Profound Quotes

"Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." From 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower' by William Blum

From "9-11, Six Years Later": "If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure of government agencies. " Paul Craig Roberts

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Danish Investigate Policy Copied by Campbell « PolicyCentre.ca

Danish Investigate Policy Copied by Campbell

December 19, 2009 in economy policy, environmental policy, provincial politics | Comments (2)

Tags: bc politics, environment

The Vancouver Sun profiled Premier Gordon Campbell on Friday in Denmark endorsing not the Copenhagen Accord, but the Danish policy of subsidizing private wind power at the expense of taxpayers. He claimed that Denmark sets an example for us if we want to develop clean energy. And indeed it appears that his government has been in many ways following the Danish example. Unfortunately, neither he nor his advisers appears to have taken the time to discover how wrong the Danish approach has turned out to be and how costly it will be to Danish taxpayers.

Campbell wants to develop privately owned small hydro and wind power to produce something in the order of 20% of the energy produced in BC. Similarly, Denmark set out a few years ago to have 20% of its electrical energy capacity in the form of wind. While Campbell’s initiative is still getting started, Denmark’s has been underway long enough to draw some conclusions. And they are not encouraging .

Denmark has now pays for about 19% of its electrical capacity in the form of wind power, but in reality only about 2% of its electricity consumption has turned out to come from it. In the course of getting to this point, the government signed contracts with private wind producers at guaranteed prices well above the average market prices for electricity, arguing that this was necessary to meet the extra costs of clean energy. The results of this program are now clear. The problems are almost exactly those that I and others have argued will accompany the Campbell policy in BC.

The biggest and most obvious problem is that the electricity produced by wind has seldom been produced when it is needed by the system. Wind as we all know is highly variable, both within any given week and seasonally. Electricity consumption is also variable, by time of day and season. But these two types of variations are hardly ever in synch. Far too often when peak electricity is required from the windmills, there is little or no wind to provide it. So the electricity has to be acquired from outside Denmark because no cheaper alternate sources have been developed in Denmark. The affect is that the government must pay a premium for electricity, usually from dirty sources, at a large loss to Danish taxpayers Other times, like at night or in the summer and fall, there is plenty of wind energy, but lots of hydro power is available cheaply because consumption has dropped (at night) or because hydro dams are full and river runs high (summer and fall). At these times the government must still buy the high priced wind power it contracted for, but it must turn around and find find buyers outside the country at deep price discounts. The affect is that the government incurs a large loss that has to be paid for by taxpayers.

Experience has established that the wind producers are in fact able to supply only about 2% of the demand for electricity on a reliable and continuing basis, rather than the 19% that is being paid for. The losses to the government and taxpayers are becoming so large that the government is now looking at developing the capacity to make up the missing 17% with new hydro and gas powered plants all at a large additional cost to the government. And it is stuck with buying all of the unreliable wind energy at inflated prices under the contracts in place and selling that energy outside the country at a large loss.

The overall result has been that developers of the private wind power have become wealthy at taxpayers expense as large amounts of money have in affect been laundered through the energy supply system into their private coffers. Taxpayers and energy consumers are the big losers, while the climate in the end has gained virtually nothing.

This is exactly what many of us have argued will be the result of the energy policy being forced on BC by the Campbell government. It is the result that the BC Utilities Commission tried to avert with its ruling earlier this year. The Cam.pbell government has now used legislation to overturn that ruling. It will press ahead with highly subsidized private hydro power that is supposed to replace the part of our energy supplied by natural gas during periods of low water flows. But this it can not do, because the private power producers will have no power to produce at these times. They will only have power when BC Hydro already has more than enough to supply BC. So it will have to sold outside BC as surplus at a large loss to BC Hydro.

Danish Investigate Policy Copied by Campbell « PolicyCentre.ca.

December 28th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment |

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