From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
How may years has it taken to work this out?
From The Telegraph:
https://digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/data/1642/reader/reader.html
The role of the NAO is:
To examine and report on the value for money of how public money has been spent.
Surely then they should be advising the government to immediately cancel these £7500 subsidies, as they are having no overall effect, in terms of hitting the targets. Nor can they can in any way be justified as a proper use of taxpayers’ money.
And instead of wittering on about raising public awareness, why don’t they face up to the reality that the public have no interest at all in heat pumps.
It’s a very bad joke. As I stated before
[Heat Pump] Installations must speed up 11-fold
…the National Audit Office (NAO) has found that heat pump installations would need to accelerate 11-fold if the government is to reach its target for 600,000 heat pumps installed in homes every year by 2028.””
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/18/uk-heat-pump-rollout-criticised-as-too-slow-by-public-spending-watchdog
If you want someone to blame, I would suggest you blame Hermann Goering. Goering did more than any Englishman to modernise the [postwar] building infrastructure of England (mostly). But even the Reichsmarschall couldn’t flatten all of our Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian etc housing stock. It is old (and extremely serviceable, even now) and would – for net zero – in all honesty be far cheaper to knock down and start again. But we can’t. We have a really dire homelessness problem as things stand.
I have an Edwardian house (1906). You would have to literally strip it down to its brick shell and start again – and don’t tell me that is affordable by me or any other body; it isn’t.
Before too long even the NAO is going to hit the brick wall of reality. The sooner the better.
As I said on the open thread there is something wrong with the NAOs statement that. installations need to increase 11 fold to meet the government’s target. I understand that there were 30,000 installations in 2023 ( the report here says 18,900 since May 2022)
The target is 600,000 a year from 2028. If 30,000 were installed in 2023 the installation rate needs to rise 20 fold.
The NAO I would say are the government’s version of the big accounting firms, such as Ernst & Young, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Arthur Andersen or whatever they call themselves these days.
Anything with a SW1A 1AA tag on it cannot be believed.
No one promised that government accountants can do sums, dividends and remainders.
Yip. NE Scotland here in a solid wall granite building built c.1850. Making this “Net Zero Proof” would cost a lot more than I could possibly afford.
Damn sight cheaper to build some nuclear power stations and make electricity free.
“Electricity too cheap to meter” – Tony Benn.
The old ones are the best!
Come on, that lie was buried so deep already, just let it rot in peace.
“”Too cheap to meter: could low-cost renewables create an abundance of energy?
A trend towards cheaper, cleaner power could pave the way for creative uses of excess energy.””
https://www.nesta.org.uk/feature/future-signals-2023/too-cheap-to-meter-could-low-cost-renewables-create-an-abundance-of-energy/?twclid=2-5xg6rgq8pdhq4rnvv6kdwkmp5
This lie was buried before it was even uttered!
It’s not a lie, it’s a mis-understanding.
He didn’t say that nuclear powered electricity would be free, he was saying that it would be a flat monthly fee for everyone.
Wow, but that would have put so many meter readers, installers, manufacturers etc. out of jobs, just imagine how much money and resources would have been saved over the last 50 years. AND how much income taxes the federal government would lose.
THEN the leftists would not be in the position to control the lives of every person through the control of the essential electricity via SMART METERS. How would MUN and his ilk be then able to make EVERYONE conform to the lifestyle the leftist/statist powers that be chose for the peons?
Just think, each home would pay a fee based on the size of the home. $ per square foot. You could then give credits for improved efficiency (insulation/windows etc.) if applied for, and any home with AC or electric heat would need to pay a little more than one without AC or with gas heat.
Once the rate is established, the price is set. No need for all the regulatory agencies every year spending billions employing ever more regulators.
And with MANY reactors built in the 70s now licensed into the 2050s. IF they had just kept building Nukes, the coal plants would have been gone through being uneconomical vs nukes long ago, i.e. at the end of their normal useful life.
But, again, that would have meant that there would be NO CO2 bs for electrical generation because MOST of the electricity would be generated by a ZERO C power source, Nukes.
OK, MUN, respond to this.
When I was a child, we had gas and electric coin box meters. The box, had two slots, one for shillings, and the other for pennies. Every month the meter man would come round, read the meter and empty the coin box. He’d then empty the contents onto a table, and sort them into piles, of 12 pence, and multiple shillings.
He’d calculate what we’d used and how much was owed. He’d put what was owed into his cash bag, and the rest was handed back. 😊
That doesn’t mean the electricity would have been free. Rather, like phone service, it would have been a flat fee per month.
Nuke, baby, nuke!
So, how is hinkley point c doing?
Ask the French…
EDF faces shouldering more of soaring bill for Hinkley Point
https://www.ft.com/content/ae5fb399-08ce-4045-bb70-45a6531ac5f2
NB
EDF is in big trouble at home…
Hinkley Point C is doing as badly as the greens can force it to.
When it’s always someone else’s fault…
Even China can’t reach their nuclear goals, and they overachive their renewable ones. Guess they are greens now.
The latest figures for primary energy consumption in China (Energy Institute 2022) show renewables at 8.3%. Not very green at all.
Still far more than nuclear will ever get.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sub-energy-fossil-renewables-nuclear?country=~CHN
Do you get paid for posting lies?
When reality is a lie to you..but no, I’m just having fun with renewables and its naysayers for the last 25 years. Never seen a site that active, though. 😀
Mylittlepony – why do idiots like you only post the gross figures of wind farms, EV’s and the like going into service and never the net figures, accounting for wind farms etc going out of service? Have you accounted for the 14% of UK wind turbines alone going out of service? Or the French and 2 Netherland wind farms that have been shut down over environmental concerns? Or the 500% increase in EV’s being written off?
No? Why is that, do you think? Perhaps because it would turn every increase in that pretty little chart of yours into a net decrease instead?
When you account for the actual net figures renewables are decreasing and failing badly.
Show me, claims are cheap.
According to Wind Europe 38GW of Europe’s onshore wind capacity will reach the end of it’s normal life by 2025. (Press release March 25th 2022)
Every claim you make is cheap propaganda.
And you think ruinables are cheap?
You show me the net figures, not an incomplete picture. You have only given half of the data – I am not making claims, this is what happens in the real world, mylittlepony. We know that all of those columns you show also should have data for them going out of service and yet you have utterly failed to show these figures which skews the entire picture. If I showed you a population chart with only the birth rates on it, it’d be utterly meaningless, wouldn’t it? The same goes for the chart you’ve shown – without the data for those going out of service, it’s utterly meaningless – we have no way of knowing what, if any, of those are actually being used in service or how many are abandoned in a Chinese field (or an American field for many wind turbines).
Because green’s believe that whatever the party is pushing is the definition of reality.
Global energy use..
Use a magnifying glass to see wind and solar
Why do you ignore EDFs business problems and the French nuclear fleet?
Those interconnectors won’t be enough
It is helpful to be a dictatorship that has the power to jail anyone who opposes the government. No wonder the greens admire China.
The Chinese most likely think catastrophic climate change is more or less utter nonsense. But they seem to be more interested in providing enough energy to a population of 1.3B people to achieve and maintain a reasonable standard of living than in arguing about energy ideology. Being a pragmatic lot, they’ll apparently take energy wherever they can find it — domestic or imported hydrocarbons, hydro, nuclear, renewable. Whatever. If it works and is affordable, they’ll use it. That seems to me not all that dumb an approach for a developing country.
Personally, I can’t see that a bit more pragmatism and concern for the welfare of their populations would hurt the rest of the world — developed as well as developing — all that much.
True
China’s energy consumption..
The bulk is COAL and OIL
Maybe China will get to produce the first region, city, town or village that was ever able to provide 24x7x52 uninterrupted electricity to their residents by relying solely on solar, wind and/or batteries?
I would have asked MyUsername this question, but I wasn’t expecting an informative answer.
Don’t forget that all the “renewable” installations are MAKE WORK projects. Yes, they will get a little back in variable unreliable electricity, but they will employ LOTS of mostly low skilled labor.
Employing the masses helps maintain stability, even in a dictatorial regime.
So the lawsuits that have delayed the project from the beginning have nothing to do with the greens who have vowed to do whatever it takes to keep the plant from opening?
China’s electricity is mostly COAL.
Ask the leftists who are using legal maneuverings to keep it from being built.
Doesn’t matter. The point is, even if you think nuclear is not a viable solution, that does not make wind and solar a viable solution. If you think nuclear is no good, that leaves you with one choice at the moment, coal and gas.
You just have to look at the numbers to see this. Wind goes up and down from 0.5GW to 21GW+, unpredictably and not in sync with demand. This is why the UK government recently embarked on a program of gas generation. It was that or turn out the lights.
People describe the UK gas installations at present as gas backing up wind and solar. That is quite wrong. Look at the numbers, and what is really going on is gas sometimes supplemented (and sometimes interfered with) by wind and solar.
I have said before, there is no way the UK is going to convert its electricity generation to wind and solar and at the same time convert its transport to electricity. If it wants to do the second it will have to abandon the first and build out even more gas.
Read the Royal Society report. Its couched as being about storage needs, but in fact the desperateness of its proposed solution to the storage problem is a comprehensive refutation of the idea that the great wind and solar conversion is possible.
We are going to find out together. Ed Miliband. Labour, will be energy secretary in November. He is then proposing to fine boiler suppliers 3,000 sterling for each gas boiler they supply over quota. And he also plans total decarbonization of electricity generation by 2030. And there are the same crazy plans for fining car manufacturers if they sell too many ICE cars.
Anyone living in the UK would do well to do a few things, in the next few months:
There is also one thing you should avoid doing: do not ask why the country is so set on moving to Net Zero. Because its an example of OCD by an entire political class, there is no reason, and the first people they will turn on when disaster hits will be those who questioned it.
Gotta be honest, the best I’ve seen from wind, on the strongest and favourable conditions, was c 14GW. And on those days, demand was low, so they achieved about 40%.
Apparently, total installed capacity for wind is around 27GW. So under ideal conditions, it looks as though 50% output is their best. Most of the time, they’re delivering considerably less than 10%.
As for Milliband, he makes me want to puke. I still can’t get it out of my mind, him fawning over Thunberg, when she was at the ‘how dare you’ COP. What a sycophant!
It does sometimes reach 21GW, from, I think, 28GW faceplate. Take a look here:
http://www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind
You can also download csv files from
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
Instant readings here:
Live generation data from the Great Britain electricity grid – Energy Numbers
But what is even more striking, and you can see them from these links, is the lows. No-one has a clue how to keep the lights on during the lows without lots and lots of gas.
I use the Templar site, like the look 😊
That 21GW, must have been a special event 👍
I notice the last site, gives a bit extra to wind than the gridwatch sites.
And like you say, the lows, that wind sinks to, makes you wonder what the CCC have been feeding to the government.
“Surely then they should be . . . .”
Yes, don’t call them Shirley.
“. . . wittering . . . .”
Oh boy! A new word for me! Did you mean “witting?” Apparently not. I’m not an Oxford Dictionary affectionate.
I do like having the edit feature back! I guess “wittering” is a real word. Dictionary.com didn’t have a clue.
Unwittingly…
Wittering = talking a lot about things that you think are silly and boring.
A Scottish equivalent would be “havering” as heard in the song “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers
At least I use a dictionary–not the right one apparently. One of my Navy bosses wanted a report twice a week. He said “biweekly.” I mistakenly told him that “biweekly” means once every two weeks. What he wanted was “semi-weekly.” As he came up through the ranks and disliked college graduates, he made a comment to that effect.
Well, college didn’t teach me that. I looked it up in a dictionary and remembered the finding. The basic thing college taught me was to find it out for yourself–in other words a dictionary isn’t just a book on a shelf.
😎
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/wittering
It seems to be an old English holdover.
Now a shorter version is “twittering ! 😉
Oi! Gunga Din ‘an old English holdover’. Do you mind, I used that word a lot in my youth, and I don’t feel that old 😄
Do I mind?
I trow not.
It’s OK we’ll have cheap US electricity in the UK any day now (along with that from North Africa)
UK eyes US electricity with transatlantic power cableBritain is reportedly considering importing electricity from the US through a proposed transatlantic power cable
Energylivenews
Oh brother. Let them take it from New York, which has gone full Eco-Nazi under herr Hochul.
Frau Hochul, please! Alternatively, you could use Comrade Hochul as a preferable gender neutral title.
Oh yes, Ben, good one, “the stupid it burns.”
Did they not realize the strategy is to use any excess renewable generation to make hydrogen and store it in the U.S. when the renewables inevitably fail to deliver? Or would we want to squander a significant portion of the power in losses in a 3,000+ mile trip across the pond?
I seem to recall them having to do regular repairs on the trans-Atlantic phone cables. There’s a reason why they jumped on satellites as soon as they were available.
Satellites, weren’t that great as telephone relays. They had limited bandwidth, and latency, was problematical. One of the tricks they used, to maximize the use of a channel, was to exploit the half duplex nature of a conversation.
When one person had stopped talking. They’d steal that channel and give it to another call. When the person started to talk again, they’d grab an unused channel from another call. You could tell when it happened, because the first part of the first would be clipped.
Now we have undersea fibre optics, which overcome all of the old phone cable, and satellite limitations.
I had to click that link as that headline sounds exactly like something you’d find at the Babylon Bee! But no, apparently they are serious….SMH!
Like that fabled power cable from Australia to Singapore which was going nowhere until it was ditched. That was 2700mls long. Distance UK to US about 4300mls – no chance!
Story Tip
Habeck wants to shut down gas networks: what that means for consumers
After the miserable debates about the heating law, Robert Habeck is concerned with the next step in climate-neutral heat supply. The overarching goal is to ensure that Germany has a completely climate- neutral heat supply by 2045.
“The overarching goal is to ensure that Germany has a completely climate- neutral heat supply by 2045.”
These damn fools keep doubling down on stupid. That’s what damn fools do. Germans should stop electing damn fools to office.
Yeah, I know, “we” elected Biden, but we are trying to fix that now by voting for the right people. You should try to fix your situation, too.
Otherwise, the damn fools are going to lead you right off the cliff.
No idea why there are always people believing voting Green is a good idea, but they still exist.
Because this time it’ll work. No, this time. All right, this time it definitely will.
It is actually because they really have NO IDEA how much GREEN is costing them.
That is why, in his first day in office, TRUMP! must issue an executive order requiring every power bill, auto sticker and gas pump provide a list of EACH cost associated to federal, state AND local “renewable”, CAFE and renewable mandate.
When the “centrists” start to see how much the leftists fantasies are costing, the midterm elections should be a “bloodb@th”, but NOT for the ICE auto industry employees.
The problem is not that the officials are wrong, it’s that their dim witted constituents refuse to embrace the obvious solutions and get on board. It’s time to ramp up the ‘nudges’ and start administering some negative encouragement via heat carbon taxes and a few trips to the Gulag.
Sadiq Khan’s tax increase for Londoners this year… 8.6%
On top of everything else
Biden wants to increase taxes on the United States by over $5 trillion dollars.
Biden and his fellow Democrats are insane.
They’re all bonkers
Most of his Democrats truly believe that they can raise an extra $5trillion in taxes by just raising taxes on the rich.
Don’t forget to declare the pennies on your eyes.
When’s that election? Is he trying everything to make himself unelectable or is he just completely unaware?
He lives in a bubble…
A report released by The Taxpayers’ Alliance reveals that the number of staff at City Hall, the Met and TfL paid over £100,000 has nearly doubled since 2019 to this financial year (2022-2023) from 655 to 1,146. The bill is footed by Londoners’ hard earned coin…
https://order-order.com/2024/03/18/fury-over-khans-city-hall-gravy-train/
Perhaps he knows that the fix is in, and it no longer matters what the voters want.
The voting this time is no longer proportional – with a 1st and 2nd choice. It’s back to First Past The Post. I’m taking nothing for granted: At the last election on 40% of London voted – and Khan got around 52% of that.
With Ulez, rampant crime, the death of nightlife in the city and much else he really could still win….
“Migration surge drives London population to new recordConcerns over housing intensify”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/03/18/migration-surge-drives-london-population-to-new-record/
Which is why he’s started promising to build housing…..
They also overestimated the enthusiasm for EVs and here’s a purported Tesla runaway fire in the long stay carpark at Gatwick airport they cleaned up real quick and the MSM are silent about-
Gatwick Airport / Rochford Salvage Fire Updates – EV TO BLAME – Surprised?! – YouTube
A bit too close for comfort with Luton airport and nothing to see here folks.
Salvage yard EV fires not so much and we can safely report and leave them to the insurance underwriters.
PS: All under control folks and nothing suspicious-
Swift Response to Vehicle Fire at Gatwick Airport’s Car Park (uknip.co.uk)
Salvage yards know to seperate and isolate EV’s wherever possible, rip out the batteries quickly and store them in steel containers. And they only store them because no-one in the UK seems to want to recycle them.
It’s not so much that nobody wants to recycle them, it’s more that nobody is able to recycle them.
Story Tip
The Conclusion Humans Drive Atmospheric CO2 Increases Is Undermined By Carbon Isotope Data
From modern instrumental carbon isotopic data of the last 40 years, no signs of human (fossil fuel) CO2 emissions can be discerned.” – Koutsoyiannis, 2024
When you select candidates for anything via box ticking methods you get mediocre appointments. What is required is a step up to dot joining starting with some fairly simple stuff but then working up to those puzzles that demand a lot of careful thought (that thing politicians never seem to do whether in office or not).
Make them earn their inflated salaries too – or else.
My house in Ohio USA, is heated by a gas fired “boiler” that pumps hot water through radiators throughout the house. It is a lovely system because it is not noisy like forced air nor does it dehumidify the air.
I put boiler in quotes because the heating unit heats the water which is not pressurized and which does not turn into steam.
A week ago the the heating unit that we had installed in the house when we moved in in 1986 failed. Our HVAC maintenance company told us that it was not repairable. That was not shocking, we had gotten 37 winters out of it. We had them replace the unit with an almost identical unit from the same manufacturer.
As I type this post there are 2 technicians in my basement connecting the new heating unit which they tell me will be working by the time they leave. That is wonderful because the outside temperature dropped below freezing lat night and the house is cold.
I want my global warming, and I want it NOW!
My son asked me why we did not go to a heat pump. I said first, to my knowledge heat pumps cannot run hot water radiator systems because the don’t get hot enough.
I hope I was correct about that. Does anybody have a different experience.
I found this article informative –
https://co2coalition.org/2024/02/20/when-and-why-heat-pumps-suck/
I have a century home near Cleveland with a boiler (replaced maybe 10 years ago) and radiators, and we love it. (Also a fairly new soapstone wood stove, burning right now!)
Here in NE Ohio I suspect we’re too cold on your average winter for a heat pump to be really viable, based on what I’ve read. If you’re all the way in the south, then maybe/maybe not.
Another meaningless and expensive unworkable solution to a non-existent problem.
Living in Britain, I can assuredly say there was/is no public enthusiasm here for heat pumps – plenty of dismay at the strong-arm tactics being deployed to take away people’s preferred gas boilers.
But how would ‘Ministers’ know about public enthusiasm, they never ask the public, just tell them what to do, what they will have, and don’t care about what the public thinks or wants anyway?
Remember to raise the grid prices again to double check the scale of the mistake.
This is market forces in action. As long as people have a choice how to spend their dollars, they will be in a position to educate central planners as to what is worth spending money on and what to avoid. Remove that choice and the slide into deindustrialization, poverty, hunger and early mortality will ramp up quickly.
Very nice.
It goes without saying yet another government boondoggle. Get the government out of the energy business, they know nothing. They are doing far more harm than even I expected and I had very low expectations.
These are likely the same ministers who were telling everyone that there would be a wave of demand for EVs. Now that the wave has never amounted to more than a trickle, they’re coming to realize that maybe all the subsidies to consumers and manufacturers have been nothing but another example of wasted tax revenue. Unfortunately, governments will find a way to throw good money after bad with a variety of heat-pump incentives even before they conduct proper surveys to determine how many people would actually decide to install them.
Overestimated, as in didn’t care.
Just who is it that thinks that any government grant will trigger many people to move to heat pumps?
A simple Heat pump installation commonly comes to over £30,000. This is the cost of installation of the pump, keeping the site of the pump where no one – including one’s neighbours – are at all affected by the extraordinary noise of the pump and of it cycling, upgrading the electricity supply which often triggers a rewire (another £10,000 on top) increasing the size of all radiators which reduces room space and often requires replacement curtains and carpets – with much additional pipe work and schemes to hide the pipe work, converting all hot water heating to electricity (because the heat pump temperature output is insufficient for that) and then of course completely redecorating all rooms and the exterior of the house. Most UK homes are unsuitable – terraced and semi detached houses for example will drop house prices on conversion even if they are deemed viable. On top of this of course the extra electricity needed to run these disasters is far more that that needed for a gas boiler. Who pays for that over the ten or more year life?
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to use heat pump heating unless the government grant is £40-50k, the neighbours agree, you have enough land to allow its constant cycling to take place without the noise problems and those that accommodate the need for air movement.?
Forget it.
Since when did a total rejection equate to a lack of enthusiasm?
I don’t understand how this will work. Heat pumps run at about 3kW so 30 million homes = 90 GW = twice the peak capacity of the UK electricity grid in the winter, zero in the summer. If we used nuclear at about £10 billion to £15 billion a GW, cost equals £900 billion to £1.35 trillion. If we used wind, we need to install over 200 GW of name-plate capacity of turbines. Back-up batteries – for, say, a very conservative single week of no wind – 168 x 90 = 15 TWhr. Assuming we use Tesla batteries costing $1 million for 3 MWhr, this is $5 trillion. (We will need 5 million of them – better get our order in now). These are guaranteed for 15 years (I think) – nuclear will run for 60 years or more. So, it probably would be cheaper to build nuclear and not charge for it. Either way, what do we do with all the excess power in the summer?