Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I guess having electricity when you need it is sooooo last century … UK families will have to get used to “only using power when it was available”. That constant electricity at home was dangerous anyhow, the unending hum of the wires can drive a man so insane that the only way to cure him is to make him head of the National Grid …
UK persons … comments?
w.
[Update, for those who believe the above is a faked article, I had Green Sand send me a photo and another scan of the actual newspaper. ~ ctm]
For what it’s worth, I can’t google up that article
You won’t find articles like that on Google. The founder funded Obama in his last election bid. Use Bing.
“Electricity provided by wind farms will increase six-fold by 2020 but critics complain they only generate on windy days. ”
OMG – who would have known? Mr. Holliday? You must be joking? It’s “Brazil” all over again.
I’m sure the UK government were well aware of the 16-19% figure that caused problems in Denmark, and I certainly had a long talk with the Scottish executive about the need for Pump storage for wind perhaps 5 years ago and at that point if anything they were more pessimistic about the intermittentsy of wind. Unfortunately I haven’t had any contact since then, but as far as I can tell the situation hasn’t changed. The politicians are driving the boat toward the weir, they don’t want to know what lies ahead with power outages. Like always the politicians have their head in the clouds and don’t want to face the reality of their stupid policieis. The first time this will be taken seriously by them is when the lights go out and the electorate vote them out.
John O’Farrell wrote a book entiltled “An Utterly Impartial History of Britain or 2000 years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge” but for reasons I can not recall the book ended in 1945; I quite enjoyed reading the book and the humour rang very true. I am of the opinion that he should write a sequell, possible starting at the time of the asumption of the last labour govenment and continuing through the current coalition.
Communist Romania style. Electricity was rationed for population for several hour per day.
If Tommies keep their mouths shut, they deserve it.
I don’t have heating on in my house it is too expensive to keep on I only put it on for a few hours in the evening if it very cold .I remember the three day week when Edward Heath was in power and taking on the miners I imagine we will go back to some system like that of rolling power cuts if we allow the green politicians to dictate where our energy comes from.
“As a society we all need to be clear about what we can and cannot afford.”
Can have a referendum on pseudo-intellectual Progressive eggheads?
d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
Way to go, U.K! What a way to eliminate all those pesky tourists. You’ll just have the youth adventure set who are willing to rough it cheaply, but this should keep the rich ‘uns who value comfort at a nice distance. Prepare to see tourist revenue plummet.
This prospect is coming soon to California. The push to get 20% of the electrical energy the state uses from wind and solar (mostly wind) by 2010 is still in trouble. Even though this reality exists the state is trying to pass new legislation to require that by 2020 33% of the states electrical energy will come from wind and solar. These initiatives have and will continue to raise the states electrical rates to higher levels making businesses here uncompetitive while further raising the states already out of control $26 billion budget deficit.
Because of the unpredictable intermittency of operation of wind and solar significant additional costs are incurred for back-up fossil generation in using these resources. For the 20% renewable goal fossil back-up generation required for electric system reliability amounts to about 4.5% of the total renewable portfolio. As the percentage of renewables climbs compared to the total required system generation the back-up requirements to maintain electric system reliability grow exponentially. Thus California’s 33% goal for renewables by 2020 requires that the back-up fossil generation need grows to 21% of the total renewable portfolio.
The inherent and unavoidable operational limitations of wind and solar make any politically driven scheme to try to establish an electric system dominated by these very expensive resources problematic at best and will always result in massively higher costs for electricity with significant detriments to system reliability.
These unattractive and detrimental cost and reliability realities for solar and wind are carefully concealed from the public by climate alarmists just as the huge shortcomings of climate fear science are concealed from the public – with the help of the biased and politically driven main stream media.
Jimbo says:
March 4, 2011 at 11:35 am
We french struggled a bit last December. Italy, Germany, Sth Spain and the pays bas plus the UK were all trying to take french power. On a couple of occasions we have shut off supplies to the countries already. With winters getting colder, and they are, we may have to cut off the UK. One should note that the continent can be and will be very much colder than the UK in future winters.
For those of you who are interested in dropping off the grid, if you have access to shale gas there is a neat little gas turbine power plant from Capstone. It uses electronics to commutate the generated voltage from the turbine shaft directly, no gear reduction. 30 KW for $2K/KW or $60K. It runs on wet gas, sour gas, light, or standard LP gas. If you have a group, they have turbines which can be grouped and load balance automatically. Needless to say, they are widely used on oil rigs for power generation.
Cloud Cuckoo Land, where the gentle wind stirs the windmills 365 days per year.
Our children will pay the price for their dreams.
One more cold winter and these problems will be highlighted. France are building 2 more Central Nucléaire but we will need them for our own usage.
Good luck UK you are going to need it. Perhaps the idiots will finally come to their senses and hang the politians from the lamp posts of London. Really, the education level of the masses in the UK is abysmal and that includes those from Eaton and Harrow.
I presume Mr Holliday has no intention of ever running getting into politics…. or maybe he is perfect for it and would fit in perfectly with the rest of the numptys.
Diesel gen here we come!
One feels that once the lights start going off the national lethargy that is allowing this to happen will vanish overnight. It is not just a case of domestic supplies but the whole fabric of life that will grind to a halt. I imagine whoever is in power at the time will be frantic as an angry populace seek vengeance. I shall be one of them looking forward to keeping warm as the Houses of PArliament burns down with the feckless ruling elites trapped inside.
I grew up in NZ after WWII with a wood-fired stove for cooking and generating hot water through a ‘wet back’ on the stove, wood-burning fireplaces throughout the house for warmth in winter, a big copper boiler with a fire under it in the laundry for the twice-weekly wash and a bloody great manual wringer to crush most of the water out of the laundry before it went out on the clothesline. No wives and mothers worked for pay, they slogged their guts out operating homes in almost medieval conditions. But in the background, our government was building hydro dams as hard as it could go to encourage industry. We were allowed the first ‘fridge in our neighbourhood as my dad was a returned serviceman and supply was limited. The world was hopeful, we worked and played hard, but after the Berlin wall was pushed over, people with strange ideas and stranger accents started taking over our communities. We were no strangers to socialism and had developed our own self-help, egalitarian variety, but these incomers and their odd ideas were hard to stop and most of us were working too hard to bother with them.
Decades later, the Marxist strain of Green socialism is infecting everything. Flash businesses own the railways, the telephone system, the electricity system and we are almost peasants in our own country. The mad pollies have brought in an ETS and are trying to justify it, but at least everything still works, so I am going home after almost a decade in the UK before I am too old to get started again. I was once proud of my British heritage, but the lot in control in the UK are barking mad and heading for the knackers yard. I spend half of my life here scratching my head and wondering where government common-sense went.
Back in the mid-seventies we endured the ‘Three Day Week’ here in the UK, a situation brought about by industrial action which was in turn a reaction to the wage restriction policies of the Conservative government. Electrical power was rationed in order to conserve coal stocks. See here:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
I remember it well – going to work at the weekend, staying home at other times. There was a General Election in the midst of this period and the Conservatives, despite heaping blame on the coal miners and power workers, lost. There’s a lesson to be learnt here, don’t you think? No matter where the blame actually lies, the people will always hold the government of the day responsible. If the lights ever do start going out, whichever political party that happens to be in power at the time will not be in power for long – no matter who’s responsible. All political parties be warned!
No one cares what they write in there stupid papers, no one cares what they say in their stupid lectures.
The only fact that is guaranteed.
The government in charge when the lights go off will be toast.
The pigs understand that.
I am dumbfounded that people keep commenting on a FAKE ARTICLE. It is not real, no author, no record at the Telegraph NOTTA. Someone is having a good laugh, like moveon.org.
Bertram Felden says:
March 4, 2011 at 10:52 am
I’m a UK citizen.
I left, some say abandoned ship, almost a decade ago. I live in a country not too far away with 80% of its power generated by nuclear reactors. A country that has just ruled an existing wind farm in Brittany (dang, gave the location away !) was built illegally, a ruling that looks like it could ban all offshore and coastal monuments to human credulity. We have a few windfarms, of course, but they are really only there to shut the looney greens up.
I was in France a few years ago, my first trip to Europe. As we were driving from the Loire Valley to Paris, I saw wind turbines for miles, then a nuclear power plant. I took pictures of both since neither were a common sight in the US. We now have the NCAR experimental wind farm a few miles north of us, but not the miles of turbines throughout the countryside.
In the UK, the results of a by-election (caused by a crook of an MP being sent to prison) was announced today. It was in a solidly labour area, so the outcome was predictable. What was encouraging, however, was the the second placed candidate was from UKIP, the only UK party sceptical about AGW (and the EC, but that’s just another bonus).
They appear to be the only hope for the future in the UK, unless the other parties wake up to the fact that to achieve any level of prosperity then we need our manufacturing and service industries to operate more productively, and our consumers to carry on consuming. It ain’t gonna happen with all the lights out.
Hello tower, this is British Airways Flight 009 coming in from New York, starting our descent from 38,000 feet. Requesting runway clearance….
What? Say again? You are fading in and out…
You want me to climb back to 38,000 feet and circle in a holding pattern? For how long? What do you mean you have to check the weather forecast first?
Oh yeah, run way lights, totaly forgot, makes sense. OK, I’ll circle until the wind picks up or sunrise, which ever comes first. Fuel? Nah, I’m good, these dirigibles float in air you know, and we collect passenger poop for methane to run the propellor motors. You should see how much our efficiency has shot up since we went to all brown beans menus. We can wait. Took three weeks so far, whats an extra few hours?
I have a secret plan to defeat these nutters. Here in leafy Surrey I’m going to install an electric powered generator.
That’ll keep the greenies happy since no oil or gas will be needed. And I’ll have constant power!
I’ll use any power I don’t need to turn a fan to blow the local windmill. Win win!
I can’t see any problems yet………. 🙂
People are not that stupid. They know the gubment shut down economical electricity and built expensive un reliable. This means the gubment knows better when you you should do things than you do. Same with rail. In america, the gubment wants rail because they know better where you should go and when than you do.
Re : geo says:
March 4, 2011 at 10:46 am
“So the Brits would rather sit in the dark than build nuclear plants? You’re still a democracy over there, right? Some political party is going to get a rude surprise over that, and some other one is going to get a windfall.”
Unfortunately no – we’re not a democracy any more. All our policies are decided by our European masters in Brussels these days. The EU Lisbon Treaty was the final seal to that. Of the 500 million citizens in the EU only a handful got to vote directly on whether they wanted to be part of this EU superstate. Mostly it was the politicians who voted on whether they wanted to be part of the EU political gravy train. The only exception was Ireland where because of their Constitution the people had to be asked first – they voted NO – that should have been the end of the Lisbon Treaty but no, our EU masters dictated they should vote again until they got the right answer so that after a very heavily funded EU propaganda campaign they eventually voted Yes. Something they now bitterly regret – their economy is a shambles thanks to the economic straitjacket of the Eurozone where one size fits all.
In the UK the leaders of our three main parties are like three peas in a pod, Cameron, Clegg and Milliband, all had meteoric rises through party ranks to take up the reins and all pursue doggedly determined pro EU/UN policies and adhere to the creed of the UN IPCC. Cameron totally disregards traditional Conservative type policies to pursue a similar path to Blair (the true ‘Heir to Blair’ as he likes to describe himself! – and it was he who insisted on giving the outgoing Blair, who had taken this country to war on a lie, a standing ovation in parliament) So whichever party wins you can be sure the same policies will be followed.
In Scotland SNP First Minister is pushing the EU policies hard, ‘leading the world’ in a bid to force the Scottish economy to adopt 80% of its energy from renewables by 2020 – no doubt he is vying for his own place in the UN/EU (after all world governance is the aim as highlighted by EU president van Rompuy in his inauguration speech), sacrificing Scotland on the altar of his political ambition. He is determined to ruin the beautiful Scottish countryside by building as many windfarms as he can both on and offshore, determined that nuclear is NOT an option, he is keen to outdo EU targets on renewables.
So welcome to the world politics of the future. Just as Obama in the US and Gillard in Australia totally disregard the will of the people and lead their countries to economic suicide (with he help of a compliant media ) so the same is happening in the UK.
Our politicians no longer represent the people.