Blowhards at The Economist

Time was that the first questions that -The Economist-, confronted by a proposal, would pose were: "is it a good idea?" and "is it economic?" No longer, under the regime that has ruled there for the past eighteen months or so. They really ought to change the name of the magazine.

This week's edition reports on ideas for distributing and storing renewable electricity. The articles are placed in the -Science and technology- section, presumably on the basis that it takes science to do it, though the ideas on which the articles are based are over a century old. On this basis, their reports on the automotive industry ought to go in the -Science and technology- section too. It takes science to make the internal combustion engine work.

The ideas considered are that (a) we can smooth out the intermittency of certain types of renewable electricity if we have a big enough grid, and (b) we can store some of that intermittent energy, to use it when we want it rather than when it is available, by compressing air. Well yes, of course we -can- do it, but -is it a good idea-? All sorts of things are feasible that aren't worth doing.

Wind and wave power is intermittent in a different way to solar and tidal power. The latter is regular and predictable, the former irregular and unpredictable (at least in Northern Europe). Storage really only lends itself to applications where the imbalance between supply and demand is predictable and varies regularly over a short period. The costs of storage to balance swings whose intervals vary but may stretch for weeks are an order of magnitude higher than the costs of storage to balance variation on a regular 24-hour cycle. Thermal winds, such as those experienced in parts of southern Europe, may be sufficiently regular to justify looking at storage. Wind caused by pressure systems - the wind we get on the whole in northern Europe - is not.

The same problem afflicts plans to compensate for intermittency through massive transmission systems. Quite recently, an Oxford academic produced a study "demonstrating" that there should be few network issues from wind-power if we had a strong network of sites around the country, on exactly the same logic (the wind will always be blowing somewhere). Of course, this has turned out to be as true as most other academic studies not grounded in market reality. The reality is that the wind resource, demand patterns and network constraints are so variable across the UK that there is no prospect that installations will be balanced geographically. Even if the theory worked (which it doesn't - have a look at the effects of high-pressure systems), why would you build windmills in parts of the South-East where the wind rarely blows, just to fill in the gaps in output from Scotland, Wales and the South-West? So now companies like Airtricity (who just by coincidence happen to be potential beneficiaries) think someone should pay for a Europe-wide super-network to overcome the problems of regional imbalances. This is both so expensive and so unlikely to convert wind-power into a baseload supplier that no one in their right mind would invest in it. But governments might.

The test should be not whether scientists and -The Economist- think it can be done, or whether I don't, but whether the economics are justified. As -The Economist- notes, although electrical storage systems have been deployed in many places around the world, they have almost never been attached to intermittent renewables. There is a reason for that. This economic reality should not be overridden by large doses of government money. It is telling us something important - that however much journalists, scientists and investors in renewables might like the idea of the government paying to make their technology more competitive, these "improvements" are inherently uncompetitive.

-The Economist's- answer should be easy: internalise the external cost of carbon through a mechanism that takes account of risk, and the balance between mitigation and adaptation, and then let the market decide how best to respond to those price signals. Don't decide what needs to be done, and then adjust the price (i.e. support) to deliver it. There's no point having markets if governments rig the outcome like that, which our supposedly centrist parties do (or propose to do) all the time nowadays. Socialization of our economy by stealth from Brussells or Westminster - that is our choice at the moment. And even -The Economist- has given up the fight.