Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
NOVEMBER 27, 2020tags: Electricity
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
With an impeccable sense of timing, some bright spark decided to make this UK Wind Week.
Perhaps they should have called it UK NO Wind Week!
Sat under an anticyclone, Britain’s contribution from wind power since yesterday has been less than 1GW, around 2% of the total electricity generated. This situation is expected to last a few more days yet.
As ever, it is fossil fuels which have come to the rescue, with gas currently supplying 60% of the nation’s power, and even coal, which has been fired up to give 7%.
Indeed, in the last day we have had more power from coal than from wind.
Thirteen years ago, the Labour government promised us that wind power could be powering every home by this year. (I wonder where I have heard that lately!)
And we were supposed to run out of gas by now, because of disruption to supplies!
We are governed by idiots.
Just what the world needs for reliable, dependable power — weather-dependent power!
But wait. Didn’t power-production switch to fossil fuels a couple centuries ago to fix that?
Power is only valuable if it is available when you need it.
Having lots of power when you don’t need it, and no power when you do need is only good for propaganda.
I checked the Templar site regularly during last week. With practically no wind or solar generation and occasionally no input from France or Netherlands interconnectors either, the picture looked very iffy: biomass was almost maxed out, CCGT heading for the same territory, avalable nuclear was doing its steady best, the last surviving coal-fired stations had been switched in, pumped hydro was called up outside peak surge and even the reserve oil-fired units had been pressed into service, I wondered, what are all the ‘we’re 100% renewables’ supply companies sending their customers just now? And which appliances have their customers had the decency to switch off rather than contaminate their supergreen homes with gas/coal/oil generated supplies?
And all this on a few days when it was only cold enough to give a touch of ground frost across most of the country – heaven help us if it had been really wintry.
“biomass was almost maxed ”
Rev up the chainsaws on the eastern seaboard and top up the bunker C floating barges!
I believe one of the ships is named “FOREST MOWER”
(wink)
And if you look at last week against the whole of this and last year it stands out as distinct from the rest of the last 2 years, doesn’t it?
Wind itself is wonderful.
Harnessing it it for dispatchable power is a complete joke and seems to do everything a real environmentalist would rail against meaning killing all things flying, ruining landscapes, creating enormous ruin zones for the footings power lines and service roads. It needs enormous fossil fuel inputs to begin and of course add the rare earth element and all of the problems with it. Then there is the whole aspect of people being driven back into the dark ages on the phoney pretext that man made CO2 is a harmful substance.
This is nothing more than a farcical political play and until the general populace wakes up to it we are going to continue wasting enormous energy creating a dysfunctional system whilst ignoring many real world problems that could actually be be solved and eliminated. I truly fear my children will have to go to war to return sanity to the world.
Thank you Charles for this post. Since a link to the G.B. National Grid Status by Elexon portal and Sheffield Uni was posted on WUWT earlier this month I’ve been quite regularly following power consumption and production of same in GB. I was born in London but have spent nearly my entire life in Canada where we also have a push for windmills although we’ve not (as yet) tried installing the numbers that GB has.
I was aghast the other day (Nov. 26 at 16:16 GMT) that the wind was only producing .82GW or 2% of the 41GW demand. Coal was producing 3% and CCGT over 58%. Isn’t the current wind installation designed to produce up to 15GW?
You’ve cherry picked the worse case there.
If you look at gridwatch you’ll see we went for months over the summer without using coal at all – a record number of days. And there are multiple days on which wind was 3 times the gas power stations.
The worst case IS the problem. If you can’t rely on generation from whirlygigs, you need to have real power stations on hot standby to maintain the grid. If you have built a reliable, efficient power station, and are burning fuel in it, it is better to have it generating power for the grid, rather than disconnecting it each time wind can produce intermittent power.
And where was the money to come from to pay for this massive investment in wind turbines? Greenpeace had no doubts about that.
“John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace, said that the plans amounted to a “wind energy revolution” but said premium prices had to be guaranteed for clean electricity.” (Guardian article)
Don’t you just love that term ‘premium prices’?
It’s so nice when folks are completely honest and use plain words that are immediately understandable. So to put Mr Sauven’s words into plain English: “Greenpeace wants the government to force electricity companies to charge very high prices for electricity produced using wind energy. These very high prices would, of course, significantkly increase the problem of fuel poverty and force many people on low incomes to cut back on heating their homes. However, we at Greenpeace don’t care a hoot about that because we all get nice big salaries.”
Sounds like you’re doing a certain amount of cherry-picking yourself. How much do people need to heat their homes in the summer?
Griff has one dystopian post after another…
Doesn’t it occur to him in a typical German summer (I have lived there!), there is little fog (nebel is the bane of German life in winter months)…
The German summer is long and hot, and geographically relatively favourable warmth in autumn and spring.
There is only one problem, the winter months with the unbearable FOG are usually wind free, freezing cold, and no sun beaming thru to those 1000s of kms of solar panels, when you need a maximum amount of energy to keep warm.
The summer months when all this much hyped wind and solar, are when you literally don’t need it for anything particularly socially useful, so they subsidise it and export it to other people who can’t do much with it either.
Supply and demand dictates, you lose money hand over fist on expensive “alternative”energy when the prices are low, then import the stuff at highest price when the demand is highest.
All this means the entire system is based on the most incompetent economic analysis known to man, – thus raising prices to the consumer who has to be milked to finance it all.
This is nothing to do with cherry picking, it’s to do with conning the German consumer at prices which could much more easily be halved.
All this is now well known in Germany, but until Merckel is gone, all the greenies are talking utter drivel and/or in denial.
Maybe we skeptics could contribute towards a scheme to send Bojo on a sailing course? That certainly makes a sailor aware of the variability of wind (which comparatively rarely seems to be just what is needed), and the unreliability of sunlight which sometimes fries yet is often non-existent.
Better send Carrie too – maybe on a one-way ticket! And preferably accompanied by our socialist NZ Prime Minister Cindy Ardern.
For price and reliability, coal not only outperforms wind, but wind isn’t even in the same ballpark.
So much scam everywhere
My latest electricity bill here in calgary:
Sept 23-oct 25
1013kwhr consumption
$63 worth of power
Then list starts of charges
Final Bill $163
Gas for same period
5.8GJ
$13.20
Final Bill including $9 of carbon tax
$77
When the supply is marginal smart meters come into their own: demand management, one consumer at a time.
If only some are cut off, people are left wondering what happened as their neighbours are still OK.
Without that ability, the grid would have to cut off whole districts. People would then talk to each other and get a clear signal that there’s a supply problem.
So the policy is divide and conquer.
Of course, there’s also the opportunity for stiffing the customer.
“I’m sorry Madam, but did you not read para 13.11.2(b) in the supply agreement?
If you want a reliable supply you can sign up for the Platinum Plus Premium tariff.
It’s only an extra £25 a month………”
Very interesting – as I say, “You get what or who you vote for!” If you vote for ignorant people or stupidity, you’ll likely get harm or stupidity in return. Personally…I have little sympathy for left-wing ignorance. For 27 years, I’ve lived with a team in many countries and climates with a ruck on my back and M16; no sleeping bags for comfort, sleeping on Mother Earth and hearing her heart beat, eating what we could forage at times, using iodine tabs to purify water. Maybe some suffering is in order this winter, just like your ancestors lived and died in extreme cold, harsh weather in “The Little Ice Age.” This winter is destined to exceed all expectations for exactly that – cold, freezing ice, snow, and harsh winds. Wind mills and solar don’t function too well in that kind of weather. All ocean wind mills will likely have serious problems, and solar usually requires the sun! It’ll be survival of the fittest and those who live, and they’ll be a hardy bunch! Exactly as Mother Nature works! Lol
They discovered an algae that can convert sunlight to useable energy at 95% efficiency, new solar panels are around 20%, and researchers around the world are working to copy the mechanism.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190509112258.htm