From Gordon James
John Etherington’s criticism of the financial support provided to wind power is fundamentally flawed because it ignores the high “external costs” of electricity generation by fossil fuels and also the subsidies that these fuels receive (21 August, p 27).
The European Commission published a report in 2003 that concluded the costs of the harm caused to human health and the environment by generating electricity from fossil fuels were significant (). In the UK, including these costs in electricity bills would have raised them by between 4 and 7 Euro cents per kilowatt-hour for generation from coal. By comparison, the external cost of generation from wind was estimated to be 0.15 Euro cents per kWh.
The energy market is further skewed by the subsidy of $557 billion that the was handed out by governments to the fossil fuel industry in 2008. A global subsidy of just $46 billion was given to renewable energy in 2009, .
The IEA research also concludes that the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies, as agreed by the G20 last year, would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 6.9 per cent by 2020, equivalent to 2.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to the current emissions of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK combined. This has to be the way forward in our climate-changing world.
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Friends of the Earth Cymru
John Etherington suggests that the UK’s Renewables Obligation legislation – which compels power companies to provide a proportion of their power from renewables – is in effect a subsidy for otherwise unviable renewable energy sources.
He appears to have forgotten the indirect subsidies received by fossil fuel-based power generators, in that they have not had to bear any of the costs imposed on the rest of the world by their carbon dioxide emissions. If the true cost of dealing with climate change and other forms of environmental degradation caused by fossil fuel electricity was applied to these generators, their electricity would likely be thought unmarketable. All this without even considering the many direct subsidies received by coal, oil and other fossil energy industries.
Cardiff, UK
