Barclays Sounds the Alarm on Renewable Energy
Barclays PLC dropped a bombshell white paper last week titled ‘Transition Realism: A Stranded Asset Perspective on the Energy Transition’. The report pulls no punches in flipping the script on the climate establishment’s favourite bogeyman. For years, we’ve been lectured that fossil fuels are the quintessential stranded assets — trillions in oil, gas and coal reserves doomed to remain unused underground as the world races to Net Zero. The term “stranded assets” – investments that suffer unanticipated or premature write-downs, devaluations or conversion to liabilities – became a fixture of climate-policy discourse.
Yet, as the Barclays analysts point out, the real risks now lurk in the renewable sector. “Stranded-asset risk is becoming system wide,” the paper warns. “Historically, stranding meant coal plants. Today, renewables facing multi-year interconnection queues, curtailment and congestion risks are increasingly likely to be impaired.”
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Government and Globalists. It is NOT GREEN. It is eco-destroying and economic-destroying. Such programs can only hide inside Big Government. It impacts all of us. Even locally, our county has buried some £60-100 mn in NutZero nonsense in the £2.3 billion Council budget. That will only increase – along with my property tax (5% p.a.) and business rates (10% p.a.). Absolute insanity.
It is indeed insanity, but as someone pointed out “People go mad in herds and only recover their senses slowly one by one”—–We see senses starting to recover but huge damage has been done. But we have to remember that this is what the UN Sustainable Development Agenda was all about. ——“The lifestyles of the affluent middle classes with central heating, air conditioning, travel in private cars and high meat intake is unsustainable”. —–Politicians all over the western world now see they are losing support and votes as living standards plummet, and the ideology will simply be ditched.
Barclays have finally worked out that Nut Zero really means nil, nothing and zero and once the electricity blackouts come, as they will, they will have no business left.
Great article, and yes renewable’s are not replacing fossil fuels, they are simply energy savers. They will save a little bit of fossil fuel use, but ofcourse at great expense as we see in all countries like the UK and Germany who have gone all out for wind and have the highest electricity prices in the world. This then causes energy poverty and destroys Industrial competitiveness. But this ofcourse was the whole idea from the start with climate change as the seemingly plausible excuse.
It was obvious to anyone not blinded by group think about CO2 emissions that the world cannot run on wind and sun and that Politicians in the UK and Europe apart from the Miliband’s of this world who will cling to the phoney planet saving lifeboat till he drowns are having to backtrack because you cannot live in a fantasy world forever.
Renewables are not “energy savers” in net terms they are actually grotesquely expensive but they do serve the purpose of stripping wealth from the proles.
I am quoting Alex Epstein on “energy savers”. —–They will save a little bit of fossil fuels, but as Alex points out and I just mentioned above the cost is astronomical. So although we may save some fossil fuel use when using the wind, overall the cost/benefit makes renewable use absurd, and you might have noticed my many comments on here before regarding this.
It’s like buying a hugely expensive sports car (that only works sometimes) in order to help pull your truck around to save diesel.
Trust me I know.
I suggest attention is also given to another way that assets can become stranded. I understand that battery backup installations are anticipated to last 25 years. Installers often rent land for them at attractive annual rentals. The owners put fundsd aside from year 15 yo pay for the removal (and as they present it, the replacement) of the battery units. Owners are typically special purpose vehicles with no staff or purpose other than ownership and operation is done by a different company. Usually all offshore. There are two scenarios where this could be a major problem for the land owner. One would arise following a major fire at a battery site. Perhaps many units would be damaged and that means they would have to be replaced. If no funds had been set aside there could easily be circumstances where the SPV would abandon the site and close. Costs of removal and pollution clean-up could bankrupt the owner. A second cause could be economic. If (or when as we all hope) governments come to realise the stupidity of subsidising battery farms it would no longer be economic to operate them. Abandonment would be the chjeapest way out. The SPV distributes all… Read more »
“the owner would have a major removal cost to regain their land.”
Well, indeed, but you’re assuming here that it might even be possible to remove them.
As I understand it, there are currently no large scale facilities for recycling either the turbines, solar panels or the batteries?
In addition, given the toxic nature of the emissions from a battery fire, it’s likely the land they stand on would be useless for future crops, or grazing for some time, surely?
The narrative of “cheap” turbines and solar panels really bothers me. It’s like buying a “cheap” printer only to find out you need to sign up to a $30 per month ink subscription before you print a single page.
Intermittent weather based sources are required to be massively overbuilt and require huge amounts of storage to account for their poor capacity factor, they require massive amounts of transmission upgrades to move the electrons where it’s needed in that moment, and synchronous condensers to provide inertia and reactive power before they can even be considered remotely fit for purpose. Nothing about that is cheap.
Plus you still need dispatchable gas or other generators to back them up when it isn’t sunny / windy…
See this letter from Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Lenin on the electrification of Russia.
The climate change nonsense is just that – nonsense. This has never been about the planet and worth pointing out that even if the climate of the planet was going to change such that humanity could not survive there is F A we could do about it. What this is really about is control and wealth. Populations to be brought under stricter controls such that they exist simply to feed the avarice of the wealthy useless elites.
Climate Change is just a joke at our expense – literally, but it will serve its purpose if it ushers in the New World Order and a truly slave society.
Well, who could have seen this coming? All we have to do is build more windmills and everything will be fine, right? Right?
Net Zero = zero growth, zero industry, and ultimately zero prosperity and zero society.
In the UK the insane net zero policies and vast taxpayer subsidies have resulted in an absolutely colossal misallocation of resources to such things as ugly and inherently inefficient windmills, productive and very valuable fields being carpeted with ugly and useless solar panels, useless heat pumps, inferior EVs, and unnecessary infrastructure.
This enormous destruction of wealth has so far been partly covered up by the government borrowing more and more money, helped by the Bank of England printing it by the sackload. Like all frauds, however it will eventually be revealed for what it is.
Great article, great perspective. It’s obvious that these grid wrecking so-called renewables will sooner or later all have to be decommissioned – stranded assets indeed. I remember back to when I was barred from commenting on the Guardian for criticising their stupid “Keep it in the ground” anti-fossil fuel campaign: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/keep-it-in-the-ground-blog/2015/mar/25/keep-it-in-the-ground-campaign-six-things-weve-learned.
Sadly, I had to decline a dinner with Tilak with other climate/energy realists last night.
Pity you were not there. We had a great chinwag.
Barclays – a bank and finance outfit – suddenly realises electricity generation and energy is a market system, not just about machines and wires.
Therefore it requires capital input which relies on it being profitable.
And “suddenly” Barclays has grasped that any business which cannot match or plan its output to supply varying demand, operates at random dependent on meteorological conditions, has no consistent revenue, unmanageable cash-flow or budget… is unviable.
It’s only taken them 30 years to figure it out. Better late than never I suppose. However not a good advert for their financial competence or being best people to look after your money.
To quote Alex Epstein: Solar and Wind aren’t real power sources, they’re intermittent fuel-savers. Anyone who thinks that is a good idea to replace a power generator consistently working at about ~90% productivity with systems that work unreliably and intermittently and achieving less than ~18% productivity, and dependent on massive public subsidies, must be in error or malign. The poor productivity of Weather-Dependent “Renewables” means that power installations would have to be about 5-6 times larger in scale. They thus cost more than conventional gas, coal and even nuclear generators. https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/refuting-the-idea-that-weather-dependent-renewables-are-cheap/ Fossil fuel power generation does produce Carbon Dioxide CO2, but CO2’s warming effectiveness diminishes with increased concentration. While CO2 does make some contribution to Global temperature, its further effect is now radically limited. Gas-firing results in about half the CO2 emissions of Coal and about a quarter of imported biomass. The UK only produces ~0.8% of Global CO2 emissions. But, CO2 is essential Plant Food, its rise in atmospheric concentration has already resulted in massive increases in plant and crop productivity worldwide. So, never forget Sun Tsu’s first art of war: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” That is exactly what is happening as Western governments pursue… Read more »
“The UK only produces ~0.8% of Global CO2 emissions.”
I’m not sure this is correct, is it? Manmade emissions are, apparently around 3% of ‘global’ emissions and the UK’s contribution is 0.8% of that 3%, I think… which is a terribly small amount to base any policy on.
Also, I’ve never seen any evidence to suggest that mankind’s contribution is somehow significantly greater than the 97% from natural sources.
Great comment, I couldn’t agree more.
How can supposedly intelligent people get things so wrong.
Several years ago I sacked my financial adviser for his insistence that ESG was the way to go. He was wrong then but I bet he’s still convinced he’s right, these people are ideologically wedded to their fantasy and will never accept reality.
How true. How unfortunate is the outcome for most of us.