by James Delingpole 12 Aug 2019
Boris Johnson’s government is shuffling towards a gigantic cliff edge which has nothing to do with Brexit. The looming disaster can be summed up in one word: renewables.
The clue came in the form of the widespread power cuts that Britain experienced at the end of last week. A million people were affected, with rail services disrupted and passengers stuck on trains for many hours.
Quickly the Establishment propaganda machine cranked into gear. This was, a National Grid spokesman told us, a “very, very rare event”. Also, he reassured us — classic distraction technique, this — there was “no malicious intent or cyberattack involved.”
OK then. So what did cause this blackout which, as Richard North rightly says here, was a national “disgrace” and “the sort of thing we expect in train-wreck economies such as Venezuela”?
Well the current official answer is “We don’t know, pending an inquiry.”
Unofficially, though, it’s bleeding obvious. Britain’s National Grid — and by extension the nation’s electricity supply — has been horribly compromised by the dash for renewable energy. The more unreliables — wind turbines, especially — are added to the grid, the more unstable the system will become.
Friday’s power cuts, far from being a freak event, are merely a taste of worse to come.
That’s because brownouts and blackouts aren’t a bug of electricity systems heavily dependent on renewable energy. They’re a feature.
And it’s not as though wiser heads haven’t been saying this for years.
Christopher Booker, for example, writing in 2009, described successive governments’ embrace of wind energy as “the maddest thing that has happened in our lifetime.”
He wrote:
Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity. And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out.
Well on Friday the lights did go out. And the big question now is: will the government try to paper over the cracks or will it turn a crisis into an opportunity?
Perhaps the best thing about those power cuts is that they couldn’t have come at a more inopportune moment for the renewables industry.
With Boris Johnson’s administration having foolishly committed itself to Theresa May’s Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050 policy, Big Wind — and its many supporters in the mainstream media — had been positioning itself for a bonanza of new contracts.
Only the Sunday before last, the Mail on Sunday (bizarrely, because it’s normally quite sceptical on environmental issues) ran a massive puff piece in its business section on the “lobbying offensive” being conducted by the wind industry:
Energy firms have launched a lobbying offensive that could result in a new
generation of wind turbines being built in rural Britain.
Executives at major power companies are urging the Government to lift the
restrictions which currently block the building of onshore windfarms.
Their demands could trigger the construction of a swathe of giant turbines
as the country battles to meet ambitious targets to slash carbon emissions
and to provide the power for electric vehicles.
If it hadn’t been for Friday’s blackout, they might have got away with it too. But now, if she plays her cards right, Energy Secretary Andrea Leadsom might yet be able to nip their nefarious scheme in the bud.
Yesterday’s power outages caused enormous disruption – National Grid must urgently review and report to Ofgem. I will also be commissioning the government’s Energy Emergencies Executive Committee to consider the incident.
— Andrea Leadsom MP (@andrealeadsom) August 10, 2019
The key here will to be ensure that the review is fair, transparent and not a greenwash — something that seems rather unlikely given that the National Grid is a parti pris organisation fully committed to the green agenda.
If the review is conducted with any rigour, I find it hard to imagine it could reach any other conclusion than that renewables are making the grid less and less stable and that the idea of incorporating still more wind projects into this overloaded system should be an absolute no-no.
This will rather depend, I think, on Leadsom’s strength of will — and also on the support she gets from fellow pragmatists within the Cabinet such as Priti Patel, Jacob Rees Mogg, and Liz Truss.
Up until now — in support of the Boris Johnson administration’s green virtue signalling gestures — even climate sceptical Cabinet members have been forced to pretend that they’re on board with the renewables suicide-by-virtue-signalling programme.
Only the day before the blackout, Leadsom herself was busily retweeting some nonsense from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), bigging up Net Zero, COP26, and the wind industry.
As one of the UK’s most sustainable cities, Glasgow is the right place to host #COP26 if the country’s bid is successful, showcasing the UK’s commitment to tackling #climatechange as we move to #netzero 🌍https://t.co/pwqA6NewE7 https://t.co/o3pABE9G42
— Dept for BEIS (@beisgovuk) August 9, 2019
“Executives at major power companies are urging the Government to lift the
restrictions which currently block the building of onshore windfarms.”
No restrictions, simply the subsidies were withdrawn for new ones.
Result, none being planned anymore.
If small wind turbines for home, farm, and virtue signalers at colleges are a terrible idea for consumers and magnified by lack of product reliability data, then national grid-scale wind power is a country risk with similar bad outcomes for policymakers as under-informed deciders.
Quick, clear cut and burn another American forest as wood pellets with airlifted shipments to stabilize the situation. /sarc
Get a clue–burning American forests for virtue signaling environmental points is not reflective of a modern, sophisticated society.
Far too many renewable energy advocates base their views on having something like a small wind turbine charging batteries in the basement of a house which, in turn, run inverters feeding the grid in the house. A simple, non-interconnected grid. First, those wind turbines are small and can be engineered to last for decades. Second, any interruption in charging those batteries has a small impact on the house grid.
They then overlay their view on a nationwide grid being fed by wind turbines. Nothing in their view is actually scalable to such a degree. And they don’t even know that they don’t know that!
It is only when there has been a similar event during a mid-winter big freeze with many associated deaths that the UK government will take this seriously and deal with it by more nuclear and fracking.
“Theresa May’s Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050 policy…” It’s NOT May’s policy, it’s the worldwide agenda to form an eco-fascist technocracy. ‘Smart meters’ anyone? But Delingpole and almost everyone else refuses to expose it. Mustn’t alert the masses and pose a real threat to the house of cards of ‘man-made climate change’.
Silence is consent.
Why would anybody in England think slashing their carbon output would be a desirable goal?
England accounts for 1.2% of global CO2 output due to human activity.
That is a rounding error on the rate of growth of CO2 emissions in Asia.
Furthermore, due to reasons not completely clear, England’s electricity use has fallen about 14% or so in the last seven years (too lazy right now to look it up!).
All this and with higher electricity prices.
The only explanation is corruption in the form of govt subsidies for wind farms.
The U.S. rightly figured it would take more than one nuclear bomb to bring Japan to the surrender table. Probably the same is true here requiring multiple power failures to obtain government attention.
https://notrickszone.com/2019/08/07/german-agency-for-disaster-preparedness-calls-on-citizens-to-be-ready-for-widespread-blackouts/
“Benny Peiser: Incredible Shrinking Europe — Between Climate Utopia & Green Energy Crisis”
The Observer view on Britain’s blackout
This is like a sci-fi / zombie flick.
I continue to be astounded at the sheer ignorance of the energy officials with respect to the future
energy technologies. They are uranium and or Thorium fueled molten salt small modular reactors
and their development does not depend on anything that occurs in renewable Europe or the U.S.
Nothing can compete with this technology – they can produce power at a levelized cost of 4 cents per kWhr, are totally and intrinsically safe and physically unable to meltdown or spread radioactive debri from any accident and can operate in a load following mode (no need for mid level peak power generators) . India and Russia are seriously developing these generators and the U.S. finally has thrown some money (not a whole lot – a few millions) and support their way. The actual basic technology is old and well known – experimental reactors have been built and operated but never at a cost effective manner. That has changed with several
innovative designs that allow operation with low level radioactive fuel. They are very proliferation resistant,as the uranium is dissolved in the molten salt and an be built in factories – no large castings are required as there are no high pressure components or operations on the radioactive side of the system.
Built in factories and installed on sites that require little preparation and no need for lakes of water for cooling – they are air cooled. They can be located practically anywhere, as they are a danger to nobody.
Look to mid 2020’s for prototypes. Their adoption completely eliminates the current state of armed camps supporting different energy technologies.
During my time as an engineering officer with P&O I found myself often alone on watch and responsible for maintaining the essential electrical supply to the ship. One of the key watch duties was to change over generators. We had four, each one capable of supplying a small town, each one powered by diesel. Before shutting a generator down, it was deemed essential for obvious reasons, to have the ongoing generator up to speed operational and generating on the ship’s system.
Compare that simple expedient with what is now taking place here in the UK. The energy providers are actually closing down (permanently), coal fired reliable generating stations and replacing that capacity with uncertain wind farm output.
They, the national grid, must be insane to even consider such a dangerous strategy. It is nothing more than gaming with what is essentially a life threatening industry when it goes down.
The complete absence and no mention of nuclear power is also very revealing. The ex CND operators that now run so much of government activity, refuse to talk about nuclear.
We live in troubled times.
Com’on Boris! Stop this madness. The only existential threat to the planet (and first the British economy) is evil enviromarxists and their crony moneybag friends. You are the new kid on the block and relatively untainted by this idiocy. Don’t join them or you own the whole mess.
“Unofficially, though, it’s bleeding obvious. Britain’s National Grid — and by extension the nation’s electricity supply — has been horribly compromised by the dash for renewable energy. The more unreliables — wind turbines, especially — are added to the grid, the more unstable the system will become”
—————-
This is a ridiculous comment to make for this outage. There was 8GW of spare CCGT power at the time of the outage. There was a demand 2.8GW below peak of the previous day. There was no drop or increase in wind strength. Simply put a gas power station tripped and a fault occurred on the transmission lines from the wind farm causing 0.9GW loss of supply. This should have been handled by the pumped storage systems – Dinorwig 1.8GW, Ffestiniog 360MW etc – the question is why this 12 second response unit and the 1 minute response failed to deliver. Note an individual WEC supplies 7MW max and a WEC trip of 7MW would be easily handled.
Did the wind suddenly die down that day? It would be nice to see whether there was any particular indication of a wind based event. I would be as likely to believe hackers.
If BoJo is just virtue signaling, nothing serious is going to happen. He will stop that immediately after Brexit and return to sane energy politics. I assume he is trying to avoid wars on too many fronts at the same time.
As Ayn Rand said.
You can choose to ignore reality.
However, you still get to suffer the consequences of ignoring reality.
Or to paraphrase David Hume.
We need to ask the question “What is the truth, rather than what we would like the truth to be.”
Where’s the beef? Oh, sorry you can’t have beef anymore.
Damage control procedure:
Step 1: Sow confusion and possibly vague finger pointing in the wrong direction and assign a study team with instructions not to have the answer withing six months to a year
Step 2: Advocate for overpriced grid battery systems and expensive grid upgrades to make up for grid problems caused by the wind farms and others that were not factored into the policy decisions on the front end. Let emergencies and crisis spending by the public be your friend.
Step 3: Stay the course and don’t admit mistakes or anything that looks like negative issues in policy making, especially in regards to further doubling down.
See how horrible that Boris Johnson is? Became prime minister in July, and the very next month there is a blackout. 🙂
C’mon Boris! Brake ‘Big Wind’!
Germany has far more wind power – and an utterly stable grid.
This is unlikely to be other than a one off event – it certainly has not happened in the last 2 decades, since wind power began to take off in the UK.
The UK will continue with wind power – in the last week or so it has been supplying the majority of UK power.
A substantial increase in EVs, which is part of the policy, will only make the destabilization of the grid much worse.