Hard School

Impressive but stupid

Christopher Booker had a simple tale to tell Daily Mail readers last Friday. Simple but extremely important, because the story he told and particularly their response to it is representative of the almost incredible ignorance which is dooming Britain.

                

His piece is about the government’s support for plans to build a £1 billion tidal power generating facility. The scheme proposes to enclose 11 square kilometres of Swansea bay with a 9 kilometre breakwater and so generate power by running the trapped water to and fro through 16 huge underwater turbines. In truth it’s both a fascinating and exciting project. It’s also mind-bendingly stupid.

Stupid because the government is offering the company behind the project a guaranteed price of £168 for each megawatt produced. That is well over three times the price paid for electricity generated by conventional coal or gas fired power stations.

Just to hammer the sheer profligate stupidity of the project home, Booker points out that for precisely the same investment a French firm is building a gas fired power station at Carrington that will produce 15 times as much power.

A simpler and more stark illustration of the economic illiteracy of our leaders would be difficult to come by. But if you checked out the comment thread to the article you’d very quickly find out that despite the simplicity and unanswerability of Booker’s argument the Great British public clearly viewed him as a killjoy Cassandra. Here’s the top rated comment:

Great idea. Should have been done years ago. Britain surrounded by water ,and what do they install, windmills. 

In fact all the top rated comments say something to the effect that it’s high time it was done and cost is no object to save the environment.

The idea uppermost in people’s minds seems to be that the power produced by this technological marvel will be “free”. Once we’ve built it, all we have to do is sit back and let the moon do its magic with the tides. Gravy for decades and decades into the future and the planet saved into the bargain.

But, of course, if such power was really “free” we wouldn’t have to bribe somebody with more than three times over the odds to get them to build it in the first place. Every time the British buy a megawatt of this “free” power for £168 they’ll have about £120 less to spend on other things. A price worth paying you might think till you consider that Tidal Lagoon Power the company behind the scheme wants to supply us with 500,000 megawatts a year at that price. So the cost of this “free” power will be half a million times £120. That  amounts to a cost of £60 million a year more than producing the electricity by conventional means. And, get this, there are another five similar schemes in the pipeline.

Economists call that £60 million an opportunity cost. The cost incurred by doing something the stupid way. So when this sparkling new envy-of-the-world tidal power generating facility is up and running the British will have £60 million less every year to spend on groceries, doctors and even the environment for decades to come.

The question is, why is such a scheme that substantially increases the costs of heating a home or powering a factory popular? And not only popular amongst the supposedly dumb right-wing Daily Mail readership. Here’s the most up-rated comment to an article in the high-brow leftie Guardian about the rejection of applications to build wind farms:

Tory-Vermin don’t like wind, do like nukes & want UK serfs to fund nukes by (state owned) EdF amongst others. On-shore wind is certainly far cheaper than nukes – hence the opposition to them. Additionally, it is likely that the wind industry is not giving sufficient money to the Tory-Vermin party (unlike the UK finance sector).

Now although as you would expect from The Guardian the intellectual level of this comment is clearly way above that in the Mail the essential viewpoint on renewable power is identical.

Then consider that the Swansea tidal power project is supported by all three legacy parties, who obviously think that being associated with this plan could translate into votes at the election. They must think so because they all voted for Ed Milliband's economically suicidal Climate Change Act of 2008 which commits Britain to cutting its CO2 emissions by 80% of 1990 levels. Each year the cost of implementing it goes up and up. In 2012/2013 the extra cost of this "free" power was £2 billion. By 2018/2019 it's projected to be £5.3 billion. And get this. In an adversarial parliament where the parties pretend to agree on nothing the Climate Change Act passed with just 5 "No" votes. Closing down the economy and blighting everybody's future is popular!

                

The reason for the popularity is, of course, the decades long propaganda campaign for every kind of environmental idiocy. In education you reap what you sow.  You can’t pander to the Gaia fantasists by showing Al Gore’s mendacious An Inconvenient Truth to every school kid in the land and expect to hear sense from them a decade later. Rubbish in rubbish out as they say.

But after the debt fuelled pretend economic recovery hits a wall.

When the bills become due.

When every penny counts to scrape up enough to pay the interest on the coalition’s doubling of our national debt.

Then the Swansea tidal lagoon vanity project will not be quite so popular.

Or as Benjamin Franklin observed:

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.