In light of the recent announcement by Ofgem chief executive Alistair Buchanan that the chances of avoiding power cuts looks very slim in the UK, Dr. John Brignell, proprietor of the Number Watch Blog, writes in with this note about a prediction he made ten years ago:
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A doleful anniversary
Ten years ago this month Number Watch carried an addendum entitled (in red) Power mad!
It was a warning of the disaster that the then Government was making inevitable with its Energy White Paper, including the estimate of ten to twenty years for it to take effect. It also laid out the simple, immutable principles of reliable energy supply. Unbelievably, we still have a government that is prevaricating on the matter, under domination by an EU that is fundamentally of the water melon tendency.
Now, it starts!
This month’s pusillanimous announcement by the bureaucrat in charge of energy, reported with characteristic wittering by the BBC, heralds a new age of energy poverty, with dire consequences, including deaths.
We are standing on the doorstep of the future.
20/02/13
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The entry from Feb 2003 was:
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Power mad!
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones.
Julius Caesar
It is fortunate that in democracies bad government is usually a transient phenomenon, but there are some areas in which bad government afflicts succeeding generations. One such area is long-term borrowing. The post-war Labour government, instead of knuckling down to the task of ensuring that the nation could earn its living, chose to borrow money from the USA on usurious terms that have blighted the lives of Britons ever since. The present Government is borrowing on a grand scale (including hire purchase disguised as the Private Finance Initiative) and like its post-war predecessor is diverting the funds into an overweening bureaucracy. Another important area is energy. Decisions on energy policy come into effect ten or twenty years after they are made. The way to cripple a modern state is to cut off its energy supply, as various oil crises have demonstrated.
The basics of a sound energy policy are quite simple:
1. Energy should be obtained from a variety of sources, lest one should fail.
2. There should be a reliable and continuous source to service the base load.
3. There should be further instantly available sources to accommodate demand surges.
4. Unpredictable and intermittent sources should be avoided.
5. Policy should not be decided by trends, fashions or religious convictions.
The British Government’s White paper of this month fails in all these respects. It represents a craven obeisance to the Green desire for a return to the Stone Age. It is driven by the science fantasy of the global warming myth. It makes no decision on the vital investment needed in nuclear technology to guarantee the servicing of the base load in future. It ensures that the country will be beholden to other nations for the provision of this most vital resource, assuming that their goodwill continues uninterrupted. It diverts even more precious research funds into academic organisations that are little better than propaganda machines.
The arithmetic that damns so-called renewable energy is perfectly simple, yet the nation’s prosperity is being hocked to pay for entry into the Solar Fraud.
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Let’s keep an eye on Bulgaria and see where an energy policy impacted a gov’t.
http://news.yahoo.com/bulgaria-government-resigns-national-protests-073220738.html
There is nothing more certain than the fact that in the UK we have been led for years by donkeys. The future generations will pay the consequences in terms of poverty and misery. Think of the grandchildren; oh how they will suffer.
According to the British Geological Survey the UK has produced a report that concludes we have huge shale gas reserves (https://www.og.decc.gov.uk/UKpromote/onshore_paper/UK_onshore_shalegas.pdf)
Needless to say the handwringing watermelons in charge of our ludicrously named “Department of Energy and Climate Change” are doing their best to ignore this report.
@ur momisugly Phillip,
Please please don’t offend that noble animal, the donkey! 🙂
Number Watch is an interesting blog.
Energy rationing for the UK via ‘smart’ meters which will soon become obligatory.
Philip Bratby (7.39) has been crusading against the drive for renewables for years and is very knowledgable regarding electricity supply.
All main parties in UK have similar energy policies.
The donkey is a noble animal, a reliable pack animal, which means it’s ill-matched as a symbol of our Democrat Party, which is trying to turn the rest of us into their pack animal.
Dr. Brignell understood the problem ten or more years ago. What is stunning is that a so-called conservative government in the UK doesn’t understand it now.
Never underestimate the power of a bad idea whose time has come.
Winter weather and high electricity prices kill old people.
Politicians jumping aboard the green bandwagon with no real understanding of the reality of climate change make electricity more expensive than it needs to be.
Therefore politicians are killing people.
How can we make sure they face justice?
Like may others around the World I have, since climategate, reverse-engineered climate alchemy to identify when it went wrong.
Basic radiation physics plus a bit of science from spectroscopy no-one has apparently hitherto suspected means CO2 is only a GHG below the self-absorption level. Above it, there is no surface IR emission in that self-absorbing band of wavelengths, because it is turned off: Maxwell’s Equations mean only net vectors can do work.
So there can be no CO2-AGW, no positive feedback at present or any future CO2 concentration. The same goes for all self-absorbing GHGs, e.g. CH4, but the self-absorbing level is very dependent on the complexity of the spectrum so water vapour’s limit is much higher in ppmV terms.
The mistake was made in 1972 or earlier, but later than 1967 when Manabe and Wetherald correctly assumed that the IR from the Earth was the 160 W/m^2 SW input from the Sun. There is no ‘GHG blanket’. The proof is very simple: if there were ‘back radiation’, you’d never get dew or a ground frost in temperate regions.
UK Demand right now is 51.55 Gw, of which wind is providing 0.46Gw. It has been this low and lower over the last 4 days. It has been at 10% a few times lately but that has been unusual, peaking at around 5.0 Gw.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php
“Dr T G Watkins says: Energy rationing for the UK via ‘smart’ meters which will soon become obligatory”
It is true that these will allow the energy companies to terminate your power supply remotely. Fortunately for me where I live we have no mobile ‘phone signal so a smart meter is unable to function. Unfortunately, when the power is cut anyway my PV solar panels will switch off because they need a signal from the mains supply.
Entirely obvious to me, as is this:
War, Or Enlightenment: The Only Option
It is not really about Green, or Bad UK Policies, it is all about GRAFT.
They or their Families and friends all have their fingers in the Renewables Industry, either in advisory, manufacturing, installing or providing the land for them. There are large amounts of money being made by them all.
Add to that the madness of the EU Greens and we have a disaster looming.
I think the majority of people in the UK know how to avoid it, but the politicians and their quango committees are all dead set on maintaining the gravy train.
One way to get an informed electorate, is to let them freeze in the dark.
Hard times make voters better citizens, our parents and grandparents built a functioning society, we frittered and wasted the benefits they gave us.
Rather than choose conservative paths and pay our own way, we borrowed from unborn children, to create a welfare state.
Rather than build infrastructure for coming needs, we paid people to kneecap the productive, and promoted liars, fools and thieves, who borrowed even more money against these unborn children, so they could live as Lords.
Now the bills are coming due, but those future hordes of children never got born and those that did, either can’t get a job or recognize they have no hope of escaping the slavery we bequeathed them.
Human nature does not change, so how do you incentivize production from people who know they will get zero benefit from their labour?
From the perspective of a twenty year old worker; Who are the greedy evil bas..rds now?
Dr Brignell is correct to highlight the BBC’s ‘witterings’ in this matter. Last night they were at it again – gleefully predicting energy doom and gloom in the years ahead, complete with ‘blackouts’ and ‘energy shortages’ (with, of course, not a mention of the readily available alternatives such as the UK’s significant, but dormant, shale gas reserves, etc). It’s the kind of gloomy CAGW-related pessimism the BBC goes in for these days; a constant meme that has infected every aspect of its output, dutifully reproduced by compliant reporter drones, documentary makers and even comedians. I’m afraid the BBC is lost in the politics of CAGW and sees the entire thing as a vehicle with which to relentlessly push it’s own pernicious brand of cultural Marxism. This is especially true now that The Corporation no longer even pretends to be even-handed in its coverage of CAGW – critics, sceptics, all now excluded from the ‘discussion’ by diktat. It’s a policy position with the BBC. There is no ‘discussion’. The ‘consensus’ must prevail.
It really is a dreadful state of affairs.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2281437/DAILY-MAIL-COMMENT-Politicians-posture-lights-out.html
Luca says: “@ur momisugly Phillip, Please please don’t offend that noble animal, the donkey! 🙂
Yes, indeed. The donkey is so noble that an entire Amercan political party has chosen it as their symbol. Oh, wait…
The Ofgen spokesman, Alistair Buchanan, also said we must respond by using less electricity. My supplier, EDF, has just last month raised prices by 12.5% and energy prices generally have gone up considerably over the past five years. Does he think anyone is wasting electricity any more?
AlecM says:
February 20, 2013 at 8:12 am
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Could you explain that a little more, please?
What is going on in Bulgaria today is a warning to those of us in the USA if “by necessity electricity prices will skyrocket” as Obama has promised. Shuttering coal plants now will come back to haunt us as natural gas begins to replace both coal and nuclear. Eventually, we will export natural gas (LNG) and it will become expensive. As our nuclear reactors are mothballed as is happening now because they are too expensive to upgrade or operate we will need to turn back to our 200 year supply of coal if we are going to have affotdable electricity.
Oil, wind, solar and most other energy technologies are on the way out…. Nickle hydrogen heat systems are the next heat technology…
Watch Cold Fusion 101 lectures in order here.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Peter Hagelstein and Dr. Mitchell Swartz of JET Energy are offering an IAP short course Cold Fusion 101: Introduction to Excess Power in Fleischmann-Pons Experiments for a second consecutive year.
The course runs from Tuesday, January 22 through Wednesday, January 30, 2013 from 11AM-1PM in Room 4-153 and 66-144 on the MIT campus.
http://coldfusionnow.org/2013-starts-right-with-cold-fusion-101-at-mit-for-second-year/
I remember a report was published in 1998 which said that if the UK was to have it’s own nuclear power construction sector it should commission new plants then. Instead the Labour govermnet did nothing and now, the people who would have designed and built the power stations that would have come on line now have been lossed and so have their skills as they retired without training people to follow them.
Even the BBC saw this coming. Their fictional future has Britain relying on Russian gas in 2010, a bomb severs the pipeline. (3 minutes of the programme)
“Unless we make decisions now our electricity will start to run out within five years,” Professor Ian Fells, World Energy Council.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/if/3487048.stm
There is an excellent article by the Express in the UK:
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/378835/Cheaper-energy-is-more-important-than-going-green
If you live in the UK you’d better get your hands on a good, wood burning stove. Buy now while stocks last. I only mention this because nearby in a country called Germany they have started stealing wood from forests to burn to keep warm. This is due to high energy prices forced on them by renewable / carbon scam schemes.
The Greeks are felling trees in public parks too. This is how you reduce man’s co2 output.
Well done you Greens. I congratulate you guys an a quite remarkable achievement. You have reduced our co2 output, increased wildlife habitat in forests, reduced soot. Is there anything you guys can’t do? ;O)
H/t
I read an article on world-nuclear.org that Russia is planning on moving toward 85% nuclear power by 2075.