Energy efficiency and renewables – together the cheapest, quickest and most effective way to deliver energy efficiency – were ignored, entirely. This was gross irresponsibility.
Given that we’ve been pouring tens of billions into both of those then it would seem that they’re not the solution. Which, to the problem of dispatchable energy, they’re not.
Plus, of course, if vast retail prices and huge profits to be made from them do not produce both renewables and efficiency then there’s something wrong with the original diagnosis, isn’t there?
You beat me to it Tim!
I was actually going to say his post on The Queen showed a surprising degree of restraint for such a cretin – indeed I hoped it would be a quiet day but but he could not help himself.
Don’t forget he supports XR, JSO, IB and the new Animal Rebellion – therefore identifying himself as a terrorist backer. In addition, his push for ‘energy efficiency’ reminds me of his predilection for projects that are ‘Shovel ready’ – which is of course nothing like fascism, unlike Truss who is so right wing she makes the fascist Johnson, candidly look Left Wing. He truly wants us all to starve. An odious piece of garbage.
I can’t help but wonder if what’s going on at the moment isn’t a blessing in disguise.
The green lobby had convinced people that Net Zero could be attained by a seamless transition to renewables. No tears to be shed. Everything would proceed without a hitch to the bright carbon-free uplands of the future. In fact what’s happening now would be inevitable at some point. There is no practical way to solve the intermittency problem or likely to be in the foreseeable future. Apart from gas.
So in the coming months the public will get a taste of the future. And there’s no chance of the Greens being able to lie their way out of it. The public’s attitudes are going to change.
@ BiS
You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.
@SCott Adams
The average member of the general public is pretty stupid.
And half are stupider than that.
I was surprised that arch republican Richard Murphy was compelled to use his blog to Queef on the Queen.
Another example of the tendency of the wretched Murphy to make every subject principally about himself.
@BiSS & SA
Indeed.
Don’t overestimate the public stupidity, they have shown remarkable wisdom in choices, on the rare occasions when asked with a real choice.
Redwall election “Anything but Corbyn”, Brexit, …
The problem is identikit party politics, which presents them with no real choice, just two versions of the same blob, and a stupid lying media which turns ‘noisy troublemaking loons’ into “Widespread public protest”.
Coming soon example will be fracking: So people of Nimbyshire, you get to choose on whether you support fracking in Nimbyshire:
Option 1: Yes.
Option 2: No, and so your grid power is switched off Thursdays to Sundays inclusive.
You have a free choice, but choices have consequences.
May need a national blackout first though.
On a related note: Anyone know if a “Black Start” is now possible? Last report I read on this, from several power station closures ago, said it was marginal (but might take up to 4 weeks!). So now, maybe not possible.
I expect a live test will be tried next Jan/Feb, though not by choice.
Can it be that what’s wrong with the original diagnosis is the idea that capitalism is in any sense efficient?
If prices are so irrational that renewables produce most electricity in Washington state, yet the utility commission has to set rates to guarantee a profit rate, isn’t capitalism disproved? https://geo.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Geology/Engaging_Adults_in_Science_and_Energy/02%3A_Energy_Choices_for_PA_and_the_US/2.04%3A_New_Page/2.4.01%3A_New_Page
Off topic you…!
A giddy Queen there. State visit 1969.
https://youtu.be/n-0hROUhslg
https://youtu.be/th8K8N0Z9D8
WaDoWa: You’re not describing capitalism there, you’re railing against free markets using an example of a market that is not free, and complaining that theoretical perfect efficiency by pointing to an example of something that is not perfectly efficient. No economist claims that (all) markets are efficient, just that example X is a description of what would happen in an efficient market.
Just as Ohm’s Law is an idealised description of what happens when objects obey Ohm’s Law.
Does Murphy really expect us to take his views on climate change seriously?
This is a single man living in a house with 4 bedrooms and 2 public rooms. His carbon footprint is immense even without considering his history of flying off to sundry civil society conferences.
Both wind and solar require planning permission (except for some small domestic installations), so it’s entirely possible that the successful builder of such systems can make a huge profit while there is a severe shortage of such projects. Apart from offshore wind, they suffer severly from nimbyism, with Liz Truss (and Rishi Sunak) recently criticising solar farms. Maybe in a free market we would already have vastly more wind and solar, but it’s far from a free market.
Maybe in a free market we would already have vastly more wind and solar, but it’s far from a free market.
In a free market we’d have vastly less wind & solar. Free market implies no subsidies & most wind & solar to date has been a subsidy harvesting exercise. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for wind. When it’s cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives. Solar for electricity generation will never be viable for the UK unless the costs of panel+installation drops by a massive amount. It’s not even currently viable here in Spain. Or you’d see all our roofs covered in PEV panels.
” Free market implies no subsidies & most wind & solar to date has been a subsidy harvesting exercise.”
I ‘think’ that solar at least now gets no subsidies, not sure about wind. I seem to remember that large scale solar subsidies were withdrawn about 2015/16 ish. Of course they in no way carry any of the costs of providing electric when the sun isn’t shining, so they are still subsidised to that extent, but not in cash terms. The price of solar panels has dropped enough that large scale schemes now make financial sense in their own right, I certainly have had a lot of unsolicited offers from solar developers in the last 2-3 years to cover large parts of my farm with them, all offering £800-1000/acre rents. And of course the rise in electric prices will be helping the viability of such schemes.
Jim said:
“I ‘think’ that solar at least now gets no subsidies”
Doesn’t it get paid according to its theoretical rather than actual output – which for a very intermittent source is a pretty large effective subsidy?
I would imagine, with a climate like southern Spain’s, it’s a good case whether they’re economically viable. If they were, Our roofs would be covered in them. There’s some legacy installations from when the government was encouraging them through a subsidy scheme. But it reneged on the deal leaving people who had taken advantage of it with manky solar panels & a load of debt.
Maybe with the current high energy prices they may make more sense. But historically they haven’t.
Also worth mentioning that the dagos are quite frugal in electricity use. You wont find many households in the UK with less than 30 amp supplies. 70’s common. It’s quite normal here to have supplies in single figures. This massive apartment I live in had 15 amps when I first moved in. About enough to run the aircon. I paid a lot of money for the upgrade & a lot more on the bills, in addition to the juice actually used. So that alone’s a big incentive to go PEV.
Musing a late-life career change to arable farming so that, next time some arsehole claims we don’t have enough useless windmills, I can feed em to the pigs, Arold.
Steve
That’s assuming the Great and the Good on these boards don’t send the Security Services to have you arrested have you arrested for being A ‘ Russian Troll’ and a ‘racist’
Bis, I remember some time ago, seeing a clip on Al Jazeerah about a whole Spanish town that had clubbed together to cover the place in solar panels and are now left with panels that don’t work and a massive debt because as you said, the government changed the rules halfway through the first half and withdrew the subsidies. If solar doesn’t work in Spain it isn’t going to work anywhere.
Steve, pendant alert: it was “feed im to the pigs, Errol”.
VP – they may take our lives, but they’ll never take… OUR LIONS
Addolff – oh yeah. I haven’t seen that film since it came out on DVD (so, about 5 years ago, right?)
Washington state when it’s short of power buys it from its next door neighbour BC which is so heavily renewables focused that the electricity generation company is called BC Hydro (confusing when you first arrive).
The project to build a new hydro dam has faced years of protest and legal battles.
One of the argument used is that you could get the same electrical output from wind for less money which conveniently ignores the on demand aspect of hydro. They also argue that hydro as a renewable source contributes to climate change and carbon dioxide levels “dam reservoirs are a significant source of carbon emissions because of anaerobic bacteria that break down vegetation and release carbon dioxide and methane. The razing of forests to make way for dams and transmission lines releases stored carbon into the atmosphere, while the drying out of wetlands destroys another valuable carbon sink.”
I looked up some numbers on UK energy use. In 2019 we used the equivalent of 1,651 TwH of power, however only 304 TwH of this was electricity. This means to electrify the nation we need to produce 5x as much electricity as today.
Nuclear and renewables produce 10.6% of our total power, so if we are to ditch fossil fuels (Bozo the Clown said we needed to be 100% powered by ‘clean’ fuels by 2035…) we need to increase power generation from these sources tenfold. That means (assuming we scale both up proportionately) we’d need 90 nuclear power stations and ten times whatever acreage of on- and offshore wind we have. I have not seen the slightest evidence of this power generation capacity being built nor the grid being upgraded to cope with it.
That’s before we get to the problem of intermittent renewables. I saw a Bloomberg report from 2018 which cited nine days of calm around the UK, with wind only providing 5% of electricity, compared with an annual average of 36%.
It would take 1.5 million Tesla megapack batteries, at a cost of $15 trillion, to store enough electricity to power an electrified UK for just one day. I haven’t tried to work out how much ‘green’ hydrogen we’d need to get us through a calm week, or how much electricity would be needed to create that hydrogen or where the fuck we’d put it.
Plus the UK population is set to be 75 million by 2050, which implies increased usage of 13% on today’s levels.
So, obviously, the whole thing is a crock of shit and not only is it impossible to achieve, we are doing nothing to achieve it other than banning things. You could insulate every home, force heat pumps on people and ban private car ownership and it will still make fuck all difference.
It is all very well claiming this is a cunning and evil plan by Them Liberal Elites, but it can’t be. Because it is bollocks. Even if you TLE banned cars and flights and heating for the proles, it still doesn’t work. It is a cult, or a religion, and it makes no more sense than that African chick who told her tribe to kill all their cattle to appease the gods….
MC – yes, this is why I discount the more elaborate conspiracy theories.
We are not ruled by Machiavellian philospher-tyrants playing 7d underwater chess while masterfully manipulating The Future. We’re ruled by deeply unimpressive midwits and dorks such as Klaus Schwab or whatever his name is, and their increasingly dumb and unbelievable pet politicians.
There’s no “plan” as such, merely a series of involuntary spasms as the bills for the last 50 years of foolishness come due.
“Doesn’t it get paid according to its theoretical rather than actual output – which for a very intermittent source is a pretty large effective subsidy?”
I don’t think so. My sister has a small solar array on the roof of one of her barns and she gets 20p/Kwh she feeds into the grid. Unfortunately for her that price is fixed for the life of the scheme, obviously when she had them installed nearly a decade ago everyone thought 20p/unit was a ‘good deal’.
We bought a house 6 years ago with an existing PV array and benefiting from FITS payments. At the time we were getting a shade over 49 pence per unit and now get over 60 pence per unit.
Currently contributing over £2k per annum towards our energy costs all paid by the subsidies on the bills of you mugs.
Thanks all 😎
Here in New South Wales Australia solar roof panels are very common, we have about 20 of them on our place, cost around $A4000, after Government subsidy. I have just paid our electricity bill for the last three months $A800 (about 450 UK pounds). For that, we run the Air Con heating at 20c from 7am to 8pm daily, all electric cooking, dishwasher etc. It would be interesting to compare bills with those of you in the UK Not sure what the situation is in other states in Australia, maybe Boganboy can advise.
@BiS
Of you build a solar farm, you make damn sure that it’s orientated for maximum collection, i.e. it’s laid out facing south and at 90-latitude degrees to the vertical. The problem with PV on the roof is that most roofs are not arranged in this way, so you’re already losing a significant proportion of your possible energy source.
I’be been bemused to see solar panels in Alaska and the Yukon and assume it must be some subsidy scheme as for most of the year they are likely producing next to nothing
Jim in the Antipodes, I’d say you know more about it than me!!
However solar panels are definitely in in Queensland and Western Australia. And to the best of my knowledge in the rest of Oz.
There are plenty on the houses around me. Though not on the old family home of course, since the roof is made of fibro-asbestos cement. I decided it’d cost me about $200 000 to replace the roof and add the panels when they first came in.
Of course, time having chugged on, the roof is crumbling, and it’d cost me even more to replace it now. Sigh!!!!!!
Still they stuck some tape on it after the floods, and it doesn’t leak at present. What to do??? I’ll think about it tomorrow!!!
Since Wa state is a significant net exporter of electricity (but even net exports are a fraction of rejected electrical energy)?
Also, @ Women dou XiangGang ren:
《No economist claims that (all) markets are efficient, just that example X is a description of what would happen in an efficient market.》
So, are economists arguing about angels on pinheads? If you honestly put bounds on market efficiency, do you end up with Fischer Black who writes in “Noise”:
《we might define an efficient market as one in which price is within a factor of 2 of value, i.e., the price is more than half of value and less than twice value.11 The factor of 2 is arbitrary, of course. Intuitively, though, it seems reasonable to me, in the light of sources of uncertainty about value and the strength of the forces tending to cause price to return to value. By this definition, I think almost all markets are efficient almost all of the time. “Almost all” means at least 90%.》
I.e., not very efficient?