So climate alarmists want a rapid, mandatory shift from fossil fuels—chiefly coal and natural gas—to wind and solar to save us all from catastrophic global warming. What comes with that?
The people of England and Wales have found out, and it isn’t pretty.
Over a decade ago, the United Kingdom began a rigorous policy of shutting down coal-fired power plants and replacing them with wind farms and solar arrays to feed its electricity grid. The direct result was skyrocketing electric rates across the country.
The indirect result was rising rates of “fuel poverty” (also called “energy poverty”), defined as when a household must spend 10 percent or more of its income simply on home heating. That doesn’t include lights, refrigerator, washer and dryer, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, television, computer, or anything else–just home heating, just in the months when it’s required.
And the result of increased fuel poverty was increased “excess winter deaths” (EWD).
Don’t misunderstand. EWDs are normal—they’re the excess deaths that occur in winter months compared with the rest of the year simply because colder weather weakens people’s immune systems, so people already vulnerable (the elderly, those with life-threatening chronic diseases, etc.) are more likely to die in cold than in warm weather. Ordinary EWDs like these usually shorten someone’s life only by days or weeks.
But fuel poverty-driven EWDs are different. They’re excess winter deaths that wouldn’t have occurred except that those who die couldn’t afford to heat their homes. Had they been able to, they might have lived for years longer. So an EWD caused by fuel poverty can rob someone of years of life.
And that’s what’s been happening all over England and Wales. Last winter saw an estimated 40,000 EWDs, the most since 1999–2000 (48,440) and topping the flu-induced spike of 2008–9 (36,450).
In each of the last five winters, England and Wales recorded an average of about 27,860 EWDs. Research by the World Health Organization concludes that from 30 to 40 percent of EWDs in Europe and Great Britain over that period are attributable to fuel poverty. If that is so, then fuel poverty caused an average of 8,358 to 11,144 deaths in each of those winters in England and Wales alone.
How many fuel poverty-caused EWDs would similar energy cost increases have caused in the United States, with a population over five-and-a-half times larger? An average of from 46,000 to 61,000 per year. (This doesn’t adjust for the fact that much of the United States experiences much colder winters than Great Britain.)
So here’s a thought for America’s federal and state lawmakers. Next time a lobbyist for the wind or solar industry demands more subsidies and an increase in the mandated share of electricity generated by wind and solar, lawmakers should respond, like the clerk at the drive-up window, “And did you want an extra 61,000 deaths with that?”
Except that the excess EWDs are automatic, no substitutes permitted. This isn’t Burger King. You can’t have it your way.
For documentation on the numbers, and to learn more about fuel poverty-driven EWDs, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Featured image courtesy of ClimateJusticeCollective, Creative Commons, used by permission.
art says
I’d like to know how solar and wind power causes fuel poverty. 1st of all define your terms. Especially Fuel Poverty. The only thing that makes any sense to me is someone with no sense puts a solar panel someplace under a tree instead of where it can catch sun. Or perhaps the initial short term cost is being recovered too quickly by excessively high prices when they can stretch out the recovery of initial cost over a longer period of time and solve the problem. Now if people are stupid, which anyone dealing with solar will have enough brains to place it well, there for they are not stupid, well, nothing further needed to be said there. If the initial cost to build is high, be smart and not greedy about how you recover your costs. Problem solved. Unless I’m missing something. Land that sees little sun obviously does not benefit but most of the planet gets a lot of sun at some point or another. Also there are batteries that can and should be used to store and maintain power levels when the Sun is not so bright. People just need to use their brains. This whole idea of energy poverty sounds like a cop out to get out of being mindful and a good steward of this planet God gave us.
art says
Since my comment does a good job of undermining what looks like a very silly and deceptive concept called energy poverty, I’m pretty sure I wont be approved. Not unless you get real clever in trying to refute what I said to refute what you claim.
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D. says
Thank you for your comment, Art. The sources linked at the end of the article have answers to some of the questions implicit in your comment (such as the definition of fuel poverty–though that definition is in the blog post itself, too).
Your comment may sound like common sense, but in reality it misses a lot of specifics about the physics, engineering, and economics of energy generation and distribution.
The trouble with wind and solar, by comparison with coal and natural gas, is that, on average, it costs 2 to 8 times as much per megawatt hour to generate electricity from those as from coal and natural gas. Consequently, switching to them requires the utilities to raise their rates, which increases the number of people who experience fuel poverty, defined as having to spend 10% or more of income on home heating alone. It has almost nothing to do with how rapidly the initial construction cost for the wind or solar generators is recovered. The higher cost of generating from them than from coal and gas is over the lifetime of the system. Part of that higher cost arises from the fact that coal- or gas-fired generators need to be kept running at “spinning reserve” (low speed but able to ramp up almost instantly to high speed) 24 hours a day to ensure that enough new energy can be fed into the grid, INSTANTANEOUSLY, to keep the power delivered to customers stable enough not to burn out lights, condensers, engines and computers–and keeping those on spinning reserve actually means they produce more real pollution (e.g., nitrous oxides, sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter) and carbon dioxide (which isn’t really pollution but a non-toxic, invisible, odorless gas safe at 20 times current levels and essential to all plant growth) per megawatt-hour of electricity generated than when they’re running at capacity.
What you say about placement of solar panels (the stupidity of putting them in the shade) applies okay to small arrays, say, of the size typical for a single home, but not for the giant arrays needed to provide energy to the grid. And while shade from a tree may follow pretty much the same path through each day (allowing for changes as the suns path lies farther south or north through the year), clouds’ shadows aren’t predictable, and when there’s total cloud cover over a region (which can stretch for hundreds of miles), there’s no way to solve that by better placement.
Add to these things the fact that Great Britain is not a particularly great place for solar because the percentage of daytime in which it actually gets strong enough sunlight to generate much electricity is low. Yes, batteries can store energy for a time, but that adds to the cost, and the size of battery array necessary to store enough energy to feed a grid to power a town, let alone a city, would be enormous and extremely expensive. At this point the best technology for storing energy from wind and solar to cover times when the wind’s not blowing or the sun’s not shining is to use the excess energy to pump water from a lower reservoir into a higher reservoir, and then let that water run back into the lower reservoir, through turbines, when needed. That, too, of course, adds to the expense, and it’s only workable in locations that have appropriate terrain–where one reservoir can be considerably higher than the other so as to provide the speed and volume of water necessary. And of course pumping the water into the upper reservoir over and over again is another demand on the generating capacity.
Last, the notion that fuel poverty is just a cop-out to escape responsibility to care for the planet is simply factually wrong. First, because fuel poverty is a very real phenomenon and does kills tens of thousands of people every winter even in places as wealthy as Great Britain. Second, because the amount of land that would have to be dedicated to energy production from wind and solar is hundreds of times higher than the amount of land that must be dedicated to produce the same amount of energy from coal and natural gas. If you really care about preserving habitat and beauty, you’ll find that coal and natural gas are far better energy sources than wind and solar. (And that’s not even to mention the numbers of birds killed by wind turbines.)
For more on the comparative costs of wind and solar versus coal and natural gas, see chapter 3 of A Renewed Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor. For much more in-depth discussion of the physics, engineering, and economics of various energy sources, see Robert Bryce, Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, particularly its discussions of comparative energy densities and power densities of the various energy sources.
Rob K says
When you consider that EPA credits the value of a premature death avoided (PMA) at ~ $8 to $9 million regardless of lenght for the PMA or age of the person, the 61,000/yr figure you estimate for the US is staggering considering the PMAs EPA claims for the Clean Power Plan are about 3500/yr.