The wind industry never lets facts shake the entrenched delusion that wind power is cheap and always available. One of the more troublesome facts relates to cost. Whereas the true and total cost of onshore wind power is merely exorbitant, taking these things kilometres offshore means the true cost of (occasionally) generating electricity is off the charts.
Notwithstanding efforts to bury them, the facts keep raising their meddlesome heads.
2023 was the year when the offshore wind industry’s grand implosion began. Dozens of projects have been scrapped and others are now highly doubtful. As the insane (and rising) cost of attempting to generate electricity with no commercial value in hostile marine environments began to bite, investors baulked.
As Andrew Montford explains below the efforts by wind industry propagandists and their political enablers to conceal the true costs of offshore wind power as they continue to escalate are reminiscent of Comical Ali’s efforts to conceal America’s conquest of Iraq in 2003.
Politicians must drop their ‘Comical Ali’ approach to offshore wind costs
Conservative Home
Andrew Montford
27 May 2024
According to officials at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), offshore wind power is around half the cost of electricity from gas turbines. But in Parliament recently, David Frost exposed the problem with this claim. If what DESNZ says is true, he observed, it is hard to understand why we still have to subsidise windfarms. And harder still to understand why we have just had to give them a 70 per cent increase in the guaranteed price they receive.
It was striking that the energy minister Martin Callanan, responding for the Government, failed to answer the question, merely reiterating the claim that wind is cheaper than gas. His evasion tells a story, and highlights the great deception at the heart of the Net Zero policy.
For years, governments have told us of a revolution in windfarms costs. Developers may even have believed it themselves, submitting extraordinarily low bids into the renewables auctions. But for the sums to add up, costs had to go down and output had to go up. So developers shaved engineering margins to the bone and moved to bigger turbines and windier sites far from shore.
The results have been an almost complete disappointment. In the hostile environment of the North Sea, operating costs have soared, and those big turbines have worn out much faster than expected. It seems that engineering margins had been cut too far. This is the real reason developers forced such an astonishing price increase from the Government. They can’t get the costs down in the way that was claimed.
So while DESNZ says that offshore wind has been cheap for many years, the sums demanded at auction, and the hard data from windfarm financial accounts, tell another story.
This leaves Callanan and the officials who briefed him, looking foolish, if not mendacious. They can’t have it both ways. If wind is cheap, it doesn’t need subsidies, let alone the astonishing largesse now on offer. Either the Government is making consumers vastly overpay for wind power, or they are not telling us the truth about the costs. It should be a resigning matter either way, or would have been, in the absence of the election.
Nevertheless, ministers have to maintain the charade. Offshore wind is the sine qua non of the Net Zero project. Almost every transition – from petrol cars to electric, from gas boilers to heat pumps – depends on the availablity of cheap offshore wind power. Without it, the cost of Net Zero soars.
The official estimate of that cost, from the Climate Change Committee, assumes that wind power can be had for around half the price currently on offer in the renewables auctions. That claim has always been absurd, and is just one of a series of scandals around the CCC’s cost estimates, which are now entirely discredited. It is perhaps not surprising that Claire Coutinho, asked a few weeks ago by GBNews’s Camilla Tominey for her current estimate of the cost of Net Zero, chose to dodge the question. One thing we can be sure is it is that it is much more expensive than we have been led to believe.
Few who were alive at the time of second Gulf War can forget the TV performances of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (‘Comical Ali’), Saddam Hussein’s Information Minister, who hilariously explained, night after night, that US forces were being driven back by the heroic Iraqi resistance, his insistence in Uncle Sam’s impending rout continuing entirely unabashed, even as US troops were knocking at the gates of Baghdad.
That extraordinary moment, when the truth finally became undeniable, has parallels in Coutinho’s announcement that she had surrendered to the windfarm developers and decided to award them the extraordinary price increase they wanted. Suddenly the idea of “cheap renewables” was exposed as a lie once and for all.
As the American tanks rolled into view, Comical Ali kept up the charade for a few more hours before disappearing forever. So, I imagine, Comical Callanan will continue to insist that wind power is cheap for a little longer, before he too will be swept away, consigned to the history books as a ridiculous figure of fun.
Conservative Home
STOP THESE THINGS 
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (‘Comical Ali’),
He was referred to as Bhagdad Bob was what I remember.