Sunday, September 17, 2023

The Offshore Wind Fiasco Sets New Records For Government Incompetence

by Xavier Connolly, 14 September 2023.

In an article on wind powered generators last week another mainstream media science & technology writer showed himself in need of remedial education in basic literacy:
"Meanwhile, 14GW of installed capacity puts us second in the world behind China," he burbled
The problem here is inability to understand the meaning of 'installed capacity.'
If it means a capability of generating 14GW of electricity, as it would if we were discussing gas, nuclear or coal that would be lovely. But on the day in question, according to Gridwatch UK, ALL our installed wind capacity (38GW the government claims), both offshore and on land, was generating only 8% of the 30 GW the nation was using at the time. 

Screenshot from gridwatch.co.uk: The orange line represents gas & the grey nuclear. Wind is blue and solar yellow. This screenshot was taken on a low wind day in Britain and is intended to show the unreliability of wind power as the main source of the nations electricity. When wind conditions are right, wind turbines can generate up to 50% of our needs but how can systems run efficiently when there are such wide variations in powerr supply, as they would have to if Net Zero is achieved..

Gas and solar were doing well when the screenshot was taken (sunny, low wind day day - solar has the same problems as wind.) nuclear was steady at 17% and we were  importing 20% from cross channel links, mostly France. Biomass and hydro made up the balance.

Once again the facts prove sustainables are not capable of sustaining an adequate power supply.

According to estimates from RenewableUK, the offshore wind projects eligible  auction in this year’s round could, had anybody bothered to turn up to bid for the licences, have “powered nearly 8 million homes a year and saved consumers £2bn a year compared to the cost of electricity from gas”. And although the cost of offshore wind has risen, Renewable UK claimed it is still significantly cheaper than new gas plants. In view of such congfidence from the green lobby it is curious that not one of the 5 areas set to be licenced for offshore wind farm development attracted a single bid.

The first step to  understanding what happened is to debunk themyth about about renewables being cheaper than gas, nuclear or coal.  To suggest such a thing is an outright deception. Renewables UK, a QANGO tasked with promoting intermittent, weather - dependent technologies for supplying our electricity unsurprisingly talk up the virtues of wind and solar because they represent the commercial (not charitable) interests of the green energy industry rther than the interests of the consumer.

The true price of renewables could be established by demanding all power generators be geared to ‘demand follow’, which is the type of power supply the grid actually needs. What would renewable suppliers do? With no scalable storage solution they would have no choice but to build gas / coal / nuclear backup capacity to a level comparable to their installed renewable capacity. Then their per Megawatt price would be north of £100/MWh and the true cost would be revealed.

The Renewable UK case rests on a blatantly false claim: “ And although the cost of offshore wind has risen, it is still significantly cheaper than new gas plants.”

This ignores the fact that windmills are highly intermittent and, unlike gas and coal, incapable of producing continuous power. To make a fair price comparison, windmill operators should be required to include in their bids the full cost of the necessary storage that their windmills should have in order to deliver continuous power - which is, after all, essential to their customers.

This may well be technically impossible, as the amount of storage required is vast. But it would certainly show that the true cost of practically usable windmill power is an order of magnitude (or even several orders of magnitude) greater than coal or gas. And always will be. 

This true cost of intermittent sources is NEVER presented because the cost of running the necessary backup for when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine is always ignored. The inevitable logic of the exercise would probably show that commercially it would be better to just build new gas and nuclear stations and dump the renewables. Which is precisely what we should do as a nation. Because this is not the route to cheap power, neither is it the route to net zero - the gas backup will always emit carbon.

The only way to a demand led, carbon free grid is nuclear. We should stop wasting our time and money on intermittent, unreliable supply in the wrong places miles from demand. Burn gas while we resurrect our erstwhile nuclear industry. Who knows we might even achieve a true net zero grid by 2050.

At the moment there are many projects approved over the last few years that the energy companies have not bothered to progress, putting more projects out, just to sit on a shelf would have been pointless. Thus it is gratifying that the auction closed with no takers, the 4.4p per unit royalty due to the government was not enough for energy companies to invest even though they are selling at 30-40p. Had the government offered a much higher price perhaps they would have been takers, but the government would have been then accused of forcing consumers to pay higher prices and of them lining the pockets of the energy companies.

This renewables nonsense all started with Ed Miliband when he was Energy Secretary in Gordon Brown's government, He and other politicians, all singularly unqualified to deal with matters relating to science and technology abandoned expert engineering advice from the old CEGB in favour of the policies recommended by 'scientists' who sit in universities making mathematical models of power stations without ever having been anywhere near a working installation. Seduced by all the virtue signalling talk about saving the planet and being environment friendly the politicians simply reneged on their social contract to serve the people, in the case of electricity by ensuring an adequate and affordable supply, in order to demonstrate their green credentials in the hope of winning the votes of middle class liberals. 

In doing so they have in effect quadrupled our supply prices, crippling UK industry, and plunging millions into fuel poverty, as a direct result of their policy. They have spent and subsidised wind, with infrastructure to the tune of over £220Bn, which is not new capacity merely replacing a portion of that all sold to foreign energy companies to prematurely close, to meet arbitrary EU. emission levels, but similar German plant meet

 Net Zero is a £3 Trillion disaster waiting to befall this country, cheered in by green activists who would rather import oil and gas halfway around the world than drreamof producing it here until we have viable storage, whilst China, India, and others exceed our total CO2 savings every 17 weeeks.

RELATED:

Millions Of Brits Told Not To Heat Homes At Night As Part Of 'Net Zero' Push
No, they aren't urging elites to ditch their private jets for commercial, or not to burn 1,000 of fuel taking the yacht out for a jaunt. Chris Stark, head of the UK's Climate Change Committee, wants ordinary citizens to turn off their electric heaters (heat pumps) at night as part of a wider drive to deliver "emissions savings," which includes a shift away from gas boilers - which Chris, a hypocrite, still has.

Scientists says Nuclear Is The Way Forward For Clean Energy - Do Ursidae Defecate In Sylvan Landscapes?
Scientists, politicians and media have been screeching, for the past 30 or so years, about the need to transition away from carbon based fossil fuels, (coal, gas and oil,) as a matter or urgency or risk destroying the life supporting ecology of our planet by overloading the system with Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emitted from human activity. Next they'll be informing us, in their lofty and condescending way that yes, bears do actually shit in the woods.

How Germany's open door to migrants and mad dash to Net Zero Brought Down The Establishment
Friedrichstrasse in Berlin is one of Europe's most renowned shopping streets. Lined with glitzy stores, from Galeries Lafayette to Karl Lagerfeld it is on a par with Avenue des Champs-Élysées, London's Regent Street or Via Montenapoleone in Milan, teeming with shoppers eager to spend their hard earned or ill - gotten cash and flowing with cars, buses and taxis.

Out Of Touch Elites Are Destroying Civilised Society Society With Net Zero Obsession And No Plan B
How good it must have felt for politicians to set those lofty goals, knowing that someone else must deal with the cost and the implementation? But now the bills are now arriving, and they’re bringing a world of hurt. To sum up: Western policy elites have embarked on the electrification of society, replacing hydrocarbons in housing and transport, but without the technology to replace it well.

Climate Scaremongers Have Taken Over Where COVID Scaremongers Left Off
Boggart Blog can announce that the winners of our coveted Scaremongering Bollocks of The Month award goes this month to BBC News. Not only did the BBC report in one of their regular climate catastrophe scare stories that river levels across the UK have been at record lows, they broadcast that news story on the same day as The London Weather Centre announced that March 2023 was set to be the wettest March since records began.

Eminent Oxford Scientist Says Wind Power "Fails On Every Count"
It could be argued that the basic arithmetic showing wind power is an economic and societal disaster in the making should be clear to a bright primary school child. Now the Oxford University mathematician and physicist, Professor Wade Allison has done the sums. “Wind power fails on every count,” he says, adding that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis”.

Europes Tractor Protests Spread To Germany And Now Include Fishing Trawlers
Hundreds of farmers have descended in their tractors on a small German coastal town to protest measures imposed by the European Union as part of the bid to 'save the planet' by reducing CO2 emissions from cow farts. 400 tractors reportedly gathered in Büsum on Wednesday to protest what is probably the most insane environmentalist policy dreamed up by the EU idealogues to date ...

Germany haemorrhaging cash to keep country running on as ‘net zero’ becomes zeroeconomic activity
Germany was so desperate to achieve 'net zero' CO2 emissions that for years the country's government closed its fossil fuel-fired and nuclear power plants,replacing those plants with wind and solar power — as well as impoorting huge volumes of natural gas and oil from Russia. 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:

Europe's Cold Spell Exposes Green Energy Policy Failure
So far the autumn of 2022 has been unusually mild which has had eco-warriors getting worked up and gluing their arses to motorways and airport runways to demand that we stop using oil. However winter temperatures across Europe predictably dropped sharply in late November and through most of December to date have been positively arctic. Scientists have offered the opinion that the cold weather spell the ongoing European gas crisis is now “likely” to worsen significantly as usual seasonal weather spreads across the northern half of the continent, bringing with it an increased need for domestic heating.

Minister's Claim That 40% UK Energy Comes From Renewables Is Technically Illiterate
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.

Amazing Increase in Global Sea Ice Confounds the Net Zero Warmageddonists

Has The Green Blob's War On Fossil Fuels Been Lost On The Battlefiels Of Ukraine?

German NatGas Consumption Too High To Avoid Energy "Emergency", Regulator Warns As Norway Increases Gas Production

Europe's Depleted Gas Storage Might Not Get Refilled Ahead Of Next Winter
While mainstream news reporting of the conflict in Ukraine continues to pump out a torrent of anri - Russia, pro - war propaganda the catastropic effects of this war that could so easily have been avoided are not mentioned. Well why would warmongering governments admit they have inflicted an energy crisis, food shortages and soaring living costs on their people for no good reason ...

Has Biden's Afghan Surrender Handed The Future To China
5 September: The abrupt and ill - considered withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan ordered by President Joe (Dementia Man) Biden and the susequent return to power of Islamic fundamentalist The Taliban hands control of the vast Afghan litium reserves to China and is a blow to the green agenda of the G7 nations

Climate change menu

Climate Scaremongers Have Taken Over Where COVID Scaremongers Left Off
Boggart Blog can announce that the winners of our coveted Scaremongering Bollocks of The Month award goes this month to BBC News. Not only did the BBC report in one of their regular climate catastrophe scare stories that river levels across the UK have been at record lows, they broadcast that news story on the same day as The London Weather Centre announced that March 2023 was set to be the wettest March since records began.

Europes Tractor Protests Spread To Germany And Now Include Fishing Trawlers
Hundreds of farmers have descended in their tractors on a small German coastal town to protest measures imposed by the European Union as part of the bid to 'save the planet' by reducing CO2 emissions from cow farts. 400 tractors reportedly gathered in Büsum on Wednesday to protest what is probably the most insane environmentalist policy dreamed up by the EU idealogues to date ...

Green Energy & Net Zero: A Herd Of Elephants In The Room

The Cuadrilla Lancashire gas exploration wells yielded very high-quality natural gas from just a few fractures [ ... ]Claims that less than 1\100th of the gas resource of 37.6 trillion m3 could be extracted has been shown to be false, no actual UK data on gas recovery is available the claim was based on pre-2010 US data. Just 10% gas recovery from Bowland shale could supply 50 years’ worth of current UK gas demand.

Germany Forcing Farmers To Use LESS Fertilizer To Satisfy EU’s Green Agenda
The German government, already reeling from the public backlash against rising fuel prices, the shortage of gas since supplies from Russia were cut off, and the biggest economic crisis in the EU, has now jumped on another 'woke' bandwagon. The socialist led ruling coalition has banned farmers in one of its federal states from properly fertilizing land in compliance with the latest lunacy of the EU's green agenda ...

Germany haemorrhaging cash to keep country running on as ‘net zero’ becomes zeroeconomic activity
Germany was so desperate to achieve 'net zero' CO2 emissions that for years the country's government closed its fossil fuel-fired and nuclear power plants,replacing those plants with wind and solar power — as well as impoorting huge volumes of natural gas and oil from Russia. 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:

The Truth About Coal And The Lies Of The Elite
So much for all the COP 26 banter late last year. Let me remind you. The elites all flew in on their private jets and promptly told us we’re all (royal we) getting off fossil fuels and killing coal.So how’s that turning out? The usage of coal is now at record highs:

Net Zero Will Lead To The End Of Modern Civilisation, Says Top Scientist
In a recently published science paper, Dr. Wallace Manheimer said Net Zero would be the end of modern civilisation. Writing about wind and solar power he argued it would be especially tragic “when not only will this new infrastructure fail, but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment, and be entirely unnecessary”.

Britain is Breaking Down; The Economy Is Struggling, Living Standards Are Falling, Institutions Are Failing
Successive governments have brought Britain to its knees.This article will focus on Britain as representative of the general malaise that is afflicting almost all the developed world. Our current crop of politicians have discarded the resources that brought the country out of the post war decline ... In spite of being rich in energy resources Britain is now in an energy crisis, our leaders have sacrificed prosperity on the altar of Net Zero, committing the nation to our reducing our 1% contribution to harmful emissions still further ...

Climate Scientists' Mathematical Models Of Reality Wrong Again…New Study Shows Jet Stream Strengthening, Not Weakening
recent research  by Samantha Hallam et al published in the journal Climate Dynamics looks at the seasonal variations over decades in Northern Hemisphere jet stream latitude and speed over land for the period 1871–2011. The authors report that they found no evidence of weakening of the sort climate alarmists have been warning about for the past three decades.

Climate Scaremongers Have Taken Over Where COVID Scaremongers Left Off
Boggart Blog can announce that the winners of our coveted Scaremongering Bollocks of The Month award goes this month to BBC News. Not only did the BBC report in one of their regular climate catastrophe scare stories that river levels across the UK have been at record lows, they broadcast that news story on the same day as The London Weather Centre announced that March 2023 was set to be the wettest March since records began.

Europes Tractor Protests Spread To Germany And Now Include Fishing Trawlers
Hundreds of farmers have descended in their tractors on a small German coastal town to protest measures imposed by the European Union as part of the bid to 'save the planet' by reducing CO2 emissions from cow farts. 400 tractors reportedly gathered in Büsum on Wednesday to protest what is probably the most insane environmentalist policy dreamed up by the EU idealogues to date ...

Green Energy & Net Zero: A Herd Of Elephants In The Room

The Cuadrilla Lancashire gas exploration wells yielded very high-quality natural gas from just a few fractures [ ... ]Claims that less than 1\100th of the gas resource of 37.6 trillion m3 could be extracted has been shown to be false, no actual UK data on gas recovery is available the claim was based on pre-2010 US data. Just 10% gas recovery from Bowland shale could supply 50 years’ worth of current UK gas demand.

Germany Forcing Farmers To Use LESS Fertilizer To Satisfy EU’s Green Agenda
The German government, already reeling from the public backlash against rising fuel prices, the shortage of gas since supplies from Russia were cut off, and the biggest economic crisis in the EU, has now jumped on another 'woke' bandwagon. The socialist led ruling coalition has banned farmers in one of its federal states from properly fertilizing land in compliance with the latest lunacy of the EU's green agenda ...

Germany haemorrhaging cash to keep country running on as ‘net zero’ becomes zeroeconomic activity
Germany was so desperate to achieve 'net zero' CO2 emissions that for years the country's government closed its fossil fuel-fired and nuclear power plants,replacing those plants with wind and solar power — as well as impoorting huge volumes of natural gas and oil from Russia. 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:

The Truth About Coal And The Lies Of The Elite
So much for all the COP 26 banter late last year. Let me remind you. The elites all flew in on their private jets and promptly told us we’re all (royal we) getting off fossil fuels and killing coal.So how’s that turning out? The usage of coal is now at record highs:

Net Zero Will Lead To The End Of Modern Civilisation, Says Top Scientist
In a recently published science paper, Dr. Wallace Manheimer said Net Zero would be the end of modern civilisation. Writing about wind and solar power he argued it would be especially tragic “when not only will this new infrastructure fail, but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment, and be entirely unnecessary”.

Britain is Breaking Down; The Economy Is Struggling, Living Standards Are Falling, Institutions Are Failing
Successive governments have brought Britain to its knees.This article will focus on Britain as representative of the general malaise that is afflicting almost all the developed world. Our current crop of politicians have discarded the resources that brought the country out of the post war decline ... In spite of being rich in energy resources Britain is now in an energy crisis, our leaders have sacrificed prosperity on the altar of Net Zero, committing the nation to our reducing our 1% contribution to harmful emissions still further ...

Climate Scientists' Mathematical Models Of Reality Wrong Again…New Study Shows Jet Stream Strengthening, Not Weakening
recent research  by Samantha Hallam et al published in the journal Climate Dynamics looks at the seasonal variations over decades in Northern Hemisphere jet stream latitude and speed over land for the period 1871–2011. The authors report that they found no evidence of weakening of the sort climate alarmists have been warning about for the past three decades.

Researchers Discover How to Use Living Plants to Generate Electricity.
Most of the hyped green energy solutions to generate electricity from wind or sunshine are so obviously flawed the only thing that makes them economically viable is that governments offer huge subsidies to generators. This in turn makes the sustainables so expensive that consumers cannot afford the intermittent energy they produce.

Renewable Energy: So Useless That Even Green Loons At Google Have Given up on it
The sandal wearing, tree hugging, bearded puritans call it "renewable energy", the zealots of the Church Of Scienceology call it sustainable energy, those with smarter heads on their shoulder call it "alternative energy" because that's what it really is: an alternative to energy that actually works (eg nuclear and anything made from cabon-rich fuel from organic matter laid down in pre-history and left to brew for a few hundred million years.)

After Nuclear Phase-Out, Germany Debates Scrapping Coal After deciding to scrap nuclear power, Germany is to debate getting rid of its coal fired generating plant too, Coal is Germany's biggest energy source but also its top polluter and main threat to the unrealistic climate goals imposed by the EU. Chancellor Angela Merkel's government is split on the issue, which pits a vocal environmental movement against energy giants and coal mining regions, with only weeks until her cabinet is set to present its next climate action plan.

Fracking Truth: Mainstream media reports only corporate lies and government propaganda.
The government, energy companies and their poodles in the science academy have been trying to sell us fracking as the cheapish, cleanish but ultimately more reliable than wind and mirrors way of meeting future energy needs. Nobody believed them of course, only a complete idiot would believe that nonsense. Unfortunately the idiots believed themselves.

[a href="file://C:/work/alltoday/energy-green-dreams.shtml">Green dreams ] ... [ Net Zero reality ] ... [ Climate change ] ... [ Wind Turbine truth ]

EXPLORE:
[Daily Stirrer] ... [ Our Page on on Substack ]... [Boggart Aboad] ... [ Ian Thorpe at Quora ] ... [ Greenteeth Home ] ... [ Greenteeth on Minds.com ] ... [ Here Come The Russians ] ... [ Latest Posts ] ... [ Blog Bulletin ]