From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Please can we have more MPs like Craig Mackinlay?
The MP described his constituents of the future as “sitting around a tepid radiator” powered by an expensive heat pump and worrying about the payments for an electric car they didn’t want either. At the same time, they watched as the growing economies of the world were building new gas and coal-fired power stations. Could this be the future of Net Zero?
In response, the Prime Minister claimed that UK households and businesses were experiencing “vertiginous” falls in the prices of batteries as well as wind and solar power.
Fact-checking Boris Johnson’s answer to my Parliamentary Question
It is critical that Britain’s decarbonisation policies are both affordable and technologically feasible. If the adoption of technologies such as wind and solar “farms”, square miles of batteries, hydrogen and widespread adoption of air source heat pumps leaves people colder and poorer, no-one is going to want to copy our example, and it won’t be very popular at home either. But is our example economically compelling? Is it even doable?
In response to my question on this topic at PMQs, the PM said that we were experiencing “vertiginous” falls in the prices of batteries as well as wind and solar power. It is all going to be OK if we adopt a spirit of “promethean technological optimism”. But what’s the truth about the PM’s claims?
As a matter of fact, renewable energy in Britain has not, as the Prime Minister suggests, been getting cheaper. Subsidies to renewable electricity generators cost consumers over £10 billion a year at present, and the average subsidy on top of the wholesale price can be conservatively calculated at about £80/MWh, making it extremely expensive by any standard.
The Prime Minister specifically claims that the cost of offshore wind power has dropped by 70 per cent in the last decade. That is untrue. Actual subsidies paid per MWh generated have not fallen, but as a matter of public record costs have increased sharply since their introduction in 2002, when they stood at just over £40/MWh, right up to the present when they stand at just over £110/MWh.
Perhaps the Prime Minister has been misled by his officials by the low offshore wind bids for non-binding “Contracts for Difference”. Most of these low-price contracts have not yet been taken up, and few if any seem likely to survive since, again as a matter of fact, there is no evidence that the underlying cost of offshore wind has fallen sharply. The real-life experience of offshore wind companies has been of higher maintenance costs and a shorter working life of equipment than the original business models planned for.
Audited accounts show clearly that offshore wind capital costs remain high and that their operation and maintenance costs are rising rapidly.
The PM also believes that the costs of solar have fallen sharply, but once again government estimates of these are inconsistent with data in audited accounts. Research in progress and shortly to be published shows that the total capex of solar “farms” in the UK fell by only 10 per cent in the period 2012 to 2018, and averaged about £1m per megawatt installed. Bizarrely, the government cost estimates are only about 60 per cent of that figure. Similarly, solar industry sources claim operating expenditure at about £20,000/MW per year while audited accounts record that it is 50 per cent higher. So they cost more to build and cost more to operate than the government has been led to believe.
And then on top of all this, we have the network and system costs of connecting and managing uncontrollable renewables, which are high and have already affected consumers. In 2002, before renewables, the cost of National Grid’s “Balancing Services” were about £400m per year. They now stand at about £1.8 billion a year with gas and, just this week, coal powered traditional power stations stepping in to keep the lights on, and the trend is upwards, very largely due to renewables.
Griff will be along shortly to tell us where and why this is incorrect. That the unicorns are getting fatter as they are not working hard enough.
Today’s material from griff’s source includes:
Production of forever chemicals emits potent greenhouse gases, analysis finds (HFCs etc)
‘Larger than usual’: this year’s ozone layer hole bigger than Antarctica
Scientists say ozone hole is unusually large for this stage in season and growing quickly
Drought puts 2.1 million Kenyans at risk of starvationNational disaster declared as crops fail after poor rains and locusts, while ethnic conflicts add to crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-crisis
He might be a bit stuck for a comment.
“….‘Larger than usual’: this year’s ozone layer hole bigger than Antarctica
Scientists say ozone hole is unusually large for this stage in season and growing quickly:
Oh dear! A quarter century since Montreal banned those CFCs, and six months since the sun abandoned Antarctica for northern climes. Next week he should pop his smiling face over the Antarctic horizon and start making fresh ozone to fill the hole.
cheers
Mike
I thought the ozone hole had been shrinking and was a clear and obvious point of success for the Montreal Protocol?
See https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/Ozone for a visual depiction of the changes in the hole from 1979 to 2019 There is lots of variation but no obvious trend to my eye. If there is no trend, this suggests either CFCs are not the cause or if they are, some countries are simply lying about how much they release. Like the CO2 meme, the CFC meme is so deeply imbedded among scientists that I expect that very few if any are looking into this matter.
Great link, DHR.
The size of the ozone hole is all over the place. In ’97 it was really small. The Montreal signatories should have declared victory right then and quit monitoring.
I think the Sumerians put up a satellite and were monitoring the ozone hole, but we have yet to run across the clay tablets with the data.
Notice that the medium to dark blue rings around the periphery of the hole are 400 to 500 Dobson units (3 to 4 times thicker than in the ‘hole’). This means that the ozone hasn’t disappeared at all. It has been ‘rolled back’ like a turtleneck sweater, therefore it is created by physical rather than chemical means.
all facts.
do you dispute them?
Ah griff, I am honoured to have received a reply.
“all facts.
do you dispute them?”
HFCs replaced CFCs, and as usual that isn’t enough. So would you go with alcohol/water? Think carefully, then let us know your alternative…
The bottom line in your source on O3 is: “We cannot really say at this stage”. They really have no idea at all.
Africa has and always will be a basket case. Now you know why the migrations occurred.
Next
Being a fact doesn’t mean it was caused by CO2.
BTW, how could the ozone hole possibly be growing. Didn’t you tell us that the problem was solved by the Montreal Protocols?
Why don’t you tell me why it is correct?
a noticeable lack of fact based argument from climate skeptics these days.
Well, vey little Boris says is actually fact based so for me it is difficult to call this…
Independent evidence suggests that when he said 40GW of offshore wind by 2030 , he was only announcing building, approved and in the course of getting planning permission schemes, so that is certainly factual
“Why don’t you tell me why it is correct
a noticeable lack of fact based argument from climate skeptics these days.”
That’s a bit rich coming from the entity that makes announcements and pronouncements and provides no [credible] source and never engages in real debate on an issue.
Your task is to comment and waste peoples’s time
To be fair it works, but don’t you think there might be more to life than winding people up with cultish nonsense.?
But there is no source outside the closed skeptic community you will find credible, is there?
I do provide plenty of evidence (e.g I just linked to Met Office figures showing UK wetter due to climate change in comment above)
We give plenty of references and sources
The MO is hopelessly compromised- that’s why you quote it. It’s on narrative
There are many places we find credible.
It is you who only finds sites that agree with what you believe to be credible.
In griff’s world, any fact that disagrees with his belief system is not a fact.
Be fair. Griff does sometimes provide sources, and sometimes even credible ones.
Its only problem is that most of its sources, especially the credible ones, utterly refute what its saying…
That’s how juveniles argue.
Well Griff, you have a flexible idea of a “fact”.
First and foremost: “the PM said that we were experiencing “vertiginous” falls in the prices of batteries as well as wind and solar power.”
The Prime Minister is a politician– like the 40GW refers to a pie in the sky finished project that is only partly done. So announcing approved plans for the future is a fact, but it doesn’t automatically produce functioning reliable windmills.
You skipped facts for the Kenyans and the ozone hole. The Kenyans are suffering from do-good programs failing, and the Ozone Holes are acting up to the vagaries of weather, the sun, and an only partially understood chemistry the stratosphere.
Not to mention the ozone “hole” was only discovered in the mid 1950s. We have no idea whatsoever if it has ever done anything “abnormal” since then.
And that planned 40GW will produce 0GW when the wind doesn’t blow. Why is this so hard to understand?
Griff,
while he said and I’m sure he meant,40 Gwatts of offshore wind building I wonder if he is aware of how much of that 40 Gwatts will actually be generated. Being generous, half of that so it really is quite disingenuous of him to quote that figure.
So far this year wind has been noticeably weak and is demonstrating the folly of relying on wind which the maritime sector was aware of very many years ago. We are ignoring history.
Griff is otherwise unavoidably detained watching his EV charge out on the street from a distance with the garden hose handy-
GM tells Bolt EV owners park away from vehicles in decks (msn.com)
He sends his apologies as supercharging is not an option and you know how it is with an extension lead from the garage.
Griff is otherwise engaged sitting on a motorway causing road traffic accidents
Let me go on record as saying XR are a useless bunch of nutters.
They have no understanding of what they are allegedly campaigning for…
but at least it keeps them off the streets… oh, wait…
He’d be better off standing there with a bat to keep the thieves away from that extension cord.
I could charge at my local supermarket, local restaurant, local car park and any number of local charging stations as well as from home
What EV do you have ?
Only if the cables haven’t been stolen.
And someone hasn’t vandalized it with mince meat 🙂
Why oh why do we spend so much time commenting on Griff. Surely people have more informative comments to make rather than poking the troll. On some threads over 50% is related to Griff. Waste of space and time!
And people keep invoking him before he even shows up. It’s really obsessive, and juvenile.
And what no one ever factors in, is that the more unreliables you use, the more energy costs and so the more the fuel for the excavators & for the lorries moving these monsters around costs. The more it costs to hire the labourers (because they also have much higher costs … like travelling to remote areas). The more it costs to transport all these monsters from China, and if China were ever mad enough to commit unreliables economic suicide, then the cost of these mosters would also skyrocket … perhaps heading toward and infinite cost because there is no guarantee, when everything is taken into account, including all the indirect energy consumption, that any energy is ever produced by any unreliables.
And, it is this feedback of indirect higher costs that cause energy costs to rise, which then cause everything in society to cost more, which then causes the cost of building unreliables to rise, which then … etc., it is that feedback which is the real killer … and by killer, I do literally mean the cost of living for the vast majority of people will be too high.
I think that this is the ‘shoe event horizon’ that Douglas Adams described in The HHGTTG. It was the inevitable conclusion of any advanced civilization, destroying itself to build more and more shoe shops.
What the woke are creating is the ‘renewable energy horizon’ with the same effect. As in The HHGTTG, future civilizations will study the remans of bird-choppers and artificial heat sinks, and ponder why we did this. The main difference is that people will not evolve into birds, or if they do, they will all be chopped up.
but humans have already evolved bird brains…
SPAMMER ALERT
moderators?
Does anyone know how much the general public (or the median voter) knows about the cost of things like the transition to gas heating for houses?
What is Boris going to say when they find out?
The general public haven’t got a clue about the gigantic increase in energy costs which are already in the pipeline. The reason is very simple. The British media won’t publish anything which contradicts their eco-loon fantasies.
For one glaring example of this, the operating costs of heat pumps are much higher than gas boilers but I have read a number of articles in the British media which claim that heat pumps will be cheaper to operate than gas boilers.
More and more, the various social media platforms won’t permit anyone to post anything that goes against what the government wants people to believe.
A lot of people I speak to do.
Judging by comments in the Mail, they have been grossly mislead and have an idea it is thousands to replace existing systems…
Griff, everybody in the entire world (except you) accepts that it will cost many thousands to install heat pumps in homes. The cost is so high that the government is thinking about grants of £7000 to cover part of the cost. Even with grants of this size, there won’t be many takers to install a heating system which costs more to run than their existing gas boilers.
https://www.building.co.uk/news/government-considering-7000-grants-for-heat-pumps/5113333.article
Pumps start at around £14k
Pointless having one unless you’ve spent up to £100k or even more retrofitting your house with new windows, insulation etc
Then you need to find somewhere to put a water tank for the shower the heat pump cannot run….
No, you are way out. When my old oil boiler failed last winter, I installed a 11.8kW heat pump which cost £2040 incl. VAT. Some larger radiators, new pipework, electronic controls and new hot water cylinder were about another £1500.
Took my son and I about 3 days to install. Find a good local plumber – don’t go through the government scheme which will cost about 3 times as much (although you would get some of it back over several years). Yes, I was lucky in that my house is already well insulated.
No regrets.
Well done for installing everything yourself. However, this option will not be feasible for most people who will have much bigger costs. I also note that you replaced an oil boiler which is expensive to run compared to a gas boiler. And you already had a well insulated house. Obviously, your experience and costs will not be realisable for most people who will pay a lot more.
And freeze at night…
One of the coldest experiences I ever had was staying at one of those heat pump loonies houses.
It was cold all the time, except like in China it would run for about 1hr a day at something approaching reasonable temps.
Even the shower was a POS, lukewarm if you are lucky.
Add the running costs including astronomical electricity price increases
But that isn’t the entire UK plan, is it?
Most homes will continue to use gas which is mixed with injected hydrogen…
all UK gas boilers sold since 1998 will run on that mix. Hydrogen injection now under active trial in the UK.
Then there is insulation reducing need for heating, district heating schemes… the initial ban is only on gas boilers in new homes too.
and the quoted ‘replacement’ prices are way too high.
Are some trials inactive, Griff?
Spoken like a true believer
“Hydrogen injection now under active trial in the UK.”
How much percent hydrogen in the mixture?
How much corrosion in pipes and appliances?
How much future permanent added expenditure in repracing corroded pipes and broken appliances?
….
Once, when I was a kid, on my newspaper route, I rode my bicycle up near a house that had just exploded because of a natural gas leak. It k!lled the man living there and competely destroyed the house. The house was all over the place in little pieces.
You don’t want natural gas leaking into your house.
1) Lower energy content
2) More dangerous
3) Temporary, as the stated goal is eliminating natural gas entirely.
4) As to the cost of replacement, you also have to include installation and modifications to the dwelling.
Ofgem wants all gas boilers to be removed from British homes by 2050.
https://www.idealhome.co.uk/news/gas-central-heating-ofgem-242723
Hang on Griff, we won’t be able to buy a new gas boiler from 2035 (?). If your boiler is unfixable after that date, your only options are to do without or spend many thousands on a heat pump. On the costs, even the BBC said it would average £63k to get a UK home up to the required standard of insulation and to install the heat pump.
Hmm, a grant doesn’t make the things any cheaper either. Doesn’t it just offload the cost onto unsuspecting taxpayers? Seems a bit deceptive to me.
We’re doing the same thing here in NZ with EV cars. Govt is giving a ~$9000 discount to people who buy an approved EV. Taxpayers are getting lumped with the cost of them.
I was just pointing out the size of grants available which contradicted Griff’s statement that it would not cost thousands to install a heat pump. For most people, a heat pump is just not going to be affordable or practical.
You are completely right. It’ll end up costing tens of thousands in installation and running costs to replace existing cheap and reliable systems.
Boris, like many politicians, is all about… Boris. And what Boris considers to be true is true.
He’s signed a deal with Australia that threw his climate commitments out of the window, but we in blighty won’t escape his green lunacy quite so easily. Protest against lockdown and the police move in fast and make arrests etc. Sit yourself down on a motorway (and cause a pile-up) and the police nicely ask if there’s anything you need. How very middle class and twee.
These are the values.
“A nation’s capacity to manage and mitigate these [climate] problems is tied up directly with its economic development. Wealthier countries can afford the top-notch infrastructure, structurally sound buildings, flood defences, sea walls and sophisticated early-warning systems that are crucial to keeping life ticking on whatever the weather throws up.
Yet green activists want the precise opposite of all this. They are explicit in their demands to rein in economic growth and development. In rich countries, the ‘Net Zero’ policies being pushed by environmentalists will make it harder for ordinary families to heat and cool their homes and to travel for work and leisure. Analysis by the UK Treasury warns that the costs of these policies will be borne overwhelmingly by the working class.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/10/the-climate-class-war/
What did catch my eye in today’s Times is a story by Lord Deben (aka John Selwyn Gummer), head of the Climate Change Committee; whence most of the mad schemes originate – like tower block cladding.
The article?
Villagers need torches, not streetlights
People starting a new life in the country should be prepared to use a torch, says a government climate adviser who wants rural streetlights phased out.
Lord Deben, chairman of the independent Climate Change Committee, said that rural streetlights were unnecessary and councils must think about all decisions in light of climate change.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/villagers-need-torches-not-streetlights-kc8wcrgvl
I think villagers may not agree with that idea – would you?
In fact you’ll find that not a few villagers will agree with him — for the wrong reasons (wrong at least by his reckoning). As I commented, this is the first thing I have agreed with Gummer in 60 years but not to further his climate obsession. The level of street lighting in the UK is beyond reason. Darkness has been virtually abolished.
Outside towns the number of people “out and about” after 10pm and before 5am is minimal. Apart from the “excessive” (by Gummer’s standards) emission of CO2, the taxpayer is paying for half-a-dozen street lights for eight hours a day for the benefit of half-a-dozen people!
We have had to designate areas like Galloway and the Northumbrian forest “dark sky areas” before people forget what the sky at night looks like.
When I took my grand-daughter for a night trip to Kielder (Northumberland) Forest, she was totally blown away! Even from a village in central Scotland she had never even contemplated what the sky might be like without the “light pollution” we take for granted. That’s the reason to restrict street lighting not dim Deben’s self-serving climate waffle.
I’ll accept an argument on finance or even dark skies, but I don’t accept an argument about a trace gas that is essential to life.
That’s nonsense.
Precisely my point. In this instance Gummer has produced something sensible (or at least arguably so) but inevitably for the wrong reasons!
Security is an issue nonetheless
I raised this matter with a councillor online once, after a rape happened in a reasonably well lit park . I said that I felt far more able to avoid potential trouble in te dark, than under a streetlamp. He said that ‘people feel safer with them’
That is the big issue. Security – particularly for women.
And for the elderly. They also need the lighting to help navigate steps and steep pavements.
I feel safer when I have a means to defend myself.
I have a big problem with light pollution in rural areas. Some people insist on mounting large spotlights on poles in their barn yards, security they claim. Well, IMO, those lights only make it easier for the villains to see better what to steal. The homeowner is usually unable to see beyond the light circle. Car parks in towns should have a little illumination but we don’t need virtual daylight!
George Carlin once suggested taking one of the squarish US states, putting a fence around it, and turning it into a sort of prison where violent criminals were sent to do as they please. Well why not something similar for all the Climate Change fanatics? They like being cold, maybe Antarctica would work. Ship them down there and wait and see how long before they are clamoring to return to the miracle of fossil-fueled civilization.
I have heard a similar suggestion for New Zealand criminals – put them all on one of our numerous deserted islands, and provide a ready supply of weapons and drugs but nothing else. Problem solved. Could we borrow Boris, preferably accompanied by Carrie, to teach them about inclusivity and sharing?
It’s also been tried and resulted in:-
1/ The Stanford Prison Experiment
2/ Book, – William Golding.”Lord of the flies”.
Mostly everthing that people suggest as ‘bright ideas” have been tried before, usually with predictably disastrous consequences.
One of the uninhabited islands off Alaska, perhaps near Dutch Harbor…
Almost achieved, although it is not squarish: in California…
“independent Climate Change Committee”. Surely a contradiction in terms???
There’s nothing independent in the house of troughers
I’d give them a few pitchforks and they can take care of this Lord Deben idiot.
Pitchforks and torches, good visual!
You lost me at “Did Boris Johnson tell the truth…”
‘No trade border in the Irish Sea’ and ‘oven ready deal’
Those were “realisations” Griff.
As every fully-signed-up climatologer should know, individual realisations are meaningless: the truth is the average of a large number of realisations.
For all politicians telling the truth only happens by accident. And even then it is best not to believe them.
When BoJo answers the cost of energy questions, and skips the need for subsidies, who is his target audience? As noted above, politicians are all about themselves, as represented by money and getting re-elected. So what sector of the voting public is he addressing? In the USA the Biden Handlers are addressing minorities and loonies, and with reckless disregard for the truth.
Doesn’t matter how many green eco-babble and technology is available, or at what cost.
In winter, the nights are long, the days are cold, and the wind often doesn’t blow.
Once the lights go out for any extended (or repeat event) more people will realise the folly…..
Hopefully…..
The overwhelmingly important factor in this report is the fact checking. Unlike the general social media and mass media censorship “because we know it ain’t true” “fact checking” this report specifies the particular points disputed, the actual values which it claims are correct, and the sources for those values. While that alone may not prove or disprove anything, it gives the reader something tangible to investigate, should said reader have questions of trust. The usual method just provides a fuzzy feeling in the middle of the head.
Correction:
“It is critical that Britain’s decarbonisation policies are both affordable and technologically feasible” OR EVEN NECESSARY?
Yes, absolutely necessary.
climate change is already impacting the UK in the form of extreme rainfall/floods
It isn’t necessary. You know it.
We all know it. Stop being silly.
Rainfall is unchanged.
Climate change continues to be evident across UK – Met Office
‘As well as increased temperatures, the UK has been on average 6% wetter over the last 30 years (1991-2020) than the preceding 30 years (1961-1990). Six of the ten wettest years for the UK in a series from 1862 have occurred since 1998.’
Yes.
Official truth.
I remember that in my country before 1974… In November 1967, according to official communication, there were no floods around Lisbon and almost no deads…
Meteorology a la carte!
(I know what happened, I was in the field with dozens of socially engaged doctors and catholic youth)
The MO is a joke just like NOAA
When their hottest temps come from a runway at Heathrow you have to laugh
No lie so trite, that the griffster won’t repeat it over and over and over again.
1) 6% is so far below the confidence interval on that data, that only a complete troll would cite it as evidence of anything.
2) Even if the alleged 6% increase is true, it’s nothing more than measuring the difference between the warm phase and the cool phase of the AMO.
If it were 6% drier u would attribute it to catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. This is hot air level nonsense.
The only thing wetter in the last 30 years are your pants Griff!
Griff, how long is your record?
According to griff, rainfall has increased 6% over the last 30 years. Even if it was true, that’s hardly enough to cause “extreme” rainfall/floods.
Beyond that, there is nothing unusual in the amount of rain falling.
Oh F…ck here we go again!!!
Parliamentary discussion with Dr. Constable of the GWPF on the subject.
To say this man is highly intelligent and well informed would be a masterly understatement. I have never seen MP’s so contrite, he even dealt with the witch who trotted out “climate deniers” in a beautifully calm and factual manner.
Around an hour long but every reader of WUWT will both greatly appreciate, and understand what he’s saying.
https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/132b6724-c396-4b61-aad4-bad9dd936d53?mc_cid=be43086da0&mc_eid=5f2cfb8234
He’s completely useless. He’s using facts, being reasonable, and expecting sensible and measurable targets to be evaluated.
What you really need for the green utopia is wishful thinking, virtue signalling, and emotional responses. Sheesh!
Agreed. He was brilliant.
[Quite took my mind off recovering from a broken rib]
Ouch. Get well soon. I take it you broke it laughing at the M25 protesters?
His comment about the lack of cost/benefit analysis struck a chord. Here in NZ, our climate change minister outright told us that he didn’t know the cost, but the cost of going net zero ‘doesn’t matter’. “We can’t afford not to do it” or some such rubbish.
It annoys me that these guys get to make these statements without receiving any sort of pushback.
We have had some report come out since then which claims that it’ll only cost us a few % of GDP. Believe that and you’ll believe anything.
The MP described his constituents of the future as “sitting around a tepid radiator” powered by an expensive heat pump and worrying about the payments for an electric car they didn’t want either.
They might be about to find out what weather dependent power is all about as this may be the winter of their discontent-
Power prices soar after key electricity cable between UK and France catches fire (msn.com)
I’m pretty sure the energy cost to consumers is going up; that’s all that matters regarding cost.
He’s describing the present.
and its not just Carrie who has Boris caught by his short & curlies.
See last night/yesterday what happened when just 25% of just the French Inter-connector blew up.
(I think 50% of its 4GW capacity was/is already offline for some other stupid/silly/fake reason)
BBC Headline:”UK power prices soar after key cable hit by blaze”
I’ll wager that (evil) Emmanuel and (awful) Ang can hardly believe their luck, or the power (all senses/meanings) they now have.
<Vladimir says silent and smiles>
Should we stop them fishing in our waters until they get it up and running again?
I Google “French inter-connector” and got some interesting marital aids.
You do know Google personnalisés ads?
Personalises. Apologies: the French spellchecker kicked in!
This is a link to the costs of Moray East windfarm, the latest offshore wind farm which is currently under construction off Britain. It already looks as if it will run at a huge loss to the operators because the costs of wind farms haven’t fallen at all.
https://www.thegwpf.com/moray-east-costs/
Are you sure it will run at a huge loss to the operators, or will that be a huge cost to the consumers?
At the moment, there will be huge costs to both the operators and consumers because the cfd price is high, but not high enough to cover the costs of the operators. What the operators are banking on in the future is that they will be bailed out by the government at even more cost to consumers.
They are not “operators”, they are taxpayer subsidized speculators.
Germany has spent Euros 150 billion on solar panels. If you relate that number to UN beliefs about Co2 then 150 billion might avert the climate crisis for 1 hour. Therefore you could spend Euros 25 trillion to avert the crisis for one week, 100 trillion to avert it for one month or 1.2 quadrillion to avert the crisis for one year. The problem with solar and wind is that they both consume huge acreages of land. 1.2 quadrillion spent on solar panels would carpet 6 quadrillion acres of land but the planet has only 16 billion acres. 1MW of wind capacity consumes 870 cubic metres of concrete and 460 tons of steel. 1MW of methane/coal consumes 27 cubic metres of concrete and 27 cubic metres of steel. Methane, coal and nuclear work 24/7 365 days of the year solar in the northern hemisphere works for a few hours a day in summer and almost never in winter. Wind is interruptible intermittent unreliable and economical without huge subsidy currently £350 a year for every home in the UK. And if we still had rain storms floods hurricanes tornadoes typhoons and cyclones the green cult would say we are still not doing enough.
Solar in Germany is pure optimism! They are too far north to benefit, it is just wasted money. I’ve seen large PVC installations on roof tops in Dusseldorf where it is rainy/cloudy a lot of the time.
er… no. This will show you that for much of the year Germany gets a huge chunk of electricity from solar.
PV electricity produced in Germany | SMA Solar
Of course in winter it gets a lot from wind…
Meanwhile you continue to ignore the soaring increase in their electric bills and the grid from other countries propping up their unstable grid.
For the middle classes like griff, increased electric bills aren’t that much of a much.
For most it’s a very different matter.
I’m not middle class.
Well we only have your word for it – like everything else
I agree Griff.
By my observations here, you have no class at all.
(sorry, but you make such a great comedy straight man)
Oh? So what are you, ruling class or lower class?
If you looked at the German power import/export map for Germany you would see that is nonsense: only with France do they have a deficit and that’s because they import French nuclear when its cheap/demand in France is low (and at other times export to France).
And as I keep telling you the Germans add non green realted tax to their electricity (which seems daft, but there it is) and use less than other nations, thanks to efficient appliances.
And you have never bloody well lived in Germany have you griff??!!
I have and I work there regularly.
Do you have even the slightest idea of the overheads of a German biz?????
Sometimes you really start to p.ss off hard working people, cos you neither give a f..ck nor know anything about getting up in the morning and putting in 12hrs hard production work in an industrial environment.
I can’t buy German services, (they are way too expensive) I outsource them to eastern Europe, cos the costs are lower.
Get it??
Germans are pricing themselved out of markets.
Well according to the official ‘Gross Electricity Production in Germany 2020’ solar provided 9% of power in 2020 compared to 16.2% from lignite coal plants and 16.1% from gas. Your disliked biomass was not far behind solar at 7.8%.
Germany gets essentially no power in the winter from solar. None. Solar during the rest of the year is variable but averaged a tiny 8.2% in 2019. They do get power from wind – when the wind is blowing. Wind averaged 25.6% of their electricity (2020). When it’s not blowing they get most of their power from coal and lignite (dirty coal). All at the cost of paying 3x more for electricity than countries that rely on coal or natural gas (China and the US) or nuclear (France).
griff, sorry to disturb the quiet peace of your deep rooted faith, but I have to put two simple questions:
“A lot” means how much of the potential? (and in “potential” I include the physical possibilities MINUS the social limitations due to people not allowind the destruction of landscapes, etc.)
And that “a lot” plus the possible expansion to its potential (“potential”, as explained above) means how much of the power needed to satisfy the needs of the population? (including the extension of availability to those that are already in energy poverty, unable to pay for heating in winter).
Just two simple questions, if you mind answering them…
I looked at the article, it claims that on a good day, they can get almost 15% of total electric power from solar. For a couple hours a day.
I know that impresses someone like griff, however it doesn’t even come close to refuting Pamela’s point.
except at bloody night you fool!!!!
“Solar in Germany is pure optimism”
Well, if you call “optimism” what usually is called “nonsense“…
You should see what they just installed in @^#*@~ ESTONIA!
That’s 60N.
I was watching today.
Dead still, no wind……grey horribly overcast..no solar power either.
I went home hoping to make tea and do some grinding and put on the electric heater…thank..@!(#@! for oil shale!
Imagine if we relied on that greenie crap we would freeze, and I wouldn’t even have internet and there would be no mobile data or phones!
Like the old priesthood indeed….
If bad weather happens, we haven’t appeased the gods enough and must do more to remove the evil of C02 from our lives
If good weather happens, we have mightily pleased the gods and so should continue to remove the evil C02 from our lives……
TBH I don’t see any good ways out of this mess at the moment….
I hope that Craig Mackinlay will push back against BoJo’s ‘green’ bluster, few MPs seem willing to do so. All the major parties in the UK Parliament are infatuated with climate change, and are in a race to the bottom to be seen to be the greenest of them all.
That race might end when they hit the wall at the bottom of the hill labelled “Laws of Physics”…….
When the left gets a good fantasy going, they just won’t let go of it.
The tepid radiator point is a very solid one. It is a matter of basic physics that heat pump efficiency declines as the temperature difference increases.
Hot radiators are less efficient.
That said, Sweden is pretty much 100% heat pumps and district heating. And doesn’t seem to be suffering from it.
We lived with a heat pump in central Virginia, not a horribly cold winter place, and it was unpleasant. When the back-up electric strips kicked in, it coast the earth. I would not wish a heat pump on anyone. We installed a soapstone wood stove and never turned on the heat pump again.
Net Zero is a euphemism for Zero Energy.
Even if batteries are getting cheaper and installing wind generators and solar panels is getting cheaper, if the cost of electricity to consumers is rising faster than inflation, then it’s not getting cheaper. It’s getting more expensive; which is easily explained by the added cost of their poor capacity factor and unreliability which requires backup by reliable base load power. So instead of just paying for reliable base load power, consumers are also paying for politicians’ boutique power in addition to the necessary base load power. You can’t have solar and wind yet without reliable power backup and that won’t change for a long time, if ever.
“Did Boris Johnson tell the truth about …”
… anything?
Nope he was trained to lie in a place called Eton.
They have an almost 100% success rate in producing the most convincing liars in the poshest ok-yah accents.
So much talk and so much cost all in an effort to decarbonise a carbon based life form. If CO2 was a problem there may be some merit to it but, as it clearly isn’t, we really do need to reset the agenda.
Human CO2 absolutely is a problem, as it is driving up temperatures and causing a rising incidence of damage from extreme weather.
That’s what the observed and recorded evidence tells us.
Yawnnnn….Zzzzzzz…..
No evidence to back up your assertions which is too much for you to handle.
Zzzzzz…………….
With August 2021 gistemp now out 2021 is well under 2020 temp ytd.
Time for Nut Nut’s exit….
WSJ
Surging Energy Prices Close U.K. Factories, Another Bottleneck in a World Full of ThemU.S. fertilizer company halts production at two British plants, citing high natural-gas costs
Soaring natural-gas prices in Britain have prompted U.S. fertilizer maker CF Industries Holdings Inc. to close two U.K. plants, in a sign that Europe’s energy crunch is affecting industry as the economy struggles with several other disruptions amid the recovery from the pandemic.
Businesses across Britain are complaining about high energy costs, with some steelmakers forced to halt production for periods during the day as the price of electricity rises almost seven times higher than at the same point last year. Power markets have also jumped in France, the Netherlands and Germany, ahead of anticipated higher demand in the winter.
On Wednesday, the price for Europe’s regional gas benchmark, the TTF month-ahead contract, closed at a record high of $24.2 per metric million British thermal units, according to S&P Global Platts.
A colder-than-average winter in Europe or Asia could send power prices spiking even higher and potentially prompt electricity blackouts in Europe, Goldman Sachs said in a research note this week.
And this alone should be the message. Things are looking bad.
Is anyone in the UK or Europe going to see lower energy bills anytime soon? In the end, the laws of economics are as inviolable as those of physics or thermodynamics.
Renewable energy doesn’t push up natural gas costs, does it?
“Did the PM tell the truth about Net Zero”? The short answer is NO.
Does the PM know the truth about Net Zero? Probably not, otherwise he wouldn’t have proposed it.