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
Normally the UK Grid should be able to ride out a >1GW sudden loss of generating capacity (or conversely, a >1GW loss of load) but this time it didn’t. The finger is pointing at the loss of inertia in the network. This has hitherto been supplied by the physical inertia of large steel rotating masses – the generators and turbines in steam plant. Because this has always existed, then change of frequency as the generators slow down & speed up due to source and load changes has become a fundamental observable to monitor & control the Grid. Now we have much less physical inertia – windfarms & solar contribute essentially none – so frequency excursions are much larger and lead to load-shedding as we have seen.
The Grid people are aware of this, and there is talk of ‘synthetic inertia’ from windfarms but this requires a change to the operating software, and possibly physical design changes and an unknown effect on maintenance & lifetime. It will also inevitably require derating of the windfarm to allow headroom for the inertia function to operate. Countering a frequency drop requires it to generate more power so it can’t run at 100% of the current potential wind input under normal conditions. So I wonder just how much of the current UK wind capacity can be retrofitted to perform this function?
Of course there are still all the other arguments against wind/solar on amenity and economic grounds.
Exactly. The general public (and some on here) have been pushed towards it being a capacity problem but it was not. It was a stability problem because the frequency fell. The Grid has been warned about it many times but they were trying to set a new renewables record on a very windy day, possibly to impress a visiting Minister.
If they wish to set a new production record percentage they should try it at 5am on a windy Sunday morning, not at 5pm when demand is rising towards the daily peak demand.
Even worse would be trying it on a still December evening when we are sitting in the dark under a high pressure system.
Over the past couple of weeks the amount of wind generated electricity has been going up and down like a bride’s nightie, varying from next to nothing and 10GW. How is that for reliable generation?
I’m not convinced that Boris really believes the green spiel any more than Cameron or many other politicians. I think they are just going along with it as the obsession de jour and are more worried about the quite small percentage of the voters who might defect to another party if they don’t get their green feathers stroked.
It still seems to be a brave politician who risks telling the truth about the green malarkey. David Cameron did it (mistakenly?) off-camera and got my qualified vote that way. Boris may yet do so because he is careless with his speech in a manner similar to Trump.
The more “interconnected” the U.K power becomes with the E.U., the less control U.K. has over it. If you build a lot of intermittent power sources, then you need backup power from somewhere to fill in. If you refuse to build your own backup power generation, then you have become hostage to another government’s whims. If they also build a lot of intermittent power, you now have a row of dominoes that can trip each other.
This is obvious. Whether or not this specific blackout had anything to do with intermittent power sources, some future blackouts will occur due to them. The more interconnected countries become, the larger the blackout can become.
I keep hoping that Texas will stay as independent as possible, but with all the wind capacity they are adding, it likely will do no good. We will eventually experience a blackout due to our own reliance on wind. Without a decent storage capacity intermittent power is just dangerous to rely upon.
Keep hoping.
According to Wikipedia, The Roscoe Wind Farm in Roscoe, Texas, owned and operated by E.ON (btw, I get my electricity from E.ON, which is a German owned utility company), is one of the world’s largest-capacity wind farms, with 634 wind turbines and a total installed capacity of 781.5 MW. At the time of its completion in 2009, it was the largest wind farm in the world.
Other large wind farms in Texas include: Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center, Sherbino Wind Farm, Capricorn Ridge Wind Farm, Sweetwater Wind Farm, Buffalo Gap Wind Farm, King Mountain Wind Farm, Desert Sky Wind Farm, Wildorado Wind Ranch, and the Brazos Wind Farm, and many more, total number over 40, total capacity well over 22 GW.
” We will eventually experience a blackout due to our own reliance on wind.”
Looks like you came pretty close just recently. Wind output dropped 50% during high demand due to heat.
Texas Power Grid Operator Declares Level 1 Emergency Amid “Extreme Heat”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-13/blowing-texas-energy-costs-hit-record-high-monday-heatwave-strikes
YUP!
The more windmills and solar panels they add to the grid, the less reliable the grid becomes, AND the more expensive the electricity becomes. What’s not to like?! Win-win! /sarc
My conspiracy inclined acquaintance said that on that day was very windy, and in advance of a high government VIP visit to the NG operations during the afternoon (widely reported in media), the NG was bragging that 50% of electricity was generated by the wind farms. This scurrilous person opines that the NG in order to impress the VIP may have decided to take out the gas generator in order to demonstrate the power of renewable potential !?
However the wind in the North Sea was getting stronger during the afternoon, eventually got too strong and the wind farm had to power down, consequently chaos ensued. I think whole thing is a bit of nonsense and blame Russian submarines prowling in the North Sea. 🙂
The article says “That’s because brownouts and blackouts aren’t a bug of electricity systems heavily dependent on renewable energy. They’re a feature.” This statement, while perhaps true in Britain where new hydro projects may not be an option, is not true in much of the world where hydro (yes, that is a renewable) are not prone to brownouts and blackouts. Plus an added bonus: hydro reservoirs are easily and effectively disguised as lakes, whereas fields of ugly wind turbines cannot be disguised.
“Where hydro are not prone to brownouts and blackouts”
Because hydro is a controllable source of power. You know how much water is stored, and that it won’t suddenly vary over the space of a few minutes in the way that wind and solar can and do.
I think most people are not aware that there is a downside to “renewables”. Perhaps this power failure will wake them up.
The only surprise is that its taken so long from the day Blair scrapped the nuclear programme in favour of virtue signalling wind turbines for this to happen. Obviously Cameron in coalition with Libtards would not have got permission but since then its a sad indictment of Conservatives that have have not repealed the disastrous Climate Change Act and started to secure our energy supply.
The simple questions must be asked over and over again. What’s it all for? Why, to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere? Why? Because CO2 causes heating of the globe? How do you know this? Because of the IPCC’s models. Are the IPCC’s models accurate or reliable? What has the record been to date? On another tack, do you expect the number of molecules of CO2 per ten thousand – just over four – to go on increasing? Yes or no. If no, how will this be achieved? If yes, what is the point beyond virtue signalling of the UK’s efforts? Is there anyone out there taking an interest in the UK’s virtue signalling? Is there any evidence that the slight warming since 1850 has been harmful? Where and how? And so on.
I’ve gotten my hands on a draft version of the commission report’s conclusions. Here it is:
Wrong type of wind.
Grid instability in the midst of a European recession will be interesting to watch….from a distance. Even more interesting will be the continued focus on all things green while the auto sector implodes and tax revenues decline.
Delingpole learned, three days before publishing this on Breitbart and five days before it was republished here, that the blackout was, in fact, caused by a gas-fired power plant (apparently in response to a lightning strike).
Wind power has advantages and disadvantages, but this story is fake news.
Wrong. As has already been pointed out here, this outage was caused by a lack of frequency control due to insufficient synchronous mass (massive spinning generators) on the grid. This is a direct result of shutting down large thermal plants and replacing them with diffuse renewables which can’t provide frequency control. In a stable system with sufficient synchronous mass, the loss of one small plant would have no effect. So the blame can be laid firmly at the feet of the renewable industry and their government supporters.
Paul:
Wind has reduced momentum and made the grid more vulnerable, but that does not take away the chronology of events.
You can argue that there is too much wind on the system, but you can also argue that there is not enough spinning reserve and other frequency regulators.
But the reason there is not enough spinning reserve is specifically because it has been REPLACED by renewable sources which have no ability to provide frequency control. Isolated generator failures can happen at any time, and has always been the case. Before the rush to renewables the grid was very resilient in the face of these failures due to having a lot of spinning mass (both in service and in reserve). So while the triggering event to this outage was the loss of a thermal plant and a wind farm, the root cause was the increased fragility of the grid due to the replacement of thermal plants with renewables.
Richard,
I thought synchronous condensers were meant to support voltage sags from short-circuits and to support the temporary frequency excursions on the grid. They can’t support the loss of generation capacity. Short circuits and frequency variations are typically short-term events. Loss of generation capacity can be a long-term event and the effects of this loss can’t be corrected by any amount of synchronous condensers.
thanks rsjt!
the first to go offline was the gas plant
2 mins later Hornsea wind farm (partially constructed) went offline
Each of the installed WECs is 7MW. As of 2nd june 2019 “over 50 of the 174 Siemens Gamesa 7MW turbines are operational”
If wind was allowing maximum name plate production then disconnecting all of them would drop 360MW from the grid.
This does not agree with the drop in wind power at the point of interruption?
https://hornseaprojectone.co.uk/News/2019/07/Operations-start-on-Hornsea-One—the-worlds-largest-offshore-wind-farm
It is interesting that they Ørsted are saying the power connection is AC and not DC.
“Longest ever AC offshore wind export cable system”
Do you even know what frequency control on the electric grid means, or why lack of frequency control is a problem? Do you have any idea how the frequency is controlled and why renewables not only don’t help, but make it harder?
The delay between trips was no more than 40 seconds. See the grid frequency chart. It did not occur when Hornsea claimed it did in the REMIT system. Hornsea was producing around 830MW at the time it tripped: many more turbines are now tied in, and in fact they tied in a bunch more just on the Thursday – work that may have been responsible for the trip if they made a mistake in the process. When complete, it will have a capacity of 1.2 GW. So just about every claim you are making is wrong.
Wrong, it was wind (Hornsea) that failed first and the gas station a few moments later, as the frequency second-by-second record showed. This was never reported by the media but was reported on WUWT on 10 Aug bu an industry insider:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/09/transport-chaos-across-england-and-wales-after-major-power-cuts/#comment-2767240
“it doesn’t add up”, Aug 10:
I’ve done a lot of research on this, looking at the data from National Grid at BM Reports, Gridwatch, and a very helpful frequency chart at 1 second resolution from Upside Energy, a small company providing experimental token grid stabilisation services using distributed systems (a potential precursor to such things as V2G). You can see that their effort was very prompt but puny at under 6MW for about 3 minutes in this chart they tweeted
Here’s what I found:
I think the conclusive answer to the question is yes – the blackout’s primary cause was the sudden loss of output from Hornsea wind farm, though the precise cause of that remains unknown at this stage: likely candidates are a failure at the offshore transmission platform where the voltage is boosted to 220kV, somewhere along the cable to shore, or at the grid connection point (at Killingholme on the Humber) onshore. The really damning evidence comes in this tweet that shows grid frequency based on 1 second data:
The extremely rapid initial drop in frequency at 15:52:32Z to below the statutory minimum of 49.5Hz is compatible with the drop in wind generation of about 850MW recorded in grid 5 minute data (although there appear to be timing discrepancies between the frequency and power data – but I would regard the frequency data as conclusive, especially with wind). That is followed by a small bounce as the grid starts to try to recover, before a further smaller collapse in frequency to the nadir at around 48.8Hz, which is entirely consistent with the smaller drop in CCGT output recorded in grid data that suggest that Little Barford was probably operating at about 50% of its 727MW capacity. There is a major grid transmission line that runs from Keadby near Killingholme past Little Barford at St. Neots and on to the transmission ring around the North of London. It is almost certain that this power line was delivering power from the wind farm towards London. When that failed, there would have been a sudden extra demand on Little Barford, which would have caused its frequency to drop and that (if not the already rapid drop in grid frequency) would have tripped it out of operation.
Do not be deceived by the reported outage times on the plants. The formal record shows that Little Barford announced it had zero capacity at 15:55:37Z w.e.f. 15:57:40Z (compare with the chart above). Hornsea is shown as having zero capacity w.e.f. 16:00:00Z – which is a highly unlikely timing, except that it coincides with the start of the next settlement period. That report was not submitted until 16:19:48Z, over 20 minutes after the main event. By 16:00Z the grid frequency chart shows that balance had been restored by the combination of load shedding and running up Dinorwig pumped storage to nearly 1GW, OCGT rapid response, and diesel STOR. It seems that management decided not to report the real time of the loss of power for reasons that might vary between inadequate monitoring systems, or a failure to understand the need to report the true time rather than the next half hour settlement period time, or simply to lie to cover up having reviewed the evidence.
That these disturbances caused such a rapid and severe frequency drop that triggered load shedding is entirely due to the lack of grid inertia caused by the high proportion of generation from wind and solar, which had been running at over 40% most of the day. A 2016 presentation from National Grid has a chart that shows the relationship between the rate of change of frequency that can be expected for different amounts of load loss at different levels of grid inertia: it suggests that they were sailing far too close to the wind. You can think of grid inertia as the flywheel energy stored in the rotating heavy generator turbines. It is measured in GVA.s, which you can think of as gigawatt-seconds. Divide by the level of grid demand, and it tells you how long the energy would last if it instantaneously could become the only source of power on the grid. That gives a measure of the response speed required from backup generation (spinning reserve, fast start, grid batteries etc.) if grid frequency is to stay within limits that avoid blackouts. You have to suspect that at Grid HQ in Wokingham, they will be thinking about having a larger level of spinning reserve, and about curtailing wind to ensure that there is more inertia.
I note that today the formal record of the timing of the shutdowns has magically disappeared. More questions to be answered.
I wouldn’t be quite so hasty with your assertion about the chronology of events. The FT has reported that in fact the wind farm tripped first, according to the National Grid report to OFGEM. Many people have been misled by the reports on the REMIT system claiming that the wind farm didn’t lose output until 16:00GMT. That report is nonsense: the blackouts started just before 15:54GMT and the trips occurred over 15:52:30-15:53:10GMT as clearly shown by the frequency data. In fact, I think it is more than nonsense – it has the flavour of an attempted cover-up with intention to mislead, especially since it wasn’t submitted until nearly half an hour after the trips occurred.
In any case, the precise order of the trips matters little. Hornsea have admitted that they had wrongly configured their substation, and that was the reason they lost the entire output so rapidly. The precise detail is not yet public. The Little Barford trip may have been caused by lightning upsetting the transmission lines from there – but if it tripped second, it was already in a precarious situation following grid frequency lower, and potentially overshooting on that because it was probably feeding the same transmission line to London as Hornsea. Again, real detail should come from the report.
But the real point is that grid inertia was too low to allow the grid to recover from the transmission losses before load shedding frequency was reached. However you spin the rest of the story, that is a fundamental truth. Bear in mind that the grid suffered a 1.1GW loss of generation less than a month previously on 11th July, and a sudden NEMO interconnector outage in May of 1GW. These event did not risk the system in the same way because there was substantially more inertia available and less wind and solar in the generation mix. National Grid have been sailing too close to the wind on inertia and spinning reserve, and got found out. That’s the real story.
What do you expect when the politicians, civil servants and business men/women are selected from the scientifically illiterate, the technologically challenged and the politically deranged. The former UK prime minister Mrs May is a splendid example of this. These people then get make decisions about encryption of personal communications, national power systems etc from a position of total ignorance and get it totally wrong.
How can we fix this? The best that I can come up with is compulsory summer schools for MP’s and Civil Servants
covering mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering and physics to be held in the month of August.
In-depth review of incident on this excellent energy site
http://watt-logic.com/2019/08/12/august-2019-blackout/
It appears the problem to be somewhat similar to the SA outage; the overall system lacks rotating inertia when there is a high proportion of wind generation.
The temporary fix in SA has been to set a minimum on the connected capacity of gas turbines while limiting the maximum input from wind generators.
The long term fix that SA is proposing is installation of synchronous condensers:
https://www.electranet.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2019-02-18-System-Strength-Economic-Evaluation-Report-FINAL.pdf
These provide the rotating inertia and can assist with voltage control, frequency control, fault levels and power flow through the system. For SA, this is a lower cost option than keeping gas plant fired and on line but is another cost not accounted for in the pricing of output from intermittent ambient energy sourced generators.
The licensing of generators to connect to the grid has been less rigorous than registering a vehicle to travel on a roadway. In the case of SA, no one checked the fault settings of the wind generators and they are now being sued by the regulator for not meeting the standard. It would not surprise me to see similar proceedings in the UK.
On the other hand, the public need to get used to power outages if they want high market share from intermittent generators. In Australia, the public are being condition to accept “load management” as an effective tool to avoid grid collapse.
I had an exchange of comments with Kathryn Porter on the subsequent post she made there, when I put together my latest view based on all the evidence available to me so far.
http://watt-logic.com/2019/08/15/blackouts-and-near-misses/
“The more unreliables — wind turbines, especially — are added to the grid, the more unstable the system will become.
That’s because brownouts and blackouts aren’t a bug of electricity systems heavily dependent on renewable energy. They’re a feature.”
Ask your Local Electric company Dispatcher. He will confirm the above statements. Utilities do not mind that it causes havoc and chaos as that creates extremely high prices which they get to pass along to the customer – YOU!
In the United States, Hydroelectric power produces 35% of the total renewable electricity, and 6.1% of the total U.S. electricity. For Hydro to be a backup, “Storage” source for Wind/Solar it would have to be equal to and greater than the total of all Unreliable Renewables. It is doubtful that in your great grandchildrens lifetime that could ever be achieved in the USA. All the countries that continually brag about numbers greater than 80% Renewables already have close to that amount, or greater, in Hydro power. Environmentalsists will never allow a 1000 fold increase in the number of dams and hydro facilities.
The Bath County Pumped Storage Station is a pumped storage hydroelectric power plant, which is described as the “largest battery in the world”,[2] with a maximum generation capacity of 3,003 MW[3], an average of 2,772 MW [2], and a total storage capacity of 24,000 MWh [2]. The station is located in the northern corner of Bath County, Virginia, on the southeast side of the Eastern Continental Divide, which forms this section of the border between Virginia and West Virginia. The station consists of two reservoirs separated by about 1,260 feet (380 m) in elevation. It is the largest pumped-storage power station in the world.[4]
And it only lasts less than 12 hours. ! ! !
In 2018, about 4,178 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or 4.18 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States. It would take over a million of these pumped storage facilities, AND over a hundred new High tension distribution lines across the USA.
A simple policy change will fix this problem. To be connected to the grid, all intermittents like solar and wind generators must be able to guarantee 100% dispatchable reliable power. That means they must always invest in backup so that when the sun doesn’t shine and the the wind doesn’t blow, power is still available. That backup may be batteries, pumped hydro, gas, diesel etc. Now let’s see the economics of these “free” renewables.
So, as Heinlein might say, “Bad luck.”
As an onlooker from Australia with a long history in power generation, I have only one question about this UK blackout.
What happened to the truth?
Readers like me must feel that each statement offered to the public suffers from defects. Incomplete, we need more time to understand this. Conflicting, it was/was not caused by renewables. Onowned, someone else caused it. And so on.
In truth, the system operators would have known within minutes about what caused the blackout. It is their job to know, so fast remedies can be put in place. What we are seeing is deliberate concealment of the truth, to create breathing space for making excuses.
On the Grid, there was a problem with spin frequency. It was alive and well amongst the guilty parties. Geoff S
I agree, and I think I’ve put together some evidence to support your view that we’ve seen little but cover-up so far. I’m sure the eventual reports will be spun so that the public message is meaningless, except I fear that there will be a push for expensive solutions such as massive grid batteries (I’m thinking GW scale) – and yet they would be utterly misleading at the same time, because storage capacity is not going to be beyond the start up time for OCGT plant and diesel STOR – not storing energy from a windy day to a calm one to cover the lack of renewable generation.
Science and sound engineering is suffering greatly as it relates to renewable energy. It is obvious that politicians are calling the shots and knowledgeable engineers are being silenced. I also noticed there was no mention of solar energy. I would guess the UK’s climate is not conducive to solar.
Overlay with an also insane push to EVs to further drive up electricity demand. What could possibly go wrong?
Of course all these millions of EVS will be feeding back into the grid because of the magic street sockets and the rainbows and unicorns that recharged the batteries as required , even in the depths of winter. No problems.
People will get used to it. Most Soviet communities showed that populations are quite happy with about 6 hours of electricity a day. For a better world, a sacrifice or two must be made.
(at this juncture it would be wise to place a :Sarc Tab:, just so there’s no confusion. 😉
As the UK leaves the EU its almost a certainty that for a period, short or long, they will have a decrease in their living standards, i.e. a recession.
Coming on top of the trade war between the USDA and China it may well be a severe one.
I am of the opinion that only rich Western countries can afford to put up with the Greens and their nonsense, so I expect to see emergency legislation coming into being in the UK, a cancelling of any contracts favouring renewable energy enterprises, and hopefully a prosperous UK at the end of it.
There vis a old saying in Politics, “” Never let a crises go to waste””.
MJE VK5ELL
Boris has to win an election and get a majority. Tricky because the country is divided over Brexit. He has produced a raft of measures cleverly designed so everyone will like more than they dislike. Unfortunately it includes a commitment to renewables so Boris must consider that a vote winner. To turn England you have to turn David Attenborough who is a much loved national treasure.
Wind company lobbying is a key problem when they have the politicians and the media all pushing in the same wrong direction. There is no natural counterbalance.
Boris Johnson needs a Richard Feynman type on his Blackout investigation. He needs someone who can talk with the engineers, not just the management people, or the PR people. He needs someone brave enough to write his own appendix to whatever report a committee prepares.
From the Appendix to The Challenger Disaster:
“Appendix F – Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle
by R. P. Feynman
Introduction
It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the
probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The
estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher
figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from
management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of
agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a
Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could
properly ask “What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the
machinery?”
How many more fuel poverty deaths per year is the UK building into their cost benefit study ?
Is another 10,000 acceptable while also doubling as a population control strategy and a means to enforce Britain’s well established class system where the poor always die first ?
The rich get rich and the poor can freeze . Such a civil country .