Labour’s commitment was for a “clean energy sprint” so that 100 per cent of the country’s power will be provided “by renewables and nuclear” by 2030.
He said: “We’d be the first major country in the world to do it. And we’re doing it for climate, but we’re also doing it to cut bills – a huge economic opportunity.
“Whether you care about climate or not, this is the right thing to do. Green energy is the future because it’s cheaper.”
Imagine this is true. We can all think of reasons why it isn’t of course – the entire and total lack of dispatchable power in such a system is one good reason for disbelief.
But imagine it is true. OK. So, we’ve already got the system that will provide that outcome – we price on a marginal basis. Power in the system is priced at the highest price necessary to encourage that last unit of energy to enter the system. That means that lower cost power providers make out like bandits.
So, capitalists – entirely unadorned and unforced – will fall over themselves to build out those lower priced energy production systems. The problem is solved. If, of course, the statement about cost is in fact true.
Mr Miliband’s plan is not to leave everything to the system we already have in place. Therefore we should not believe his statement about costs, should we?
Entertainingly, as they shut down the coal burners in Oz, the price of electricity rises. Indeed the Labor party here has already broken its promise to lower electricity bills.
Miliband sounds like as big a drongo as his Aussie counterparts.
If it’s a choice in the Milliband household to cook Vegan Sunday lunch in the main kitchen and the nanny to make a pot noodle in her kitchen, there’s only one winner.
I don’t know if “drongo” has the connotation of fool or liar, but Miliband is the ex-leader of the labour party that was photographed losing a battle of wits with a bacon sarnie. Even for a politician he’s a fuckwit.
More a fool than a liar BiW!! Fuckwit is an excellent translation.
BiW, stupid or incompetent is the polite translation. But fuckwit works too.
I thought the main reason was ‘Because he’s Ed Milliband’…
Note to Ed Milliband (also Chris Bowen here in Aust). Renewable may be cheaper when it’s available. But power that isn’t there when you need it is the most expensive of all.
Going forward it’s a terrible way to set energy prices. The unreliable low cost providers pile into the market as there is money to be made. This would be good if they could supply power 100% of the time, but they can’t. The result of the growing over capacity means that the reliable power generators will provide 100% demand for “most” of the time so the reliable dispatchable providers will run for a relatively short number of days per year. During those few days the energy costs will be huge as they need to recover all their fixed costs over this short period. The more “unreliable” power we have the more expensive the reliable power becomes.
It is completely impossible for the UK to be 100% powered by nuclear and renewables, due to the intermittency of renewables. There is no technology in existence which would allow us to do this.
It would take 200,000 Tesla megapacks to cover a single day’s electricity use. Obviously, 200,000 such batteries wouldn’t be much use in a week of winter low pressure. And they’d cost $200 billion. And it would take Tesla 15 years to produce them at current rates.
Although, if you think Mili’s proposal is stupid, how much more stupid is the pledge to entirely cease the use of fossil fuels by 2050? Electricity is only one-fifth of our energy use.
Just this once let’s watch some other country be first to try it, because it cannot possibly work and AndyF is right, the current scheme does not work in the interests of the consumer. And then there’s the penetration problem, not as exciting as it sounds but the idea that as the proportion of wind and solar increases the grid becomes harder to manage and it all goes titsup way before 100%.
@Rhoda – yeah we really need somewhere to give this a good go and collapse as a result. The Netherlands seems to be well on the way.
‘ so that 100 per cent of the country’s power will be provided “by renewables and nuclear” by 2030.’
And of that percentage what percent nuclear, what percent ‘renewables’ and what ‘renewables’ exactly?
‘Renewables’ include wood/biomass power stations which emit more carbon dioxide than gas and coal and more pollutants than gas – per GWh. But they are at least dispatchable.
“‘Renewables’ include wood/biomass power stations which emit more carbon dioxide than gas and coal and more pollutants than gas – per GWh. But they are at least dispatchable.”
Are they dispatchable? I doubt you can fire up a biomass power station (like Drax) in the minutes needed when the wind drops suddenly. Or turn it off as quickly. One assumes they are rather like coal in that respect, fairly steady baseload, not able to be cut in and out like gas can. Similarly biodigestors have to run constantly because they operate on a biological process – bugs eating the feedstock and producing gas. You can’t just switch the bugs off and on again.
“Just this once let’s watch some other country be first to try it, because it cannot possibly work and AndyF is right, the current scheme does not work in the interests of the consumer. And then there’s the penetration problem, not as exciting as it sounds but the idea that as the proportion of wind and solar increases the grid becomes harder to manage and it all goes titsup way before 100%.”
I don’t believe that the likes of Ed Milliband are that stupid they don’t know what they are doing here. A drooling moron could work out that there’s times the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, and thus you need a dispatchable source of power for those times. No, my conclusion is they know exactly what they are doing and its deliberate. They want to force the masses back in time to when their betters controlled them and their movements, and what better way than to reduce their ability to access energy. That keeps them physically in one place and dependent on the provider of their meagre energy ration for their very existence. The likes of EM will have a big house with a heat pump in the garden, solar panels of the roof, a battery storage scheme in the outhouse and a big Tesla on the driveway. They won’t go hungry, or cold, or be unable to move around. Thats for the peasants.
Milliband is just one of the head girls running things. They prioritise keeping in with the in crowd, and excel at that.
They are however incapable of independent thought.
MC : “@Rhoda – yeah we really need somewhere to give this a good go and collapse as a result. The Netherlands seems to be well on the way.”
Yarp. Although I’ve a feeling Germany will go flat on its arse sooner. Something to do with winters that are more consistently harsher compared to our sort-of-cold-spell. And their insistence that all Nuclear must go as well…
Jim, I dunno. OK, there’s probably an element of “the great unwashed need to sacrifice for the common good” involved, but in Australia at least the pollies spruiking this stuff seem to really believe it. The Greens and recently elected independents are basically ignorant nutcases, but the Labor party aren’t far behind them in messianical zeal for renewables. Even more stupidly, they’re dead set against nuclear power. They honestly seem to believe that enough windmills, battery farms or pumped storage, and a couple of gas peaking plants (soon to be converted to hydrogen, watch this space ) will do the job.
If I hear Chris Bowen say “Aust will be a renewable energy superpower” one more time… WTF is that supposed to even mean?
Grikath: “Germany will go flat on its arse sooner”
Whilst the krauts are still talking the talk, the last I heard was that they are knocking down windmills to make way for a coal mine. And it’s a nice, environmentally friendly, strip mine to boot.
In the second half of this video Tony Heller has a bit to say about German energy policy, including the fact that they seem to be turning back to real energy sources while still mouthing net zero platitudes.
So I think that while Germany and the Netherlands are still in the race to be first to totally destroy their economies, the good old UK has the politicians – in all parties – to show them how it’s done.
We should need reasons not to believe Ed Milliband?
By how much could nuclear power costs be reduced if the 1930-vintage LNT model of harm done by low levels of radiation exposure were replaced by a model that makes more sense of any advances in understanding made since then?
It’s worth scrolling down to the Mental Health Effects section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
to see how effective Moscow gold was in beating up health scares about radiation, though naturally that’s not how WKPD phrases it.
There is no way Sizewell C is going to get built & working by 2030. It may not even happen, despite the government trying to stop rumours that it will be ‘reviewed’ the other day. We need to build them much more quickly but the technology and the regulations & process to do that aren’t with us yet.
People like Miliband have no understanding of the detail you need to make rational decisions, and it seems it’s almost a badge of honour not to.
Cheaper for whom?
Obviously for those whom Ed Millionaireband has decreed should receive a subsidy to be paid by those poorer than them using a pay-as-you-go electricity meter.
*Practising* Jews care about the poor
And of that percentage what percent nuclear, what percent ‘renewables’ and what ‘renewables’ exactly?
Like they gave that a moment’s thought.
Assuming Miliband is of at least average intelligence, he must have access to the same facts as humble bloggers (should he care to look for them).
So his adherence to mainly disproved and shaky climate ‘science’ suggests he is one or more of the following:
Lying
Misinformed (I’m being kind)
Bought
Threatened
Which is it, bacon-sandwich-eating failure?
Miliband is stupid, for sure: but
“… we price on a marginal basis. Power in the system is priced at the highest price necessary to encourage that last unit of energy to enter the system. That means that lower cost power providers make out like bandits”
This isn’t quite right, Tim.
The marginal (balancing) power in the system is priced on a marginal basis, at the highest price necessary .. etc etc. Very large amounts of power in the system are priced at fixed price, having already been sold forward. Indeed, many if not most developers of power plants are pretty much obliged to sell forward (or get equivalent subsidy arrangements), in order to get finance.
The producers who make out like bandits are those (relatively few) that have held their nerve and NOT sold forward at fixed price – called “taking merchant risk”. I’d be very surprised if you could populate the power generation fleet entirely with developers that are willing or able to become such unhedged, fully exposed producers.
Which rather qualifies, if not undermines, the point you are making.
Jim,
I don’t believe that the likes of Ed Milliband are that stupid they don’t know what they are doing here. A drooling moron could work out that there’s times the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, and thus you need a dispatchable source of power for those times. No, my conclusion is they know exactly what they are doing and its deliberate. They want to force the masses back in time to when their betters controlled them and their movements, and what better way than to reduce their ability to access energy.
I think there’s two possibilities. Either:
As someone pointed out on Twatter, they know they can’t get what they want so they’re going to make sure we cant get what we want.
Or my current position, but I’m open to persuasion:
Since they shut down all debate by dismissing any reasonable dissent as climate denying conspiracy theories there’s no “fool” around to tell them they might be wrong, so they’re on a self-reinforcing delusion that everything they say is not only right but also implementable. They’ve become so invested in the righteousness of their cause that the mental harm of admitting they might be wrong means they can’t even contemplate the idea.
And of course there’s plenty of people willing to tell them how right, righteous and brave they are in order to get hold of all those lovely subsides and research grants.
We’re seeing something similar over the current excess deaths and deaths at home crises.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-excess-deaths-higher-now-than-during-covid/
The government and MSM, esp the BBC and Guardian, got so invested in their own righteousness over lockdowns and other Covid measures that they can’t now easily accept the mistakes and so this problem is being ignored. To acknowledge the problem and its cause would be to admit that all those conspiracy theorists who were so vilified might have had a point.
To that end they’re trying to gaslight us in to believing that it was done in good faith because it was novel and nobody knew etc. Fortunately they can’t erase the internet and there’s a list of many of the warnings in this thread:
It’s time to invest in Uninteruptable Power Supply shares. Where can I get some, plus where can I get a UPS before the rush?
The unreliable low cost providers pile into the market as there is money to be made. This would be good if they could supply power 100% of the time, but they can’t.
This should never have been permitted. Energy suppliers should be contracted to supply 100% of the time; if their preferred generation method is only 75% reliable then it should be up to them, not somebody else, to provide the shortfall. Imposing the unreliability costs of “renewables” on the supplier would provide the proper pricing signals to all.
But we get Ed Miliband types designing energy policy for purposes other than energy, so here we are.
BiND – I don’t think it’s quite like covid. I have spoken to a number of very senior businesspeople in my industry about this and they all appear to be believers in the New Church of Climate Change & Net Zero. Of course it’s a mix of genuine belief and cynical/mindless pack following but there’s enough genuine believers to keep the doubters honest.
I was talking to a chap the other day and asked what happened if it become obvious we weren’t getting anywhere on net zero. Initial reaction: “You’re not a denier are you, it’s normally only deniers who ask that sort of question?” When reassured he mumbled something about China being likely to surprise us, after all what about all the solar panels they build, then faltered a bit before saying, well we’ve just got to do more haven’t we, whatever that requires?
Like I said, I’m afraid it’s going to take something serious, like a nation going belly up, to change minds. I just hope it’s not the UK.
The best UPS is a diesel generator. Most UPSs are only designed to give you enough time to do an orderly shutdown, or until the genny starts up.
. . . where can I get a UPS before the rush?
Depends on how uninterruptable. If you want something to get the basics of your household (gas boiler, fridge-freezer, some lights, etc) through 3 hour rolling power cuts, there are battery-inverter solutions on Amazon*. If you want sustained off-grid then you’re looking at some form of generating installation.
*You’ll probably need to spend a couple of grand to get a system with good headroom. It’ll be cheaper to just sit the 3 hours out, unless you have a work requirement.
I’m thinking more keeping the server running, it doesn’t like power to the drives being pulled without warning. And “time to be able to make an orderly shutdown” last time was five hours until I could get home from work after a ten-minute power outage.
@jgh…
Most decent UPSs come with software that will load on your server to automatically do a controlled shutdown. When the power goes out and the UPS kicks in it communicates with the server software and, after waiting a pre-programmed time, if the power is still out, shuts the server down in an orderly fashion. It’s not as good as talking to and warning everyone online at the time but it’s a damned-site better than the plug effectively being pulled.
Just saw that Jezza is looking to remove the EV road tax subsidy from 2025 to cover the circa £1 Bn loss.
Not before time, let those who want green shoulder the cost…..
I was thinking about possible power cuts this winter and how that might be done. In the 70s they had to switch at, probably, the 33kV level so everyone in a fairly large area would go off. These days with the fairly good penetration of smart meters, it would be possible to be much more selective than that. However, I read this from http://www.smartme.co.uk when searching for info on SMETS2 meters:
Can my supply be turned off remotely?
Smart meters have the facility to remotely disconnect and reconnect both the electricity and gas supply. However, suppliers have decided it is too dangerous to remotely disconnect or reconnect, as in the case of disconnection they cannot always be sure that the customer isn’t relying on a supply for serious health reasons and in the case of reconnection the customer may have left a cooker on for example.
The same issues apply to load shedding so I would fully expect the govt to force the companies to tell the meters to turn off.
I wonder if there is yet a process for e.g. people to say “Don’t turn me off, I have a kidney dialysis machine”? Or can such things last OK on batteries for 3 hours?
I have avoided getting a smart meter so far despite being bombarded with texts, posted flyers and emails from my supplier to persuade me to get one. If the meter didn’t contain a big switch I would be more amenable to getting one but even so I can see tariffs moving to match the wholesale 30 minute period with fairly wide variation across the periods.
“Labour’s commitment was for a ‘clean energy sprint'”
Software development has some things to answer for. This “sprint” is a term from Agile, the SD methodology that everyone wants to do (but almost no one actually does, since it doesn’t involve micromanagement from pointy-headed empty suits).
Alternative explanation: the Labour party wants to push a complete changeover under the impression that it would be more difficult to change back if it’s done that way. Never mind that the numbers make it impossible to do.
Bloke in North Dorset said: “Since they shut down all debate by dismissing any reasonable dissent as climate denying conspiracy theories there’s no “fool” around to tell them they might be wrong, so they’re on a self-reinforcing delusion that everything they say is not only right but also implementable. They’ve become so invested in the righteousness of their cause that the mental harm of admitting they might be wrong means they can’t even contemplate the idea.”
Well said there. Too many of our politicians are in an echo chamber, when it comes to issues like this. They are in a situation where it becomes almost impossible for politicians to psychologically to step outside of it. They can’t dissent because they fear the reactions of the herd. This is similar to what I’ve seen on the political extremes of both Left and Right where people hang on to ideas that are questionable evidence-wise because a) they’ve invested too much personally and psychologically in their ideas and b) they fear the mob that they’ve backed turning around and attacking them.
I’m wary of echo chambers, they can be dangerous but also for some comforting. When I use reference sources that are outside of my political side (centre right) I do so because I don’t want to be trapped in an echo chamber and miss a dissenting point that might be useful or valuable.
When I read some of the early papers on Global Warming I realised that compared to many of the people publishing I had more experience of infrared absorption by CO2, of mathematical modelling, of temperature measurement, and of statistical analysis.
And I didn’t share their common background of degrees in feeble subjects from feeble universities. All in all they struck me more as being dim than being crooks. But the crooks arrived soon enough.