From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
“What Mr Trump sneeringly calls “windmills” are pretty important right now for keeping the UK’s lights on.”
BBC Environment Correspondent Paul Murphy
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I wonder how Mr Trump will rid Texas of windmills?
End the subsidies and mandates and wait a while.
Next?
^ 1000
Texans clearly like them. They keep building more.
It’s not so much Texas that likes windmills. It’s the companies that get all the subsidies. If the people of Texas were ever actually asked if they would prefer to have all their electricity produced by fossil fuels you might get a different answer.
I prefer nuclear power for baseload.
it is the only answer to our growing energy demand. those refusing to embrace nuclear are sadly misinformed or deluded. Else they are just busy making tons of money off our taxes.
Growing up in Wyoming, you get used to seeing most every wonder Mother Nature created – including miles and miles of absolutely NOTHING!
Oddly (or not), Nothing kinda grows on you. I drove across the state twice last summer. After two days in Cheyenne, I headed west. Just a few miles down the road, I’m saying to myself, ” Where the **** did my “Nothing” go?”
Being curious and insufferably talkative, I asked every native I encountered how they felt about the windmills. Not one person defended them and most expressed degrees (some extreme) of disapproval.
A significant number of these contraptions were just standing there; blades not turning; some with visibly damaged blades. Sometimes, the wind in parts of Wyoming, blow at hurrican force for days at a time. Coincidence?
Most people don’t fully appreciate the size of these things. I didn’t until passing within a few feet of trucks hauling replacement blades. God knows where the damaged blades go…
I know where a lot of folks would like to insert these blades.
Wind farm developers and politicians would need a personal proctologist for the rest of their sorry lives.
I’d nominate Ed Miliband to be the first…
“God knows where the damaged blades go…”
Landfill…
Personally I wish people would take a page out of Edward Abbey’s “The Monkey Wrench Gang” and wrap about 4-5 turns of det cord around the base of everyone of them and then set them off. Chop ’em off at the base!
Subsidies distort the market. Without them, there would not be any solar or wind farms. Sometime ago, Warren Buffet admitted the wind turbines installed by Mid-America were decided based on the subsidies provided by the federal government. Hence, the taxpayer.
It’s not just subsidies, it is state government mandates for an arbitrary percentage of renewable power laws.
Over 15,000 of them…
Even with that many you still don’t know what you’re going to get.
January 2024 generation down -22% compared to January 2023.
January 2025?…. ain’t lookin too good either.
Kind of like a box of chocolates! And, generation down despite adding capacity….. In other words, it does not matter how many turbines you have or the overall capacity, if the wind is not blowing, the turbines don’t spin and actually consume power.
Maybe the wind is learning to avoid Texas because it doesn’t like to be chopped up and fed to the grid?
With “Take or Pay” what’s not to like? Everyone loves being forced to pay for an unwanted/unneeded commodity.
T. Boone Pickens saw a chance to get free money and built windmills.
How many would they build without the subsidies and mandates?
Or did you decide to skip over that part again?
They have to build more as what they have freezes in winter and produces nothing
You’re such an idiot. How many Texans have built windmills (or wind turbines as you like to call them so they don’t sound like 13th century technology).
You had me at “End the Subsidies”!
Though ending the ” Take or Pay” mandate would have a chilling effect.
He really doesn’t need to. Storms and hail will do their thing to the turbines and the solar panels.
Just prohibit their replacement and mandate their appropriate disposal, time will do the rest.
I wonder how Mr Trump will rid Texas of windmills?
Once the British empire asked of itself, how should we rid ourselves of criminals? The answer they came up with was firstly, the new world colonies and then the Australian continent.
Where there is a will there is a way, Nick.
Oz, is proud to be known as the world’s biggest open air prison 🙂
Show us with your math, what the difference to the climate would be with or without windmills in Texas. You can us the bogus positive feedback numbers too if you would like.
That’s “President Trump”, not Mr Trump.
He isn’t the President.
He is soon
Current President Elect as well
All ex-presidents are called President for the the rest of their life, just like President Carter. Surely you know that?
They don’t even have to be an ex to still get called President.
Look at the current incumbent.
He should be called “Bernie”, because after all, the past 4 years has been a “Weekend At Bernies” experience for the citizens USA.
“All ex-presidents are called President for the the rest of their life”
Nope.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140610083421/http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1030916.html
And while I’m sure that all ex Prez’s were called Prez erroneously by some, Carter never referred to himself that way.
He is, with one last pending ceremony that swears him in.
Then your first post doesn’t make any sense. If you consider him just” a mister and not a president then he has no power to stop Texas from building windmills.
Not just his first post…just sayin’.
He was President. Normal people refer to prior Presidents, Secretaries, Governors, using their prior title.
The whole world is treating Trump as though he is already President.
Other one is snoozing on a beach somewhere…
… waking only to to sign bits of paper the far-left activists put in from of him…. No reading necessary.
Well, he will be the first President the country has had in Over 4 years
He was and so always is…out of respect…just like recently passed Jimmy Carter was always President Jimmy Carter.
ALL former Presidents are referred to as “President” – your approval isn’t required.
[snip–I’m going to start cracking down on abusive comments when I see them –ctm]
I wonder if Nit Pick Nick Stokes will ever develop a brain?
He has a brain, and it’s a big one, at least according to him.
And he uses it to find new ways to hide the obvious.
The problem though, is that it is smooth.
Our MSM is freaked out not by Trump’s utter rejection of their green energy faith, but his musings on the Panama canal and Greenland. They seem torn between it being either a weird and wacky joke or something altogether more sinister. But which?
We could shut down [and remove] every wind farm and solar farm in the UK – and it would make an enormous difference to the English countryside that has been ruined. A new form of ‘rewilding’ if you like.
And replace them with reliable nuclear using a fraction of the land used for unreliable wind and solar
Isn’t it funny how the sensible nuclear and fossil fuel technologies only require a tiny fraction of what the freebie wind and solar demand.
That’s what the people pushing “free” renewables always forget: there’s no such thing as “free”. The price will be paid, one way or another.
ALL of the raw material costs for energy on earth today are free. No one gets a bill from Mother Earth for wind, sun, coal, gas, oil, or uranium. The final cost to the consumer is the cost of obtaining it, processing it and getting it to the consumer in the form he can use it, where and when he needs it. So far, wind and solar cost the most, and no end for that is in sight.
you left out steel, aluminum, copper, lithium, rare earths, etc., etc., etc.
The final cost is exactly as you stated.
Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek has made that point many times. “Natural resources” are natural, but not resources. It’s only when they are processed that they become resources, and then they are no longer natural.
And over the full lifetimes of nuclear, coal and gas, renewables end up costing over twice as much.
Why is Team Trump distracting MAGA’s weakest minds with shiny new objects like annexing Canada or Greenland? These weren’t part of the agenda before the election.
Annexing Canada is particularly bad idea, like no taxes on tips. Canadians are very progressive, like California but without the crime and gang violence. Canadians are given rights by the governmentm, our rights are not granted by laws or legislation. Canada has screwed up immigration worse than we have. Canadians must implement true democrats reforms before we let them beg to join us.
Don’t forget, these are all distractions. In the meantime, proposals are being floated to only deport criminal illegal aliens, amnesty for dreamers is another and expanding H1-B visas to replace more American knowledge workers is another scam they’re sneaking under the radar.
And don’t fall for an omnibus mega bill to pass the MAGA agenda. It’s a bait and switch scam and will be loaded with pork and compromise and betrayals that could never pass as standalone bills.
Did he play a lot of Monopoly during the Christmas break?
Annexing Canada was never a serious proposition, but something that the media originally tacked on when Trump mused on the idea of buying Greenland at the start of his first term. He played into it this time around because it made the media go crazy and annoyed Justin Trudeau, and because dropping it suddenly makes “only” making Greenland a territory seem reasonable in comparison.
He’s pretty serious about Greenland, however. Greenland has massive untapped mineral wealth (that Denmark has left sitting on the table for environmental reasons) and a significant strategic role to play, to the point the US already have a significant military presence there. Expanding US access to mineral wealth and removing the possibility of losing strategic bases to bad-faith political maneuvering is surely a net plus in his mind.
Yes, and with a population of only 56,000, it’s likely that “incentives” will make this happen.
As a guy who worked behind a bar (I could be in Congress), I’m curious as to why taxes on tips are a bad idea MS.Green ??
…why taxes on tips….
yes a great idea….I’m going to tip the plumber and electrician from now on instead of paying their bills…
Most waiters and bartenders don’t earn enough to be paying income taxes anyway.
If those who live in Greenland receive a small royalty for the wealth that could be extracted, they will all be millionaires.
It was never about annexing Canada. It was about Canada joining the US as a State.
He talked of Greenland in his first term. Both ideas from a strategic view are great. With Russia claiming areas in Arctic for oil exploitation can be offset by using Greenland’s border on the ocean to stake claims of our own. Same with Canada.
Besides the natural resources of each are tremendous.
The military position of Greenland and Iceland box in Russia. We should try to get Philippines back too.
I agree on all points, particularly re. annexing Canada, whose citizens for the most part are way more ‘progressive’ than California’s Democrats on many issues. I can only hope that this is just Trump’s way of distracting our Leftists prior to dropping a bomb on their beloved administrative state, but will admit I’m wrong if Victoria Nuland gets dispatched to serve cookies in Ottawa before Canada’s next national election.
Canada’s western provinces used to be a lot more conservative than the ruling classes in the eastern provinces. Standard rural vs. urban problem.
Trump has a tendency to taunt those who offend him.
His talk of annexing Canada is just that. It’s not a serious offer.
As to MAGA minds being weak, I feel the same way about socialists in general.
Institutionalized Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Can people please assist me in pointing out that these moronic destructive schemes have not had, to date, any effect on the Keeling curve or global climate (assuming ECS is something other than zero at today’s level of 428 ppm(?)), nor will they have in the future.
Because more CO2 is released in gathering the materials, processing them, constructing the obscenities, than is save by having “CO2-free fuel.”
Also, idling fossil fuel plants while wind and solar provide the power, saves very little in terms of how much fossil fuels are being burned.
Wasn’t there a study in Denmark, with a paired Coal and wind turbine farm.
Coal use actually increased, because the erratic nature of the wind farm caused the coal-fired power station to operate so inefficiently.
I’d keep a few of them and attach certain green energy advocates to the blades…
As the saying goes: What goes around comes around…
how many rotations could one actually survive?
‘“What Mr Trump sneeringly calls “windmills” are pretty important right now for keeping the UK’s lights on.”’
Intriguing! Just how important for keeping the lights on is it that the wind is blowing?
Not at all, just about got by without them before Xmas when the wind and sun disappeared for 3 weeks. It meant the UK had to rely on import lines from Europe but a few extra gas turbines would restore the shortfall, maddingly the coal turbines were routinely blown up to stop them being reused.
I saw a recent report from the Southwest Power Pool, the organization that controls the grid in my State and about a dozen others, and they said they thought they had enough energy supply to see us through the current winter storm, depending on how the wind behaved!
In other words, the Net Zero fiends have put our grid in jeopardy by adding too many windmills to the mix. We now have to worry as to whether the wind is blowing or not.
There are too many fools in positions of power.
Trump isn’t going to be giving windmills any subsidies and he had nothing good to say about windmills at his press conference yesterday. He detailed a number of problems they create.
Trump is going to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. I thought that is an excellent idea.
Trump introduced a man who is going to invest $20 billion in building Artificial Intelligence Data Centers in about six U.S. States, and is going to build his own power plants, located next to the Data Centers, to power the Data Centers. Trump said he like the idea of these AI Data Centers building their own power plants for their own consumption, and Trump suggested if they produced any extra electricity, they could put it out on the public grid.
Trump is interested in gaining control of Greenland. The people who live in Greenland are going to declare their independence from Denmark and if they welcome Trump in to help them out, he will be happy to help. Don Jr. made a trip to Greenland yesterday.
The Panama Canal issue is not mainly about the Canal, it is about Chinese influence in South and Central America. Trump is the only politician who would raise this issue. It’s an issue that needs to be raised. Trump is so far ahead of the rest of our leaders in every respect.
We finally have an adult in the room that sees the Big Picture.
Wind currently only producing 6% of UK power, Wind also 6%, nuclear 12%
It is GAS, 56%, that is powering what is left of the UK.
I’m not sure about Northern Ireland, which is part of the EirGrid infrastructure, but for the island of Great Britain (England + Scotland + Wales) that “right now” quote had better not have been uttered during either of the 11th-12th-13th or 26th-27th-28th ranges for last month (December 2024).
What’s the English translation of “dunkenflaute” again … “Dark doldrums” ?
The BBC were simply admitting that wind power is important for keeping the lights on – ie no wind, no lights.
But it seems Paul Murphy was too dumb to realise he was shooting himself in the foot with his statement.
No, the BBC was “simply”, i.e. without thinking or verification, repeating the “government (/ official / expert) narrative” that “No wind = No lights”.
Out here in The Real World (TM), we have “No wind (and/or solar) = CCGT ramps up to compensate in its ‘load following’ role”.
.
Although the UK government’s “Action Plan” document leans heavily on the NESO “Clean Power 2030” report, the former is missing many details included in the latter.
NESO’s “Clean Power 2030” document is available at the following link :
https://www.neso.energy/publications/clean-power-2030
From the “Unabated gas generation” section, on page 30 :
Also, in the “Security of supply” section, on page 48 :
While the politicians may be focussed on the “Net Zero” mantra, the actual operator of the GB electricity grid didn’t even attempt to create a “scenario / pathway” that had a (greatly) reduced CCGT fleet size by 2030.
“Dark doldrums” ?
About sums it up.
“What Mr Trump sneeringly calls “windmills” are pretty important right now for keeping the UK’s lights on.”
Really? At time of posting, not so much. Solar, for anyone interested is 3.3%. (the gauge is too small to see on the gridwatch website)
Just made a road trip down south, and every windmill we passed was not turning. Not. A. Single. One. That was in 5 states.
Maybe they’d run out of gas?
Here in the UK, demand for electricity is about 46GW,very close to ‘peak’ demand. Solar and wind have gone AWOL. Providing less than 10%,which will reduce in the next couple of hours as darkness descends. Gas & Nuclear are providing over 60%. Gas is close to maxing out.
Considering, at present most of our heating is gas based!
If it wasn’t for the interconnects, I reckon, we’d be seeing our first brown/blackout.
In the UK as I write, it’s a cold day with cloud and little wind. Renewables are contributing less than 15% of our electricity generation. In a couple of hours time, many people will be relying on their gas boilers to start up for their heating as they come home from work. What happens on a similar day in the not too distant future?
” . . . and then a miracle happens”?
The UK wound up curtailing (i.e. paying money to get rid of) a record 8.34 terawatt-hours – that’s 8.34 billion kilowatt-hours, in 2024 at a cost of 393 million GBP. The previous record, 2023, was 4.34 terawatt-hours at a cost of 310 million GBP.
Or in other words: every household in the UK paid 13.8 GBP just for the privilege of dumping electricity last year. This on top of the other literal billions of GBP in subsidies, both direct and indirect, paid for wind farms.
Thanks to the back up system of gas fired power plants.
The closure of North Sea gas/oil however means that we will import more and more LNG as we did 60 years ago from Algeria in double skinned LNG carriers. We used Canvey Island storage facilities.
We British will be bankrupt in no time. Back to normal
After mopping up Greenland and taking back the canal zone Mr Trump will liberate us from the current Socialist/Bolshevik dictatorship. Not to mention the Islamists that run London
The wind is blowing in southern CA today. And the effects of government
mandates is being clearly seen. I’m referring to the wildfires of course.
It was just a couple of years ago that the government implemented a pay
increase for goat herders to increase to $15.50hr or $15,925.08 per month.
The goats are used for prescribed grazing in the coastal areas for fire control.
There’s enough goat eaters from south of the border in that area that they
could manage that situation in a much different way where wildfires like
what we are seeing today wouldn’t be happening on this scale. Same thing with
energy. Let private business’s compete for low cost, reliable safe
energy, not this government mandated nightmare crap.
Does anyone have any ideas regarding what or who started the fires?
The media is reporting that the cause is “under investigation”.
That always the story
The wholesale price of electricity in Britain is now over 1000 pound a Megawatt hour, just one day after the BBC boasts of the success of wind power.
That depends on how you define success.
Yes, tonight they are all together producing 2 GW, with a demand of 45 GW.
With the next big scare now being about Micro plastics in our food chain, including Seafood, it is surprising there is no concern about the 100s of thousands of wind turbines broadcasting plastic particles across the world. Through leading-edge erosion, of over a million turbine blades, is it not likely that there are 1000s of tonnes of Epoxy, Polyester and other plastic polymers being spread over Land and Sea over their life of operation?
There is also the possibility that some turbine blades use BPA in their epoxies.
Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators, remove all wind and solar from the grid.
A note to Nick Stokes…Former Presidents are always addressed as “Mr President” (in written story’s or comments as (former) President, but never, ever as “ex”-President.
Clearly Net Zero is a scam. CO2,N2O and CH4 emissions from humans and animals cannot absorb sufficient long wave radiant energy in Earth’s atmosphere to cause runaway global warming. Building windmills in Texas or anywhere else is futile exercise and a waste of resources and must be ended.