UK Dumps Climate Madhouse Project To Harvest Sun And Wind Energy In The Sahara

 

 

It comes as little surprise that yet another grandiose techno-utopian vision has ended not with a triumphant march toward Net Zero, but with a flick of the off-switch. Last week, Britain’s energy secretary quietly announced that the government “has pulled the plug on a £24 billion plan to bring Moroccan wind and solar power to Britain via the world’s longest subsea electricity cable, citing concerns over security and costs” . In other words, after years of hype, headline-grabbing simulations and talk of “reliable clean power for 19 hours a day,” the reality of risk and expense finally intruded—and the dream of Sahara sun for all has been consigned to the scrapheap.

The scheme, championed by Xlinks and backed by big-name investors from Abu Dhabi’s Taqa to TotalEnergies, was unveiled in 2022 with a headline price tag of £16 billion. By the time official talks fizzled, project costs had ballooned to between £22 billion and £24 billion—and the fixed, subsidised price for UK consumers had climbed from a promising £48/MWh in 2012 terms to a sobering £70-80/MWh, on par with Hinkley Point C’s notorious £92.50/MWh deal from a decade ago . It was a textbook illustration of how techno-optimism meets political reality: grand ambitions crashing headlong into the twin walls of finance and geopolitics.

Perhaps the most telling line came when officials admitted this “first-of-a-kind mega project” carried “a high level of inherent, cumulative risk, delivery, operational, and security.” In plainer terms, nobody quite trusted a 3,800-mile subsea cable stretching from the Sahara to Devon to keep the lights on—or to fend off hostile actors, accidental damage or simple technical failure . For all the talk of homegrown power, the reality was a foreign-built supergrid running through disputed waters, vulnerable to every storm, saboteur or bureaucratic blunder.

And yet just a few years ago, this venture was presented as the ultimate win-win: millions of desert acres covered in solar panels and wind turbines, exporting 3.6 GW of “reliable” energy to 7 million homes and displacing imported gas.

The initial delivery method proposed in this projects for energy collected in Morocco to be delivered to homes and businesses in UK was by undersea cable but this was found to be unfeasible in avery imaginable way, cost, technical difficuty, security, politics etc. and an alteenative proposal to transport the cuurent via the national grids of France and Spain put forward.

How many of you spotted that yes,  this is the same Spain where only a few weeks ago the entire 70% solar/wind supplied grid  shut down due to power overload which because a surge of current flowing into the grid as both wind and solar generators experiences perfect conditions simultaneously while insufficient grid inertia destsbilised frequency? Spain's high capacity undersea Moroccan Inreconnector could do nothing to save the situation.

(Note: the problem isn’t lack of supply, it’s lack of inertia only available from spinning generation. Since this means the majority of supply must be spinning generation, the alleged aim of wind/solar – battling the evil devil Siotu – cannot be achieved and its expense not warranted.)

And spread that frequency failure to part of southern France via an interconnector causing power cuts there, to the evident delight of the French. Are interconnectors une bonne idée? L’ on y pense.

Long distance interconnectors are usually DC and can provide no inertia. The French/Spain one is short distance AC which is why Spain was able to export its frequency chaos.

Without mostly spinning generation, grids are inherently unstable and at constant risk of failure from frequency instability which can be caused by a variety of factors.This is why for all the hysterical claims of the UK's green lobby that on a breezy, sunny day, renewables are generating up to 70% of our electricity is such a joke. In order to provide the necessary inertia to smooth out sudded fluctuations in current that are a feature of ;gren' technologies, we have to keep gas power stations running twenty four hours a  day and pay the operators to let the otput go down to earth.

Spain exports to France and France exports to England – but this is not dispatchsble. It is heavily dependent on whether Spain and France have spare capacity available on demand. It overlooks the other energy self-harming Country Germany which relies heavily on France and Norway when dunkelflautes are about… often in Winter. Norway is threatening to restrict supplies via interconnector as extra-territorial demand is forcing prices up to – unhappy – Norwegian consumers. France meanwhile is faced with replacing its fleet of aged 59 nuclear reactors, of which recently 26 were out if action for repair/maintenance a few months ago and France had no spare juice, struggling to,meet its own requirements.

Oh – and then there’s energy loss. The further electricity travels the less comes out the other end. So by the time it arrives in England, consumersd might get might get enoough juice on \ winter's morning to boil a small kettle for a cup of tea. So long was they don't switch on the low wattage light at the same time.

But back to the sheer wrong - headedness of the Sahara project. 

Consider that you can’t build stable turbines or panels on shifting sands and that the sands of the Sahara Run an average depth of 500′ then consider the deepest “Moving Dunes” can be 1000′ deep, you will need some gargantuan turbine masts and deeply excavated turbine footings (down to bedrock) to place turbines “Just anywhere” in the Sahara. Same for Solar Panels, their bases would also need to be set deep to “Not be Disturbed” by Saharan shifting sands. 

As as some readers will know the Sahara is not all sand dunes,it would be equally difficult to put wind turbines or solar farms on Gravel plains or salt flats either. The gravel would still need to be excavated to a stable surface and the salt would prove corrosive to panel supports. So that leaves the rocky Mesa areas and I’m not sure how much of a problem the stone might pose as foundation footing installations.

And on top of all that, the first desert sand storm would knock out every solar panel caught in its pash. Sand blasted panels become opaque and thus the light is diffused before it hits the photo - voltaic cells. 

There is an kind of joy to be obtained from witnessing this particular techno-dream deflate. It reminds us that even the most elaborate green schemes are only as sound as their financial footings and, adherednce ti the laws of physics and geopolitical practicalities. When those are not taken into account, the utopian narrative gives way to something far more earthy: the simple recognition that expensive, complex, and foreign-dependent projects rarely survive contact with reality.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: 

 

 

 

Do We Have A Winter Of Civil Disobedience Ahead?

 Xavier Connolly, 18 August 2022

Civil Unrest UK - picture source BBC news

 

As many people in Britain slap on the apres sun gloop in the wake of what passes for a heatwave in these cool cloudy climes, our inept politicians caught with their pants down by unusual weather as usual have heard that that winter is coming and are making plans for a coldwave. 

We are in the grip of an energy crisis at the height of summer, due in part at least to the loss of gas imports from Russia.  Six months into the war in Ukraine, UK and EU policymakers are finally realising the potentially catastrophic implications of their gung-ho attitude in sanctioning Russia and supplying the neo Nazi nutters in Kiev with unlimited armaments and ammunition having backfired as The Kremlin retaliated by sanctioning gas exports to European states that depend on Russian gas.

Last week, it was reported that the UK government is laying down plans for a “reasonable worst-case scenario” through the winter of '22/'23 in which below-average temperatures and gas shortages could force  to trigger industry regulators to impose emergency gas-saving measures, including blackouts for industry and even households. And this is as energy prices spiral out of control to new records every day. The average annual energy bill for a typical household is expected to reach £4,200, or about £350 a month in the coming winter — more than double what households are currently paying and a four-fold increase on the average bill paid just a year ago.

The social consequences of such an outcome will be metamorphic, the public are already aware that a far bigger factor in the energy price increase is the risible underperformance of 'sustainable sources' of clean, green electricity. Our dependence on wind and sunshine to provide the stream of megawatts we need twenty four hours a day looks like pushing 10.5 million households — a third of the total — into poverty, worsening what is already the UK’s worst cost-of-living crisis in decades. Yet even when faced with a campaign of civil disobedience, calling on people to cancel their energy direct debits, the government hasn’t been able to come up with anything better than offering households a one-off £400 discount on their fuel bills in October (and a bit more for those on means-tested benefits).

This has been the inevitable outcome of former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband’s disastrous Climate Change Act since 2008.

 Environmentalists representing groups outside parliament effectively wrote the act in collaboration with elected politicians from the 'Looney Left' of the Labour Party and a few Liberal Democrat tree huggers, and all MPs (bar 5) voted it through. There are enough covenants, pledges and commitments in its claues to make sure the green blob and their philanthropist billionaire funders can (and do) sue the government at even the slightest deviation. 

Then we have ESGs which ensure companies’ feet are held to the fire, and ensure funding – which the oil companies desperately need to ramp up production – is steered well away from anything which would negatively affect climate policy.

Of course the green blob are screaming loudest about the lack of energy and how it hits the poorest and most vulnerable in society hardest, hypocritically oblivious to the fact that policies they pushed for are the main cause. They could be well on the way to NetZero, if they had allowed nuclear, but apparently that isn’t an option either.

Not to mention that shutting down 20 power stations in 20 years without viable alternatives will do that. We aren’t using less energy, we’re now just dependent on importing more.

 One of the proposals being considered among the government's winter plans is bringing energy under government control. This shows a lack of historical awareness as well as a lack of intelligence, there are many examples of how bringing an industry under government control turns it into a basket case, and it certainly won’t magically produce more energy without building power stations, pumping more gas out of North Sea wells, reopening coal mines or fracking. And you can guarantee the green blob lawyers would be all over that to make sure they aren’t viable options. 

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