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Facepalm with Caroline Lucas

GIQE could contribute to strengthening the UK economy via a carefully costed, nationwide programme to train and employ a ‘carbon army’. This army would be at the frontline of the fight against cold homes by making all of the UK’s 30 million buildings energy efficient, and, where feasible, fitted with solar panels. This would, in the first instance, dramatically reduce energy bills and fuel poverty, whilst also cutting greenhouse gas emission and cutting current dependence on imported energy.

How does putting in a more expensive method of energy generation reduce fuel poverty?

44 thoughts on “Facepalm with Caroline Lucas”

  1. They do love their military metaphors don’t they? Always fighting a “war on” something, the Proggies.

  2. Any cold homes in the UK are due to expensive energy due to having to fund useless green energy schemes. Nearly every home now has a combi boiler. Are the greens going to rip them out and replace them with immersion heaters as well? They do seem to have this aversion to gas, shale gas.

  3. Unicorn farts obviously contribute to greenhouse gas emissions so it will likely be another Greenie initiative where the overall emissions actually increase.

  4. I think this will be ‘carefully costed’ by that mendacious misanthrope… er respected economist Lord Stern to show that providing every home in the country with quadruple glazing, cavity wall insulation and solar panels will cost four shillings and sixpence, whereas not doing all that will cost eleventy gazillion pounds and kill every living creature in the universe.

  5. “Yeah, green regression – way to go!” said Caroline,

    “British scum”,

    “we’ll make the proletariat eat sh*t, that’s the idea”,

    “and if bankrupting the economy via green boondoggles and birdslicers doesn’t work, then we’ll try something else – my dream – to go back to the hunter gatherers and where ‘they’ all live in caves”

    “I’ll still have my 4×4 and the elite will always survive, at the top, leaving the struggle – to the rest”

    Caroline giggled almost helplessly……………..and schoolgirlishly clapped her hands in gleeful mirth,

    “ooh, what fun is Marxist agitating and wanton societal destruction!”

  6. 30 million buildings? Great – my warehouse has walls so thin can hear talking next door with the airbricks between us. And holes in the wall.
    At home could reduce my energy bill by about £25 a month by fitting solar panels. Use far more electricity at night. Leaving the remaining £325 to be paid by us still. Fuel poverty will still apply.

  7. Is there any actual documentary evidence that solar panels reduce CO2 emissions, considering the carbon cost to make, transport, install and maintain them and their respective energy storage, located on a UK rooftop and not in some sunny Californian backyard?

    As a lot energy in the UK is used to heat water so a solar thermal collector is a better option than PV cells. And the abundance of gas powered boilers in use in British homes means converting them to reclaim the lost heat as electricity would have even more of an impact.

    I’d admit that solar panels have come a long way, but they still have a way to go to be a better carbon efficient option, as has the energy storage they require.

    The fixation that greenies have with solar is almost religious, even when money is far better spend on more effective measures.

  8. And the abundance of gas powered boilers in use in British homes means converting them to reclaim the lost heat as electricity would have even more of an impact.

    God only knows how you’d do that. Assuming the boiler is as efficiently designed as possible, there’s pretty much nothing you can do with that waste heat: no point trying to heat water with it, because that’s what the boiler’s just done at maximum possible efficiency. We use waste heat recovery units on our turbogenerators offshore sometimes, and use to the waste heat to increase the temperature of some part of the process, but on a domestic level there’s not much to be done.

  9. My parents have a small combined heat & power unit. As well as solar panels. But then they are well off. The solar is only useful to keep the tv setup on standby on sunny days, and the CHP is most useful in winter when it’s providing heat.

  10. And the greens go beserk when individuals who are not poor want to set up solar farms…..

  11. I’ve a feeling my fridge freezer accounts for about 30% of my electric bill, so to be fair, covering my roof in solar panels would probably knock £3 off my £12 a month bill.

    I leave as a exercise for the reader an estimataion of the payback time for a set of panels installed on my roof…

  12. And what happens to the people who are currently employed to install these things in houses?
    To be honest after more than a decade of free insulation for those who qualify and special tariffs for solar – are there many homes left where people want this but have chosen to delay until now?

  13. Seriously, does anyone really think Lucas gives a flying handshake about energy bills and fuel poverty?

    It’s the thought of cadres marching across the UK that gets her inner thighs going a-tingle.

  14. Bloke in North Dorset

    Martin Davies,

    Who said anything about choice, this is a Green Party proposal. Everything they do is for our own good.

  15. Sixteen weeks ago, Tim assured me in this column that he would be paying off his consulting debts withing six weeks.

    How am I to pay for my air conditioning if this feckless economic pundit continues to pontificate while failing to pay his bills?

  16. She could have her army break the windows in all the buildings. That would REALLY get the economy humming.

  17. Yes. Most political parties do not want to kill me. Greens being the exception.
    They live in their own world. Links to reality optional.
    Came across one candidate a few months back who was trying to convince others – and having some success with a few – that lorries should be banned.

  18. So Much for Subtlety

    How does putting in a more expensive method of energy generation reduce fuel poverty?

    Because it is relative fuel poverty innit? So if we persuade all the stupid middle class Green types, you know, doctor’s wives and the like, to spend a fortune putting in useless things like solar panels, they will be much poorer. And hence closer to the feckless underclass in terms of income. And hence Britain would be more equal.

    It is a win-win really.

  19. Edward

    Green reaction, romanticism and anti-humanism isn’t marxism.

    What is true is that both a decent number of old Marxists, being opportunists and such embrace green ideas as a substitute for thinking and class struggle in the west. Lots of Young people who might call themselves Marxists are ignorant or idiots and do not articulate marxism, just ‘right on bullshit’ which includes much of the green ideology but isn’t related to marxism.

  20. @ Rob
    Solar water-heating panels in the UK are cost-effective, giving a cost-saving far in excess of the return that you could get from putting your spare cash in a building society.
    Solar PV panels are not *yet* profiable without a subsidy in the UK but a dozen years ago they saved southern Californian homeowners money compared to the cost of buyinmhg electricity generated in Colorado and transmitted to California by utility companies requiring a return on theur investment. There has been a lot of progress since then and new-build Solar PV is now competitive with new-build fossil-fuel plants in places like Morocco. They will be economic in Europe this century.

  21. So Much for Subtlety

    john77 – “There has been a lot of progress since then and new-build Solar PV is now competitive with new-build fossil-fuel plants in places like Morocco. They will be economic in Europe this century.”

    But you are not comparing like with like. It may well be true that it is cost-effective to add a few solar power cells here and there. As long as they are simply supplementing the existing power grid. What do you do when the sun does not shine? Well as long as Drax is burning the rain forest, it does not matter. You draw from fossil fuels.

    However, what happens when solar is a significant producer of power? When the whole of the UK is covered in cloud? You have to turn to your back up. Which is what? You can have gas turbines standing by. We do today. But we only have a small fraction of the over all power demand standing by. We don’t need more. Will we need 100% back up for solar? 80%? The costs of building, say, a back up of about 75% of the existing power demand, but leaving it idle most of the time is not small. What will we do at night?

    The other solution is a continent-wide grid. Which means giving the Moroccans the power to turn off our industry.

    I am not sure solar is ever going to be a significant player.

  22. @ SMFS
    Have you heard of batteries? 40 or so years ago I was a fan of Dinorwic.
    But you are going off on a tangent – I was not proposing in that post a complete replacement of fossil fuiels by solar PV (much thoughI might wish it) – I was merely pointing out that solar water heating is already economic in the UK, and has been for a generation. Thanks to Wilson I had to come south to get a job but my father remained in the north-east and installed solar water-heaing panels in the late 1980s; a decade later I got the chance to do do the same. It has paid me back two or three times since then and I expect it to do so again until I die.

  23. Bloke in Costa Rica

    Batteries don’t work. They have a specific energy (energy per unit mass) 60–100 times lower than fossil fuels. Taking into account conversion efficiencies in (charging) and out (discharging) the battery pack you need to power the average UK house through the 19 hours or so of twilight/darkness in midwinter is enormous, and expensive. 50 kWh of Li-ion battery is almost 14 kAh at the 3.6V nominal output voltage.

  24. So Much for Subtlety

    Dongguan John – “Wind Farms on the moon. You know it makes sense.”

    I totally support wind farms on the moon. In fact I have a plan. We take the excess CO2 from the Earth and from Venus. What we don’t dump on Mars, we dump on the Moon. With half the moon in the sunlight and half in the shade, winds would whip around at some speed. We need to maintain a temperature neither too hot or too cold, but hey, those Greenhouse gas models work, right?

    Admittedly cost is a bit of a problem. But I think it is solvable.

    john77 – “Have you heard of batteries? 40 or so years ago I was a fan of Dinorwic.”

    Sure but then you have the add the massive costs of those batteries to the equation. Hence it won’t be economic. George Monbiot talks of damming every valley in Scotland in an effort to provide enough pumped storage. It is a really bad idea.

  25. @ SMFS
    I am not, repeat *not*, responsible for George Monbiot nor for the incompetence of his maths teachers. Secondly, the capital cost of Dinorwic was a fraction of what we should have had to pay for the extra nuclear power stations which would have been needed without it. Thirdly you are just plain wrong about the cost of pumped storage making the whole thing uneconomic – Norway uses pumped storage to balance the peaks and troughs of Denmark’s wind-powered grid. Fourthly, you are irrelevant as well as wrong because I was stating that solar power can be used as a partial, not total, substitute for conventional power sources. Fifthly, cloud does not totally eliminate the sunshine falling on solar cells, whether PV or for water heating.

  26. I think if you gave the Moon an atmosphere, it would all freeze out on the shaded side and form a kind of creeping ice cap, circling the Moon every 28 days. Or just freeze out entirely in the South Pole basin, one or the other.

  27. Freeze? Like at the poles on Terra?
    Put enough there it can retain some heat in atmosphere.

  28. Bloke in Costa Rica

    At the risk of taking the bait and looking a bit po-faced, lunar escape velocity is only 1600 m·s⁻¹ and the rms velocity, for example, of monatomic oxygen at 473K (200 °C) is about half that, so a significant fraction of the (Maxwell-Boltzmann distributed) velocities of atoms in any lunar atmosphere would be above escape velocity. If the moon were a lot further out it might be able to hold on to some vestigial atmosphere but it wouldn’t “condense out at the poles”. Water can, because its freezing point is so much higher.

  29. So Much for Subtlety

    john77 – “I am not, repeat *not*, responsible for George Monbiot nor for the incompetence of his maths teachers.”

    Actually when he does power, his conclusions are stupid, but he is rigorous in a way that does his teachers credit. With a firm hand, Monbiot can actually write some good stuff. Unlike, say, Polly.

    “Secondly, the capital cost of Dinorwic was a fraction of what we should have had to pay for the extra nuclear power stations which would have been needed without it.”

    Well storage. It is hard to use a nuclear reactor for storage. The point being that all the best hydro sites have been used. If we could build cheaply, we have built cheaply. Can anyone seriously name another site you would want to put a dam on? Britain is not like China or Brazil. I am not opposed to the idea of pumped storage. I just recognise we have run out of sites – and the costs of doing so would have to be included in the costs of solar.

    “Thirdly you are just plain wrong about the cost of pumped storage making the whole thing uneconomic – Norway uses pumped storage to balance the peaks and troughs of Denmark’s wind-powered grid.”

    Actually I did not say pumped storage was uneconomic. I said batteries were. If we had dozens of sites to build new dams, it might make sense. The ecological costs of damming every valley is Scotland ought to be obvious even to George Monbiot. It is not a good idea. It may not be economic either, I suspect not. We are not Norway. We pine for fjords like that.

    “Fourthly, you are irrelevant as well as wrong because I was stating that solar power can be used as a partial, not total, substitute for conventional power sources.”

    By all means. I am not sure that was obvious from your post but clearly we are in agreement.

    “Fifthly, cloud does not totally eliminate the sunshine falling on solar cells, whether PV or for water heating.”

    Not sure why that is relevant.

    Ian B – “I think if you gave the Moon an atmosphere, it would all freeze out on the shaded side and form a kind of creeping ice cap, circling the Moon every 28 days. Or just freeze out entirely in the South Pole basin, one or the other.”

    That is where the climate models come in. We need to maintain sufficient pressure and heat that the CO2 would not freeze out. At some combination, hot gas would come roaring around the Moon, but it would not freeze out totally.

  30. And of course, the solar panels grow on trees.

    Or can be bought with money that grows on trees, which is the same thing.

    It must be true, Alex Salmond told me.

  31. @John77: Solar panels are competitive with building society interest? Have you looked at building society interest lately? 0.5% if you’re lucky…

    And they work fine in California or Mexico? So what? Those are sunny places at lower latitudes, did you notice?

    Good grief.

  32. Pumped storage? Guys, we have already used all the (three) possible sites for significant pumped storage in the UK. Unless you’re thinking of literally moving mountains, which might not be such a great idea from an EROEI point of view.

  33. @ Andrew Duffin
    Oops, failure to update comment!
    I installed solar panels nearly 20 years ago when real interest rates were positive. I reckon they have repaid me twice over or more.

  34. @ SMFS
    You quote me saying “john77 – “Have you heard of batteries? 40 or so years ago I was a fan of Dinorwic.”
    Sure but then you have the add the massive costs of those batteries to the equation. Hence it won’t be economic. George Monbiot talks of damming every valley in Scotland in an effort to provide enough pumped storage. It is a really bad idea.”
    Then you claim that you are excluding pumped storage from your definition of batteries…
    “Not sure why that is relevant.” Because you said “However, what happens when solar is a significant producer of power? When the whole of the UK is covered in cloud?”
    We shall need some back-up for solar when it gets to be a major part of power supply to the grid, but not the 99% back-up we need for wind-power (there are examples on the National Grid website of wind-power producing 1% of capacity in January when demand for power is at or near its peak).
    “Well storage” – if we didn’t have storage we should have needed much more capacity and nuclear was recognised as the best choice at the time Dinorwic was planned and they started to build. Tony Benn had ruined our lead in peaceful nuclear power before they finished building Dinorwic so the follow-up pumped storage project on Exmoor never got built.
    “Can anyone seriously name another site you would want to put a dam on?” Actually you may not need another site: all you need for a pumped storage system is two bodies of water, one feeding the other, on different levels. Most hydro-power stations in Scotland could be adapted to become pumped storage, generating power at night and pumping uphill during daylight. Dinorwic has capacity of 1800MW, there are *currently* three pumped storage facilities but a fourth is under construction at Glyn Rhonwy and several others could be be built – one was scheduled to be built on Exmoor before the “dash for gas” so your naive belief “I just recognise we have run out of sites” is inaccurate. For instance, the locks between Loch Lochy and Loch Ness could be converted: more effectively but without a pun, Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite Lake, or Buttermere and Crummock Water, or Grasmere and Rydal Water and Windermere, or … could be used.
    I am glad/reassured that we are in partial agreement – no single source of energy should be relied on for everything, but solar clearly has value even in the UK.

  35. @ Andrew Duffin
    Read the wiki site on Dinorwig – Glyn Rhonwy and Exmoor make five! And that’s without the Lake District or Loch Ness or Loch Morar or ….

  36. @ Andrew Duffin
    Try *reading* my first post.
    Solar *water heating* panels are economic in the UK. Solar PV has been economic in California for a decade.
    You are grossly ignorant and display your ignorance. Some engineers in the UK build their own solar water heating panels and pay for the equipment from their pocket money.

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