The Empire Strikes Out

Katabasis says: March 5, 2011 at 2:05 am
There are some people here expressing doubts that this could possibly be the… position of the National Grid and/or that there has been misrepresentation by the Telegraph.
One link (‘Gone Green’ a Scenario for 2020) you offer has this statement:
This potential ‘business as usual’ future scenario
(depicted right) sees the closure of 12 GW of oil and
coal fired-plant under the Large Combustion Plant
Directive and the closure of 7.5 GW of nuclear
capacity. The market may ‘fill the gap’ with some
renewables; potentially 13 GW of transmission
connected, combined onshore and offshore wind
could be achieved. However, the dominant energy
source will be from about 15 GW of new gas-fired
generation. We believe that this energy mix may fall
substantially short of the 15% target and we support
the Government’s consultation on measures which
could address this issue.
Looks like plans for new generators are there.

Willis, when you put a phrase in parenthesis it usually indicates that the phrase is a direct quote. (that’s what parenthesesmean). You did exactly that but the phrase you quoted did not appear in the article, your excuse was that this is what it meant. Had you looked into the context rather more you would have found that your perception was wrong, nevertheless the misquote then sent this thread off into a discussion (rant) about a different issue.
This is the sort of Bull***t you expect from the warmist community.
Yes the UK has got inherent problems looming due to the inability of governments to sanction new power station capacity and that might lead to all sorts of problems. But this news report and the interview that it resulted from had nothing to do with that issue. Hallidays interview was about producing a more resilient and efficient power distribution system that produces the same outcomes with less resources.
Current power generation in many countries relies on sources of fuel that are non indigenous. When your oil supplies are dependent on unstable arab dictatorships (Libya) and your supplies of natural gas are routed to you via unstable ex communist countries it makes sense to start thinking about how you can maximise the efficiency of utilisation of these fuel sources and making plans to deal with any interruptions to supply that might occur.
As several commentators have pointed out, this interview, for those who have bothered to listen to it rather than joining the general slanging match about what he didn’t say, was concerned with using new technology to develop a smarter grid system and at no time did he say, as you inferred, that there would not be continuity of supply.

In 1974 when Britain still had a very sizable coal industry and lots of the power stations used coal the miners were on strike the Conservative government introducted a “Three Day Week” (instead of the normal 5 working days) to conserve coal stocks and to reduce disruption to the electricity supply. Those of you in other countries or Brits too young to remember those events can read about it in Wikipedia.
Three-Day Week
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
It is quite obvious what we need to do now. We must re-introduce the Three Day Week and rely on Met Office forecasts each week to tell us which three days will be the windiest. Of course there would be many weeks with fewer than three windy days but, looking on the bright side, unlike the temperature the number of windy days cannot drop below zero!

Nostradamus ( to get your attention ) was not as good as Ayn Rand, we are in the first 3 chapters of ATLAS SHRUGGED, it reads like today’s news !!!!!

Looking past the headline, which is an example of provocative yellow journalism of the sort one has come to expect from the Murdoch owned Telegraph, what Holliday is saying is that electricity prices will be based on time of day. Use of washers, driers, and charging electric cars will cost less if it is done off peak.
This is an economically sensible measure which could avoid excessive installation of facilities that are needed for peak periods, and make good use wind power which is available at night. Lowering the price of off peak electricity is not a new idea, and has been win-win strategy, which shares reduced cost of off peak power between the utilities and the customers.
This can be facilitated with a smart grid.
The same kind of project is proposed in my home state of Vermont.
http://recovery.vermont.gov/blog/unite
The project is called eEnergy Vermont because smart grid means using digital technology to make better use of energy resources than was ever possible before. For consumers the smart grid means better information about our energy use and much better control over it including substantial opportunities to save money by using electricity when it is cheap and shunning it when it is expensive as well as better reliability. For utilities the smart grid means an opportunity to cooperate with their customers to reduce expensive buys of peak electricity, avoid the need to build as much generation and transmission capability as would otherwise be necessary to deal with escalating peaks (the grid must be sized for peaks), and lower operational costs which include but go way beyond the obvious cost of sending someone out to read your meter. The distributed small sources of renewable power popping up around the state are better used and therefore more valuable if plugged into a smart grid. For the country a smarter grid means reduced reliance on foreign oil and lower CO2 emissions as well as a stronger economy because of lower energy costs.

Looks like the Chinese have won the cold war.
Brrrrrr.

Berényi Péter, “It is not. Listen to BBC Radio 4 how National Grid’s Steve Holliday explains why 2011 is a crucial year for the UK’s energy system. You can hear it all in his own voice, the ”days of permanently available electricity coming to an end” thing included (it is at the end of the 02.45 record).”
I did and he says no such thing. Show me the quote where he says anything about the, “days of permanently available electricity coming to an end”. That is a gross distortion of what he actually said,
What he says is,
“The grid’s going to be a very different system in 2020 2030. We keep thinking about we want it to be there and provide power when we need it. It’s going to be a much smarter system then, were going to have to change our own behaviour and consume it when it’s available and available cheaply.”
That does not mean you will not have permanently available electricity (no power at all). Nor does it have anything to do with having unlimited power as you don’t even have that now. Any grid can be overloaded. What he could simply mean is the rates will fluctuate automatically based on the grid’s load. So you can use all you want during peak times but it is going to be much more expensive. The expense of course would be increased dramatically if it only came from renewables which is I believe what he is getting at for a 2020, 2030 scenario. This will naturally make people drastically change their behavior to save money. That is a much different interpretation than the government deciding to arbitrarily shut your power off for “green” reasons.

The problem with articles like this is they generate propaganda that the UK government is going to in the future have certain times of the day when you have no electricity at all (The days of permanently available electricity may be coming to an end). I am as anti-green energy as they come but these sorts of wild distortions do nothing to help and only fuel useless rhetoric. I still want to know why this is not online and there is not author.