Hot air blows Telegraph off course

Our old pals at REF have been up to some of their normal mischief. With the co-operation of Andrew Gilligan at the Telegraph, they’ve put out another tranche of misinformation about wind, this time focusing on the experience of Denmark.

As anyone remotely interested in renewables knows, Denmark is one of the world leaders in wind power, the Danish Government having had a clear policy focus on it for the last few decades. Currently, about 20% of their electricity is produced by wind turbines. However, not all of that electricity is used by the Danes themselves – wind power is variable, and so sometimes there’s excess production at night. This excess production is sold to Norway and Sweden, who have extensive hydropower plants, which can be used to store electricity by pumping water uphill. This is then sold back to Denmark or used in the country that bought it.

Apparently having ready access to storage facilities for wind power but having to pay for them is a terrible imposition on the Danish people, or so the Telegraph believes. It certainly couldn’t lead to Denmark having a pre-tax price of electricity that’s 14% lower than the UK could it? Oh wait, it could.

However, it is true that household customers in Denmark do have the highest electricity bills in Europe when tax is added back in – which the Telegraph attributes ‘in part’ to wind power. Over half an average household bill is comprised of energy taxes – but what part of that tax is actually attributable to wind energy?

We can see from this page on the Danish Energy Saving Trust that the portion of the bill that supports wind energy is called Public Liabilities… and from this example bill that ‘Public Liabilities’ (or, as it is there, ‘Offentlige Forpligtelser’) that it comprises about 3.5% of the overall bill. The real reason electricity bills are high in Denmark has very little to do with wind power and much more to do with high overall taxes.

Even still, according to REF this export arrangement is a terrible model for Britain to follow:

"Our system is totally different," says [John Constable, REF’s Research Director]. "We are an island grid. We have virtually no interconnectors with other countries, only a very limited amount of hydro, and the British Government simply doesn't know how to integrate the very large fleets of wind turbines that they are blithely introducing. It's a leap in the dark."

The news that the British Government has no idea how to integrate large amounts of wind power will come as an enormous surprise to National Grid, who consulted on their plans to do just that last year. It’s quite surprising that the Research Director of REF would have no idea that scenarios on integrating wind into the grid had already been set out by the body that operates the grid. It’s even more surprising given that REF actually responded to the consultation.

Surely someone should’ve told John that.