Britain has a wind problem

Spectator

2 days ago

Climate change is giving Britain more violent weather, with ever-increasing storms tearing down our trees and whipping up waves which erode our coastlines. No one ever seems to get into trouble for saying the above – as many did yet again during Storm Floris last week – in spite of it being the inverse of the truth. Actually, Britain has been experiencing a downwards trend in average and extreme wind speeds for the past four decades.
One place where they won't be making that mistake, though, is the boardroom at German energy company RWE, which became the second wind company this week to report some financial disappointment – after Danish wind company Orsted announced a rights issue to fund offshore wind projects. RWE's profit fell by a quarter in the first half of this year, which it blamed on low wind speeds. I don't usually have a lot of time for companies which try to blame lousy results on the weather, but in this case you can see RWE's point by looking at the weather charts. Floris aside (and even she failed to live up to dire warnings) northern Europe has spent much of this year under becalmed, anticyclonic conditions. When the wind does blow, your wind turbines can't turn, hence the falling profits.
Falling wind speeds – both in Britain and around most of the world – is the climatic trend we hear little about because it doesn't fit in with the general alarmist message. We have plenty of scientists spewing out projections of increased deaths from heatwaves or trying to calculate the cost of increased rainfall – which has risen by around 10 per cent in the past 60 years. But I have yet to see a single study which seeks to quantify how much damage has been averted because winds have been less strong in recent years than they were when the country was rocked by the Great Storm of 1987 and the Burns' Day storm of 1990.
Generally, a trend towards lower wind speeds is benign. But it is something of an obvious problem when you are trying to build an energy system around wind power, as Britain is doing. Yet there is little sign it has entered Ed Miliband's head that he is trying to tap into a declining resource. The consequences certainly are dawning, however, at wind energy companies which – hit by rising costs as well as falling wind speeds – are demanding ever higher subsidised prices in order to build their plants. The German government has just failed to attract a single bid in its latest round of auctions to build wind farms in the North Sea. The same fate may well face Miliband's latest auction, AR7, which starts this month. This is even though the government has increased the maximum level of 'strike price' – a guaranteed price which rises with inflation for the next 15 years – to £113 million per megawatt-hour, nearly three times what was on offer three years ago.
Besides the general fall in wind speeds, developers also have to take into account a localised phenomenon where wind turbines 'steal' the wind from other turbines which lie in their lee. The more crowded the North Sea becomes with wind turbines, the more acute this phenomenon will become. Green activists like to talk about the world reaching 'peak oil' – an event which keeps advancing into the future – but maybe we are already past the point of peak wind.
At least Miliband can satisfy himself that his solar farms are having a good year, and indeed a good decade. Another climate trend which tends to be under-reported is Britain's increasing sunshine hours. Solar power is not a great solution to Britain's energy problems because of the unfailing tendency of its output to fall to zero when energy demand is at its highest, on winter evenings, but you only have to have been looking out of the window to realise that solar, unlike wind, is going to have a bumper year in Britain. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a hedge fund out there which is going to make a killing by short-selling wind farms and going long on solar farms.