One of the arguments being used in Britain to justify the country’s immense investment in wind power is that it will make the U.K. less reliant on foreign energy suppliers. Oddly, those making that pitch rarely mention how additional steps could be taken towards that objective by increasing North Sea oil and gas production and, onshore, lifting the suspension on fracking, but there we are.
In an article for the Financial Times, Elizabeth Braw raises some issues that are none too helpful for the case that wind power will increase Britain’s energy independence — and the implications are not confined to the U.K.
Braw highlights some recent incidents. The first, last month (I wrote about it here), involved breaches to a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia and damage to two telecommunications cables: one between Sweden and Estonia, the other between Finland and Estonia.
Braw notes:
A suspect has already emerged: the Hong Kong-flagged, Chinese-owned boxship NewNew Polar Bear, which was being escorted by a Russian-flagged vessel. This comes after two undersea cables connecting the Matsu Islands with Taiwan were severed by merchant ships earlier this year, and the mysterious explosions in the Nord Stream pipelines last September.
These incidents are alarming because the west is so dependent on this maritime infrastructure: pipelines to deliver our oil and gas supplies, undersea cables carrying the data for our modern digital economies, and offshore wind to power the energy transition. Wind power currently accounts for 17 per cent of Europe’s electricity, and this figure is set to increase: in an effort to counter the effects of climate change, the EU, Norway and the UK plan to double their offshore wind energy capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050. That will mean a rapid increase in construction, especially for offshore wind, which has only reached 16GW so far.
The reality is that there are already too many miles of undersea infrastructure for effective protection to be much more than a matter of luck.
And then there’s this:
Wind farms face a further, troubling vulnerability: dependence on China in their supply chains. Chinese-made wind turbines cost less than half the average price of those manufactured elsewhere — and while the number of European countries that are using them is still low, Chinese companies have declared their interest in participating in European wind energy auctions and in opening up production facilities on the continent.
Chinese suppliers sell such components at “insanely low” prices, a top European wind energy executive tells me. And then for certain raw materials, “China is the main producer and exporter, and this is especially true for some of the raw materials used in permanent magnets,” says Christoph Zipf of Wind Europe, the European wind energy trade association. (These magnets convert the energy generated by turbine blades into electricity).
In recent months, western suppliers of wind turbine equipment have also begun receiving more offers from prospective Chinese investors who want to form joint ventures or buy significant minority stakes…
Braw reminds her readers that Germany was the world’s leading solar panel producer a decade ago. Those days are gone.
Writing in the FT in June, Harvard professor Graham Allison (my emphasis added):
China manufactures 80 per cent of all the solar panels produced globally. And, as the IEA notes, China’s dominance is even more pronounced when one examines the entire supply chain. It produces 85 per cent of the global supply of solar cells, 88 per cent of solar-grade polysilicon, and 97 per cent of the silicon ingots and wafers that form the core of solar cells.
But Allison argues that this is something that the West would just have to get used to:
While it is painful to recognise and may be politically unacceptable to say so, the brute fact is that in solar, as in other green technologies including electric vehicles, the west’s green future will be red. To be dependent on a nation the EU has declared a “systemic challenge” and the US sees as its principal rival is troubling. Nonetheless, the larger truth is that Europeans, Americans and Chinese inhabit a small planet. Unconstrained greenhouse gas emissions from any of the three can so disrupt the climate that no one can live in it.
Oh, come on.
Nevertheless, Allison should be credited with having the honesty to admit that, as currently envisaged, climate policy has led the West into a dependency on China for solar. He is also right, in this connection, to note the coming threat to (in particular) the European auto sector from imported Chinese EVs.
Back to Braw:
It is no surprise that the European Commission recently launched a “wind package” that will double financing for clean energy manufacturing to €1.4bn and guarantee bank loans to wind power suppliers.
Taxpayers, doubtless, will be rejoicing.
To build up an energy dependency on China is more than “troubling.” It is madness. But if Western countries continue to go down the decarbonization path, that’s most likely what will happen. The best they can probably do is to mitigate the damage by increasing tariffs (or introducing an outright ban) on Chinese imports of solar or wind power equipment. And if that means slowing down the pace of decarbonization in order to buy time for Western manufacturers to increase capacity, so be it. The impact on the climate will be minimal. The effect on the cost of electricity to Western consumers may, however, be rather significant, and will do yet more damage to the idea that wind power is cheap.