As the Tories plunge ahead with far more expensive, disruptive and unpopular fracking, onshore wind energy is the cheapest of all renewables, and Britain one of the most wind-rich spots on earth.
So, fracking is not in fact an electricity producing technology. It’s a method of gaining access to a fossil fuel. Presumably, fracking would reduce the cost of that fossil fuel and thus of electricity produced from natural gas (as it has in the US) but it’s still not really directly comparable, is it?
Even better though. Here’s the report that Polly herself points to on the costs of renewables. That report stating that dams, hydropower, are considerably cheaper than onshore wind.
Facts, has she heard of the idea?
Wind is free. Therefore the power produced from it is free. Only nasty Tories as so blinkered and small-minded as to worry about the costs of windmills and gen sets and power cables. You complete pendant, Worstall.
“Unpopular fracking”
Is it though? There are the loud protest groups, but what is the general public’s opinion?
I’m sure I read that U.S. & Canada are both broadly in favour now they’ve seen the cheaper prices and the small footprint of fracking wells once they are up and running.
GlenDorran,
This is my unrepresentative anecdote. I know a number of far left people, anyway at a birthday party a few years ago I bumped into a ‘green anarchist’ who had been protesting fracking for a few weeks up in Lancashire, the place where that walking drugs shipment Bez motioned up and made himself out to be a prat again.
Anyway I asked him how the protest camp was, he witter on about it descending into an anti-cop protest with the usual suspects ( him and people who protest in places for weeks) led it that way.
I asked him what the locals thought of their protest, fracking and whether they came out to protest. In answer to all three he said ‘oh the locals didn’t give a shit, we never saw them’.
Manicured and lacquered nails, done for her – always, holidays spent in Tuscany, glory it’s a pampered life! Lo! and a cushy sinecure and no money cares – who cares darling? Writing tosh – easy money.
Private school and silver spoon, indeed. Steeped in the Socialist sanctimony of Norf Landan – Hampstead, beyond to Islington and Notting Hill, champagne all the way in the salons and dinner parties lavished by the unspeakable and ‘liberal’ group think, going green……….all the way baby.
Electricity?
Surely! It’s just a matter of a flick of a switch and of course choosing the crystal chandeliers, and then, with lots of low energy bulbs for the servants and the masses – natch.
Everything lefties like = cheap, an investment, environmentally sound, etc. etc. etc.
Everything lefties don’t like = expensive, taxpayer-subsidised, polluing etc.etc. etc.
To be strictly accurate, Ed, Pol’s secondary education was care of Holland Park comp. And the Notting Hill she used to groove around in, in her Afghan, was the Notting Hill of Portabello Road & All Saints Road. And that’s basically Pol. What happens to middle-class hippies after Hawkwind split.
@FlatcapArmy: Indeed. it’s also terribly neoliberal to want power on demand whatever the weather and so worry about the need to have backup fossil fuel capacity idling until the wind drops. Or to consider whether increasing the price of generation by having the maintenance costs of the wind turbies (likely to be more per turbine than for fossil generators because of the facts that they’re necessarily bigger and exposed to the elements, not to mention the fact you need more turbines per MW spread over a larger footprint) on top of the maintenance costs for the backup generation capacity…
I think Polly’s long-term plan for her own electricity needs is to have an army of poor people on exercise bikes linked up to a genny.
She will provide jobs, reduce emissions and have something to talk about at dinner parties.
Once she cracks the issue of how to avoid the food miles necessary to give the serfs the extra calories. Though she may just not, it will be for their own good.
If we could guarantee that Polly and the rest of the gormless clowns were the ones hanging from lampposts when the mob kicked off because the lights went out and stayed out, it would almost be worth it.
But they won’t, because they have the wealth and mobility to flee the nest after they’ve shit in it, again.
GlenDorran – the anti-fracking campaign is pure astroturfing.
Beardy-weirdy little Schnauzer-men who send letters to their local papers warning of earthquakes, plagues, and lentil harvests being devastated.
Wobbly-bellied Wiccans crying about the rape of Goddess-Mother Earth and how we should respect the spirits of the nettles and the precious, irreplaceable habitats for sticky willies.
Skeletor-thin hipster beta-boys hoping to cop a shag off some rainbow-haired she-twink if they fight the power, yeah?… and meanwhile, the unfragrant objects of their affections are being drilled by undercover policemen.
Charlie Manson type hard-eyed eco-freaks who wouldn’t be in circulation if not for the disastrous “care in the community” policy.
Childlike simpletons who thought James Cameron’s Avatar was a documentary.
Normal, healthy, attractive people with above-average personal hygeine love fracking. Gaia has something we need, and we’re going to plunder her for it with our giant metal patriarchal cisgendered phallic drills.
Don’t worry, she likes it.
Skeletor-thin hipster beta-boys hoping to cop a shag off some rainbow-haired she-twink if they fight the power, yeah?… and meanwhile, the unfragrant objects of their affections are being drilled by undercover policemen.
Heh heh!
Fracking protest may work for a time. Will they continue to work as other sources of oil dry up? As prices rise?
Cannot see governments listening to them then – and will be a lot more wells then.
Oi Stevo gerrablog! That was very good. And I say that as someone with some skepticism about the dash to track.
Tim, not sure there’s much potential for dams and hydropower in the UK (other than tidal).
Tim, are you being a bit unfair re hydro? Clearly cheap where it is feasible. But Britain is not sloshing with powerful rivers to harness, so hydro is never going to be a major component for us.
Incidentally, what do the projected future cost curves for solar versus onshore wind look like? Before/after allowance is made for British latitude and cloud cover? Is the gap between conditions in south of England and North of Scotland sufficiently large that even in two decades time they are likely to need a different energy mix?
Trumped by Ben S, in part. But the query stands!
By far the best aspect about hydro is that it acts as a giant battery (storing potential energy) that can be released when the demand is high, and any surplus energy in the grid used to pump water back into the reservoir (which isn’t efficient, but it doesn’t need to be). Whereas there isn’t any way to store wind short of the method employed by my lower bowels following a hearty curry.
Will no one think of the fish?
Re Tim Newman at 12:35 – this is pumped storage. Hydro on the whole is not very useful in the UK, because the vertical relief is so low, and the potential reservoir sites of the slightest use are in National Parks or AONBs. Pumped storage only works when the energy to pump water back into the reservoir is genuinely cheap, and guaranteed available to keep it topped up for when the energy is needed.
Plus, Hydro is incredibly dangerous as its record of fatalities shows – even if I discarded Banquiao and only counted Vaiont, I would end up with an annual figure for Hydro direct fatalities that is similar to that for nuclear throughout the whole of its history, although if one discards Banquiao, then one should also discard Chernobyl!
There were over three times as many people killed building the Hoover Dam than there were prompt fatalities at Chernobyl.
When I was a young, callow idealistic knob, back in the 60s or 70s, I was a huge admirer of Greenpeace and believed passionately that the oil was running out. Any factual, logical, scientific arguments to prove that it wasn’t were infuriating. Not really sure why – presumably it is some form of doomsday denial – the wish to say, soon the oil will be gone and then you’ll be sorry. The emotional response to fracking is along those lines, I imagine.
Hydro on the whole is not very useful in the UK
Quite. I was thinking of Norway.
There were over three times as many people killed building the Hoover Dam than there were prompt fatalities at Chernobyl.
I bet a fair few died building Chernobyl! Not that we’d have been told.
one of the most wind-rich spots on earth
Irrelevant factoid. The wind does not blow when you want power, so it needs to be stored, and that drastically reduces efficiency and increases the energy payback. It is this simple fact that seems to elude many wind-lovers.
Perhaps Mr Musk may come up with a wonderful new energy storage device some day, but right now the lack of such a device makes wind a bad option.
Besides, didn’t we decide a few years back we were approaching peak wind
Rob Harries – “I know a number of far left people, anyway at a birthday party a few years ago I bumped into a ‘green anarchist’ who had been protesting fracking for a few weeks up in Lancashire”
I am curious – how does a Green Anarchist stop anyone fracking? Let us suppose we have had a revolution and all the Capitalists have been put against the wall. Suppose I happen to live next to a now deserted fracking plant, decorated with the rotting corpse of the chairman of BP. And suppose Tim Newman wanders past and the head of the local Revolutionary Committee asks him to get fracking. What are they going to do? They can’t send in the Rozzers can they?
How precisely do Anarchists stop people doing what they want?
mike fowle – “When I was a young, callow idealistic knob, back in the 60s or 70s, I was a huge admirer of Greenpeace and believed passionately that the oil was running out.”
There has long been an argument that fossil fuels are not biological in origin. That they were cooked up inorganically when the planet was created. And hence there is probably a lot more of them than we think:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
It is not a popular theory among professionals, but it is certainly interesting. Especially as this week, NASA has taken time off making Muslims feel better about producing nothing but terrorism and FGM to point out that Titan has more oil than the Earth:
http://www.space.com/4968-titan-oil-earth.html
That was certainly not the result of plant decay.
I hope it is true because it suggests that human-type life may be a lot more common than we think. It may even be that, you know, we can shag other alien races like in Star Trek. And who hasn’t wanted to have a passionate fling with a Green-skinned alien chick from Alpha Centauri?
Intergalactic space squirrels must be amazing. I can’t even imagine what genial space ostriches will be like.
And pendants corner: that alien chick must have really thick green skin if she can live on a star.
GlenDorran – “And pendants corner: that alien chick must have really thick green skin if she can live on a star.”
I don’t know. Alpha Centauri is a binary system. So let us assume said Green Alien Chick lives in a civilisation so advanced that they needed to build a Dyson sphere in order to capture all the energy of one of those suns. Then there is an obvious solution – if they stand on the surface it might be a little too hot and the gravity too extreme. But if they pull back a little, the gravity will decrease until it is zero, meaning there will be a sweet spot with exactly 1 g pulling them down into the sun.
They need to build a concrete (or some other form of unobtainium) shell around the sun at precisely that distance. That way they can capture all the energy they want – although they would need a pretty impressive cooling system to dump the waste heat. And they can live on the outer surface under the light of the other sun. And exactly 1 g.
The day may be a bit long.
And needless to say they must have done this rather quickly and rather recently. Because we haven’t noticed as the light of their construction torches has not reached us yet.
@SMFS:
Thanks, hadn’t thought of that. I was focussed on the space squirrels.