Often I have referred to the situation that the UK, Germany, California and others have set themselves up for as “hitting the green energy wall.” But now that the UK has actually gotten there and has begun to deal with the consequences, I’m not sure that “hitting the wall” is the best analogy. A better analogy might be “driving into the green energy cul-de-sac.” After all, when you hit a wall you can probably just pick yourself up and turn around and be on your way. In the cul-de-sac you are trapped with no evident way of getting out. You might be in there for a long time.
This is where the UK finds itself today. For well more than a decade, they have been aggressively and intentionally pursuing the green energy fantasy. The Net Zero emissions target was made mandatory by legislation in 2019. They have built hundreds of wind turbines and solar panels, while at the same time closing almost all of their coal mines and coal power plants. That has left them largely dependent on natural gas to back up the intermittent renewables. They have plenty of natural gas right under their feet in a large shale formation, but for years they dithered about allowing fracking to produce the gas, and then in 2019 they imposed a blanket moratorium on fracking. With production from their North Sea gas fields declining, they must buy gas on the European market. And although they don’t buy much gas directly from Russia, the European market has been driven to great heights by the cutoff of Russian supplies. Result: average annual residential energy bills in the UK, which were around £1000 as recently as earlier this year, went up to about £3000 this month, and have been projected to go as high as £5000 by this coming April absent some sort of government intervention.
And only now has it become apparent that there is no good exit strategy. That would be true even if everyone in the UK were on board with exiting from the green energy delusion, but of course that is not the case either. For years they have been prohibiting the things they have needed to do to maintain a low-cost energy system, and now they are facing years if not a decade or more to get back to where they were.
Consider some possibilities:
- Perhaps the most obvious first step to get back to energy sanity would be to lift the ban on domestic fracking. Prime-Minister-for-a-month Liz Truss did just that during her brief term in office. Then new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took office on October 25, and on October 26 — the very next day — he announced that he would reinstate the fracking ban. From Reuters, October 26:Fracking will be banned in England under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, reversing a decision made by his predecessor Liz Truss, as the new British leader returned to a 2019 Conservative Party manifesto pledge.. . . . In parliament, Sunak was asked about fracking, and said he stood by a 2019 manifesto commitment on the issue. In the best of circumstances, it would take several years after fracking is allowed before full-scale production can be up and running to alleviate the energy crisis. But with a regulatory environment that reverses by 180 degrees every few weeks, who exactly is going to put up millions of pounds to start big fracking projects? Even if they reversed course again and opened up fracking tomorrow, it would at a minimum be multiple years before large scale new production would come on line.
- How about importing more natural gas from the U.S., where prices are much lower due to the fracking revolution that has enabled vastly increased production over the past decade? That is much easier said than done. There are multiple bottlenecks in the system, each of which could take multiple years to resolve. The biggest immediate bottleneck is that all U.S. facilities for cooling and compressing natural gas into LNG for export are already operating at capacity. (From Reuters, March 25, 2022: “All seven U.S. LNG export plants, however, are currently operating at capacity and liquefying about 12.7 bcfd of gas. So, no matter how high global prices rise, the U.S. cannot produce anymore LNG – at the moment.”). Other bottlenecks include shortage of LNG tankers to transport the fuel, insufficient pipeline capacity from the Permian basin gas fields to the export facilities on the Gulf coast, and insufficient LNG import capacity on the European side. The existence of all of these bottlenecks preventing U.S. exports to Europe is precisely the reason that natural gas prices are so much higher in Europe than the U.S. We’re talking years to alleviate all of these bottlenecks.
- What about the coal option? As recently as 2012, the UK got close to 20% of its energy (not just electricity) from coal; but by 2020, as part of the forced green energy transition, coal produced only about 2% of the UK’s electricity (and almost none of its energy for other purposes). The recent plan was to close the last coal plants by 2024, although in the current crisis the talk is that the last plants will be kept open for a little while longer. (From Reuters, May 30, 2022: “Some of the British coal-fired power plants slated for closure this year might need to stay open to ensure electricity supply this winter, the government said on Monday.” ). But there is no real possibility of going back and reopening the many plants that got closed in the last decade. In many cases they were blown up. Here is a picture of the Longannet plant in Fife, Scotland, getting blown to smithereens just last year in 2021:
Here’s the comment of the CEO of Scottish Power, Keith Anderson, quoted in the Express: “In 2016 we made the decision to close Longannet after over 40 years of generation. This step marked our commitment, and that of our parent company Iberdrola, to decarbonise the economy. This commitment has been strengthened time and again over the past five years – two years after Longannet’s closure we closed our remaining coal plants and sold our gas business, making us the first integrated energy company in the UK to generate 100% green electricity.” Such virtue Keith! The Express (February 2021) adds: “Longannet, which closed in 2016, was Scotland’s largest coal-fired power station and had been generating power since 1970. The station was capable of producing enough electricity to power two million homes each year.”
- Nuclear? Given the regulatory morass and activist opposition, we’ll probably all be long dead before it can make a significant contribution.. The UK supposedly has two nuclear plants in the works, Hinckley Point C and Sizewell C. The Hinckley Point plant started construction in 2016, and is currently supposed to be finished in 2027, after lengthy delays and massive cost overruns. Sizewell C just got its green light from the UK government in July 2022, so don’t expect that one to produce any electricity before some time in the mid-2030s. According to the AP at that link, activists continue to seek to block Sizewell through litigation.
- Yet more wind and solar? Don’t be ridiculous. As discussed many times here, it doesn’t matter how much in the way of wind and solar facilities you build, you will still have long periods of blackout absent full backup from some dispatchable source. In the UK, all the dispatchable sources are at the minimum many years away, if not completely blocked.
Here’s one more idea: hand out hundreds of billions of pounds of subsidies to utilities to bring the costs to households down below the £5000 annually otherwise projected. This will assure that the private sector has no incentive at all to work to alleviate the crisis, and that the crisis persists essentially forever, as public debt explodes. Of course, this is the “solution” they are actually putting into place.
So they are in a cul-de-sac. And on top of everything else they can’t even muster a solid political majority for trying to get out. A substantial bloc of what they call the “Green Tories” continues to advocate for doubling down on the green fantasies. From the Evening Standard, October 29:
Green Tory MP Nadine Dorries condemns Rishi Sunak for not attending COP27 summit. . . . Ms Dorries said on Twitter it was wrong for Mr Sunak not to attend because global warming was one of the “biggest crises facing our planet”. . . . “Global warming is the biggest crisis facing our planet and net zero creates many 1,000s of jobs, which is good for the economy. COP in Glasgow was most successful ever … but don’t expect media to report that.”
For the full article click here.
Read the following quotes from https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/
“The Rules of the Lebensraum game with no CO2 Climate Crisis.
SUMMARY
1.The earth has now reached a population level which has generated a battle for Lebensraum, i.e. energy and food resources, in Ukraine. The associated covid pandemic, and global poverty and income disparity increases, threaten the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. During the last major influenza epidemic in 1919 world population was 1.9 billion. It is now 7.8 billion+/ – an approximate four fold increase.
The IPCC and UNFCCC post modern science establishment’s “consensus” is that a modelled future increase in CO2 levels is the main threat to human civilization. This is an egregious error of scientific judgement. A Millennial Solar ” Activity” Peak at 1991 correlates with the Millennial Temperature Peak at 2003/4 with a 12/13 year delay because of the thermal inertia of the oceans. Earth has now entered a general cooling trend which will last for the next 700+/- years.
Because of the areal distribution and variability in the energy density of energy resources and the varying per capita use of energy in different countries, international power relationships have been transformed. The global free trade system and global supply chains have been disrupted.
Additionally, the worlds richest and most easily accessible key mineral deposits were mined first and the lower quality resources which remain in the 21st century are distributed without regard to national boundaries and demand. As population grows inflation inevitably skyrockets. War between states and violent conflicts between tribes and religious groups within states are multiplying.
2 The Millennial Temperature Cycle Peak.
Latest Data (1) https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
Global Temp Data 2003/12 Anomaly 0.26 : 2022/9 Anomaly 0.24 Net cooling for 19 years
Tropics Temp Data 2004/01 Anomaly 0.22 : 2022/9 Anomaly 0.03 Net cooling for 19 years.
USA 48 Temp Data 2004/03 Anomaly 1.32 : 2022/9 Anomaly 0.59 Net cooling for 19 years.
There is obviously NO CO2 Caused Climate Crisis…………………………………..
see Figs 1,2,3 in link…………………………
5. CO2 -Temperature and Climate.
The whole COP Net Zero meme is founded on the flawed assumptions and algorithms which produced the IPCC- UNFCCC model forecasts of coming dangerous temperature increases.
The “consensus” IPCC models make the fundamental error of ignoring the long- term decline in solar activity and temperature following the Millennial Solar Activity Turning Point and activity peak which was reached in 1990/91 as shown in Figure 1
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is .058% by weight. That is one 1,720th of the whole. It is inconceivable thermodynamically that such a tiny tail could wag so big a dog. (13)
Stallinga 2020 (14) concludes: ” The atmosphere is close to thermodynamic equilibrium and based on that we……… find that the alleged greenhouse effect cannot explain the empirical data—orders of magnitude are missing. ……Henry’s Law—outgassing of oceans—easily can explain all observed phenomena.” CO2 levels follow temperature changes. CO2 is the dependent variable and there is no calculable consistent relationship between the two. The uncertainties and wide range of out-comes of model calculations of climate radiative forcing (RF) arise from the improbable basic assumption that anthropogenic CO2 is the major controller of global temperatures.
Miskolczi 2014 (15) in “The greenhouse effect and the Infrared Radiative Structure of the Earth’s Atmosphere “says “The stability and natural fluctuations of the global average surface temperature of the heterogeneous system are ultimately determined by the phase changes of water.”
Also See AleksandrZhitomirskiy2022 Absorption of heat and the greenhouse gas effect. https://independent.academia.edu/AleksandrZhitomirskiy (16) which says:
“The molar heat capacities of the main greenhouse and non-greenhouse gases are of the same order of magnitude. Given the low concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, their contribution to temperature change is below the measurement error. It seems that the role of various gases in the absorption of heat by the atmosphere is determined not by the ability of the gas to absorb infrared radiation, but by its heat capacity and concentration. ”
Zaichun Zhul et al 2016 (17) in Greening of the Earth and its drivers report “a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated Leaf Area Index (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area from 1982 – 2009. ………. C02 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend.”
Policies which limit CO2 emissions or even worse sequester CO2 in a quixotic attempt to greenwash or mitigate these natural cycles would decrease agricultural food production and are antithetical to the goals of feeding the increasing population and bringing people out of poverty.”
Both Germany and the UK are trapped. They needed natgas to back up their overbuilt renewables. NORD1 and 2 are gone, and the US is maxed out on LNG for a few years until more capacity can be built. So it is likely their grids will go dark. That is definitely NOT a good thing in the dead of winter.
The interesting thing will be what it does—if anything—to change their insane energy policies.
Not quite true. The UK is capable of importing all the gas it needs, the quesion is from where?
Currently IIRC its Kuwait, Norway and the USA mostly. Some comes from Belgium and I think Holland, but that isn’t where its drilled.
This is a very penetrating analysis of the UK situation, of where the green mania and the Net Zero manias have led. Its spot on. And unfortunately its right in its conclusions, this really is a cul-de-sac, and there is no visible way out.
One hopes that government and civil service are now waking up to it. The two places that have not and show no signs of doing so are the Guardian and BBC, both of whom seem lost in a dream world where intermittency doesn’t matter and global warming is the greatest threat to the planet since…. and the UK moving to Zero Carbon will somehow fix it, or make a material difference to it.
Having politicians and bankers setting energy policies is a very dangerous trend.
Blowing up closed coal-fired power plants was purposeful as they want to make sure they could NOT be reopened. This is called burning your bridges.
It’s horribly destructive as it is the destruction of wealth right up front. The steam electricity generation part of such a power plant could be hooked up to a modern nuclear reactor and there would also be not change in land footprint as the nuclear reactor would take up my less area.
This is identical to the Obama-era buy back of used cars in the US and then putting diamond dust in the engines to make sure that parts, let alone the car, could never be used again. This not only hurts the used part industry, aimed to decrease our ability to keep our existing cars going, but also was more destruction of wealth.
At the same time the Detroit government decided in the Obama era that empty houses were bad, so they tore them down, which was more wealth destruction and made sure no one could come back and buy the house as the economy improved. This is all about taking apart our culture, society, and economy. Nothing more, nothing less.
Condense it all down and it’s what has overtaken almost everywhere/everything and everybody in the UK and is a culture of ‘Just saying no‘
It affects all aspects of UK life, especially UK people themselves.
The only folks in this country now who are open, affable & friendly, helpful, useful even, are the immigrants. Especially the Poles
Nobody else can be bothered.
Are they frightened of something? Overly cautious. Fearful of doing something criminal, or new, or adventurous or just ‘different’ but wherever you go, ask an English person for almost anything and you will get a look of outright indifference and the one word ‘no’
If you’re lucky. Plenty times you’re simply ignored or left in a queue until you simply get pissed-off and walk.
Similarly, here in the US, the CEO of Ever
StupidSource is now urging Biden to use the Federal Power Act to ensure adequate electricity for the region in the event of an extended cold snap, whining that investments in “renewables” like solar and offshore wind have been made, but power from them are still some years off. The Stupid, it burns. These are the folks in charge. Let’s jump off a cliff and hope we sprout wings. Wheeeeeee!!!!!If enough people jump off the cliffs eventually we will surely evolve wings 🙂
The craziest thing about this is the continued acceptance of the term “green” energy for what is actually ANTI green energy or FAKE green energy.
Fossil fuel emissions of CO2 are massively greening up the planet and causing a booming biosphere. Nobody has repealed the law of photosynthesis.
It should be enough to just know that we are taking that away by eliminating fossil fuels which means LESS planet greening.
But the worse part is replacing it with a source like wind…………the energy source from environmental hell………..and calling THAT the green energy!
Wind turbines and fake green energy is what’s wrecking the planet.
https://www.masterresource.org/droz-john-awed/25-industrial-wind-energy-deceptions/
Death by Greening:
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/69258/
Photosynthesis using the building block for life and beneficial gas, CO2. All animals eat plants or something that ate plants.
Wind turbines KILL birds and bats. Fossil fuels increase food for them.
The planet was close to CO2 starvation before humans rescued life with beneficial CO2, during this current SCIENTIFIC climate optimum.
The fake climate crisis, is entirely manufactured based on science DISinformation.
We were this warm 1,000 years ago during the Medieval WARM period, the last climate optimum. During the Holocene climate OPTIMUM just over 5,000 years ago, it was 2 deg. C warmer than this in the higher latitudes(that always warm the most) with LESS Arctic ice that we have today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum
With today’s fake climate crisis, ALL extreme weather events caused by natural variability(most that have occurred numerous times in the past) by the new, political/non scientific definition of climate change……..were caused by the fake climate crisis as a result of the 1 deg. C of beneficial warming(that is saving lives) the past century.
The goal is clear: restoring the Victorian era. The average citizen will have little-to-no access to electricity or private transportation.
Only wealthy and connected people like Sunak will live in modern comfort. The woke police, of course, will be granted privilege as long as they toe the party line.
Charles will perfect his royal wave, and, damnit, the plebes will be grateful for their 30 minutes of electricity per day and the local warming stations.
The goal is clear: restoring the Mediaeval era. The average thrall/serf/vassal will have little-to-no access to anything.
Why? Because of the way society works. In the days when agriculture was wealth, agricultural labourers had value. But the top man was the warrior who could keep them safe from other warriors.
Today the top man is in fact a money lender. He owns everything – on paper. The thrall/serf/vassals are simply superfluous. All they do is consume wealth. Especially energy. They no longer have any part to play in creating it. Nor do they own or control capital.
If all the post industrial towns of the North of england were nuked tomorrow, it would be a huge gain. We have far too many people who don’t do anything, and more importantly, have no power.
We could have built a golden age of production all done by robots, powered by nuclear power, in which everyone had a fantastic education, lived a comfortable luxuriuous life and no one had to work.
But that would mean that certain other sections of society would have become superfluous. And they are very scared of that. They like their power, privilege and influence.
The CoP in Glasgow was the most successful ever????
Until the next one, of course.
Yep prostitutes and restaurants did good trade.
This is all so stupid. Number one no country that outlaws fracking should be allowed to buy or burn fracked gas. Number two the energy mess Britain finds itself in is purely the result of dreadful government actions. We know which government officials are responsible for this mess. They all need to be personally held responsible. As soon as you start doing that all of the so called roadblocks will magically disappear.
“Building green creates jobs” – but high costs of energy drive industries overseas, destroying jobs.
Smashing windows builds jobs – in glazing companies.
Job creation is the biggest socialist myth there is.
We, the people, dont want no stinking JOBS, we want MONEY, WEALTH COMFORT and PLEASURE.
And washilst we might get that with nuclear power, and robots, we never will with windmills and smart meters
I have to laugh at the claim that the Glasgow COP-26 last year was the most successful ever. Didn’t the IEA reveal that coal consumption worldwide has increased this year to 8 billion tons, the highest since 2013? And doesn’t India plan to double its use of the fuel by 2040? And aren’t China’s emissions greater than those of the entire developed world combined? So if this is what is considered a successful COP conference result, I’d hate to see what a failure would look like
NutZero will never be achieved in the developed countries because China does not have enough coal to manufacture all the stuff needed.
:
Current internal coal reserves are down to 34 years consumption. They would need to massively accelerate coal consumption to make a fraction of the stuff needed to start the journey to NutZero in the developed countries.
They simply cannot replenish reserves fast enough to meet the rising demand for stuff.
Explainations about party’s 2019 manifesto as a reason to ban fracking are retarded. 2019 was a year of abundance of natural gas, but the situation has changed – now we have deficits. As such a new plan is necessary, based on current situation, not something based on radically different past state. A new prime minister should be expected to have a new plan, based on current state and predicted future state of the world, and not rely on ancient history (2019), that is radically different from present.
That may be so , but its difficult for a party to abandon a clear promise I wouldnt call 2019 an abundance as even then they needed LNG tankers were coming from Russia
But there is no real possibility of going back and reopening the many plants that got closed in the last decade.
But there is a problem here. We didn’t put them into mothball status, we put explosives under them in yet another virtue signal of ‘commitment’ to ‘the cause’.
Oh dear …
We are going top vote Reform UK. Eventually we will kick this Marxist crap out of Britain!
The problem is that even Reform would not be able to govern.
The UKs ability to borrow would be forced to junk status, the pund would be crashed deliberately, until a Rishi Sunak equivalent zombie was appointed to do what the money lenders said.
The world is in debt, and whoever owns that debt, unless law and order breaks down, controls the world.
And climate change, and banning all new fossil and nuclear power, is what they want, to protect the value of their investments.
Thank you Francis for all your very good work.
My co-authors and I published almost every important fact on the Climate scam in 2002. I even warned Baroness Verma (British Undersecretary for Energy and Climate Change) in 2013, predicting the exact scenario that is unfolding now – see:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/09/17/open-thread-35/#comment-3603080
It was obvious even in 2002 that the Climate-and-Green-Energy campaign was a scam and the left’s technological “solutions” would lead to a catastrophic energy shortfall. The only difficult part was our correct prediction of natural solar-driven global cooling by ~2020, which started either in Feb2016 or Feb 2020 – I prefer the latter.
I fear the cold polar vortex will hit Western Europe hard this year – hope to be wrong.
IF the great cull of Europe’s elderly and poor happens this Winter as I predicted, there is criminal culpability on the part of the climate scammers, and prosecutions and imprisonment should result.
I’ve been saying for ~20 years that the Climate Scam has been promoted by “scoundrels and imbeciles” – the scoundrels knew they were lying; the imbeciles believed them.
I just updated my paper at CorrectPredictions.ca – it is now over a year old, and records how we accurately predicted the catastrophic outcomes of both the Climate and Covid scams – the latter I nailed 30+ months ago on 21Mar2020. In both cases I was ignored and the killing machine has been working overtime and there is much more carnage to come.
Tough, suck it up, the vast majority of MPs from all parties support this garbage and the public have voted for it.
Time to test “net zero” to destruction – destruction of a modern, industrial, society that is.
I’d love to know what Nadine Dorries is referring to when she describes COP26 as the “most successful ever”! The energy crisis has exploded since then.