He finds no real answers in the “four pillars” of the UK’s energy policy:

The first is that electricity companies should not be allowed to replace those coal-fired power stations which help provide us with 35 per cent of our electricity unless new ones are fitted with a system to pipe off their CO2 emissions and bury them under the North Sea. The Government has allocated some £4 billion for four new plants to pioneer this unproven technology (to be paid for by all of us through electricity bills), but the Tories say that no new plants should be permitted unless carbon capture is already in place.

The Tories’ second headline policy is what they call a “decentralised energy revolution”, subsidising millions of homeowners, firms, schools and hospitals to cover their roofs with solar panels and mini wind turbines. Again, the Government has already got on to this one with its new “feed-in tariff” scheme, appropriately due to start on All Fools’ Day. This will pay 34.5p to the owners of mini-turbines for each kilowatt hour (kWh) of power they feed into the grid, and 41p per kWh for electricity from photovoltaic panels. Even The Guardian’s green crusader, George Monbiot, has denounced this as a scandal, which he estimates will add £8.6 billion to our electricity bills over 20 years.

…the third pillar of their energy policy, which is to support the Government’s plan to see £100 billion spent on 10,000 giant wind turbines, in a further desperate bid to meet the EU’s requirement that, within 10 years, 32 per cent of our electricity must come from renewables. (Last Thursday, our 2,900 existing turbines met just 0.1 per cent of demand, or 1,000th of the electricity we were all using.) Again, even if it were worth doing, there is not the faintest chance that we could install three giant offshore and onshore turbines up to 650 feet high, each costing up to £4 million or more (and almost all produced and installed by foreign-owned companies), every day between now and 2020.

And what is the fourth pillar of the Tories’ energy policy? They want every home in the country to be fitted, at a cost of a further £10 billion, with “smart meters”, to allow for “better management of supply and demand”. Indeed, that is precisely the point about smart meters. They not only allow consumers to monitor their own electricity usage, they also allow electricity companies to “manage supply”, by cutting off the power when not enough is available to the grid.

It sounds like a plan dreamed up by some politically correct schoolchildren. You know, like those we have in the US congress across the pond.

Full story: Telegraph UK

Those who hate environmentalism have spent years looking for the definitive example of a great green rip-off. Finally it arrives, and nobody notices. The government is about to shift £8.6bn from the poor to the middle classes. It expects a loss on this scheme of £8.2bn, or 95%

How is this scheme going to be funded?

On 1 April the government introduces its feed-in tariffs. These oblige electricity companies to pay people for the power they produce at home. The money will come from their [other] customers in the form of higher bills. It would make sense, if we didn’t know that the technologies the scheme will reward are comically inefficient.

All that money to produce energy inefficiently? Ideology above common sense.

The government wants everyone to get the same rate of return. So while the electricity you might generate from large wind turbines and hydro plants will earn you 4.5p per kilowatt hour, mini wind turbines get 34p, and solar panels 41p. In other words, the government acknowledges that micro wind and solar PV in the UK are between seven and nine times less cost-effective than the alternatives.

Just to emphasise how daft the idea is.

The reason for these astonishing costs is that the government expects most people who use this scheme to install solar panels. Solar PV is a great technology – if you live in southern California. But the further from the equator you travel, the less sense it makes. It’s not just that the amount of power PV panels produce at this latitude is risible, they also produce it at the wrong time. In hot countries, where air conditioning guzzles electricity, peak demand coincides with peak solar radiation. In the UK, peak demand takes place between 5pm and 7pm on winter evenings. Do I need to spell out the implications?

But surely it must do some good?

We don’t need to guess the results: the German government made the same mistake 10 years ago. By 2006 its generous feed-in tariffs had stimulated 230,000 solar roofs, at a cost of ¤1.2bn. Their total contribution to the country’s electricity supply was 0.4%. Their total contribution to carbon savings, as a paper in the journal Energy Policy points out, is zero.

There is one way it could make you money, but still not save any carbon emissions.

….it can’t be long before thousands of petty criminals discover the perfect carousel fraud, bypassing their solar panels by connecting the incoming wire to the outgoing wire. By buying electricity for 7p and selling it for 44p (if you sell power to the grid rather than using it yourself, you get an extra 3p), they’ll make a 600% profit.

It saves no emissions, and is just the latest useless eco-accessory.

The solar panel is the ideal modern status symbol, which signifies both wealth and moral superiority, even if it’s perfectly useless.

Source: Guardian UK