From the GWPF: Cold Winter Could Cause Britain’s Lights To Go Out
Emergency measures to prevent blackouts this winter have been unveiled by National Grid after Britain’s spare power capacity fell to just 4 per cent.
–Emily Gosden, The Daily Telegraph, 27 October 2014
The capacity crunch has been predicted for about seven years. Everyone seems to have seen this coming – except the people in charge.
–Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 10 June 2014
National Grid has warned that there has been a significant increase in the risk of electricity shortages and brownouts this winter after fires and faults knocked out a large chunk of Britain’s shrinking power station coverage. The grid operator admitted that in the event of Britain experiencing the coldest snap in 20 years – a 5 per cent chance – then electricity supplies would not be able to meet demand during two weeks in January.
–Tim Webb, The Times, 27 October 2014
The UK government will set out Second World War-style measures to keep the lights on and avert power cuts as a “last resort”. The price to Britons will be high. Factories will be asked to “voluntarily” shut down to save energy at peak times for homes, while others will be paid to provide their own backup power should they have a spare generator or two lying around.
–Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 10 June 2014
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Reverse Self-Immolation, what a concept!
Stop this greenuttery NOW
“how did they die?” Frozen, but at least they died GREEN!”
I remember this post
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/04/the-empire-strikes-out/
“Families would have to get use to only using power when it was available”
Steve Holliday – chief exec national grid. (2011)
DPRK knows how to deal with power shortages – http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h–/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/4/22/1398181592128/be6e71a6-8823-4e82-881d-dd9ac979efee-bestSizeAvailable.jpeg
I’m hoping for the harshest winter in living memory, a major blackout, and the last three Government Chief Scientific Officers in the Tower of London for treason.
And the bloody politicians Ed Miliband, DickEd Davey, Cleg, Tim Yeo,& about 200 others, who pushed this madness though.
If we do have a cold winter 1,000s of our poor & vulnerable will die
30,000 extra deaths occurred in the cold spell at the beginning of this year, due to green policy’s increasing energy prices to the point that the elderly instead of turning a heater on froze..
so it’s already happened, and the gov kept it nice and quiet!!!
Seconded
Don’t do it Brent. I tried that last year and in the central US we got one of the coldest snowiest winters in a very long time. It was bad bad bad bad. It did not stop our MSM from giving us climate change cra stories. I was afraid my head would explode when I would hear them.
Brent, I find it difficult to agree with you because of the pain, suffering and death that would be caused to so many people here in the UK. However, I have become convinced that without such an outcome the lunacy will continue. I fear for the future.
Agree. Again.
W H Y IS IT OUR POLITICIANS – RED, YELLOW, BLUE, GREEN PURPLE, simply cannot see the problem . . . .
Auto
To add insult to injury we have had the Met Office crowing all over BBC radio today about their new £97,000,000 super computer that can perform 1300 trillion calculations a second. If they have factored AGW into its program as they have done with the current £60,000 000 PC then cr*p in cr*p out will be the predictable outcome.
We have had a relatively mild Autumn so far, I am sure that propaganda by sending out messages about power cuts when the weather is warm and that future cold spells can be predicted anyway is the formula of any government who does not wish to question the EU’s policy on CO2 .
The sooner we get out of the EU the better
Question for UKIP MEPs how many kilowatts of Electricity does the Brussels European Parliament Building use when its empty..
When I lived in Brussels, the lights were on all the time…and that was in the early 80’s.
did they say it was being run with only wind/sun power?
Andrew, as a first order approximation lets assume doubling the cost of the machine quadrupled its capacity. Pick your own multiplier. It is rounding error.
See the essay Models all the way Down in new ebook Blowing Smoke, which explains the inherent problem in modelling essential (mostly tropical) convective processes. Only a two order of magnitude (yes, 100 fold) increase in computing power comes even close to beginning a resolution of this problem. And computational feasibility still does not solve the nonlinear dynamics (chaos theory) problem.
You all just flushed another £97 million. It could have been used to buy candles and blankets against the coming blackouts, core topic on this thread.
A hundred fold increase is not nearly enough. To simulate small scale processes like convection you need to increase spatial resolution at least ten times from c. 100 to 10 kilometers. This requires 10^4 (10,000) times more computing power since you must increase the resolution in three dimensions, plus shorten the time steps by the same amount. Actually you will need to get down to 1 km resolution or better to actually simulate thunderstorm cells reasonably well, not to mention tornados, squall lines and so on. That means 100,000,000 times more computing power.
Well, no, decreasing the cell size is contraductive (counter-productive). Statistical description breaks down when too few process instances happen in one cell.
They actually have *NO* hope of improving their models.
Also, process instance size varies by orders of magnitudes. (Convective fronts)
NO. HOPE.
Emergency measures Re-Carbonise
Twitter campaign to get Take That to release Re-lite my fire and get it to the Christmas Number One just in time for the Winter Power Cuts.
Gary Barlow Tory voting tax dodging muti millionaire singer song writer add Climate Skeptic to his list.
This green blob nonsense would stop instantly if we made all those goofy politicians, spouting CAGW theory, live in specially designed areas, powered only by solar and wind power and where absolutely no batteries were allowed.
the event of Britain experiencing the coldest snap in 20 years – a 5 per cent chance –
I hope they are not relying on a UK Met Off forecast for the bet. I haven’t yet seen the UKMO seasonal forecast but JAMSTEC and others show a below average winter for temps and a very cold spring next year for the whole of NW europe.
andrewmharding
October 28, 2014 at 12:23 pm
To add insult to injury we have had the Met Office crowing all over BBC radio today about their new £97,000,000 super computer that can perform 1300 trillion calculations a second
Not so much the UKMO more the BBC who is, of course, their most high profile user.
Super Computer.
The risk is GIGO
Sorry – the Met Office does a decent job.
But GiGo – what our models think it was like 15,000 years ago = compare with 23 KYA or 31 KYA.
Auto
It just means they will get the wrong answer faster!!
mwhite
October 28, 2014 at 12:17 pm
I remember this post
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/04/the-empire-strikes-out/
“Families would have to get use to only using power when it was available”
Steve Holliday – chief exec national grid. (2011)
This is exactly what the report on the BBC R4 programme was saying. Smart metres to charge you higher prices when the power was short. The idea is to “train” the public to behave differently.
Maybe we can send them a few kilowatts via the Transatlantic Cable?
We’re going to need guns to defend our self’s if food riots start cos the police & army will be defending our glorious leaders not us.
I’m stocking up on popcorn and hoping for some nice fat UK blackouts this winter. More entertaining still will be the chorus of “what I would say is …” from government ministers. Inept buffoons and clowns!
What I would say is this, that there is a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. A lot. Tons and heaps of it. A huge amount. And it’s all caused by us. Every bit of it.
I watch/follow a little ‘renewable energy’ forum based here in the UK.
To a man they are rabidly against Fossil Fuels but have latched on to this story and are now bragging about and posting pictures of their petrol/diesel powered generators and boasting how they’re going to keep posting the renewable message regardless. The unthinking hypocrisy is amazing, do you laugh or cry?
But anyway, one of their member is quite close to the UK energy ‘system’ and informed us all that, on one December day 2013, the UK was down to 30MW of spare capacity, pretty well= a margin of 0.05%
And wasn’t it, sometime about then, we were just a few hours from running out of natural gas, saved only by a couple of tankers full of LNG hijacked from somewhere or the other.
What does it take to wake these zombies.
Silver bullet or a wooden stake through the heart.
Will the Met office shut down the super duper computer to keep the lights on?
Shirley you jest.
Bruce– Don’t call him Shirley
phillipbratby
October 28, 2014 at 11:47 am
Mine generator runs on LPG – much better.
Where did you buy your diesel gen.? At what price ?
A 5% chance! Make it conservatively 75%:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_new.gif
Did the GBP100M computer get a look at the sea temps around UK?
Early snow damaged crops in Kazakhstan!!, Russia is having their cold winter already. Serbia has been crippled by early snow and cold temperatures – Ukraine, Moldova, Romania
Yes but its probably hot somewhere. Feel better now?
Ah but didn’t you get the memo? The SST anomaly map is confusing. Blue ain’t necessarily blue. And cold can be warm-cold. Up can sometimes be down. You’re not really allowed to comment on cold SSTs. See … no-one else is.
While there seems to be some cooling occurring in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, that UNISYS chart looks wildly exaggerated to me.
This may provide a more realistic picture :
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2014/anomnight.10.27.2014.gif
Thanks – I wondered when the SST police were going to show up. Nice to see that reassuring warm yellow in the neutral regions giving that pleasing overall warm tint.
However the NOAA map makes the cool SSTs around Antarctica look more pronounced. Someone should take a look at that.
Alarmists always have an out. They will claim AGW is causing the blackouts. AGW to alarmists is like Satan is to Christians, the cause of all the ills and evils in the world.
Meanwhile, governments continue to act irresponsibly, since after all they are saving the world.
When a cold front moves in there are often violent winds. This is the source of many blizzards. But once the cold air becomes established over an area, the wind often stops blowing because cold air is dense and sluggish. The coldest days are often very still.
Thus wind power becomes useless just when it’s needed most.
This is particularly dangerous in western Europe, where housing and plumbing are often poorly designed for cold snaps.
Yup. Not a terrific combination.
And Europe in general (used to live in Munich) doesn’t know what a real cold snap is. Now in Chicago, several days in a row below zero daily high (Farenheit, NOT Celsius) , with wind chills to minus 30 or 40 (F in the ‘Windy City’) are considered just a bit colder than normal. Like last winter. Chicago does NOT rely on wind turbines. Coal, nucs, and nat gas CCGT are the order of the day. Despite Chicago’s out of his depth former south side community organizer, Obummer.
I spent a month there one day in 1989, Muenchen that is. Why are we Americans taught the wrong name of that city? Germany was a great place to visit. Wish I could afford to do it again.
Rud Istvan
October 28, 2014 at 2:09 pm
“Yup. Not a terrific combination.
And Europe in general (used to live in Munich) doesn’t know what a real cold snap is. ”
Well Munich. Try a winter in Berlin or the likes in the Northern plains when the Eastern wind comes and you’d talk differently. The only wind that the Münchner knows is the Föhn in the summer (warm falling wind from the Alps. We call our hairdriers Föhn for that reason)
DirkH
Sie haben Recht. Ich habe Vorkurtzt’s,’ und Foehn nicht vorbetraggen. Hoch Achtung.
Und Gruesse aus Chicago.
Oh, the irony of having to run generators, a hugely less efficient way of producing energy, with way more “carbon” being “spewed”, in addition to far more actual pollution. All because of the desire to be “green”, or at least appear to be. It is truly amazing that the greenie insanity has managed to keep going, to the detriment of all who must suffer under its idiotic policies.
It’s working! Here is Baroness Sandip Verma on government measures to ‘tackle’ global warming. Someone should let her know that co2 levels are higher today than 18 years ago, or for nearly all of the Holocene.
With conditions like in the photo, the Royal Marines won’t need to go to Norway for Arctic training. #Hoofing #RM350
Yawn,
here in the new South Africa, we have perfected this already since 2008,
I receive a good dividend from a company that is paid by the power producing
company, not to consume their power.
When the left come into power, nothing can go right.
Oscar, you are monetizing ‘Negawatts’ (efficiency savings). Good in general if not subsidy distorted, which it usually is. Who can argue with ‘less is more’.
Alas, even negawatts are subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns.
And when you overdepend on unreliable electricity (as in the UK just now), less is always much less in the end, even if one can lead a charmed life for a brief while. The Disney parable of the grasshoppers and the ants comes to mind. And as with the cartoon parable, winter now comes.
Enjoy Brits! For the majority that votes for these dolts that put you in this predicament.
unfortunately the only people we have a choice of voting for all believe in this crap..
This lands squarely in the lap of PM Cameron, the fool. This will give the UKIP the boost that it needs.
When you spring such a surprise on the verge of winter, people will fret at each cold front and wonder who to blame. Correction, they will blame the one responsible.
I wonder how Ms. Truss feels now, being sent out to feed the public a bunch of smooth evasions, when this was brewing.
Catherine Brahic New Scientist’s environment news editor writes:
“As the Arctic warms, extremely cold winters are becoming more likely in Eurasia. Recent studies had suggested that a warmer North Pole would be linked to colder, more extreme winters in Eurasia. Now a study based on climate models of Eurasian weather suggest colder than normal winters will be twice as likely to happen.”
We are gona to freeze. 🙂
Which is why the UK is having the balmiest Divali I can remember.
This is a marvellous opportunity for the Greens to prove how wonderfully effective wind and solar is. I expect nothing less than uninterrupted power supplies this winter. I will not be best pleased if the wind fails to blow and the sun fails to shine.