ABSTRACT: The good news that resolves and dissolves all the arguments about the inadequacies of renewable energy is delivered to us by the Telegraph on December 12, 2020 in their article on a cost comparison between renewables and fossil fuels. It says that a family in England that was paying energy bills of £713/month = £8,556 a year was able to reduce their cost of energy by £4,380 a year by switching from fossil fuels to renewables. This proves that renewables are now competitive with fossil fuels in the market for energy. Even greater support for this conclusion is found in that the family was able to further lower their energy cost by £1,800 a year when they replaced their Jaguar gasoline car with a Tesla electric car. This story in the Telegraph shows that renewable energy technology has matured and is now competitive in the market for energy to the point that fossil fuels can no longer compete with renewables not only for home needs and and swimming pool heating needs but for automobile transportation as well. The dramatic and amazing conclusion we can draw from the information provided by the Telegraph is that we no longer need to create fear of climate change to force the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables that we want. This remarkable piece of information from the Telegraph marks the end of the climate change fearmongering movement that had become necessary to force the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables when renewables were not competitive in the market for energy. THIS BREAKTHROUGH PIECE IN THE TELEGRAPH MARKS THE END OF CLIMATE ACTIVISM AGAINST FOSSIL FUELS AND CAPITALISM BECAUSE CLIMATE ACTION WILL NOW BE DRIVEN IN THE MARKET FOR ENERGY BY CAPITALISM ITSELF AND BY THE MARKET FOR ENERGY, AND NOT BY CLIMATE SCIENCE. CAPITALISM WILL RID THE WORLD OF FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS.

THIS POST IS A CRITICAL REVIEW OF AN ARTICLE IN THE TELEGRAPH THAT RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CCOMPETITIVE AGAINST FOSSIL FUELS IN TERMS OF BOTH COST AND UTILITY. LINK TO SOURCE: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/going-green-saved-family-nearly-7000-year-energy-bills/

WITH THANKS TO PAUL HOMEWOOD OF NOT-A-LOT-OF-PEOPLE-KNOW-THAT: LINK: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2020/12/12/telegraphs-puff-for-green-energy/

PART-1: WHAT THE TELEGRAPH ARTICLE SAYS

The swarms of young people moving back home during coronavirus lockdowns will have left many parents paying higher household bills. One exception to this is the family of 24-year-old Grace Stencil, from Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, who helped her parents save more than £7,000 a year on their bills by switching to an eco-friendly lifestyle. Ms Stencil, who runs her own company selling CBD-infused products, moved in with her parents when lockdown struck and quickly realised that they were spending far more on energy bills than they needed to. When her parents received a monthly energy bill of £713, equivalent to £8,556 a year, she set about looking for ways to cut costs – and their carbon footprint. “My mum mentioned in passing how much they were paying. Over the years, we’d had a pool put in, which costs a lot to heat, and started heating our conservatory in the winter. Things just started adding up,” Ms Stencil said. “I thought the cost was absurd. So, we all sat down together and went through the changes we could make.” While the aim was to save money, Ms Stencil was also keen to nudge her family towards a greener lifestyle. After trawling a price comparison website, the family found they could cut their energy bill by £4,380 a year by switching from their old supplier’s expensive Economy 7 tariff to a cheaper deal with Pure Planet, a renewable energy supplier, while at the same time cutting their carbon dioxide emissions to zero. Ms Stencil’s father, who commuted less during lockdown, also decided to sell the family’s petrol-powered Jaguar and switch to an electric Tesla, which they expect to reduce their running costs by more than £1,800 a year. Ms Stencil said: “My dad has always liked cars and thought he would save money in the long run by switching to electric. As he wasn’t travelling to London too much during the lockdown, it was a convenient option.” On top of switching energy supplier and swapping petrol for electric, the family decided to convert the Aga from an oil-burning model to an electric one, saving them around £1,680 a year. They also installed a better swimming pool cover to reduce heat loss by 85pc and cut running costs by a third, saving £780 a year. In their mission to go green, the Stencils even replaced their lightbulbs with more efficient LED versions. “Once we got going, we just thought, ‘we are on a roll’,” Ms Stencil said. Without taking into account the cost or savings of the new Tesla, the family spent a total of £2,800 on home improvements, which they should recoup through energy bill savings in roughly four months. Including the outlay for the Tesla Model X, it would take just over five years to make up for the expenditure with savings. There is plenty of research suggesting that most people would like to be more environmentally friendly, but according to the Pure Planet People & Power Report, 81pc of adults admit they could do more to be sustainable at home. The survey found that almost two thirds of the public think it is more expensive to lead a sustainable lifestyle, while only 5pc think it is cheaper to be green. Almost a third of 18-to-35-year-old said they could not afford to be more sustainable, compared to one-in-five over-55s. Cordelia Samson, of comparison website Uswitch, said: “It’s a common misconception that renewable energy plans are more expensive than other types of tariff. Green energy is advancing rapidly, meaning renewable energy can be cheaper to produce than ever before. This means that green energy plans can be some of the cheapest on the market.” Ms Stencil added: “There are so many statistics coming out on how we’re ruining the world, and I think every little helps. If everyone does their part, it’s going to make an impact. “I recommend going green completely – it really wasn’t difficult. “Our life hasn’t changed dramatically. It took a maximum of four hours for us to sit down and figure out what changes to make. The changes then happened within a week. Now we have better consciences.” And cheaper bills, too.

PART-2: CRITICAL COMMENTARY

This article says that renewable energy is now competitive with fossil fuels and that therefore it sells itself in the market for energy without the need for fear based activism against fossil fuels as for example in the case of catastrophic human caused climate change by way of fossil fuel emissions. This claim is inconsistent with the claim by climate science that the inability of renewables to compete with fossil fuels in the market for energy derives from the unavailability of energy storage technologies for renewable energy; but that promising new technologies for energy storage are under development that will eventually make renewables competitive with fossil fuels in the market for energy without the need for fear based climate activism against fossil fuels: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/18/energy-storage/ . A likely explanation of this contradiction is that advances have been made in those energy storage technologies that have rendered renewables competitive in the market.

IN THE RELATED POST ON ENERGY STORAGE TECHNOLOGY R&D WE NOTE AS FOLLOWS:

A HISTORICAL CONTEXT: In the history of energy that drove human progress since the Neolithic Revolution from human power, animal power, the invention of the wheel, water wheels, windmills, the combustion of carbon based fuels, and nuclear power, the evolution of energy technology was orderly and progressive. These changes were driven by ideas and innovations in a market economy. The dynamics of a market for energy that selects winners and losers is the evolutionary process gave us the fossil fueled economy we live in today.

FOSSIL FUELS: However, certain downsides to fossil fuels were identified in the 1960s when smog, oil spills, acid rain, and other environmental issues emerged as serious issues from both human welfare and ecology points of view. The 1960s hippie movement against fossil fuels was a product of these weaknesses in fossil fuel energy. These environmental problems with fossil fuels spearheaded the renewable energy movement more than 50 years ago with innovations in wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal energy. The renewable energy technology that had held out the greatest promise in those days was tidal energy. However, in the market for energy, even as renewable energy was being developed and implemented, fossil fuels regained the upper hand with technological innovations needed to overcome environmental laws enforced by the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

These innovations by the fossil fuel industry solved the smog, the acid rain, and oil spill problems and weakened the case against fossil fuels. At the same time, the widespread implementation of renewables revealed their operational weaknesses in terms of intermittency, high maintenance cost, and power output variability such that the power delivered was not under human control without fossil fueled backup power. As a result, renewables could not compete with the new improved fossil fuel energy product free of smog and acid rain. Wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal waned and retreated into a near death experience.

This left the large and growing environmental movement against fossil fuels in shock because it had seemed for a time that the war against fossil fuels had been won and that clean green renewables were the future of energy. The rise of fear based climate change environmentalism against fossil fuels is best understood in this historical context. Fear based climate change is preached by climate scientists and activist with horrific predictions of extreme heat, the collapse of polar ice sheets, catastrophic sea level rise, extreme weather in terms of storms, droughts, floods, heat waves, forest fires, leading to mass extinctions, and the collapse of civilization. An evolution of the phraseology from global warming to global heating and from climate change to climate crisis or climate emergency is best understood in the context of fear based activism against fossil fuels. The only escape from these climate horrors is offered in the form of moving the world’s energy infrastructure from fossil fuels to renewables. These features of the theory of anthropogenic global warming and climate change leave little doubt that it is anti fossil fuel activism.

In the related post on energy storage solutions to the intermittency and unreliability of renewables: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/18/energy-storage/ we show that new technologies such as TES, PCM, and PHES, currently in development, are held out as solutions to the unreliability of renewables that will make renewables competitive with fossil fuels in the market for energy. In the context of the history of the cart before the horse forced implementation of wind and solar renewables with fear based activism, the promising developments for reliable wind and solar renewables, offered after the fact, reveals the failure and the fallacy of forced fear based activism as a method for promoting an unreliable energy technology that is not ready to compete in the market for energy. A technology still under development and not ready for the market was thus imposed with activism.

This grotesque history of the attempt to force an energy transition with a technology that is still under development is revealed as yet another criminal failure in a poorly thought out activism against fossil fuels before the proposed alternative energy technology was ready for implementation. The admission after 40 years of climate activism against fossil fuels that technologies for reliability of renewables are still in development: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/18/energy-storage/ discredits the climate movement against fossil fuels. There should be criminal charges or at the least lawsuits against the perpetrators of this scam.

THE GOOD NEWS FROM THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: DECEMBER 2020

The good news that resolves and dissolves all the arguments about the inadequacies of renewable energy made above is delivered to us by the Telegraph on December 12, 2020 in their article on a cost comparison between renewables and fossil fuels.

It says that a family in England that was paying energy bills of £713/month = £8,556 a year was able to reduce their cost of energy by £4,380 a year by switching from fossil fuels to renewables.

This proves that renewables are now competitive with fossil fuels in the market for energy. Even greater support for this conclusion is found in that the family was able to further lower their energy cost by £1,800 a year when they replaced their Jaguar gasoline car with a Tesla electric car.

This story in the Telegraph shows that renewable energy technology has matured and is now competitive in the market for energy to the point that fossil fuels can no longer compete with renewables not only for home needs and and swimming pool heating needs but for automobile transportation as well. The dramatic and amazing conclusion we can draw from the information provided by the Telegraph is that we no longer need to create fear of climate change to force the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables that we want.

This remarkable piece of information from the Telegraph marks the end of the climate change fearmongering movement that had become necessary to force the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables when renewables were not competitive in the market for energy.

THIS BREAKTHROUGH PIECE IN THE TELEGRAPH MARKS THE END OF CLIMATE ACTIVISM AGAINST FOSSIL FUELS AND CAPITALISM BECAUSE CLIMATE ACTION WILL NOW BE DRIVEN NOT BY CLIMATE SCIENCE BUT BY THE MARKET FOR ENERGY AND BY CAPITALISM ITSELF. THE MARKET FOR ENERGY WILL RID THE WORLD OF FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS.