Among our “climate leader” jurisdictions, Britain is a serious contender for the top spot. Sure Germany got started earlier than Britain, with the so-called “Energiewende” going back to the 1990s; and upstart American states like California and New York each think that their own hair shirt energy restrictions should qualify them for the number one position.
But Britain’s suite of policies in the aggregate is hard to top: mandatory Net Zero goals set by statute; madcap buildout of wind and solar electricity generation; shuttering of generation from coal and natural gas; refusal to permit drilling in the North Sea; complete ban on fracking. The Energy Minister of the current Labour government — Ed Milliband — is as crazed a climate zealot as you can find anywhere. The British have even dynamited coal-fired power stations to be sure that nobody could ever change their minds about this Net Zero thing and try to re-start the plants.
Here from a post I did back in 2022, is a picture of the former Longannet coal plant in Fife, Scotland, getting dynamited to smithereens in 2021.
The last coal-fired electricity generation station in the UK closed in 2024. Today, the UK claims to get about 45-47% of its electricity from “renewables,” although that includes about 5-7% “biomass,” plus a small amount of hydro. The wind/solar contribution is around 35-40%. Milliband thinks he can further increase that percentage by just building more and more wind turbines and solar farms.
But unfortunately for the British, their wind and solar generation facilities seem to be subject to all going quiet at the same time, often inconveniently at the very hottest or coldest times of the year. Building more and yet more of them does not solve the problem. Some call this Britain’s “looming firm generation capacity crisis.”
So what’s the answer? How about doing the unthinkable — bring back coal!
On June 9, Andrew Montford, Director of Net Zero Watch, addressed this issue with his new Report “Thinking the Unthinkable: Coal Power and National Security.” (Full disclosure: I serve on the Board of the American affiliate of Net Zero Watch.). Here is the basic assumption underlying Andrew’s paper:
[T]he deteriorating state of the UK economy – unsustainably high electricity prices, low growth, deindustrialisation and a declining tax base – means that Net Zero and, along with it, carbon pricing, will be abandoned, no matter which party is in power.
I think that is clearly right. Reality has caught up with them. It is only a question of time until they are forced to abandon the Net Zero fantasy.
Andrew’s Report also focuses on the national security implications of unreliable electricity, with its inherent need for insecure backup from imports:
[I]mports and offshore production are both vulnerable to the actions of hostile powers, as the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline in 2022 made clear. In this regard, the UK is horribly exposed. Nearly half of our gas supply comes from Norway. Sabotage of the Langeled pipeline, which alone brings around 20%, would be catastrophic for the UK, and would quickly lead to a civil emergency.
Is it even possible to raise the subject of coal power generation today in the UK, where that fuel has been subject to a decades-long campaign of vilification? Montford:
While such a step [i.e., reviving coal generation] was unthinkable just 12 months ago, the political landscape is moving quickly. Polling by More in Common has found that that ever-rising energy bills are causing political volatility and fragmentation. Italy and Germany have both recently announced the extension of the lives of their coal-fired power stations. As a result, new voices are being listened to. As a hint of just how far the Overton window has already moved, the Reform party’s manifesto for the Scottish elections featured a pledge to allow coal mining once again. It clear that the looming geopolitical threats to the country now mean that the time is ripe to reconsider the consensus against coal that has taken hold in the last two decades.
So all that is needed is a sufficiently imminent crisis to force the issue of coal generation back into the public conversation. The two short weeks since issuance of Andrew’s Report have brought to Britain some indicators of the dire corner it has backed itself into. Readers here probably know about the recent record-setting heat wave that has covered much of Europe, including Britain. Paul Homewood, of the Not a Lot of People Know That website, has a post on June 25, titled “No Wind? No Sun? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” Homewood’s post includes extensive excerpts from a piece in the Telegraph from June 24 (behind paywall). The gist is that on June 23 the UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) had issued an emergency power supply warning, which was then withdrawn after NESO secured emergency supplies from the continent. However, obtaining the emergency imported supplies required getting a special waiver of EU export restrictions. From the Telegraph piece:
The National Energy System Operator (Neso), which manages the grid, issued a rare emergency power supply warning on Tuesday after soaring temperatures triggered a slump in solar energy, with panels struggling to work in the hot conditions. It was subsequently withdrawn after Neso secured emergency supplies from the Continent on Wednesday. Kathryn Porter, an industry consultant, said Neso had “begged the EU” to lift import trading limits which would have capped the amount of energy Britain could import. Ms Porter said the sudden easing of restrictions had allowed the UK to obtain 2.3 gigawatts (GW) of imports versus a 1.5 GW limit introduced in May, helping Britain avoid power shortages.
OK, crisis averted, for now. But Homewood reports on a few other aspects of this solution to Britain’s crunch. First, they had to buy the power from the Netherlands on a day-ahead market that was already at a high level due to the heat wave and lack of dispatchable capacity. Homewood links a Tweet from a firm called Montel Analytics as to the price: “[T]hey are paying up to €1600 per MWh for it.” €1600/MWh is equivalent to more than $2000/MWh, or more than $2.00/kWh. That will translate to a retail price of around $2.50/kWh, compared to average U.S. retail electricity prices of under $0.20/kWh.
Oh, and almost all of the imported power was generated from either natural gas or coal.
In other words, the only effect of the wind/solar generation obsession has been to drive up the cost of electricity to consumers and businesses to ridiculous levels. And, next time around, when the next wind/sun drought comes along on a hot evening, the imported power may not be available at all, and widespread blackouts could follow.
Thank you, Andrew, for getting the subject of coal-fired electricity generation back into the conversation. It’s only a question of time before this will happen.
“You can ignore reality but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality”.
Something something heat waves
And cold snaps…
lol Someone censored / redacted your “Reality is”, but at least they’ve got a sensor of humor.
Mr. fakename: Yes, and next for renewables- something something blackout; something something grid breakdown; something something can’t fix it with “renewable” power; something something love nature as you step over corpses. You renewable fans sure have our future sources figured out- it’s something.
Please keep coming in and reminding us what chumps think.
The “Something something” you’re looking for is “cold kills 10 times the number of people than”.
You’re welcome
You could go to Greenland; according to the radar it is snowing heavily there at the moment.
Happen every year. Always have always will.
If you limit history to only the last 70 years or so, current heat waves are slightly out of the norm.
If you admit that history didn’t start in 1950 and look at the wider record, you will see that there is nothing unusual regarding the current temperatures.
The same thing goes for all forms of weather. Storms, droughts, heat waves, cold waves, etc.
If you think that feature (renewables ) of U.K. energy policy is crazy, which it is. Wait till you read about the UK tax payers, being forced to pay the continental users to take the UKs excess production when the wind and sun shines too much here in the U.K. U.K. taxes are paying France and Holland to take our excess electricity and is on top of U.K. tax payers paying the owners of the wind farms and solar arrays for generating too much and would they please shut down.
It is totally Alice in Wonderland here in U.K. energy policy world.
It may be past the time when the men in white coats were sent out to collect Ed Miliband along with the rest of his crazy gang?
It’s not just UK, it’s even more extreme in Germany. Germany is flooding central Europe with useless surplus electric energy, when the sun is shining in summer, or the wind is blowing. They have to pay massive sums as negative prices (paid by the customers) to get rid of it. Neighbouring countries like Switzerland and Austria are even opening the gates of their riverrun hydroelectric power plants to not generate cheap reliable electric energy and use the PV electricity instead.
Why are they not storing that excess electricity in batteries for later use? Is that because battery storage is just too, damn expensive?
and dangerous
Too expensive and too dangerous. They prefer pump-storage reservoirs. But despite several of those it’s only sufficient to generate enough electricity for a few hours each day: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=AT&week=26&legendItems=3x2vvg
If burning North American virgin forests in Yorkshire to boil water didn’t do it nothing will.
Can the coal mine underneath the DRAX facility be put back in service or did the crazies sabotage it? DRAX used to burn the coal located beneath the plant but then some genius decided it would be better to use wood pellets imported from the United States.
Talk about delusional!
The Selby Mine hit problems with geological faults that they were unaware of and became uneconomic. That’s why it closed. I’d therefore assume that, sadly, it would still be uneconomic today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selby_Coalfield
You are struggling if you rely on Wikipedia for your information.
The coal for Drax mainly was from the Selby Coalfield and came from five deep mines (Wistow, Riccall, Stillingfleet, Whitemore and North Selby), conveyed to the surface through drift tunnels to Gascoigne Wood mine near Sherburn in Elmet. Still a long way from Drax, but that was so that (nationalised) British Railtrack could share in the profits from the coal.
Yes, there were many small geological faults which were undetectable with the technology available when the Selby Project was planned (the usual rose tinted spectacles Major Projects problem). But the peak production before privatisation was 12 Million tonnes of treated coal (rather than the envisaged maximum 10 Million tonnes) PLUS a further 2.5 million tonnes of discard which had to be conveyed by rail for disposal elsewhere, at significant cost.
Never the less, the cost was still much less than the “Plan for Coal” which Government had envisaged as being supportable after our Arab chums had again failed to wipe Israel off the map in the Yom Kippur war, leading to oil prices quadrupling.
And still competitive with odd shiploads of high Sulphur coal landed at Rotterdam, despite Government propaganda. What finally sank Selby was the introduction of the first Carbon Taxes, designed precisely to destroy Coal.
Wasn’t ‘some genius’
Drax used to be part of a consortium of power generations that included nuclear power that became ‘British Eenergy’.
Then the nuclear plants were sold to EDF, and Drax was left high and dry as a coal and agricultural waste burning station.
It is te largest power station in the UK
Under the then regulatory environment there was no way to continue burning coal, so the management of what is now a publicly listed company looked at their options. The then ministry pf energy assured them, they would receive generous subsidies from burning biomass, so they spent a heinous amount of money experimenting with and then perfecting one process line to replace coal with woodchip.
Followed by the other furnaces.
Then the government ratted on the deal and they didn’t get the subsidies they were promised.
They have since looked at building gas plant, but abandoned the plans.
Currently they are dabbling with carbon capture and aim to build a data centre there.
Why they are not queuing up to convert to small modular nuclear power is anyone’s guess.
Drax uses wood waste from a variety sources for the manufacture of wood pellets. Virgin forests are not used for manufacture of wood pellets.
Wood pellets have a large carbon footprint. Heavy machinery with large diesel engines is use to go into the to fell the trees. this generates some wood waste which can be used for making wood pellets. Timber is taken to the sawmills by trucks with large diesel engines. Milling the timber into lumber generates wood waste. Manufacture of furniture generates wood waste. After the wood pellets are made they are transported to the UK in with large marine engines. At the port the pellets are off load to trucks for transport to the power plant.
Thanks for that.
Of course most of us here don’t worry about carbon footprints so that argument against burning wood is null and void.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s just another export. It’s also an additional product for forestry companies and wood mills, which helps to keep them profitable.
Exactly and they certainly aren’t going to export a log worth several orders of magnitude more as a sawlog than for chipping.
I am going to guess that the marine engines and the transport trucks in the UK are diesel powered.
You would be wrong., Drax was built over a coal mine that exported its coal nationwide.
…By rail…
Even the diesel locomotives are run off biodiesel – presumably as part of the greenwashing.
Drax is not some evil capitalist greenCrap™ company. It is a listed commercial company struggling to conform to legislation it had no hand in formulating.
It has genuinely tried to play the cards it has been dealt honestly.
Wood pellets (“biofuel”) are not made strictly from wood waste. Of course the best timber is not use for wood pellets, but a lot of the wood pellets are made from wood which could have been used for lower value lumber products, like OSB.
They aren’t burning North American virgin forests. It’s idiotic to keep pushing that lie.
Because of political decisions made decades ago (Thatcher 1980s) & implemented ever since, the British coal industry has been almost eliminated, & there are now only 2 active coal mines in the UK & no coal power stations.
It would be eyewaterinly expencive & very long-term to rebuild a new viable coal industry AND build new coal-burning power stations at the same time (we can’t even build a 140-mile railway – HS2 … Original cost: ~£40.9bn total) Original construction time: 6 years …
latest estimates = £100bn & 16 years. ).https://www.railwaymagazine.co.uk/30569/the-full-hs2-timeline-from-inception-to-today/
The UK now desperately needs to buy in a few HTR-PM: pebble-bed modular reactors from China (as we’ve lost the nuclear lead we had, again, due to politics )
Anyway, coal is too precious a commodity to burn; it’s a cornucopia of chemicals, and it should be refined as we do with oil.
I could go on at length … but I won’t (:<))
Coal can be turned into gas in the coal seam, you don’t have to mine it.
Indeed, & it’s the only practical way of extracting any fuel from a long-closed deep mine, but you do lose a lot of the chemicals in the process.
A little history for you.
Most coal mines were closed before Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979. 850 were closed 1947 to 1979; 160 closed 1979 to 1990.
The coal industry was privately owned until nationalised by the Marxist-Socialist Government after 1945, along with all other industry, infrastructure and utilities.
This created a huge debt to finance the compensation to private businesses that were nationalised, and created an enormous payroll expense. The UK was bankrupt and economy in tatters post-war. To make it worse the welfare-state was launched in 1948, another huge expense on the public purse. Instead of spending money from the USA Marshal Plan to rebuild infrastructure, it was spent on funding the welfare-state which by 1950 was costing twice the projected cost. (Today the welfare-state costs £333 billion – more than the entire revenue from income tax which is £331 billion.)
The nationalised industries became totally unionised and since they were part of the Socialist project, primarily to provide employment.
Within 10 years, the Nationalised industries became a net cost to the Treasury rather than as predicted a net contributor since “profits” supposedly would go to the Treasury for redistribution rather than to private investors.
The consequence was, lack of investment, decreased labour productivity, inefficiency, bloody-minded unions wanting more and more. This coupled with double-digit inflation, 22% at one point, 14% average wage inflation, income tax 35% to 83%, corporation tax 60%, persistant strikes, all the nationalised industries became uncompetitive. It was costing more to bring coal to the surface than it was worth on the market.
And. Most coal was deep-shaft mined coal. This is the most expensive. Moves to mechanise, increase labour productivity was resisted by the unions. Eventually British coal was too expensive to mine, British steel too expensive to make.
The British economy was a tragedy and by 1976, the IMF were called in.
It is true to say political decisions caused the collapse of the British coal industry – along with most of the rest of it – but those decisions were taken long before Thatcher.
British coal is mostly anthracite – best quality. It can be profitably mined using modern mining equipment and technique but the lunatic Government will not grant licences – they have already turned down a number.
The contraction of coal predated Thatcher. According to the numbers of post-war pit closures given by wikipedia, 626 pits were closed under previous governments (354 under Labour govts, 272 under Tory); during the Thatcher years a further 115 pits were closed.
Coal certainly is cornucopia of chemicals- but since there is a vast amount of it left on this planet, it’s not precious in the sense of being rare- so in that sense, there’s no reason to not burn it.
The best use for any product is determined by whom ever is willing to pay the most for it.
There are many sources for all of those chemicals, we don’t need to reserve oil/coal/gas for them.
“… we can’t even build a 140-mile railway – HS2 … Original cost: ~£40.9bn total) Original construction time: 6 years …
latest estimates = £100bn & 16 years … ”
Sound like the California High-Speed Train.
Ahem. More coal mines were scheduled for closure under the Labour government than were closed under Thatcher…
But yes, the ‘coal revivalists’ are as demented as the ‘tidal/wavists’ and the windmill and solar panel cultists.
Starting from here, now, the quickest/cheapest route to sanity is North sea gas followed by small modular reactors, them if the regulatory process can be improved, larger site built reactors
Pebble bed was always a bit controversial.
There is simply no need to take any technological risks whatsoever. Ther are a range of proven designs already in operation worldwide for many flavours of PWR and BWR.
Britain made the ‘hi tech’ mistake withe the AGR reactors – advanced design, efficient, but a bit too clever. A Mercedes when the world wanted simple V8 Ford trucks.
Why not go all the way? Steam trains, steam lorries, steam ships! Steam powered factories? Make smog great again 😀
Millions of tons of coal to be sold and peasants don’t deserve clean air anyways.
That was caused by high gas prices – brought to you by the champions of fossil fuels putin and trump.
MUNR,
don’t let facts get in the way of your narrative.
Steam power was abandoned for much of what you suggest before renewables came along as better sources of power were used.
Coal fired power stations emissions are very clean.
Renewables are the reason for our high electricity prices, as they are for other similarly powered countries and states, not gas.
A fact free zone is MUNR.
MUNR at least knows how to use the internet:
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uk-natural-gas
Looks quite impacted from global events for me.
Analysis: Record wind and solar saved UK from gas imports worth £1bn in March 2026
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-wind-and-solar-saved-uk-from-gas-imports-worth-1bn-in-march-2026/
You may know how to use the internet, but you certainly don’t know how to use your brain.
The Carbon Brief piece shows renewables had a strong month (for a change!), but the “£1bn saved” claim is much less solid than it sounds.
It’s not an observed saving, it’s a modelled estimate based on assuming gas would have been imported at ~130p/therm and that all wind/solar output displaced gas.
That’s a big simplification.
In reality, electricity systems are more complex, and renewables can also displace imports, domestic generation, or even be curtailed. Plus, the claim is based on a single high-wind month, so it does not reflect typical conditions when output is zero to far less than nameplate claims.
So the “£1bn saved” headline should be seen as a rough, assumption-heavy estimate rather than a definitive figure based on a single month.
What goes up- can and will go back down.
LoserName knows how to use the internet to locate the propaganda site that the party has instructed him to use.
Unfortunately for it, it has never managed to use the internet to find the entire story. Nor does it want to.
To modernize a phrase from The Merchant of Venice: “The devil can cite
Scripturethe Internet for his purpose.”And If they Fracked and tapped the UKCS (UK Continental Shelf) has hundreds of billions of cubic meters of untapped recoverable gas.
Their refusal to do so is a major cause of their Gas Price Shocks.
Hmmm— when I see MUNR, I immediately think “manure”. Wonder why?
When I see Bruce Cobb, I see right wing idiot. I wonder why……
Because your brain has been corrupted by your marxist masters and is no longer capable of independant thought.
He’s pushing the myth that anything involving fossil fuels is out dated and that wind and solar are the future. Yes, he is that delusional.
I think you meant to say that the eye watering prices are caused by the payment formula which includes paying unreliable when the don’t produce any electricity, paying them to stop producing electricity when they produce too much.
How anyone could think that such a system would be efficient and good is unbelivable.
Red Ed us named because he believes that ultimately the state should and will control everything.
[“eye watering prices are caused by the payment formula”]
Indeed, but there’s more…
We have solar panels & signed up to a Government-promoted, index-linked, 25-year FIT (feed-in-tariff
schemescam) in 2012, so we get paid an amount for every kWh we produce. ( £ for £ it’s the best investment we ever made )The average wholesale electricity price in the UK for 2025 was approximately 4.28 pence per kWh.
We currently get paid 78p for every kWh we produce ( 18x what it is worth !!! ) with another 11 years of increases to go. All part of the despicable subsidies used to drive the insane rush to Nut Zero.
For the full list, see the … https://subsidyclock.co.uk/
Moribund Miliband is a 5th columnist destroying the UK economy
When do you intend to remove the dummy from your mouth?
You know Ed loves coal and gas-
Controversial emissions tax nets the Treasury £20 billion
“That was caused by high gas prices – brought to you by the champions of fossil fuels putin and trump.”
As he was referencing electricity prices, a quick look at the rates of electricity per country shows that the United States average is less than half that of Germany or Britain, which, if it’s supposedly “Trump’s fault”, raises the question: why isn’t Trump’s own country affected by it?
Gas is not the problem. The problem is that you cannot run a country on a power generation system that behaves like this:
http://www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind
Look at this month and last month. Low generation from 30GW of wind was 1-1.5GW. This is a regular occurrence. In winter too, and in winter solar produces nothing.
You can talk all you like about how bad coal and gas are. But the question is, do you work around their issues, or do you do without a reliable supply? Because just look at the charts. Wind and solar is not a viable technology. You are never going to be able to supply 40GW+ for days on end from batteries. The Royal Society published a report clearly showing this.
Then in passages worthy of Yes Minister they proposed digging out and sealing large numbers of caverns, and filling them with hydrogen, obtained from unclear sources, which would have to be stored for decades to cover the low wind seasons which occur every ten years or so.
Its completely hare brained, and its hard to read their report and find it anything other than a Yes Minister level of rejoinder. If this is the solution, Minister, are you really sure you still see the problem in the same way?
You may not like coal, few do, and gas has its problems also. But you don’t have any alternative. Wind and solar and Net Zero would be back to 1750.
Yes, the charts show that the solar produces next to nothing for half of the year. Unreliable even in summer. The solar output aligns with demand fairly well when it works at all. Not nearly often enough to justify building and connecting it.
Coal, oil, wood and nuclear electricity generating units use the heat from the coal, oil, wood or nuclear units to make steam which turns the turbines which turn the generators.
Didn’t you know that, MUNR?
Combined cycle gas-fired units also use steam and have the highest efficiencies of any gas-fired generators.
A power plant using CCGT technology has a thermal efficiency of 64%. A typical nuclear plant has thermal efficiency of 33% as a does a coal-fired power plant. I’ll have to check on the thermal efficiency of a coal-fired power plant using super critical technology.
A supercritical plant has a nominal efficiency of about 48% but adding on environmental controls can lower that significantly.
I am not an expert on gas generation, but I have read that the CCGT plants are not well suited to quickly ramping output up and down. That defeats their efficiency somewhat if they have to accommodate fluctuating wind and solar. Peaking plants are also needed.
Good point. CCGT plants can ramp more quickly that coal ones, but minute-to minute ramps to compensate for wind and solar are an issue. Aero-derivative CTs are much quicker and have efficiencies close to coal units.
It is the combined cycle part that doesn’t ramp up quickly as the steam side has to heat up slowly. My understanding is that the NOX control systems they use on those units require specific temperatures and that hampers ramping up quickly as well.
If the UK is anything like the US, then maximum demand occurs after 5pm on summer afternoons and after midnight on winder nights.
Neither of those align well with max solar.
Why not go all the way?
With those rather childish tantrums you often do.
“Why not go all the way? Steam trains, steam lorries, steam ships! Steam powered factories?”
We call that Nuclear! Safe, clean, reliable and affordable Nuclear.
“Safe, clean, reliable and affordable Nuclear.”
Certainly our most promising future source. But as of today, pick any 3….
as with all things, we get what we pay for
Except with “renewables” of course.
Taxpayers’ $$$$ are being hijacked to pay for unnecessarily duplicated “renewables”, which are nothing more than a parasite on established electrical grids.
I should have spoon fed the point. “Any 3” are not good enough.
Over 50% of electricity in the UK was generated by coal up to 2015 – we had no smogs.
And steam trains running on heritage lines are hugely popular these days, and the business growing each year.
Gas prices: 45% of UK gas comes from the UK North Sea fields and is piped directly to Great Britain. UK has no liquefaction plants so the gas stays – it is not traded on the global market. The rest of UK gas is nearly all from the US as LNG with contracted prices.
UK natural gas prices were not affected by Ukraine or Iran wars, and have been relatively stable.
UK gas generated electricity prices during first part of 2026 were in the range £65 to £75 per MWh wholesale. Compared to 2025 when they were in the range (£70 to £100 per MWh wholesale, which means overall prices have fallen. About half the price of gas generated electricity is carbon tax. Without this it would be much cheaper.
Recent Contracts for Difference give wind companies a “strike price” of £128 per MWh wholesale. Gas sets the wholesale price 90% of the time, which means a wind company feeding in will get, say, £70 per MWh wholesale but has that subsidised by £58 per MWh up to the strike price by NESO the grid operator which is past on to the retailers and thus consumer bills. It is this plus other aspects of the intermittency costs of Ruinables that make UK electricity four times higher of any other developed Country.
Makes a difference when you have the facts – doesn’t it?
Facts! MUNR doesn’t know what facts are.
Facts are what the party says they are.
We have always been at war with EastAsia.
I see MyUsernameReloaded has succeeded….
…. in getting multiple responses…..
…. in getting the attention he feels he deserved or desperately needs…
…. in inflating his ego….
And no catnip was offered!
LooserName is the pinata, the rest of us get a kick out of seeing who can get the most style points while whacking him.
And once again, looserName demonstrates that whatever the party tells him to believe, he believes.
News flash. Energy prices in Sonoma County are higher than any place in the Country. Sonoma County CA. is powered exclusively by Sonoma Clean Power (Wind Solar and Geysers Geothermal). Electricity is at 56¢ per KWh during Peak Demand and … No Gas…No Coal to influence the prices.
If Renewables were “All That” why wouldn’t Sonoma County be lowest in the state? When I switched back to PG&E sourced power (including Gas, Hydro and Nuclear) my electric bill dropped over $100 per month.
Oil and gas prices are so high that I can buy heating oil at one quarter the price of ‘renewable’ electricity.
Can anyone confirm that Drax power station still has two coal boilers and generators still functioning? I seem to remember a winter or two back that they were paid very high amounts to warm them up in readiness.
If so using those would be a start, I’ve no idea, if they are still capable of operating, as to their capacity?
(We would need to be rid of Mr Milliband though)
Coal-fired power generation ended in 2021, and all coal handling plants have been decommissioned.
Drax Power Station has 4 boiler/turbine sets, all on ‘biomass’; capacity is now about 2,595 MW (biomass),
Each set was 660 MW when new, but may have been derated as the last major referb was between 2007 and 2012 when the high- and low-pressure turbines were replaced by Siemens in a £100 million programme.
After 6 years of non-use, there would be a big, long & expensive refurb on the other two.
Drax are making lots of dosh from subsidies without the bother of refurbs.
But at least the boilers can be reconverted to burn coal, should the political winds change.
These people relish dynamiting coal stations. Drax is a huge woodburner now.,
The current disarray in our governing Labour party has seen talk of moving Mad Ed to Chancellor of the Exchequer. Not content with allowing him to ruin our energy sector they are seriously thinking of allowing him to totally trash the economy at a faster rate than he already was with his net zero policies!
The Department of Energy and Net Zero now has over 7000 staff (doing what? God only knows) and is, like the temperate keyboard, in tune with its leader:
Mr Miliband branded Rosebank a “colossal waste of taxpayer money and climate vandalism”.
The expected new leader is stating his priorities… and naturally, they involve spending another huge wad of borrowed cash. But then, what would one expect of a wannabe working class bloke who is really a better off Cambridge English Literature graduate?
Arguing that Greater Manchester’s resurgence proves devolution can outpace Westminster dysfunction, Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, sets out why “Manchesterism” offers a practical model for good growth that could rebalance the entire UK economy.
This will mean hiring many more blob persons, not fewer. It will mean duplication, triplication and worse. But the middle class public and third sector will be very pleased. No real industrial problems with energy etc are even on the radar. Thanks to mad Ed.
Britain for the time being is only going back to the 1970s in the sense that we will need a another bailout like 1976 before too long. Leave it in the ground is official poilcy.
Of course, Rosebank will not be using taxpayer money at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. Rosebank will be paying money to the taxman. Ed Miliband doesn’t seem to understand basic economics.
Miliband actively opposes basic economics on the basis that is racist, xenophobic, and harms the natural world, everything that does not conform with the canon of critical theories – as handed to Oxford, Manchester, Nottingham, Bristol, Exeter, Imperial, Cambridge, Sorbonne, Potsdam ad nauseam from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, MIT, Stanford, State Penn, Columbia, Berkeley, Caltech…. ad nauseam.
Fun fact diversity is the opposite of university – and the now required groupthink
One has to wonder what ‘E’ is taught in the Oxford PPE course. Rachel from Complaints is another PPE graduate with zero grasp of economics.
It wouldn’t take much dynamite to bring down wind turbines. And such a great sight it would be, watching them fall, like dominoes. Solar installations would be a bit trickier to do in though. Maybe carpet-bombing?
Just sayin’.
You could add in some sort of firework display!
On their way home from Germany, perhaps US troops could deploy 105mm and 155mm howitzers around the EU and the UK and take down the bird-chomping monstrosities the working class has paid for to further enrich their “noble” elites!
If the ammunition is still in short supply maybe the Ukrainian Nazis could persuaded to take the whirligigs out with their drones. I understand that they will do virtually anything if the price is right; like the Nordstream pipeline!
The eagles, hawks, birds, and bats will be eternally grateful!
The price for copper is presently over US $6 per pound. It is only a matter of time before the copper thieves start stealing the copper from the wind turbines.
See my earlier reply to Bruce Cobb which I made before reaching your comment.
Certain ‘enterprising’ people have found turbines in remote wind farms in the UK are a useful source of copper which is needed elsewhere.
Good one from Bishop Hill…
How much capacity do solar panels lose under extreme heat?
According to some figures:
Hot temps: 12-18%
Extreme temps: 15-20%
What is the demarcation for hot to extreme?
Whatever the Misleadia says it is 🤣
Hot temperatures also lower the life expectancy of solar panels, by speeding up the migration of the dopants.
Electronic devices work by adding dopants to a crystalline matrix. I won’t go into the details because it’s been 40+ years since I took those courses.
These dopants alter the electrical behavior of the material.
These dopants don’t become part of the matrix, but sit in holes in the matrix.
Over time the vibration of the atoms and the matrix will cause these dopants to start migrating. The greater the vibration (temperature) in the matrix, the faster this migration occurs.
Importing coal produced electricity increases the renewables % of generation as Neso ie Miliband count all imports as 100% renewable regardless of how its generated. With the Met office and their inflated temp records we have fraud on a vast scale.
Just like moving manufacturing to other countries counts as a reduction in Britain’s CO2 production.
The more likely scenario is a cold windless day in January, when demand peaks and there’s obviously no solar, if we can’t get the electricity then, that is a genuinely life-threatening crisis for those who are not prepared.
Shall we not mention that by 2030, 50% of our CCGT plants will be 30+ years old.
Yep 12GW of gas are nearing retirement and firm power equivalent to over 25% of current winter peak demand could be off the grid in the next few years with no current plans to replace it!
The known reserves of coal are vast. There are a few problems.
These disadvantages have made coal the enemy of the people.
Now, the solutions are obvious
Oh, and of course coal is the feedstock for many other processes.
So Elon – get on it.
For the life of me I can’t understand how getting energy from your own fossil fuels is bad but getting energy from neighboring countries fossil fuel is okay. It is lunacy.
Depending on wind & solar means freezing in the dark on windless winter nights… and in the UK those winter nights are especially long.
Battery storage is not a solution, either. It can be useful for frequency regulation (a/k/a FCAS), and short term arbitrage, but it cannot get you through a 16-hour-long windless winter night, let alone a week-long dunkelflaute. Even Bill Gates, a climate crisis True Believer, understands that:
The UK has no significant coal reserves left. Poland and Germany do. UK new coal would neither be cheap nor reliable. It would rely on vulnerable imports.
Everybody knows what we need is our own gas in the short term and nuclear power in the medium term.
The UK has lots of coal reserves. Scotland alone has enough for the next 300 years but we aren’t allowed to access it.