No, Turning the North Sea into a Massive Wind Farm Won’t Boost “Energy Security”
“We’re doubling down on clean power as the route to energy sovereignty and abundance,” explains Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband. It’s a curious timing. The opposition and Reform have now clearly established climate policy scepticism as a feature of UK politics. And that sea change is also reflected in the very different conversations heard in Davos recently, compared to the woke, green, globalist mantras of the past. Yet now “a new clean energy security pact with the EU” has been agreed at a North Sea Summit in Hamburg, which Miliband claims will “transform the North Sea into the world’s largest clean energy reservoir”. This attempt to boost the “green economy” with “100 GW of joint offshore wind projects” in international waters therefore looks more like a Grand Projet to salvage the EU and its flagship policy in the face of signs of the looming failure of both.
The pact is inaugurated by an article in Politico jointly penned by Miliband and Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen, the European Commissioner for Energy and Housing. The article treads some very familiar ground. It cites the geopolitical “uncertainty” seemingly created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which “sent global gas prices soaring”. The claim is that renewable energy will create “energy security” by removing the economy from the “volatility” of “global markets”. This is Miliband’s now very boring routine – a ritual even. “Exposure to fossil fuels remains the Achilles’ heel of our energy systems,” claim the pair, citing European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen’s belief that “as our energy dependency on fossil fuels goes down, our energy security goes up”.
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“Why can’t it (Europe) build more gas storage to limit the shock of price volatility? Ideology has developed into a fully-fledged irrational obsession”.——–The reason it won’t expand gas use and storage is that the ideology is to remove affordable reliable energy and replace it with unaffordable unreliable energy. ——This all comes from the UN Sustainable Development Agenda. —–We in the wealthy west have too much of everything goes the story and we are to make do with LESS, and that all starts of with with ENERGY. We are to be priced out of using it. Or as the former head of the National Grid (Steve Holiday) said a few years ago “We need to get used to using electricity as and when it is available”—In other words, if there happens to be wind.
If – and it’s a big “if” – the wind farms in the North Sea were able to eradicate the need for gas power plants as a backup on calm days, then we might not need hydrocarbon-based electricity generation. As someone who’s read a lot of articles on this site, I can’t see that ever being case.
And even if we divorced ourselves from the dastardly volatility of the energy markets, we’d still be the hostage of China’s pricing policy for its wind generation equipment. China has cornered the market in wind and solar power generation by out-competing the rest of the world. Once the competition is dead, there’s nothing to stop it increasing prices for the rest of the world as and when it wishes, and we mustn’t assume that any number of visits by government officials to Beijing will make them feel they need to be nice to us.
We will always need a large percentage of dispatchable and 100% reliable generation to maintain grid stability, some countries can do this with hydro given their geology, we don’t have that, and gas is therefore the next best option…
It isn’t the next best option, it is the ONLY OPTION. But we are in serious trouble when the ONLY OPTION is seen by an absurd Political Class that panders to the UN and WEF Sustainable Development Socialist Agenda as something that needs gotten rid of. Which is exactly where many western countries like the EU, Australia, and the UK are at the moment. —–Sucking up the a..ses of the Phoney Planet Saving One World Government people that think our lifestyles are “unsustainable”
We have been reliant on natural gas since the 1960s – How is it price volatility has suddenly become an issue? Of course gas price volatility wasn’t a problem when 50% to 60% of electricity was generated from coal which has more stable prices.
And does gas price volatility only affect electricity prices and not gas used in homes and industry? Why is electricity price going up and up, but not gas?
The grid frequency is 50Hz which is set and maintained – through inertia – by spinning generation from gas and steam turbines. The frequency must not vary by more than +/- 1Hz otherwise the grid fails.
Wind and solar can neither set grid frequency nor maintain it. in April the Iberian grid was being served by 73% solar and wind – mostly solar – it collapsed within 3 seconds because of a frequency anomaly at one of the solar arrays, and virtually no inertia in the grid, and took days to be restarted using spinning generators.
Net Zero requires that physics and economics be abolished.
Coal can be easily stored, easily transported and is unaffected by freezing conditions. As Texas found out 5 years ago, with little coal and a gas supply powered by the failing grid, when the windmills freeze up it can kill hundreds of people.
Energy security:
As at the end of 2025 there were ‘more than’ 460 wind turbines in the North Sea (all nations).
I don’t know this for sure but I reckon a decent shotgun blast* or well aimed rifle bullet could take a wind turbine out of service. A few fast boats and decent marksmen could probably take out most of the North Sea generating capacity in a couple of hours and certainly do a lot of damage before being stopped by the military**.
*100m to the hub is a long shot for a shotgun blast – might have to use a drone.
**Who might well do more damage stopping the fast boats as they weave in and out of the wind turbines..
Energy security they call it.
Cutting the supply cables would seem to be a lot easier as they are fewer in number.
Yes but cutting the cables might take more equipment and the cables might be better protected with redundant routing (well that’s what I’d try to do).
Knocking out say 50% of the wind turbines would mean each machine must be visited by engineers before being brought back into service – a long process.
Ed is not thinking big enough here.
We build (or get the Chinese to build) a massive array of wind-creating turbines in the North Sea, which will be powered by Chinese coal fired power stations via an undersea cable. These will create the wind required to generate clean green electricity 24/7/365.
Job done.
Ed is not thinking
There you go – much shorter.
Perfect plan. We will, of course, pay for building and maintaining the coal fired power stations, pay for the coal, pay for the undersea cable and pay a monthly rent for using it, will pay for the wind-generating turbines and the wind-using turbines and pay for the electricity generated by them on top of that. In order to save the climate, the CO₂ created when burning the coal will be taxed and the sum of all of this will be subject to VAT. To maximize ROI, all of these will be billed separately in different intervals which are prime to each other and if someone ever managed to dig through it, he’d find the cost of renting a Caribbean island as retirement home for Miliband somewhere in the small print.
Something I forgot to add: The final price for the electricty generated in this way will be slightly lower than it presently is. This will enable Miliband to claim that he has brought electricity prices down.
Ha you are getting onto his wavelength now!
Oh No! I’m going to have to share that Nobel prize!
Ed does plenty of thinking—About how to impoverish his own citizens so he can get a little gold star on his lapel from the UN and WEF for pretending to save he planet.
I wouldn’t worry, there is a difference between saying they are going to build them, and actually building them.
They will be as silly as the new electric ferry to Argentina. 250 tons of batteries, and a range of 100km. It will have to charge up 4 times on the journey, and each charging station will also have to have 250 tons of batteries. so 1250 tons of batteries for a 400km journey. That is assuming that the electricity will be available in such huge amounts to charge the shore based batteries. It gives a new meaning to insanity.
Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands all have problems getting companies interested in building windmills. Increased taxpayers cash will be required.
And meanwhile, we have become such a successful Saudi Arabia of green energy that our only manufacturer of offshore blades has failed, losing three hundred jobs. The other three hundred only being saved by a massive bail out from the taxpayer to enable production to be converted to onshore blades. You couldn’t make it up
The sole point of this exercise is to create a black hole taxpayer money can disappear into without taxpayers noticing where it precisely ends up. The more byzantine and inefficent the whole machinery is, the better. Every epicyclically moving apparatus which can be latched to it enables increasing the overall price by some amount.
The one thing these articles always fail to mention is that about half of the states of the USA are governed by the very people who initated this insane Save the Climate! agenda (eg, Al Gore) and that this is not about Europe doing this or that but about the European vassals of the US Democrats implementing Democrat policies against the will and to the detriment of the people they lord over because the Democrats placed them in these positions.
For illustration: By the time Germany still had colonies, someone in Germany adopted a black boy. The emperor Wilhlem II. became his godfather, he later joined the military, serving first with the railways corps and later, with a distinguished cavary unit. He fought in WWI and got decorated with the Iron Cross 2nd class. After the war, he continued to serve in the 100,000 soldiers Reichswehr whose members were beyond hand-picked. In private life, he was active in the Kölner Karneval as kettledrum player.
Yet, the people who presently govern Germany treat us as if we had been implementing the American segregations laws because that’s what their American masters demand.
Whilst making electricity prices less volatile may sound desirable, fixing the price of a windfarm’s output for decades at a level way above the current cost of gas-generated electricity is madness.
Never mind the impending slaughter of kittiwakes and puffins by the wind turbines as predicted by experienced ornithologists.
That will help prove we’re in a mass-extinction event.
A positive feedback loop: Wind turbine kill birds. Lots of birds dying will be blamed on man-made climate to justify building more turbines which will then kill more birds.
The climate change industry would certainly love nothing more than a “solution” causing or worsening the very problem it’s supposed to solve.
So, a bit like covid vaccines then?
They will all end up rusted and broken, sitting in huge piles on the bottom of the North Sea.
It’s very noticeable to anyone paying even reasonable attention that the argument for so-called renewable energy has shape-shifted from “saving the planet” to “making us secure.”
But at the same time the EU, and therefore the British Establishment, refuses to accept that the only route to reliable, non fossil-fuel energy is nuclear ….. the windmills and solar panels will NEVER do it.
So, yes. Red Ed’s latest act of “renewable” lunacy is to push the EU’s Grand Projet to create energy inter-dependency, as a means of holding the block together.
The immediate route to secure energy is coal. While estimates vary, the UK has very likely more than a billion tons of “economically recoverable” coal domestically and if energy security was the main concern, coal could be subsidized instead “wind and sun” which would have the nice side-effect that using it would actually work. Insofar burning it results in poisonous fumes, these could be dealt with using technology and the even then, the CO₂ emissions of Britain would still be dwarved by those of China and India which – by definition – don’t harm the planet because they’re coming from developing countries.
Nuclear is emission-free but produce highly toxic nuclear waste which has to be stored securely for a seriously long time. That’s a problem which can be solved but still a problem which needs to be solved.
I am a huge climate sceptic (and mathematician) but I am not convinced by your log argument!
Great article. Need to get it in the DT or the Speccy.