6 March 2023
“The more power we generate within our own
borders, the better protected we will be from volatile gas prices that
are pushing up bills,” Kwasi Kwarteng, then business secretary, said this week.
The Cuadrilla Lancashire gas exploration wells yielded very high-quality natural gas to the surface from just a few fractures completed in the underlying shale rock. The limited number of fractures was due to the UK's regulatory requirement to halt operations any time micro-seismicity induced by fracturing exceeded just 0.5 on the Richter scale. Liverpool University's seismology dept. has equated the impact of 0.5 micro-seismic event to sitting down on an office chair.
Claims that less than 1\100th of the huge in place gas resource of 37.6 trillion m3 could be extracted has been shown to be biased towards green / extremist left political views, no actual UK data on gas recovery is available the claim was based on pre-2010 US data, before hydraulic fracturing techniques were advanced to improve gas recoveries to as high as 30% of in-place volumes. Just 10% gas recovery from Bowland shale could supply 50 years’ worth of current UK gas demand.
To produce the same amount of energy as one 4 hectare shale site of 40 wells would require a wind farm some 1500 times that size or a solar park nearly 1000 times the size. At current UK gas prices, the value of just 10% of the in-place UK gas would be approx £3.3 trillion. Potential tax take from this could be close to £200 billion. Imported gas produces no tax, no jobs & higher CO2 emissions. Gas prices can of course go down but we don't share doubts that UK could ever be commercially viable. Gas from the existing Cuadrilla wells could & should be flowing to local domestic consumers within a year of equipment re-mobilising to site. 6 other such sites located across Northern England could be producing gas & making a material contribution to energy security & tax revenue within 4\5years. The case for shale gas is strong & logical. HMG needs to lift the moratorium urgently.
It’s all a huge con. Lining companies’ pockets whilst deluding the public into thinking they’re doing something ‘good’. Energy independence at an affordable cost is the only way for populous prosperity. Anything else will accelerate decline and leave the UK poorer than Poland sooner rather than later.
No more subsidies for foreigners investing in inefficieny and expensive wind power - if it’s not economic at the market rate (which we all know is distorted to pay these green robber barons their subsidies) it should not happen - the consumer is being mugged over and over by this net zero nonsense .
Just take a look at the graph below, showing what sources, on a cold, sunny, almost windless winter day, our electricity needs are serviced by. Some smartarse may try to accuse The Boggart of cherry picking. Not so, there is no argument about the fact that on a day with ideal weather conditions for wind turbines to generate then around 50% of our electricity comes from wind. The question is were to to cease using 'fossil fuels' as groups like the Exstinktion Rebellion crusties and the Just Stop Oil motorway obstructers demand, where would we get the 75% of our electricity not supplied by wind, solar, hydro or imports from France, Netherlands and Norway?
In our headlong rush to ‘save the planet’ perhaps a sobering reality check for the deluded Greens is long overdue?
A small, ever-so-green, 100-megawatt wind farm needs 30,000 tons of iron ore; 50,000 tons of concrete and 900 tons of non-recyclable plastic.
For the same power from an ever-so-green solar farm you need to increase that by 150 per cent.
An electric car battery weighs half a ton, making just one requires shifting 250 tons of earth somewhere else on the planet.
All require what are called ‘rare earths’, so a phenomenal 200 to 2,000 per cent increase in toxic mining, processing and shipping is required somewhere else on the planet, usually from unregulated regimes with very lax environmental standards.
Solar and wind have weather-dependant limits, but we need energy ALL the time, so we have to have permanent back-up. The giant Tesla factory in Nevada would take 500 years to make enough batteries to supply the USA with electricity for 1 day!
After 30 years and countless billions in subsidies wind and solar supply less than 3 per cent of the world’s energy. On top of that, like all machines ‘renewables’ are built from non-renewable materials – and have to be replaced time and time again, so definitely NOT a one-off cost.
To accommodate 2,000 MW of gas or nuclear power generation requires the same area of two 18-hole golf courses. Whereas, accommodating 2,000 MW of wind power requires an area the size of Belgium!
Then, of course, you still need 2,000 MW of gas or nuclear power to accommodate those hundreds of occasions each year when wind and solar power is producing absolutely nothing.
Ay there's the rub:
The true elephant in the room where crusties, tree huggers and motorway arse gluers spout the virtues of medieval windmill technology is of course is you have to invest in two energy supply systems along with additional transmission and additional infrastructure for ancillary services - if you go for variable renewable wind and solar as the so-called backbone of the grid system. Gas turbines with or without carbon capture and storage and nuclear require no backup. The backup for variable wind and solar needs to be at least this much as the installed capacity and the wind solar installation. It is totally meaningless to say Windows the cheapest energy source. You have to look at the value of system and all the associated Investments required.
Wind turbines are a also a delusional, expensive con trick. Because:
1. Wind turbines operational life span is much shorter than anticipated[1], at 12-15 years. This means the vast majority will not generate enough electricity to break even. Furthermore around half of the UK's wind turbines are reaching their maximum operating life so will start to need replacing.
2. Wind turbines are proving to be less reliable than expected with Siemens reporting almost a 1 billion US Dollar loss for Oct-Dec 2022 due to much higher warranty claims [2]
3. Wind turbines require a lot of oil for both production, transportation, installation and maintenance. A large wind turbine requires around 80 gallons of oil each year.
"For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels."[3]
4. The turbine vanes cannot be recycles, have a short working life and are just being buried in land fill.[4]
[2] https://www.ogv.energy/news-item/siemens-gamesa-posts-974-mln-net-loss-on-higher-warranty-costs
[3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil
Claims that onshore wind is cheap come thick and fast from politicians in thrall to the most well oiled of crony-capitalist industries, the wind merchants. The claims are not supported by the accounts of onshore wind farms, which indicate a breakeven cost of around £80/MWh for the very cheapest farms. And this, note, is for the efficient wind farms with 200-metre turbines (twice the typical height), located in the windiest sites and spaced at least 1,200 metres apart so they don’t they steal each other’s wind. The cost estimate doesn’t even count the need to carefully manage backup power generation for those times and places where the wind is not blowing hard enough, or blowing too hard. Nor does it count the cost of building and running transmission lines from remote wind farms to places where people actually live.
The total UK install base of wind turbine electricity at the time the data for the above graph was gathereed was generating 2.33GW out of a demand of 36.3GW i.e. 6.4 %
Net Zero, as it is currently being currently implemented, is economic lunacy on a massive scale.
Our execution of the policy has produced a loss maximisation result - we are all poorer and exposed to continuing short squeezes in the price of gas.
To reduce these losses, I suggest:
1. Stop market rigging by making all suppliers contractually liable for dispatchable energy. IF the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine it is up to the producer to supply their shortfall, not the grid.
2. Spend the levy/ subsidy money on storage - i.e. pumped hydro!
3. Spend the subsidy money on developing new storage methods.
4. Gear the grid to coping with the variability of green supplies BEFORE installing that supply.
5. Per the Local Authorities ruling in the eighties/ early nineties ban the public sector from entering supply contracts based on CfDs - the currents CfDs appearing to be the wrong way round! Where are the ISDA agreements?
In the interim, rejig the N Sea taxation and development regime and allowing fracking/ on-shore wind, subject to market related payments to affected locals.
The constant issue that I have with charts like "WIND IS NOW BRITAIN'S SECOND BIGGEST POWER SOURCE" is that I suspect they are lying. I don't know the details but a certain political movement has such an exhaustive history of lying that I would be surprised if was not yet more lying buried in this chart.
And what form might the lying taking in this instance?
Well I would be immediately suspicious about two issues:
(a) Are they talking about capacity to make energy or are they talking about energy actually delivered and usefully used?
There's a difference between the two because people need energy at some times of the day far more than others. If a large portion of the energy is being produced late at night for instance it may serve no useful purpose.
(b) Are we talking about useful energy extracted from the grid or are we talking about energy put into the grid?
This is a less important issue than (a) but nonetheless wind mills usually have a much longer path through the grid than some other power sources, and thus have greater transmission losses.
And finally just because I'm not able to immediately think of a way that we might be being deceived doesn't mean it is not occurring. Based on past actions, there is no reason to trust anybody involved either at government, academic or commercial level.
Today
which is a relatively windless day across most of Britain, wind is
generating just over 5% of our current electricity usage
(https://gridwatch.co.uk - GBfuel type power generation graph
23-03-05, 16:10 ) behind gas 57% nuclear 13%, Biomass 6%, Imports from
Norway 7%, Imports from France 6% and Imports from Netherlands 6%.
What
should concern us as the people who pay for this product is why, with
all those wind and solar farms we subsidise so generously, we still have
to import almost 20% of or electricity from abroad.
Wind fans may
say I'm cherry picking. OK, on days when conditions are ideal for wind
generation wind farms produce over 50% of our electricity, no argument
against that.
But on days like today we need just the same amount of
power as when the wind blows steadily at 18mph (the optimum speed for
generation according to wind watch.)
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After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when NATO (aka the U.S.A.) mandated that the West impose retaliatory sanctions on Russia, including a ban on importation of Russian gas and oil, Germany found itself in a hole:
Just When We Need It Most, Renewable Energy Disappears
In an encouraging sign of a great awakening, million of people in the UK are now, after a week of brutally cold, absolutely windless weather asking "Why have we wasted so much money on wind turbines and harvesting solar energy."
Yet when politicians are asked directly: "How do we keep the lights on and our homes warm when the wind does not blow and the sun is too low in the sky to make much impression on photovoltaic cells that do the business in solar panels?
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Britain's newly installed Secretary of State for Energy, Grant Shapps, is still learning the job so perhaps we should cut him some slack, but even so a statement he made on our energy supply today shows astounding ignorance of technical details relating to his portfolio.
Answering a question in Parliament this morning about Britain's ability to reach its target of getting 40% of our energy needs from sustainable sources, Shapps sneered that it was not possible for us to reach 40% now as we already get 43% from wind. Unfortunately the sneering sarcasm was misplaced but served to reveal the man in charge of energy policy does not know the difference between energy and electricity.
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