Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t JoNova – The cold is biting Britain so hard domestic gas use is causing a supply shortage, forcing the British government to ask industrial users to reduce energy expenditure to preserve supply to households.
UK running out of gas, warns National Grid
Perfect storm of freezing weather and supply problems prompts call for more fuel immediately
Adam Vaughan
Fri 2 Mar 2018 02.36 AEDT First published on Thu 1 Mar 2018 19.56 AEDT
National Grid has warned that the UK would not have enough gas to meet public demand on Thursday, as temperatures plummeted and imports were affected by outages.
But the government said households would not notice disruptions to their supply or any increase in energy bills because suppliers, including British Gas, bought energy further ahead. The energy minister Claire Perry said people should cook and use their heating as they would normally.
But experts said there was a strong chance that industrial users could experience interruptions to their gas supply.
Within-day wholesale gas prices soared 74% to 200p per therm after the formal deficit warning, which acts as a call to suppliers to bring forward more gas. It is the first time such an alert has been issued since 2010.
By lunchtime on Thursday the price had spiked even higher, hitting a high of 275p per therm at one point.
National Grid’s forecast for the day initially showed a shortfall across the day of 49.5m cubic metres (mcm) below the country’s projected need of 395.7mcm, which would normally be around 300mcm at this time of year. The gas deficit warning aims to fill the gap, which has since narrowed to 16.5mcm.
“We are in communication with industry partners and are closely monitoring the situation,” the company said.
The UK Government MET office has issued severe weather warnings, such as the following;
Chief Forecaster’s assessment
Widespread snow is expected to develop through Thursday afternoon and evening. Around 10-20 cm is likely to fall widely, with the potential for up to 30 to 50 cm over parts of Dartmoor, Exmoor and parts of southeast Wales. Snowfall will be accompanied by strong to gale easterly winds, leading to severe drifting of lying snow especially in upland areas. Severe cold and wind chill will compound the dangerous conditions, with very poor visibility. Towards midnight, there is a chance of snow turning to freezing rain in places, mainly across the south of the area, with widespread icy stretches making driving conditions particularly dangerous.
Source: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/warnings#?date=2018-03-01
This deep freeze is occurring despite predictions just a few years ago that global warming would cause wetter, milder winters;
National Trust campaign highlights how gardens will look if global warming brings Mediterranean weather to Britain
By David Derbyshire for MailOnline
UPDATED: 19:04 AEDT, 24 March 2010
The apple orchards have been replaced with orange groves, the turf covered over with gravel and the summer borders replanted with cacti.
They may look like scenes from a Portugese holiday, but these images could be the future of the traditional English garden, plant experts claimed yesterday.
The striking images are part of a National Trust campaign to highlight how gardens will look if global warming brings Mediterranean weather to Britain in the next few decades.
…
No word yet on when the UK’s 12 GW of installed solar panel capacity will kick in to alleviate the load on gas supplies.
Lucky the government planned ahead for extreme cold temperatures, eh?
“How can it be that Britain is being caught by an energy shortfall?”
Because idiots like that one eyed chancellor from Scotland were running the country while Bliar made war in another part of the world.
One of his finest hours apart from selling all the UK gold reserves at the lowest possible price was destroying the British nuclear power industry so that they would have to pay the French and the Chinese to do what we did first.
Then they sold off stuff like the UK oil pipeline, told everyone that coal was still a curse, and spread the disease in everyone’s minds that CO2 was a deadly poison, while making Britain reliant in every possible way on imported energy, and failing to have enough reserves for the really cold days which kids were being indoctrinated to believe could never happen.
If it actually weren’t so serious, once could be forgiven for believing this dystopia was a cold war communist plot from Erik Honecker.
The sad part, the person running the ex-soviet union today, was a good pal of Erik, and understandably was disappointed with the way the USSR turned out.
He weaponised gas exports to be able to screw around with people’s lives then co-opted the ex chancellor of Germany to help him sell this idea to the west as “energy security” sweetly wrapped up instead of the old brutal propaganda stuff that used to come out from behind the Berlin wall.
The irony is THEY WON, when the wall came down!
tTomas wrote:
“The irony is THEY WON, when the wall came down!”
Maybe Tomas this is not irony. Maybe this was the plot all along – that the Soviets could win by simply appealing to the weakest minds in the west, the leftards, the warmists and their imbecilic fellow-travelers, all led by a few scoundrels who knew the truth and how to manipulate it.
It was obvious to me, with my earth-sciences education, that global warming alarmism was a false crisis as early as ~1985 when it first appeared.
It was also obvious to me, with my energy expertise, that intermittent electrical power generated from wind and solar systems was not green and would produce little useful (dispatchable) power. The fact that the wind does not blow all the time and the Sun does not shine all the time is hardly news. Does anyone truly think that these warmist leaders were (and continue to be) that stupid?
Here is what we published, with confidence, in 2002:
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
“The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”
Educated professionals have known for several decades that global warming alarmism and green energy schemes were fraudulent nonsense. Those who spoke out have been vilified or ignored. Now the imbeciles, the sheeple, are about to pay the price with energy shortfalls and human suffering. We tried to prevent this debacle, often a great personal cost, but nobody would listen.
IMPORTANT
Hi Anthony
I just read this article from GWPF – now it all makes sense. This stunning report by the House of Representatives is just “the tip of the iceberg”, imo.
Anti-pipeline, anti-fracking, anti-oilsands – it’s the new Cold War.
Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, wrote this article in 1994. It still rings true today. Read “The Rise of Eco-Extremism”.
http://ecosense.me/2012/12/30/key-environmental-issues-4/
Regards, Allan
***************************************************************************************
Begin forwarded message:
From: Benny Peiser
Date: March 2, 2018 at 11:11:16 AM MST
Subject: Russia’s Secret Campaign Against U.S. Energy Policy Revealed
GWPF Newsletter 02/03/18
Russia’s Secret Campaign Against U.S. Energy Policy Revealed
U.S. House Committee Reveals Russian Attempts to Influence U.S. Domestic Energy Markets by Exploiting Social Media
A Russian-backed propaganda group used social media in an attempt to disrupt the U.S. energy industry and influence energy policy, according to a new congressional staff report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Unlike other Russian campaigns to stir political unrest in the U.S., this effort by the tech-savvy Internet Research Agency is characterized as mostly one-sided, agitating against American fossil-fuel production in a way lawmakers believe was aimed at benefiting Russia, the world’s largest oil producer.
–The Wall Street Journal, 1 March 2018
The purpose of this report is to provide the American people with the findings of the Committee’s investigation into Russian efforts to influence U.S. energy markets. First, the report discusses several factors driving the Kremlin’s desire to interfere with U.S. energy markets and influence domestic energy policy. Next, it demonstrates how the Kremlin manipulated various groups in an attempt to carry out its geopolitical agenda, particularly with respect to domestic energy policy. Finally, this report provides an assessment of the Committee’s findings, including examples of Russian-propagated content targeting U.S. energy markets and domestic energy policy. The facts put into perspective the nature and extent of the Kremlin’s energy influence-peddling operation.
–United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Majority Staff Report, 1 March 2018
1) Russia’s Secret Campaign Against U.S. Energy Policy Revealed
The Wall Street Journal, 1 March 2018
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-meddling-on-social-media-targeted-u-s-energy-industry-report-says-1519902001?utm_source=CCNet+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a10c8bbc3c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_03_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fe4b2f45ef-a10c8bbc3c-20138661
2) Russian Attempts to Influence U.S. Domestic Energy Markets by Exploiting Social Media
United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Majority Staff Report, 1 March 2018
https://thegwpf.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=c0b87e49db&e=da89067c4f
3) Gazprom: Russia Is EU’s Energy Guardian as Cold Grips Europe
Bloomberg, 2 March 2018
4) Reminder: Putin TV Station ‘Stokes Fracking Fears’
The Times, 6 August 2016
5) Europe’s Green Madness: Russia’s Grip On Anti-Fracking EU Tightening
OilPrice.com, 3 January 2018
********************************************
I, and many other people, have known the Russian and Saudi governments were the primary backers of the anti-domestic oil/gas production and pipeline movements in America since the 1990s. How did we learn of this nefarious scheme? Because both publicly said they were doing it. No big secret. George Soros is balls deep in it, too. No surprises in this at all.
To be fair what killed nuclear in Britain was the EU, the ERM and North Sea Gas back round Thatchers time.
Up till then interest rates were low, the coal industry was collapsing under the weight of history and the Unions, and that left only nuclear for baseload.
Then Britain got shafted by currency speculators like Soros, the pound collapsed, interest rates soared and the economics of debt to asset finance collapsed too. Gas plant was cheap to build and there was plenty of gas.
And that meant the political hit potato of nuclear could simply be dropped.
Then the EU – led by the most profoundly anti-nuclear nation in the world – Germany (a tribute to the billions of rubles poured into political agitation by Merkel and her communist chums in the cold war) pushed for a Europe wide ‘renewable obligation/. Siemens made wind turbines…
Only then did a junior minister in Blairs government – a whey faced wimp called Edward Milliband, son f another communist who was given refuge in the country and proceeded to attack it at every turn – had a chat with the ex communist funded eco-groups and drew up – with the assistance of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and several renewable energy trade organisations – the Climate Change Act…which laid down how we would not only meet EU renewable targets (whilst other EU nations judged it cheaper to pay he fines or NOT meeting them ) but EXCEED them.
It was about three years later that I was setting up Gridwatch,(http://gridwatch.org.uk) to collate data on wind variability that I was able to help the late Dr David Mackay get his book published (www.withouthotair.com)
That book propelled him into DECC – the now defunct department of energy and climate change – as chief scientific adviser where he told the then minister (subsequently disgraced) Chris Huhne, that the energy density of windmills and solar panels together with their intermittency meant that actually the best carbon free power available was nuclear. Huhne, a Liberal Democrat whose anti-nuclear stance was fundamental to their green credentials, was alleged to have stormed out of the ministry not to be seen for two weeks…I passed him my monograph on intermittency (http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limitations.pdf) – it may have been useful but I never found out.
Since then the UK position has been delightfully ambivalent. Whilst absolutely advocating renewables susbisdies have been replaced by contracts for difference, to give a level playing field. Unfortunately level playing fields do not favour renewables, but having claimed they were viable without subsidy, they are hoist by their own petards.
I mention this because the reality is that there is a massive political and ideological struggle, even within British parties themselves as to whether or not its windmills or nukes. Andrea Leadsom who made her bid for prime mister before being stabbed in the back, was involved with energy, and is one of the few politicians I have ever heard utter the word ‘dispatch’ in a power generating context and actually understood what she was talking about, is pro brexit and pro nuclear.
But the EU supporters are all behind the faux policies of renewable obligations, because European industry is invested heavily in it – well West European industry, Further east in the old sovbloc countries they are still dependent on coal, soviet gas and soviet built nuclear power, which they are reluctant to relinquish.Russia via Gazprom, is keen on renewables and wants to squash nuclear, because that means more gas. Russia is also in te business of selling nuclear power however, so it seems that the west if Europe is encouraged to be anti nuclear, whilst the east is encouraged to be pro.
Paranoid as ever Russia would be very happy to see these tensions tear the EU apart. There shalt be no Soviet Union in Europe but the Russian Soviet union, and they don’t like the EU trying to out do them in soviet style propaganda, rule by diktat, political control and outright 19th century colonialism.
So its all about as complex and interlinked as is the climate itself.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Rising-says-UK-should-aim-for-50percent-nuclear-2802185.html
is another view of someone who has a little skin in the game, but is actually (heaven forfend) talking sense from the point if view of what is best for the people of these isles (bless!).
How old fashioned!
Personally I thunk with a bit if luck, we will exit Europe, and that will bring with it, once the dust has settled, the obvious corollary at we don’t need to follow EU diktats on energy any more.
It’s all down to how important it’s seen politically, and to how much anti-nuclear sentiment the usual suspects are able to whip up. It may well be another hard face off between the forces of the left and the forces of reason like Thatcher and the miners, with nuclear power being rammed through against fierce opposition.
What this current cold weather has done is raise the level of public consciousness about energy. My website has seen unprecedented activity and interest, and that;s the best news there is The media are all talking about energy security, and solar panel are shown to be as much use as a chocolate teapot.
So keep pushing the message. Renewable energy is pants, and we need actual real fact based policies, not ideological flatulence.
Thank you Leo – an interesting analysis.
My bottom line is:
Educated and experienced professionals like me have known since about 1985 that global warming alarmism was a false crisis, and that the warmists’ green energy schemes would not replace fossil fuels. We spoke out and wrote articles stating these facts, sometimes at great personal cost, and we were ignored and vilified.
Leading skeptics including Dr Sallie Baliunas (Harvard-Smithsonian) and Dr Pat Michaels (U of Virginia) and many others were forced from their universities by people too vile to be named. Other leading skeptics including Dr Richard Lindzen (MIT) and Dr Willie Soon (Harvard-Smithsonian) were persecuted but were able to hang on to their positions.
Tens of trillions of dollars of scarce global resources have been squandered on this obvious scam, enough money to bribe countess corrupt politicians, government officials and academics. The result has been an avoidable huge increase in electrical costs, the destabilizing of electrical grids due to intermittent wind and solar power, and the premature deaths of millions due to dysfunctional energy policies and the misallocation of tens of trillions of dollars that could have been used to improve lives and alleviate human suffering.
These corrupt warmist scoundrels have committed unforgivable crimes against humanity and they belong in jail.
Regards, Allan
+10
“cold war communist plot ” Rather I had thought that it was an energy suppliers’ conspiracy to cause shortfall and drive up prices. That way you get winnowing of marginal buyers with payment problems as a bonus.
No – false.
Companies did jump on the “green power” bandwagon after the structures had been put in place to provide trillions of dollars in overly generous subsidies, but wind and solar power schemes were primarily driven by corrupt greens and idiot politicians.
For example, in Alberta and elsewhere intermittent (non-dispatchable) wind power is purchased by the grid on a preferential basis, and dispatchable power is expected to reduce or increase output to compensate for wind power. This is an enormous indirect subsidy to wind power.
Furthermore, in Alberta wind power was paid 20 cents/KWh regardless of demand and was paid this huge overpayment 24/7, when dispatchable coal-fired or natural-gas fired power was paid about 2-4 cents/KWh, This is the opposite of what these types of power are worth – I calculated on wattsup that intermittent wind power in a large grid is actually worth about 5% of dispatchable power.
Only an imbecile or a phony green politician could derive such an incompetent and corrupt payment system.
I think the UK Met Orofice quietly dropped the “Mediterranean Climate” theme after the bad winter of 2010.
That, and the dawning realization that they weren’t actually scaring many British people by threatening them with a climate the same as where they like to go on vacation. That was probably a Homer Simpson moment for the global warmers.
Here on the south coast of England 15 miles from the Met office the snow has become freezing rain and the roads right outside my house are literally a skating rink and I don’t dare go out.
This would be a good time to contact the met office to see how many have made it into the office through the global warming drifting on the roads.
tonyb
I would not recommend contacting The Met Office for anything – they haven’t a clue. Just when it is most needed, their rainfall radar observations page has been unavailable “due to unprecedented demand”! They spend hundreds of millions on supercomputers but can’t keep their website servers up to the mark. Pathetic!
Grimwig,
I totally agree. The fact that the Met Office Radar has been unavailable since Wednesday on the grounds that it is “little used” is one of the most reckless decisions I have ever seen. On the same grounds a lifeboat is “little used” so it should not be made available in an emergency. If I say any more about this stupidity I would violate site policy.
I have found this alternative at weatheronline that uses the same information.
Excellent except that the key at the bottom seems to go up to infinity which is an alarming thought.
It is still quite severe in Lincolnshire with the lying snow and it has not yet risen above freezing. I don’t think it will last that much longer however it is another case of winter arriving too late here in the UK, we will likely get a some more frosty nights in March but it is only going to stay colder at higher latitudes than the UK. The likelihood of the UK getting a severe winter will increase over the next few years with the approaching Solar Minimum.
…and ocean cycles
I note that Prof Roy Spencer’s UAH satellite reading is now 0.2degs above the 30yr mean – a disappointing drop
From last month, but I’m sure the La Niña will continue to kick in.
Drifting snow can be really bad and quite dangerous, even in Sweden where everybody is used to snow and winter driving and uses studded tires. This gives you an idea:
Störst av allt är smaken. Or should I say smack!
It means “the taste is the greatest thing of all”.
Most people her have missed the point
Gas is needed for domestic central heating, not electricity.
No, it is also used for electricity: “Power prices, which would usually be around £45-50 per megawatt hour at this time of year, spiked at an astronomical £990 per mWh on Thursday.”
without electricity my gas central heating wont work
Brian and everyone else with natural gas or oil-fired central heating that is run by electricity:
If you live in a cold climate, buy a Honda generator large enough to power your furnace, fridge and other basic needs and learn how to quickly set it up. Chain it down outside, because in a major power failure it will develop legs and walk away.
Another good plan is to install a good wood stove and a store of dry firewood, My family experienced a long-term power failure in the Great Ice Storm of 1998 and my dad’s wood stove rescued the entire neighborhood.
You can also buy ventless ceramic tile gas heaters that do not use electricity. They work very well.
“Gas is needed for domestic central heating, not electricity.”
Nope. At this moment (13:12 02 March UK) Gas is generating 28.94% of leccy going in to the grid.
They are not out of natural gas resources.
There is more than enough gas in Britain.
Thanks to the climate extremists, the gas is useless, in the ground and unavailable.
Britain is freezing, and I hope that they tske comfort in the fact that they are shivering while on top of huge safe natural gas reserves.
Why has a seemingly intelligent scientific and political community allowed a country to cope with a perceptually uncertain and dangerous weather reality with primitive energy devices like solar and wind power? It would almost seem to be a perfect plan for the poor to be sacrificed to the elements.
Cold air from Sibir has been pouring down into Europe. Many people have died from frost. New temperature records for March. Several places in southern Norway had colder than -40 C night to Thursday.
Solution – more cabbage!
If only we were sat atop 300 years worth of Gas like those lucky Russians
So sorry I posted a description of a Nautiraid boat and not the promised Gridwatch clip for today, it’s the dumb link-only system used here by WordPress. Try again. Even Twitter finally managed to take images as attachments.
The last desperate and utterly childish throes of den!alism.
Let’s ignore fact that the Arctic is scorching.
Enjoy the “enterprise” while lasts. You guys are so far gone in delusion it’s hilarious to everyone else.
The arctic is scorching? And you accuse us of suffering from delusions?
Regardless, when arctic air plunges south, it gets replaced with non-arctic air from somewhere else.
That’s just how the world works. Perhaps you should study a little meteorology?
That is of course assuming you actually want to know something, rather than just being told what to think.
That’s right MarkW – it’s called weather and it doesn’t disprove climate change despite the idiotic claims and insinuations to the contrary here. glad we agree.
Do you have any reference to your claim that the “Arctic is scorching” or are you just making that up to support your views?
Minus twenty centigrade isn’t exactly scorching:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2018.png
PS. Apparently you have to click the image to get the current version. DMI apparently has defaulted a version several days old. One wonders why….
Maybe he means scorching cold, since extreme cold causes burns on skin contact similar to extreme heat.
I’m in a generous mood today.
Donald
The climate that matters is where people are.
Have you ever wondered why the “fastest warming” places on earth are always remote and unpeopled?
Poles, oceans, Siberia, etc.
Like a “weeping angel” in Doctor Who.
Only moving when you can’t see it.
We’ve got used weather headed your way for another round.
Allan McRae earlier wrote a few things about CET. You may be interested to know that yesterday’s CET max, if my estimate of -1.3C is roughly correct, was the coldest March day since the records began in 1878, and the first negative since 1947.
Rich.
Some more on the CET
The daily means go back to 1776, but for some reason, the daily Max and Min started in 1878
For the CET Max, this was only the 3rd “Ice Day” in March in the 140 years, after -0.1 on 3rd March, 1892, and -0.7 on 6th March, 1942. As mentioned above, it looks as though 1st March this year will have a CET Max of about -1.3, though this will only be officially confirmed at the end of the month
The CET mean for 1st March (-3.8 C) is also a record for the date, and the 4th coldest March day on record.
Date records were also set on 28th Feb, and equalled on 2nd March
The 7-day period from 24th Feb to 2nd March inclusive had a CET Mean of -1.06 deg C. Only 1947 was colder (-2.24), and 8 other years had means below zero for that 7-day period.
The rest of the winter was very close to the most recent 30-year mean, with December, and the first half of February about average, and January about 1 degree above, which made the recent sudden cold snap all the more surprising – and chaotic.
“This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.” – Donald Trump (2014)
David could have picked one of the many countries that actually is by the Mediterranean sea…
It was a spectacularly great decision by UK apparatchiks to close the undersea gas storage facility at Rough last summer. Maintaining it must have seemed too much like hard work for someone.
Rough decision!
And if you think it’s rough now, wait ’til you run out of gas.
It’s cheap to build poorly insulated houses, but those houses are expensive to keep warm.
Preparing reports about orange groves in Britain while the snow is blowing through March shows how pathological the Anthropogenic Global Wastrel obtundites are getting. I’m sure there wasn’t this kind of idiocy during the little ice age snows. This is real Dark Ages stuff ~ what happens when people turn to witchcraft and fantasy.
This year, throngs of warming never-say-die journalists and scientists are holding their noses selling the terrible NH winter that reached southern Morocco, and is still pelting all of Europe, Russia, Korea, Canada , USA … a powerful global warming signal. I’m detecting more desperation and flagging enthusiasm for the existential battle going on.