Britain’s Green Rent-Seeker’s Paradise
On Monday, the National Energy System Operator (NESO), (now an office of the Department for Energy Security) announced changes to the “pipeline” for projects that will deliver Ed Miliband’s “Clean Power 2030” agenda. This will unlock, claim NESO’s wonks, “£40 billion in clean investment annually”. “This overhaul of the connections process is the single most important step we will take towards a clean power system”, explained former Climate Change Committee CEO Chris Stark, now in position as “Head of Mission Control for Clean Power 2030” for Ed Miliband.
The problem that this “reform” addresses is one that I have written about recently here. The absurd subsidies that have driven Britain’s irrational renewable energy development have created a massive queue of subsidy farmers. These have been dealt with on a first-come first-served basis, claim the wonks. And that puts the problems of bureaucratic process, grid integration and financing in the way of delivering the 2030 agenda. Instead, the most viable projects will now be given priority and moved further up the queue.
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That figure of 436 square miles being required for solar alone scares me. “Man cannot live by electricity alone”, to misquote from the Good Book. It’s frequently been pointed out that solar is gobbling up some of the most productive arable land in the UK. If the government really wants us to adopt a more plant-based diet (good luck with that!), then they should be encouraging the production of crops by British farmers. Instead of aiming for greater self-sufficiency, they’re setting us up to import a larger proportion of our food supplies from abroad year on year, putting us at the mercy of foreign producers and transporters. It’s the same with oil and gas. We have those resources within our borders, but the government is condemning us to import them from abroad. Not everything runs on electricity, and you cannot produce pharmaceuticals, plastics etc. from electrons, so whatever Miliband might tell us, we still need hydrocarbons. And when the UK’s unpredictable and unreliable “green” electricity generation system underperforms, we have to resort to international interconnectors to make up the shortfall, at whatever price we’re willing to pay. The present government seems to have embraced the idea that we’ll own nothing,… Read more »
Have a look out of your living room window today as you sit with that laptop on your knee. Do you see much sun? It didn’t get light till nearer to 9 am and infact it still isn’t what you would call light even now as I type at 10.25 am. Then it gets dark again all winter at about 3.45 pm Yet our dimwit pretend to save he planet morons think solar is the way to go.
Then to confirm just how ideologically driven and dumb they are they are even proposing to BLOCK the sun to fight global warming. —–The lunatics run the asylum and Miliband is the chef lunatic, but they are mostly all in on the SCAM
At least today we have the wind blowing, although I imagine the blades on a lot of the turbines around the country will be feathered to prevent damage from too much wind. The conditions that really concern me are the classic “Dunkelflaute”, which can persist for days at a time. We’d never have enough battery storage to compensate for that.
Wind and sun are part time energy that can only power a country if storage at grid level is possible and at a cost that makes it economically viable. Which it currently IS NOT.——Then ofcourse as long as that storage isn’t available we will need to continue having gas plants ticking over as backup waiting for the wind to stop, which is often, which is costing huge sums of money, and all of this and other costs are added to our bills, which explains why we now have the highest electricity price sin the world along with that other silly country that has covered its once beautiful country in thousands of turbines—Germany
A minor query: in quoting battery capacity you need time as well as peak power rating. Is 35 GW really intended to be just the maximum peak generation & transmission value, or does it mean 35 GWh storage capacity, or just 35 GW for a few minutes? Anyway, the graph seems to show transmission capacity from various sources, not storage capacity for any kind of battery.
While the definition of investment is fairly broad, I suspect the “wonks” use it to describe the expenditure and construction of things that may deliver physical value (but might represent a financial loss in due course). They might argue that if we really need something, we don’t care how much it costs.
Capacities are as quoted by NESO’s report, and my understanding is that when quoting grid-scale battery capacity, GW = GWh, though, as you say, that is both imprecise as a statement of capacity and doesn’t speak to the rate at which power can be supplied. No matter the detail, however, the rest of it — i.e. the economics — is bonkers enough.
The eco socialists get away with this SCAM because 90% of the public know nothing about how energy works or how the excuse for energy policy (the phony climate crisis) is a jumble of evidence free politicised science presented to them as some kind of ultimate truth and that “all scientists agree”. ——–It has all the hallmarks of a classic GRIFT.
The public think they are being informed about the “science” of a changing climate that requires urgent action from government and from us all changing the way we live, when infact they are only being shown one version of the “science”. The one that supports the Political Agenda’s called Sustainable Development and Net Zero.
The “science” was hijacked by controlling the language, who got to speak about it and how it was framed. ——–Once politics enters science it isn’t science any longer. It is the excuse for public policy. Or as Edenhoffer of the IPCC said a few years ago “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policy is environmental policy anymore. We redistribute the worlds wealth via climate policy”——— An ECO SOCIALIST SCAM. —No wonder the Marxist Miliband is fully onboard.
The most important is unabated gas generation where nobody is interested in ‘investing’ in building this because there is NO return on the investment. Without more gas generation our grid fails in the years ahead.
Perhaps that will be for the best. Managed decline only takes us so far, at some point it will be unmanaged decline.
Over the last 2 decades, the Climate alarmism rife in Western Nations has led Governments to mandate Weather-Dependent “Renewables”, (Wind and Solar), for power generation. This is an attempt to replace reliable, high productivity, energy dense power generators, Coal, Gas and Nuclear, that provide firm power for large scale National power production with dilute, low productivity, intermittent but nominally “Renewable” generation from Wind and Solar technologies. The government mandates have been continuously supported by strident assertions that “Renewable” technologies are vastly cheaper than the cost of using fossil fuels, asserting that “Renewable” technologies are “nine times cheaper”. That statement is a gross self-deception inside Government and a massive Fraud on the public. The supposed benefit of “Renewables” is that they do not directly release any CO2 emissions for the power they produce. But the only rationale for this exaggerated assertion is that as the fuel is the Weather and the Weather is cost free, so, Weather-Dependent “Renewables” must be “Cheaper”. It is not quite that simple. It is nothing but a naive fallacy. For power generation at a scale sufficient to support developed civilisations that assumption is a fallacy: it flies in the face of the Laws of Physics it ignores the scale and costs of the engineering… Read more »