty, with unpredictable local decisions. Often, rulings will be reversed on appeal, only for the energy secretary to step and reject the application. Investors, faced with higher risk, will require higher rewards …

“Even more significantly, investors in wind farm supply chains can choose to locate instead in jurisdictions which offer far greater long-term clarity and security. This is why both Denmark and Germany have strong wind supply chains, and Britain’s is still nascent.”

With a committed and supportive government, onshore wind prices should drop well below the German level – in the region of £30 to £60 per MWh – making the lowest cost wind directly competitive in the wholesale power market, where current prices average just below £40.

This is broadly in line with the findings of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, whose UK-specific calculation (page 42) indicates a raw cost of about £55 per MWh for UK wind. That rises to £80 with the additional costs of managing intermittency and grid integration at a penetration level of 30-40%. “For lower shares”, IRENA notes, “integration costs would be much less.”

Nuclear power, by contrast, ‘socialises’ its considerable integration costs onto the grid as a whole. For Hinkley C this will require the commissioning of a full 3.2GW of spinning reserve in case the whole power station suddenly drops out – something nuclear stations are prone to do.

The forgotten dimension: time

But the biggest fiddle the Treasury is trying to pull on us is in the fourth dimension – time. EDF recently announced that it will be unable to complete Hinkley C in 2023 as planned, and has given no new target date. Let’s assume a completion year of 2025 – bearing in mind that it could well take until 2030 given the abysmal example of other EPR sites in France and Finland.

So we should not be comparing Hinkley C’s £96.28 per MWh cost in today’s money against today’s renewable power prices. We should be looking at renewables prices in 2025 and through the full 35 years of its CFD period to 2060.

As far as solar power is concerned, the UK’s Solar Trade Association believes that UK solar generation can be fully cost competitive with fossil fuels, with no subsidy at all, by 2020.

According to its Solar Independence Plan, domestic rooftop solar installations could, by 2020, be as cheap as buying power off the grid, while large solar farms will compete directly on wholesale power markets. All with no subsidy at all. And after 2020 as the scale of worldwide solar deployment keeps on increasing, the cost will only continue to plummet.

With onshore wind, prices will also continue to fall, but less dramatically. For example BVG Associates estimate a 5-6% price fall from 2014 levels by 2025.

As for offshore wind, BVG estimate that prices will drop to about 73% of current levels by 2025. Offshore wind prices in the last CFD auction in February were between £114 and £120 per MWh. And 73% of that means prices of £83.22 to £87.60 by 2025 – considerably less than Hinkley C’s £96.24.

The way is renewable!

So the four main sources of renewable energy that the UK can quickly bring on stream – onshore and offshore wind, domestic and field-scale solar – are all going to be much cheaper than nuclear power by 2025, and some will even be undercutting fossil fuels as well. While Hinkley C – if it is ever built – will be forcing its overpriced power on UK energy consumers for another 35 years.

Nuclear power benefits from government largesse in another ways too. Hinkley C is being promised a 35-year CFD contract when renewable technologies get just 15 years. It’s also getting £17 billion in Treasury guarantees for bondholders in the project. Renewable energy financiers get none.

What does all this add up to? The government, its Treasury department, its Chancellor George Osborne and its energy department, DECC, are grossly and presumably knowingly misrepresenting the relative costs of renewable energy and nuclear power.

And it’s all part of plan to force upon us a new generation of hyper-expensive nuclear power plants that will cost energy users through the nose until 2060 and beyond, putting the country on a ‘back to the future’ path to the 1950’s, while wiser nations reap the benefits of cheap, clean renewable energy.

They must be stopped. And shame upon them! 

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Volkswagen has set aside €6.5 billion to cover the costs of the growing scandal over cheating on emissions tests in the US.

Putting a number on the cost further down line will be far harder, however, as it is a crisis which calls into question the ethical credentials of the company and the industry.

It also poses tough questions about the regulators and authorities who were duped.

Although the Volkswagen emissions scandal has caught many by surprise, in fact it has been brewing for a while.

It all started when the European wing of the US NGO International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) set out to prove modern diesels were genuinely clean and would therefore be able to make a significant contribution to improving both CO₂ emissions and air quality.

The US has higher emissions standards than Europe, which were regularly passed by VW’s diesel-fuelled cars. The ICCT decided to test why this was the case – and had some surprising results.

Partnering with a team from the University of West Virginia, the team fitted portable emissions testing equipment to three vehicles (two VWs and one BMW) on a run from San Diego to Seattle, which turned up very disappointing results for the VWs.

The VW Jetta tested on the road trip exceeded NOx (oxides of nitrogen, one of the regulated toxic emissions) standards by 15 to 35 times the legal limit.

When similar vehicles were subjected to their official test in the California Air Resources Board’s laboratory, however, they passed. The road test emissions numbers in the lab all fell within the accepted levels of NOx emissions.

Following investigations into the matter, VW has admitted to gaming the US air pollution tests. Nearly half a million cars have been recalled for containing ‘defeat device’ software that only turns on the cars’ emissions controls when they are undergoing official testing.

Climate benefits versus increased toxicity

Arguably, VW was complying with US law by meeting test standards and this raises an important issue when it comes to the efforts being made to reduce emissions.

Global efforts to combat climate change and reduce CO₂ emissions have resulted in leniency on diesel cars – not only in public debates concerning the environment, but also in legislation. This is one of the reasons why the EU has followed a more lenient toxic emissions regime for diesel than petrol in recent years.

Along the way, human health and the impact of toxic tailpipe emissions from vehicles, has taken a backseat. But this approach is increasingly being questioned. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, for example, announced plans to ban most diesel vehicles from the city from 2020.

Many feel that with potentially low carbon alternatives such as electric and hybrid-electric vehicles increasingly available, as well as, more recently, the first commercial fuel-cell cars, the need for diesel as a carbon reduction technology is becoming less central.

Why did it take an NGO to discover this? Where were the regulators?

For VW itself, apart from the massive loss of share value in recent days, its corporate social and environmental responsibility has taken a severe knock. Diesel cars represent a large proportion of new car sales in Europe and also of vehicles in use.

Many of these will be Volkswagen Group vehicles bought by people who probably thought that they were helping reduce carbon emissions.

While they certainly did so – the TDI-engines in question are among the most fuel-efficient engines available and low fuel consumption means low CO₂ – but these same people probably assumed that beyond this, their cars at least complied with toxic emissions standards.

Others, such as the Brussels-based NGO Transport & Environment are probably less surprised. They have long been among those highlighting the fact that the real world experience of many car owners, even in terms of fuel consumption, did not come anywhere near to the official figures that resulted from emissions testing.

The question arises of why it takes underfunded NGOs to discover these problems, rather than the regulators themselves.

It is also unclear whether this technique was only used to deal with the particularly tight US and California regulations, or whether it was also used to get around the European test cycle and emissions compliance is being investigated in Asia too.

At the same time, it raises serious questions about diesel and public support for this technology may well suffer. What is clear is that this is one of the biggest crises to hit the car industry – and on a par with those that have rocked the banking sector.

Perhaps we’ll see the same tightening of regulation that has significantly improved that industry.

Paul Nieuwenhuis is Senior Lecturer and Co-Director at the Electric Vehicle Centre of Excellence (EVCE), Cardiff University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The movement to divest from fossil fuels and invest in renewable energy and climate solutions has exploded, now topping $2.6 trillion, according to a new analysis released today.

“To date, 436 institutions and 2,040 individuals across 43 countries and representing $2.6 trillion in assets have committed to divest from fossil fuel companies”, states the report from Arabella Advisors.

“The divestment movement has grown exponentially since Climate Week in September 2014.”

At that time 181 institutions and 656 individuals representing over $50 billion in assets had committed to divest, and divestment advocates pledged to triple these numbers by the December 2015 Paris UN climate negotiations.

But those hopes have been vastly exceeded: “Three months before the negotiations, we have already witnessed a fifty-fold increase in the total combined assets of those committed to divest from fossil fuels.”

The increasing commitments to invest and a proliferation of fossil free products also mean that more capital is flowing toward climate solutions, says the report:

“Globally, investment in clean energy reached $310 billion in 2014. Among those pledging to divest, many are also committing to invest in climate solutions: those institutions and individuals that have pledged to both divest and invest in clean energy collectively hold $785 billion in assets.”

Leonardo: ‘Now is the time to divest and invest’

Commitments have come from governments and investors from 43 countries and multiple sectors, including pension funds, health, education, philanthropy, faith, entertainment, climate justice and municipalities.

Recent notable commitments include the $476 billion California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the Norway Pension Fund, the Canadian Medical Association, the World Council of Churches, the University of California system, actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio, and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.

“Climate change is severely impacting the health of our planet and all of its inhabitants, and we must transition to a clean energy economy that does not rely on fossil fuels, the main driver of this global problem”, said DiCaprio, who announced his commitment today.

“After looking into the growing movement to divest from fossil fuels and invest in climate solutions, I was convinced to make the pledge on behalf of myself and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.

“Now is the time to divest and invest to let our world leaders know that we, as individuals and institutions, are taking action to address climate change, and we expect them to do their part this December in Paris at the UN climate talks.”

Providence, Rhode Island became one of the largest cities to commit to divesting all its funds from top coal companies. In Australia, the city of Newcastle – home to the largest coal port in the world – voted to divest, as did the government of the Australian Capital Territory.

“If these numbers tell us anything, it’s that the divestment movement is catching fire”, said May Boeve, Executive Director of 350.org.

“Since starting on the campuses of a few colleges in the US, this movement has struck a chord with people across the world who care about climate change, and convinced some of the largest and most influential institutions in the world to begin pulling their money out of climate destruction.

“That makes me hopeful for our future, and it’s sending a clear message to world leaders as they head into Paris: It’s time for them to follow suit, and divest our governments from fossil fuel companies too.”

Fossil fuel assets come with real and quantifiable risks

Recent financial analyses from HSBC, Citigroup, Mercer, Bank of England and the International Energy Agency all indicate a significant, quantifiable risk to portfolios exposed to fossil fuel assets.

“The Arabella Report shows that more and more investors are reducing their carbon risk today and diversifying their portfolios with the goal to harness the upside in the sustainable clean growth industries of the future”, said Thomas Van Dyck, Managing Director-Financial Advisor of SRI Wealth Management Group.

“That underscores what I see every day as a financial advisor-that the demand for fossil-free investment products is increasing.”

When Norway’s $900 billion sovereign wealth fund decided to divest from 122 coal companies – the largest divestment commitment to date – a joint statement by Norway’s political parties cited both climate and financial risks, the report points out.

Similarly, when the French insurance company Axa announced it would divest $576 million in coal assets by the end of 2015, its CEO argued that “it is our responsibility, as a long-term institutional investor, to consider carbon as a risk and to accompany the global energy transition.”

“Investing at scale in clean, efficient power offers one of the clearest, no regret choices ever presented to human progress”, said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, in a video statement at a press conference in New York today unveiling the Arabella Advisors report.

The United Nations climate chief has been advocating for the shift of investment flows from fossil fuels to climate solutions to meet the $1 trillion / year need for clean energy investment – and to create momentum ahead of the upcoming international climate negotiations in Paris this December.

Divestment strategies vary among participants in the movement. Some have divested from all fossil fuel companies both large and small; others are beginning with coal and / or tar sands. The Arabella Advisors report provides details on commitments made to date.

The report: ‘Measuring the Growth of the Global Fossil Fuel Divestment and Clean Energy Investment Movement‘ is by Arabella Advisors.

More information: Divest-Invest

I was rather perplexed to wake up to hear the news that George Osborne was pledging £2bn in loan guarantees for the ill-fated Hinkley C nuclear power project in England.

Hadn’t he already pledged £10bn in loan guarantees more than two years ago? Now quietly increased to £17 billion?

Hinkley C, all 3.2 gigawatts of it, was according to earlier proud boasts supposed to be up and running in 2018, but will now be lucky to be started by 2025.

As recently as 2008, the total cost of such a plant was estimated by the UK department of energy at £5.6bn. Now it could easily be five times higher.

Has Osborne decided to cut the support he is offering French group EDF and the Chinese state nuclear companies to build the plant from £10bn to £2bn? No, it seems he is offering an ‘initial’ £2bn. Has George made his current trip to Beijing with £2bn in £50 notes in a secure luggage arrangement? No, of course not.

So what does this mean? Well, absolutely nothing apart from, no doubt, some PR consultant coming up with a bright idea to distract attention from the sheer awfulness that is the British nuclear programme.

Although some may feel that how this (awfulness) is all an aberration and that somewhere else nuclear power is being done much better, in my studies I can’t find much evidence of this, certainly not in the US and Europe.

Do any of these ‘third generation’ reactors even work?

Both of the two ‘generation III’ reactors being developed, EPR (Finland, France, China) and AP1000 (China, US, Bulgaria), are taking ages to build and costing mountains more money than originally anticipated.

Hitachi’s ABWR, another reactor tipped to be built in the UK, has a very chequered reliability record that would make it a no-go zone for investors.

Even in China the much-vaunted nuclear construction programme is, as much as you hear about these things from Chinese authorities, a lot less vaunted than one would think. And we need to understand that this is before we even know whether any of these upcoming generation III reactors work well or not.

Really this is not much of a change compared with what went on in previous decades. The marvellous hype from the nuclear people suckered an eager-to-be-suckered UK body politic that there really is a magical nuclear answer to our problems. So why do we find this out now?

The answer is actually surprisingly simple. Up until now, nuclear power has not been treated like other energy sources. In the UK and many other countries it has always been given a blank cheque to cover its construction costs and its electricity has never been costed according to commercial risk criteria.

Now, in a bowdlerised way, it has been costed according to some commercial criteria under the UK’s Electricity Market Reform system for incentivising low-carbon power generation.

So now we know what nuclear power really costs

This produced what many found to be a surprising answer. Two years ago Hinkley C ended up being offered (still not signed) £92.50 per MWh (now £94 per MWh, rising with inflation) over 35 years with a £10bn loan guarantee – taken by the European Commission to rise to £17bn with interest payments.

This means the contract price is more than double the wholesale power price and the consumer will have to pay the difference for 35 years after generation starts.

It is a higher subsidy than that offered to onshore wind farms (which also get no loan guarantees and get 15-year contracts). Earlier in the year, the government awarded premium price contracts to onshore wind farms for around £80 per MWh.

And if nuclear had the same contract lengths as other power plants: 15 years – and certainly no more than 20 years – its contract price would rise to well over £100 per MWh. That would make it look more expensive than offshore wind. Well, we couldn’t have that, could we?

And if the £17bn was not guaranteed, it would never be built. The risk of cost overruns would be considered far too great.

A feast has been prepared – but only one guest is at the table

Meanwhile the other nuclear power plant proposals for the UK currently held by EDF, Hitachi and Toshiba seemed to have melted into the background.

Even with the government’s very generous offer to get new nuclear power projects off the ground, will these players take the risk of investing in these new projects?

Only the Chinese seem to be at the table, having apparently been promised they can build their own reactor at Bradwell in Essex as part of the Hinkley C deal.

Of course many would point out that we could have lots of other things, including wind farms and solar farms generating loads of clean energy by the time (if ever) that our nuclear power programme gets going. But the government has made sure this is not going to happen, by cutting the incentives.

Even the CBI, the voice of business, is raising concerns about this. Instead the government seems to be pinning its hopes on a nuclear programme happening at the end of a Chinese rainbow.

Stand by for the crock of gold at Bradwell to be just as eye-watering.

David Toke is Reader in Energy Policy at the University of Aberdeen.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A 15 minute drive from the elite environs of Windsor Castle and Eton College are the beautiful woods and water-meadows of Runnymede.

Until last week, if you had visited this historic site, you would have found 30-40 people living in an array of shacks and homes, many beautifully made from recycled materials.

They lived sustainably there for three years: heating their homes with coppiced sycamore, using water from a spring and growing or ‘skipping’ their food.

Now those people are homeless and all that remains of their lives there is some splintered wood, smashed up wattle and daub, and belongings strewn across the forest floor.

The destruction was unleashed by bailiffs on behalf of the Royalton Group – an off-shored luxury property development company – who bought the land for £47 million and intend to build a high-end gated community there called the Magna Carta Park.

It’s not news that the wishes of global capital trump all others but we might pause and reflect how, in a Tory heartland, in the fifth biggest economy in the world, such a miniature shanty town came to exist.

A sanctuary from state and economic brutality

Those on the right will no doubt claim this was simply a gathering of the chronically workshy finding a way to avoid their responsibilities as taxpayers. But then I suspect they have never lived in a wood in winter, negotiating freezing rain and knee deep mud, without utilities or sanitation.

The real answer is complicated: for some residents living there was an informed choice. They came from Occupy St Pauls and were offering a direct-action solution to government inaction on housing and climate change: reclaim disused land for low impact sustainable villages.

But for others the village was a safety net that caught them in the freefall from an atomised society and self-harming State; a place of sanctuary from the brutality of our current economic system.

Take Betty, who with her small child, was evicted with 24 hours notice from her Essex flat and arrived in the village ‘emotionally and physically shattered’. Or Shawn who found himself street homeless in Brighton when the state relinquished responsibility for him at 18, after over a decade spent in foster homes and mental health inpatient wards.

If we entertain the notion that there might be deeper forces at work here rather than people’s preferences or moral failings what do we find?

According to Crisis almost three quarters of the increase in statutory homelessness from 2010 to 2014 was attributable to private tenancy terminations. In London the figures are worse, with such cases rising from 925 to 5,960 in the same four years.

It is worth remembering  that whilst a month’s notice is the legal minimum for normal tenants, the ‘reasonable notice’ required of resident landlords can be as little as 24 hours.

So why can’t these people just find another flat?

Perhaps the answer lies in the Homelet Rental Index which calculated the average UK rent for new tenancies this summer to be £992pcm. Most landlords require a month in an advance and a month’s deposit, and on top of this the average letting agent fees are now £337.

That totals up to £2,321, for the average renter, before they can move in. Many cannot afford this initial outlay, especially in a context where rents rose 10.5% last year, but wages only 3%. With rents outpacing wages for the last 5 years this adds up to a serious squeeze.

In addition to this there is simply not enough supply: Matt Hutchinson, director of the house sharing website SpareRoom, said in some parts of London 13 tenants were competing for each room advertised.

The government knows these realities but has failed to introduce legislation that would relieve the pressure. If a government fails to act on this information, surely it loses its legitimacy?

The law does not protect the common man or woman

This is the argument of those living at Runnymede: The times we live in, they argue, are corrupt; statute law no longer protects or serves the interests of the common man or woman. It no longer guarantees access to affordable shelter or a reasonable wage and has allowed the wants of the rich and comfortable to trump the needs of the poor and destitute.

We can see this in the convergence of other statistics: on any one night there are currently around  2700- 6500 people sleeping rough in the UK but 610 000 empty homes;  however, the squatting of these properties – even if they are derelict – has recently been criminalised.

No matter if a residential property had been empty for 5, 10 or 15 years, if a homeless person sought shelter there in cold or rain – they would now be committing a criminal offence. 

But they shouldn’t need to squat or live in a shack I hear you cry: the government have funded adequate hostel provision for people who have become destitute. Wrong again:  there are only around 36,000 hostel placesavailable for the single homeless, and an estimated 185,000 adults experiencing some degree of homelessness each year in England.

So if there is not room for these people in government funded hostels, and they are forbidden to squat, then surely it is acceptable for them to sleep in parks or doorways?

Criminalising homelessness

Sadly not: rough sleeping has risen by 55% since 2010 yet is now being criminalized in many boroughs of London and elsewhere, as is begging. Under Operation Encompass Rough Sleepers are arrested and told if they return to the borough (where their entire social network might be) they will be issued an ASBO, and if they break that they face a fine or prison.

In short, the government is closing all the exits out of the wage-labour rentier economy. It refuses to regulate the hyper-inflation of the housing and rental sectors that are creating homelessness but then does legislate to criminalize the victims of those market forces (the homeless) and those who try to find solutions for themselves ( squatters).

This encircling is nearly complete: the residents of Runnymede were told in the High Court last week they had no right to appeal and were evicted on Wednesday. They slept outside a public toilet that night and on Thursday opened a squat in a disused Adult Learning Centre.

They have already been served notice to quit. So it goes on. 

Facebook: Diggers2012 – where all the photos came from!

Nicholas Sebley is a freelance journalist and artist.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

The UK could generate more than 80% of its electricity from wind, solar and tidal power within 15 years and keep the lights on.

And it’s all possible thanks to advances in storage and smart technology, and falls in the costs of renewables, according to a new study

The analysis comes as experts and politicians remain divided over how and whether the UK can cut its emissions, following the example of countries like Sweden and Denmark.

The UK government is keen to put its efforts into large-scale projects such as the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant. Just today the Chancellor, George Osborne, accounced a £2 billion loan guarantee for the project – a first instalment on a promised £17 billion loan guarantee package.

In the opposite corner, the chief executive of the UK’s National Grid recently said in an interview that “the idea of large power stations is outdated.”

The study by consultants Demand Energy Equality (DEE) for Greenpeace, ‘2030 Energy Scenarios‘, is one of the first to look at whether the UK could meet its targets to reduce emissions and tackle climate change through renewable energy, efficiency, batteries and smart technology.

It meets a target for carbon emissions of 50g for every kWh of energy produced – in line with the advice of the government’s independent climate committee.

It’s a tricky question, particularly because of concerns that getting much more than half our power from renewables would be inefficient, needing huge amounts of backup power for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.

The report suggests it is possible to avoid these pitfalls – though it isn’t easy.

Eleven years of weather data analysed

The study’s authors used hourly weather data for 11 years and modelled how national demand could be met, down to the household level, if the UK were relying on renewables – chiefly wind, solar, and tidal power – for more than 80% of its electricity.

To make things even more complex the study also assumes we use electricity not just for traditional purposes, but also for transport and heat – as more people begin to drive electric cars and use electricity instead of gas to heat their homes.

The DEE study did not include a full technical cost modelling exercise – partly because the cost of renewable energy keeps changing.

However, the rapidly falling cost of onshore wind, solar and offshore wind – along with the high cost of alternatives such as nuclear and clean coal – mean that the costs would be similar to other cost-effective ways of decarbonising the power sector using a different mix of technologies.

A comparison of the scenario in the study with a ‘high renewables scenario‘ done by energy analysts Poyry for the government’s independent climate advisors, the Climate Change Committee, indicates that the costs would not be very different.

It is likely that levels of investment would now be lower than those estimated when the Poyry scenario was published four years ago because of the changing costs of different technologies – in particular the falling costs of renewables.

So here are four important steps to delivering renewables in the UK …