Mott's Blog

We live in a strange time and place. Electricity in Poland is much cheaper than it was a few years ago, but the experts are projecting power shortages in the near future. The rules of supply and demand seem suspended by the regulatory and political situation. The low price of electricity in Poland is stopping new construction and investment for multiple possible sources. Polish government officials do not want us to follow the road of Germany and develop a higher percent of renewables. They say it is too expensive and unreliable. Yet German electricity is cheaper than Polish power and has far, far fewer outages. The Polish Government objects to adding too much to the price of electricity to support renewable energy, but proposes to continue to use most of the support for the existing production of electricity with only a small partial switch to biomass to make it "green." This does not create any new electricity and detailed studies show that it is 100% transferred to...

The Polish law on renewable energy has been a moving target for years. Originally, the law was deliberately delayed to allow the state-owned energy companies to keep receiving support which the European Commission would have stopped if the new law had been notified under the treaty. Now the delays are being triggered by the new government's efforts to amend the program on the fly. The government has convinced itself that what RES capacity is already done and more co-firing will be all that we need. Some additional biogas plant construction (actually a lot in real terms) is strongly supported in their mix. But the classic RES technologies are on their black list. They have been completely persuaded by the coal lobby that these technologies are too unreliable to be major parts of the energy mix. The factual basis for their assumptions is being broadly challenged by the RES sector. Poland will not meet the 2020 target without a serious program that includes the full mix of RES ...

Leaked information published in Poland today suggests that the PiS Government will fundamentally change the nature of renewable energy support contained in the prior government's version of the new law.  'State support in the form of a contract does not have to get the source of the most cost-effective, but the disposition by the greatest number of hours per year.  Among the defined limit at the auction they would have been performed in a specific order: the renewable energy sources for power exhibiting the best stability, but not necessarily the cheapest, and finally to the least controllable and disposable....  This means opening up  co-firing  [eg.  coal and biomass from wood], will take precedence.  Then the next blocks will be biomass and biogas, as well as clusters, also considered self-sufficient and stable systems - indicates our source close to the government sources, and knowing the draft amendment. - If a designated  pool of ene...

The year is ending with the new Polish Government trying to re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic which is Polish energy policy. The Law and Justice party seems confused between its election campaign rhetoric and the realities of the situation it now faces. As the deck is vanishing under the encroaching sea, the politicians gather on the fantail making speeches about the ship's seaworthiness. Almost all elements of the proposed path to energy security are fraught with bogus assumptions, bad information and a special kind of Polish naiivity. Shale gas- when there is a major rise in  oil and gas prices worldwide and the government gets out of the way, this might be possible. Until then, it is a dead-end street in Poland. The type of policies it would take to really jump start shale gas here (where it is in deep formations and quite expensive to develop) seem implausible in the context of Polish politics. Now more than ever.....  This day, if it ever comes, also depen...

The core message in the current Parliamentary elections for Law and Justice (PiS) on energy issues is to repeal Poland's commitment to participation in the European Emissions Trading Directive and other environmental requirements that limit the unfettered use of coal in Poland. Their argument is that Poland is so dependent on coal that it is unfair to require the same things of Poland that other EU Member States have not only committed to, but are doing. The assumption of this argument is that, but for the emission charge on CO2, that coal energy would be profitable. This is a fundamental fallacy for several reasons. First, the current system grants free allowances for coal emissions and coal-fired power is still not profitable.[1] The current electricity rates make it difficult for the power companies to invest in new facilities, but simultaneously those rates are higher than Germany next door. The profitability of the coal-fired electricity sector is already very weak without...

The party leading the polls to take charge of the Polish Parliament (Law and Justice) has a campaign to fight wind farms in Poland. They complain about their aesthetics and possible noise issues for immediate neighbors. Law and Justice wants to ban wind farms in most of Poland by placing restrictions on their siting. This is an amazingly hypocritical viewpoint all things considered. Wind energy is gradually replacing coal in most of Europe. It could reduce coal burning in Poland as well. Even the Pope has weighed in on the need for a "rapid transition" away fro coal energy. The observed effects of burning coal in Poland are not in dispute: The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that poor air quality resulting from low emissions in Poland is the reason why an average of 48 thousand. premature deaths a year and shorten life by an average of 10 months. Link. Law and Justice proclaims that it is the Christian party and is comprised of many devote Catholics. I...

The Pope's new encyclical " Laudato Si " contains a unmistakable repudiation of Polish energy policy devoted to long-term reliance on coal as a major source of electricity and heat in the country.[1]  The reference to reliance on coal could not be more explicit: " "We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay." The irony of this message is that Poland is at once the most devout Catholic nation and the most reliant on coal for energy.  This new theological mandate to change the Polish system comes in the wake of many major economic and technological pressures in the same direction.  The huge Norwegian investment fund just announced an end to investment in coal-based assets. The large German utility companies have suffered enormous losses in the operation of their coal-fired plants and are divesting them. Vi...

   The impetus for Polish policy supporting biogas has been almost entirely from the stand-point of agriculture (narrowly defined). The Ministry of Agriculture has been the only Ministry taking biogas seriously (the Ministry of Environment seems to forget that biogas has a critical organic waste management role). The vision of the Ministry of Agriculture (until recently anyway) was for small farm-based biogas plants averaging 250 kW in capacity. Ironically, while sacrificing every other biogas application to this vision, the current proposed law does little to help farmers get into the biogas business.    Every serious discussion of biogas policy needs to start with how much it actually cost. The Institute for Renewable Energy documented the cost of biogas last July in their report to the Ministry of Economy using multiple sources. Their data were realistic and no one has seriously questioned their conclusions: biogas requires substantially more support than the fl...