Articles by
Jérôme Guillet
Offshore wind and big company lobbying
By
Jérôme Guillet
Don’t do tenders based on price if you don’t know when the project can get built (ie if projects are still subject to permitting processes or legal recourse or other uncontrollable delays). That’s a sure way to get unrealistic bids that will then be subject to lobbying and renegotiation.
Some positive thoughts about the UK CFD 5 auction
By
Jérôme Guillet
There were no successful bids from offshore wind projects in the latest CfD auction in the UK, and that is already described variously as a setback for net zero plans in the UK, and yet another nail in the coffin of the industry, already struggling from headwinds in the US and UK, where various projects are being cancelled or postponed, and PPAs abandoned or renegotiated.
But I actually take it as a good thing, in that (i) it reflects cost discipline, and (ii) it proves that the tariff design is smart in that it avoids crazy bids like we have seen in other markets.
The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind
By
Jérôme Guillet
Oscar Wilde famously wrote that people “know the price of everything and the value of nothing” suggesting there is a difference between the two concepts of price and value. In the power market, due to some of its structural features, it is even more confusing as you also need to deal with the cost of power, which may again be different.
The below, derived from an article I wrote almost 15 years ago, tries to make sense of the differences between the 3, and how these are ultimately decided by political choices.
Dear governments – stop listening to whining utilities
By
Jérôme Guillet
So, to the UK government: the CfD is actually is an excellent design for a tariff (as is the OFTO mechanism, as an aside), developers and financiers understand it and like it, there is no need to tinker with it on the basis of the whining or blackmail of utilities..
The design of lease auctions is something else - it could be tweaked given how it currently encourages irresponsible bidding for leases that have no connection to the reality of the price of the sector but favor the deepest-pockets players at the expense of the long term viability of the sector.
Jérôme Guillet on Substack
By
Jérôme Guillet
Insightful analysis by an authority on wind energy and energy policy with extensive experience in the offshore wind sector.
The duck in the room – the end of baseload
By
Jérôme Guillet
There's simply no space left for new (or even, soon, old) nuclear
The real lesson about the end of nuclear in Germany–The end of baseload is coming
By
Jérôme Guillet
A lot of articles about the closure of the last German nuclear power plants have emphasized the cost in carbon emissions of closing nuclear plants rather than coal (more precisely: lignite) plants: see for instance Jean-Marc Jancovici, the highly publicized French pundit.
How messed up was Germany’s energy policy?
By
Jérôme Guillet
Reading the press or comments these days in French or English, the tone about Germany’s energy policies is a mix of the gleeful (of the “schadenfreude” kind) and the contemptuous. Germany was naive (to trust Putin), mercantilist / corrupt (its elite selling their soul or themselves for the “cheap gas” that its industry craves), or in thrall to the perverse ideology of the “commie greens” (who pushed to close nuclear and promote useless renewables).
While it is clear that the current situation, with Russia wilfully reducing gas volumes to Europe, hits Germany quite hard, and will impose harsh choices on its industry and population this year, how much of the above criticism makes sense?
HKZ is not “the first subsidy-free offshore wind farm” (it’s not even subsidy free)
By
Jérôme Guillet
Vattenfall and BASF have been getting a lot of coverage for the first power generated at the HKZ offshore wind farm, with headlines like: Subsidy-Free Offshore Wind Power Starts Flowing into Dutch Grid. This is doubly annoying, as HKZ is actually not subsidy-free, and what it is “free” of is not a subsidy.
EDF – the strategic questions and to-do list
By
Jérôme Guillet
Following my previous post on EDF’s woes and their impact on the European market, here’s a list of topics, both practical and political, that the company needs to deal, and their domestic impact in France.
EDF’s woes are a bigger long term problem for EU energy than the war in Ukraine
By
Jérôme Guillet
France is looking at many dark years. All the criticism one can hear about Germany’s decision to close down its nuclear plants misses the fact that gas supply is not the problem for the power sector: the real problem is French nuclear, which allows high gas prices to cause power price increases across the board.
Wind needs to be competitive against the lowest price of gas, not the average (or the current) price
By
Jérôme Guillet
Cheaper and more competitive are not the same.
