Who would have thunk? Maybe it had something to do with this video of a Vestas wind turbine:
I wonder if it used “Lucas” electronic parts? I owned an Austin Healy Sprite and a Triumph TR6 at one time, and the failure above looks familiar.
Excerpts from an article in the Guardian:
Vestas is to shut down its Isle of Wight factory in the face of collapsing demand from a wind-farming industry hobbled by the recession and red tape.
The group had planned to convert the factory in Newport so it could make blades for the British market, but said this morning that the paralysis gripping the industry meant that orders had ground to a halt. Such low demand could not justify the investment, Ditlev Engel, the chief executive, told the Guardian.
The UK’s only wind turbine manufacturing plant is to close, dealing a humiliating blow to the government’s promise to support low-carbon industries.”
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/28/vestas-wind-turbine-factory-close
See Vestas Wind Power Solutions here
Of course, windmills produce clean emissions free power, they don’t pollute.
Just to be fair, anyone have video or photos of a coal fired power plant exploding or uncontrollably catching fire?
h/t to David Segesta
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Re: costs of wind. Wind farms in Ontario are getting paid 14 cents per kWhr, and if they are required to pay property tax on the capital costs of their installs, can’t make a profit.
Nukes in Ontario are getting round about 5 cents per kWhr and are making a tidy operating profit. This includes paying into the fund for decomissioning and disposal of spent fuel, which now has some tens of billions in it.
EPRI estimates the “all in” costs of nuclear, including fuel cradle to grave,
construction, maintenance, operation, decomission, plus the govt subsidy,
to be in the range 8 cents to 14 cents per kWhr. They also estimate that
the CO2 production due to construction, maintenance, and operation of
wind turbines is roughly double that of nukes.
The capacity factor of wind in Ontario is hitting round about 10 percent.
This is because the turbines are dispatched off if the wind is too low
*or* too high. Or just too variable. Also, the turbine may not be needed,
as cheaper power may be available at low demand times. Why should the
water at Niagara be spilled over the falls at 2AM when nobody is watching,
when the price of electricity is about 3 cents per kWhr. And the highest
wind availability tends not to match peak demand, which is typically
in the 4PM to 7PM time in Ontario.
And the price paid to the operators does not include the costs required
for upgrades to the grid, nor increased operating costs per kWhr at the
backup generation required to operate fewer hours but still have all
their employees on the job. A coal plant that operates for 70 percent
of the time costs a lot more per kWhr than one that operates all the time.
Wind is mighty silly as it is currently used.
Why is it that the most common scene of these windmills is idle?
I have driven by the I-580 site too many times, only to see them in their
natural state…doing nothing.
TonyB (12:48:39) :
…
The sad fact is that despite the warm words and pious aspirations a modern economy can’t exist on renewables for its base load energy-however nice that may sound. In twenty years time perhaps, but there is an awful lot of trial and error to go through first, and in the meantime we need to build some new power stations using coal or nuclear-and quickly.
Tonyb
Tonyb – Sad to say, but the UK looks like a slow motion train wreck that will take the next 5 to 10 years to play out. Perhaps buying electricity from France will take the edge of some of the pain.
I predict serious and prolonged blackouts will occur, local industry will be decimated, social unrest will occur, and the rest of the world will use the UK as an object lesson in what not to do.
Eh?
The standard CEGB 200 Mw set of the 1960’s on coal firing held on spinning reserve at 10% capacity could run to half power in about 30 minutes and full power in about 45 minutes.
The 500 Mw sets introduced in the 1970’s, Drax etc, with the new so called fast forced boilers were slightly slower and had serious teething troubles at first but were sorted after a few years.
The standard CEGB 25 MW gas turbine set installed from 1975 could reach full power from cold in 2 minutes, and as later built in pairs in the mid 1980’s with a steam second stage of a further 35 MW could be run up without steam generation in much the same time but with steam reach full power in about ten minutes.
Bit dodgy though running them down in dual mode with all that excess heat.
The Magnox nuclear stations of the 1950’s were very slow compared to their coal fired counterparts but the AGRs, when finally got to work, were surprisingly fast because being gas cooled using helium the conductivity was amazing and unlike PWRs there was no danger of a cold slug problem.
When I was sent to recommission Seaton Carew AGR just before the miner’s strike, it hadn’t turned a wheel in five years, I could hold her on idle at 100 MW and run her up to her full 2000 MW in twenty five minutes.
My counterpart at the Isle of Grain, oil fired, which also had been mothballed for years, needed nearly fifty minutes and he had the latest, then, oxygen boost fast ignition.
KIndest Regards
@ur momisugly bill (19:25:12) :
You cite 8 references to incidents spanning the globe in a timespan of 12 years. Now, consider the potential incident ratio per kilowatt/hour and compare that to Bird Beaters. I suspect that you will find the ratio for Bird Beater failures to be significantly, many magnitude, higher than power stations (of any kind). It would take thousands upon thousands of Bird Beaters to replace just the power stations you have cited here, and I suspect they would have a far greater failure rate.
I am suspicious of these quotes:
They can guarantee this? This does not seem plausible.
To date it has clearly not been.
This does not include any manufacturing, maintanence, etc… Very vague and simply not true.
Then why the need for such lavish subsidies?
Clearly not true. They have been attempting this technology for better than 35 years without success.
Again, clearly not true, unless you consider almost 40 years of operation a “young” technology. Further, this contradicts their own prior statements.
Really? How well has this worked out so far? All reports I have seen are completely to the contrary, and this doesn’t even factor in the cost of subsidizing.
Power plants clearly have the upper hand here since they do not require placement in viable “windy” areas.
This is absolutely contrary to observed and as soon as I see the term “stakeholders” it is a blaring signal to me that politics are involved. The term “stakeholders” in political terms means “bend over and get ready for it”
Again, not what has been observed and quite to the contrary.
No real reason for me to continue on with this report.
My summary of this report:
This information does look somewhat plausible to me, however, I do believe the metrics would change considerably once a usable volume of Bird Beaters were put into place. There are a lot more buildings and cars around then there are Bird Beaters. Additionally, the type of birds in harms way differs greatly, and the current concern are for migratory birds such as Geese. How many 25 pound Geese fly into buildings and cars? I saw a YouTube once of a flock of Canadian Geese flying through a Bird Beater farm and it wasn’t pretty. Took out quite a few.
These costs do not factor in subsidies, but they do factor in the enourmous cost to Nuclear, Natural Gas and Coal power plants to cut through the years of red tape purpetrated upon their industries by the Greenie Weenie’s. Because of these issues, this is not a properly balanced assessment.
This cites a purported “tax credit”, definately something one cannot count on, especially for any duration. And if it is so cheap, why the need for a “credit”. Additionally, this does not include the cost of subsidy. Even without factoring in these extra costs and the inevitable demise of the “tax credit”, this would affectively increase my current rate by some 60%. Doesn’t sound like a good deal to me, and this assumes that they are accurate, but as we usually find out later, the costs are likely to be grossly underestimating.
Another of the reasons wind power is quite a bit less efficient, there are electric oil pumps that are needed for the bearings – even when the wind isn’t blowing! Several readers have commented about seeing windmills turning when the air is still. Big windmills that aren’t turning are out of commission, even if the wind starts blowing, they won’t spin. If a large windmill sits still, the blades sag and get out of balance, so even when the wind isn’t strong enough to power the system – electric power needs to be used to power the oil pump and spin the air foil – when there is no wind you don’t get no power, you get negative power!
The media always uses the size of Manhattan as an example because they are mostly from Manhattan – They often think that the weather in NYC represents the entire country – It’s all about them.
British beer is served warm because it can be – there are no off flavors, etc that need to be disguised by being ice cold. American beer is HORRIBLE warm (it’s not great cold either), not so with a good Pale ale, ESB or brown. British beer is wonderful. [just one American’s opinion]
Roger Sowell
You need to read the source documentation when you link it, 2008 is a preliminary and renewables are high and also include out of state purchase of renewable power. So lets be real and not use unconfirmed numbers, ok?
The numbers for 2007 are accurate and have source documentation..
They come in 1.5% of total consumption and when Calculated into MW Production equals 653 Mw of average generation from 2539Mw of installed nameplate capacity or 25.7% capacity utilization averaged over the year. Sounds Good yes? Well no because of one thing this report does not tell you and the latest report with the data which is needed was 2001, but the data is seasonal percentages so it should be accurate…
http://www.energy.ca.gov/reports/2003-01-17_500-02-034F.PDF
Page 44 – Table 5
Statewide Total Wind Power Generated by Fiscal Quarter…
1st = 16%, 2nd = 35%, 3rd = 33%, 4th = 15%
I know the argument is that AC uses more power in the summer and it adds when it is needed most but consumption does not change 19% seasonally in California, and if we are indeed in a warming world the need for cooling will only increase in winter.
When the electric car shows up how is this going to jive with demand year round?
Roger, I read the information in your link, you are incorrect about the 7,000 GWH .. Northwest imports were 1,026 GWH, Southwest imports were 2,279 GWH, leaving local production at 5,724 GWH. This is for a total budget of 302,072 GWH. I would call that trivial, and this is after 35 years of build-out and operation! It doesn’t sound to me like it is working so well, and I believe there are others here that will agree with me on this.
You are correct about “sound businessmen”, not building, but investing in companies that build these products (GE being one big player). They are jumping on the subsidy bandwagon just as they have in Britain and elsewhere. Once the subsidy well dries up, they will move on, leaving the inevitable costs to the consumer, which really won’t be a lot different since the subsidy is our tax money anyway. This type of thing is and has been happening in other places around the world. If this were such a good technology, why has it taken almost 40 years for these “sound businessmen” to finally jump on board? I suspect because it has not been such a “sound investment”, until now that the current administration is announcing some $160 billion in “incentive” to invest (just first round and the tip of the inevitable subsidy iceberg). With this kind of money involved, as an investor from that perspective, I too would be interested in investment. But that doesn’t make it a sound “alternative energy” source, but it could buy a whole lot of pizza’s!
@ur momisugly a jones (20:58:42) :
Fascinating stuff! I love it when we get “hands on” people in here contributing and laying down some “real world smack”! That’s what it’s all about!
Thank you for the wonderful insight!
@ur momisugly Roger Sowell (19:48:14) :
Roger, looking over that data a bit more, I have to say, there is not only a huge problem with California’s overall energy plan (as they import nearly 1/3 or their energy needs from other states), but they are also only able to produce 1.89% of their energy needs from almost 40 years of Bird Beater trials. This doesn’t sound like a very good track record to me.
I went to the 1980 World’s Fair in Vancouver British Columbia were we enjoyed a quart of warm Bavarian beer. Best beer I have ever had, and I have had a lot. Beats any beer made in America, by far. IMHO
We were never leaders in this field anyway………..if Danish/German ones shut down, that would be the key indicator that the industry was going tits up……..
I repeat. Wind makes sense in very special circumstances.
In the land of DIRTY OIL, there is about 1/2 GW of windmills that have been intelligently deployed without subsidy or any handouts.
Mind you people pay the real cost of power in this jurisdiction where the only true successful deregulation in NA took place.
I am a consumer in said jurisdiction so I should know. After living under the umbrella of the TVA for 5 years and returning to DIRTY OIL land, I was shocked at what the real cost of power was. Everyone else in NA is subsidized in some fashion by politicians with no balls … including Arny.
As an operator of Coal Base Load in this jurisdiction’s grid, I still do look at the windmills as fluff … but having watched the energy trading system for 10 years, they do have a place.
Oh, would you like a link to watch how the grid is dispatched over time in DIRTY OIL land? Definately not England although they did steal a little English scenery in a tourism ad …
Adolfo Giurfa (11:00:52) : I would say, “instead Start investing in French Energy futures now!” because, chances are that you will have to buy energy from France
Actually a practical solution. Lay a superconducting power cable (such as those produced by American Superconductor) under the channel and put the French nuclear grid on line in England. No Problem. (This really would work).
John Laidlaw (11:10:58) : Hey hey hey! We drink warm beer because we *like* it and it has more flavour. Just keeping the facts straight here… 😉
Um, I thought Brits drank “room temperature beer” which last time I was there was about 56 F (or about the same as a California Fridge during the repeated energy shortages we had from similar government energy meddling nonsense 😉
what popular proponents of wind and solar power always seem to skirt past quickly is the fact that it’s the *storage* of the energy that matters. If you can’t store it efficiently, you can’t balance it against demand, and the whole system becomes an expensive white elephant.
While this is true at large percentages, for less than about 15-20% you can forgo storage. Simply turning down a gas turbine saves the fuel you would otherwise need, much as is done with gas turbines vs nukes for peaking. Basically, wind becomes your lowest variable cost, but least dispatchable, peaking plant.
I say again (for the umpteenth time), money needs to be poured into nuclear fusion research. Anything else is folly.
Sorry, but no. There are lots of non-folly energy sources at reasonable prices while fusion has been ’50 years away’ for each of the last 50 years and is still 50 years away… Now a place like the U.S.A. has many more options than Britain, but there are still plenty of options for every location.
Yes, too, each option has good points and bad points. So wind power in North Texas is not a bad idea ( while living there might be due to the incessant wind!) and solar in Arizona makes sense but wind, not so much. For anyone with access to sea water, near infinite Uranium is available and fission works rather well; with the quantity of waste to ‘dispose’ of so small that we’ve run about 40 years and still haven’t bothered to designate a disposal site(!). For Britain, wave bobbers makes a lot of sense (not tidal generators, but surface waves). But, IMHO, what makes the most sense is the several hundred years of coal scattered all over the planet. Yeah, scrub the flue for mercury, uranium, etc. But let the CO2 go.
FWIW, the last I heard numbers wind in N. Texas was headed for 7 cents / kWhr while solar in Arizona and S. California was at about a dime, but some new stuff in lab scale was at the nickel / kW-hr rate. Nuclear is all over the board with old plants at about 3 cents and new build at up to 25 cents depending on how much litigation they expect 8-{
There is a wave farm going in off the coast of Hawaii that looks to have decently low costs (and far less impact visually or as sound than wind turbines with no bird kill issues…).
The point? We have dozens of systems to make energy services that work just fine. What we don’t have is an economic system that lets them compete in a free and open market; we have massively regulated energy markets and political management. Thus we have a mess…
Markets may not be perfect, but they blow the doors of politicians for efficiency, low cost, reliability, and ability to pick winners well.
I live in an area where these windmills spring up like weeds (Lancashire coast, UK). We even have a forest of the things a couple of miles offshore. All of them were useless during the recent freeze. What use is energy technology when it fails just when you need it most?
I have installed a wood/coal burning stove to make sure we don’t freeze to death. There is an abundant supply of wood washed up on the beach which we saw up, dry out and store. What the British eco-Nazis will make of my carbon footprint is anyone’s guess but then, I don’t give a toss what they think. They won’t be the ones freezing their bums off in winter. Need I point out that Hitler was the last one to get the lights turned off (or blacked out) in Britain?
Forget useless sustainables. Bring back coal before the damn lights go out.
PS Squidly, I second the great taste of British beer but only that of the independent breweries. The big company commercial stuff tastes every bit as bad as the US commercial stuff. 😀
PaulHClark (11:15:08) :
1). What is the cost per Kwh from one of these machines?
2). What is the cost per KwH from alternatives such as nuclear, coal and oil?
3). What is the end to end carbon footprint of a wind turbine?
4). What is the additional cost to the grid of running wind turbines – which operate in a way that requires back-up from other energy providing platforms that often have to operate at inefficient levels in such a system?
1) Highly variable with site specific wind speeds. Bigger turbines are cheaper than little ones. From about 25 cents / kW-hr down to 7 cents / Wk-hr for typical U.S. sites. Hope is to hit nickel / kW-hr “soon” in the steady wind corridor of Oklahoma / Texas.
2) Highly variable with construction costs. Nuke could be the cheapest in some parts of the world (2 cents / kW-hr possible) but in most of the U.S.A. today (and especially in California) figure about 25 c/kW-hr. Coal has been hanging in about 5 cents per kW-hr (with some variation with coal prices and construction costs). Oil is almost 100% transportation fuel, not generator fuel, other than in very small scale emergency generators or small village scale systems (i.e. remote Alaskan village…) It just isn’t really important, but figure about 10 to 25 cents / kWhr in small scales.
3) Irrelevant (and somewhat impossible to figure out anyway. It’s mostly an exercise in stating what assumptions you like for where the energy to make the thing came from). You can make it smaller by using farm grown bio-plastics and wind or solar sourced electricity; or larger by using petroleum based chemicals and coal electricity. There is just no point to the exercise.
4) Near zero at small percentages, rising to some minor management of existing peaking plant at the 10% of capacity scale, then a bit more significant as you approach the 15% to 20% level. After that it rises darned fast since then you need to build duplicate plant for stable capacity. Depending on what you build (i.e. gas turbine vs nuke) you can get high fuel costs / low capital costs; or high capital costs, low fuel costs. Management to a stable grid becomes ‘problematic’…
All these questions are best handled by an electric company in a free market, but that won’t happen…
Benjamin P. (12:23:44) : Climate change or otherwise, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, are all finite resources, so one way or another, we’ll need 100% renewable energy at some point.
Hopefully everyone on this blog recognizes that.
Yes, we do. And I hope that you realize the sizes involved. For coal the problem is about 250 to 400 years away. For Uranium, it’s 10,000 years for the known reserves on land. Then we would have to switch to Thorium for the next 30,000 years. After that, we would need to spend about 10% more to get our Uranium from sea water for the next 3 or 4 billion years. Unfortunately, the sun will incinerate life on the planet in about 2.5 billion years, so we can’t quite use it all up in time… But yes, if the planet could survive just a couple of billion years longer, we could use up the non-renewables…
Oh, and there is more carbon in methane clathrates than we can count (estimates are about as much as all other fossil fuels combined) so if we every use them, that’s another 1/2 millennium or so. Oh, and the tar sands and oil shales have as much oil as all other oil combined, call it plus a couple of hundred years…
Yes, we will run out… hundreds and hundreds of years for some fuels, billions and billions for others… I’m not going to lose sleep over it…
From:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
“Uranium is not renewable, but it is functionally unlimited. This clever scientist in Japan made a polymer that absorbs it from sea water at a price of about $150 / lb. Not competitive with the land based U by a few dollars, so not counted as an “economic reserve” today; but certainly cheap enough to make cheap electricity. And if we powered the whole planet on sea water U, we would extract slightly less each year than washes into the ocean via erosion… We run out of energy when we run out of planet. Literally. See:”
http://www.taka.jaea.go.jp/eimr_div/j637/theme3%20sea_e.html
Learn to use numbers when talking about ‘running out’. It is very enlightening…
Benjamin P. (14:22:54) :
@Thomas Gough (13:44:46) :
May as well put it off then is what you are saying?
Yes. Precisely. But if solar drops below a nickel, or wind, and someone wants to pay market rates for it, go right ahead. Basically, there is no urgency so we ought to do what is cheapest now (thus leaving more money for things like parks, medicines, etc.
And hopefully those Saudis are honest about their reserves…
Hopefully, yes, but they most likely have not. They have not really drilled much at all since they had a superfield that is over producing their OPEC quota anyway. Why drill for more that has to be shut in? So the best guess is that they are sitting on way more oil and that some day they might go drill for it. FWIW, every time they have been accused of not having the spare 2 mbbl/day they’ve claimed, they have eventually opened the spigot and pumped it. They have more capacity than they admit, and probable reserves are understated as well. But if not, Petrobras in Brasil has found what looks like a superfield (it will take a decade just to explore it all, but 10 B bbl is known now) and Standard Oil hit oil in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth everyone said was theoretically impossible. So now a lot of “explored areas” may need redrilling to a new depth …
We know that Hubberts Peak is a roughly bell shaped curve, and we know we started 150 years ago for Drakes first well, so we have 150 more at least (though we are not yet at Hubberts peak globally, so it might be longer) to be pumping out the oil. I’m not worried at all.
Heck, we have substantially not drilled at all on both east and west coasts and coastal Alaska.
Then there is:
This page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale
puts the recoverable shale oil estimate at about 3 trillion barrels. That is about 100 years at present oil consumption rates if all oil consumption was supplied from shale oil. Somehow I don’t feel like I’m running out…
But if we did have a surprise oil shortage, we can turn coal into oil and petroleum products. That’s good for a couple of hundred more years (and is being done today in South Africa and China on a commercial basis. SSL, SYMX, RTK, and SYNM are companies stock tickers in this business. SSL is the largest).
http://www.sasol.com/sasol_internet/frontend/navigation.jsp?navid=1600033&rootid=2
That’s another hundred or two.
Look, we are just not going to run out of energy. Ever. The only questions have to do with price and esthetics… We can make “petro” chemical from trees, algae, even trash (RTK does this one) and we have plenty of trash… so why ‘save the oil’?
We don’t need to develop anything, it’s already developed. We just need to let free markets decide which one gives us the most bang for the buck.
Robert Bateman (20:56:34) : Why is it that the most common scene of these windmills is idle? I have driven by the I-580 site too many times, only to see them in their natural state…doing nothing.
Because windmills can only work effectively in a modest range of wind speeds. You can design for slow ( think wild west water pumper dozens of blades), medium (egg beaters) and fast ( 3 wings on the prop high in the sky). Now the slow one will run a lot of the time, but not make much power, since it folds out of the way in modest to fast wind, but when that winter killer storm comes in with near gale force wind you have LOTS of power from the high speed ones. Except that 90% of the time the wind speed is way lower than that, so they sit idle. But for total $$ sold in a year, that 10% of the time gives you 90% of the $$$ …
Graeme Rodaughan (20:57:31) : Sad to say, but the UK looks like a slow motion train wreck that will take the next 5 to 10 years to play out. Perhaps buying electricity from France will take the edge of some of the pain.
I predict serious and prolonged blackouts will occur, local industry will be decimated, social unrest will occur, and the rest of the world will use the UK as an object lesson in what not to do.
Um, been there, done that. Thanks to governor Grayout Davis California had blackouts, local industry packed up an left (helped by tax beatings), folks were grumpy. But I’m sorry to say, no body seems to learn from the experience of others. So I don’t thing the object lesson will happen.
BTW, California buys a lot of power from Arizona and Nevada … Did you know that Nevada has coal power stations and that Arizona has a very large nuclear facility? But California has windmills (which we can load level because we have), lots of hydro? (about 10% hydro). We also buy lots of power from Washington state via the DC Intertie. We buy lots of power from other folks. We put it on the credit card (issue bonds) and generally freeload, since we have 14% unemployment and rising. We only have a $14 Billion $$ deficit this year projected to grow to $45 Billion Real Soon Now. Sure hope they don’t ask to be paid… But we’re not broke because folks keep buying our bonds… How can you be broke if the credit card still works!
But no, nobody will learn from it. We’re an existence proof…
Healey. Austin Healey. Donald Healey. Nash Healey.
Healey, Healey, Healey.
With an “E.”
hareynolds (19:45:07) : Meanwhile, domestic natural gas (methane has FOUR nasty disgusting baby-killing carbon atoms per molecule,
Um, I think you meant that it has 4 hydrogens and one nasty … carbon. Ethane is 2, propane is 3, at butane you get 4. But I like Octane with 8, as does my FI V8 sports car (Benz SL …)
but then you knew that) at the wellhead is below $4 per thousand cubic feet (due mainly to technical advances in tight shale drilling), roughly equivalent to $24/barrel oil.
Yeah… I’ve been thinking about getting a Phil station and a CNG car…
Folks are stacking drilling rigs because the price is too low to justify more drilling. You’re welcome.
Yup. I’ve sold out of my natural gas companies and oil / gas services stocks. While my heater bill is happy (even though we’re back to the 36 F range at the SF bay area which ought to be more like 50F with May just a day or two away…) I’m not so much since it’s hard to make money with gas so cheap… But I’ve hung on to CLNE (T. Boone Picken’s company) doing the CNG truck conversions and building out CNG gas stations. $25 / bbl equiv. beats the pants off $50 / bbl and bouncing to rising longer term oil…
I sure hope we don’t drop another 4 F degrees. Got about 3 more hours till sun up. I don’t want to lose my garden to a frost 45 days late… Already lost some tomatoes to a frost 15 or so days late. I’m getting tired of killing tomato plants…
This late cold start to the garden / farm season is not good… One side of the jet stream is fine, normal, and warm. Then we flop to the other side and it has a nasty blustery coldness to it that is just not right. The polar side is just way too cold way too late in the season. We are losing a lot of heat from the poles (slowly pumping heat from the oceans via these long fingers of the polar jet protruding more N and S than ‘normal’; cold on one side headed south, hot on the other headed north) and I wish the mechanism was clear.
Sun sleepy. Poles FreezeMAO cold. Massive heat / cold flows. I don’t like where this is headed… I want my May tomato harvest of 45 day wonders, not to be replanting what died of cold and looking at the others not growing from lack of heat… Heck, even my cold tolerant purple pod green beans are sulking in the cold.
Maybe time for an article on what makes the jet stream be this way and what it implies for gardeners?…
I say chaps, now look here! British beer (or real ale) is not served warm. It should be served at just above room temperature when it is cold, or just below room temperature when it is hot, just like a fine red wine! I am expecting it tp be served as the former for quite a while to come!