Batteries can charge on windy or sunny days cheaply, or even for free, and then deploy that power when needed. The plant is expected to offer the equivalent of 2,080 megawatts – a decent sized power station – for an hour.
…
Blueprints for the world’s largest battery on the site of an old coal-fired power station in Manchester, storing enough energy for 36,000 homes for a week, have won approval from planning officials.
It’s to cost £750 million. So we’d only need 1,000 of these to cover British housing for a still winter week then.
Sigh.
Homes. Lying b*tards.
Only a part of the grid demand feeds homes. What about all the shops, offices, factories, trains, cars, prisons, water & sewerage treatment, etc etc etc.
The answer to the question: Not over 10 without taking their shoes & socks off. Arts graduates, don’t you love to hate them. Howard Mustoe is 14½ & his Mum says he’s a very clever boy but should tidy his room more often.
Of course they can count. But to criticise is to to be a denier and besides if the planet will be a lifeless husk by 2100 then what alternative do we have. Climate Emergency!!!!!
We’re doomed I think. I don’t see this madness train being derailed by maths until it’s far too late.
There’s a piece on the BBC site about why EVs are the future. It covers all the well worn ground, reliability, range, cost charging points, but never mentions the most important thing, where’s the generating capacity going to come from?
How many ‘still weeks’ per year? Ten, twenty, thirty? And then there’s all the rest of the ‘leccy users. As TtC points out.
And how much bigger does the generating system need to be to cover the total demand and charging all those batteries?
If God had meant us to use windmills, He wouldn’t have invented nukes.
PS. He’s probably thinking, ‘The bloke’s a bloody moron. That’s why I invented fracking!!!!’
I see the 36000 homes for a week as only an illustration in the PR release. In the article it explains that this facility will help smooth out delivery whilst a related “liquid air” facility spins up when called upon.
OK so, leaving aside the PR illustrations, having a battery to smooth things over seems a logical concept. Is that workable?
God did intend man to use windmills. But only the Dutch. Because He didn’t have enough land left over to give them an entire country.
Geoffers; probably workable, Dinorweg sort of does the same thing with water. The firm involved apparently has sort of hydrogen plant thingy on the same industrial site in Manchester.
It strikes me that what’s happening is that the facilities are being pushed out towards the edges of the grid, so the smoothing/matching/balancing is very local. Don’t know if that’s correct or not.
Also, it’s not clear how long the batteries take to re-charge.
It turns out that the UK had an experimental scheme back in the ’90s or early ’00s with flow batteries. Ran into a fair few problems with the technology, and it never came into service and was abandoned.
Is a climate denier what they use to measure the thickness of tights for cold weather ?
Any ladies ( or pervs ) here know ?
Have a look at https://openinframap.org/
You’ll see lots of batteries installed pretty recently. And they are almost all being used for smoothing as I understand it – which makes sense given the variety of power sources currently being used, many of which have variable output, which in turn needs matching to variable demand.
What ticks me off is when these batteries get reported as if they are intended for long term storage to replace gas power stations on still cloudy days. There actually are batteries intended for that too, but that’s a very different sized job.
. . . whilst a related “liquid air” facility spins up when called upon.
More stupid. There’s a carbon dioxide based system that does the same job at ambient temperatures, uses less power and has much less complexity. Needs room for a big tent, though, which may be an issue in a city.
Still out by a factor of 3:
Supply:
2,080 MW for 1 hour = 2,080 MWh
Demand
Avg consumption for an avg home = 1kW
36,000 homes x 1kW = 36,000 kW = 36 MW
36 MW x 24 hours x 7 days = 6,048 MWh for the week
In order for their sums to be correct, you would need avg consumption to be only ~300W per household.
Two things:
1) 300W is a fridge. That’s it. And a small one at that. Nothing else running. No water heaters, no lights, no internet kit/routers/wifi
2) And they expect that load to remain constant and not rise? Air Source Heat Pumps? Car chargers?
@ Tim the Coder
They aren’t actually lying: Manchester is quite happy to see all businesses close down whenever the wind stops blowing and reserve battery power for homes.
Consequences such as widespread bankruptcies, mass unemployment and people starving to death can all be conveniently blamed on “greedy capitalism”.
Of course the week’s usage is based on summertime, not on the electricity that will be consumed in winter when all those homes will have switched from efficient gas boilers to heat-pumps.
I have mentioned before, if all those peeps who tell us they believe we must use less fossil fuel actually stopped using fossil fuels there would be enough for the rest of us and (the illusionary problem of) gorbal worming would be solved. And the annoying cunts would be stuck at home with no leccy, no gas, no internet, no TV and no ability to drive to the smoke and cause mayhem.
I did enjoy this stunt pulled on the JSO wankers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P0bN4Tmel0.
More of this please.
Does Grikath agree with you BiS??
The P-G;
This was a right old botch sometime ago, but very roughly each EV whilst charging is probably equivalent to running the fridge and the freezer for about 8 hours, so 3 (to get 24 hours) EVs = (some part of) demand from a single dwelling. Or something close to that.
Then number of dwellings in the UK vs number of ICE vehicles to be replaced starts to give some really bonkers numbers about the equivalent annual build rate of dwellings to match the EV adoption rate.
I was probably bored over lockdown, and it was a hack.
Anyway, it’s seems likely that these sites are sort of intended to power homes – but only to provide the additional supply to allow OK-ish EV charging overnight. Maybe.
When are people like Tim, who persist in looking at this through the lens of traditional logic and the world as it was, going to realise that this isn’t about powering your home, or electric cars, or ’emissions’, it’s about controlling and ultimately eradicating people.
This is just a sop, a delaying tactic to make morons think the governmewnt has a plan that involves you.
The government has a plan alright – it just doesn’t involve you (or at least, not in any way you’re going to enjoy).
There will be no banks of batteries powerring homes and no switch to electric cars because there are not and can never be enough of the required electricity generation, grid, or batteries, or charging points.
There aren’t even and can never be the cars.
If we allow this to happen then the fact is, for 98% of us: You will not heat your home. You will not have a car.
You will have to stay at home in the cold, and dark.
If you want to go anywhere – to the shops (hah), to work, to visit your elderly rellies – you will have to walk or cycle or get an occasional bus. These buses will be irregular, and filthy, and dangerous.
By 2030, cash will be gone and they will have you hooked up to a digital financial system where your purchases are at their whim, and are contingent on you accepting whatever ‘health schedule’ of unknown ‘vaccinations’ they require you to have.
No jabs, no job. No job – no food. They actually trialled this in some countries – including the UK – during the ‘pandemic’. It went swimmingly.
The ongoing excess mortality, which the government (like others) is refusing even to investigate, will accelerate.
These people are no different to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or hundreds of other psychopaths who have led countries to disaster since ancient times.
There are two big differences.
1. They are openly committed to depopulation, to solve ‘climate change’. Whether this is a cover to allow them freedom of movement in the preparatory stages, or because they really believe it, doesn’t really matter – the effect is the same.)
2. They no longer need most of us – unlike Genghis Khan, they won’t need an army (they’ll use drones, and anyway – why will they fight each other in a world without nations – the army can only be dangerous to them).
Unlike Hitler, they don’t need factory workers or farm workers (most of what is made and grown is made and grown for us, not them). They won’t even need the police once most of us are gone.
It’s not just the lumpen masses, either.
They won’t need any of the ‘professionals’ – the teachers who teach our kids, the accountants who do our books, the lawyers who sort out our squabbles, the doctors who (supposedly) cure our ills.
We have a very short window before this is completely unstoppable.
I have no idea how we stop it, but it’s not by snarking about maths.
Sorry Interested but I don’t buy any of that. Tin foil hat nonsense. Much simpler explanation is that politicians have seen all this as issues to get elected on. And they may just be finding it’s issues not to get elected on. The mistake is thinking politicians have any designs on the future of the country or the world in the first place. Their primary & only interest is themselves in the now.
A BANQUET???? (vocce Lady Bracknell) They really are useless Tarquins and Jocastas, aren’t they? Let’s pig out and celebrate pissing off the oiks!
If I was there I’d’ve used a shotgnu. For the balloons, of course.
It’s like science since it stopped being a hobby & became a profession. It’s primary purpose is to provide employment for scientists. Any actual “science” comes out of it is mostly fortuitous.
Thus education is to provide employment for educationalists, medicine to provide employment for the medical community, economics to provide employment for economists etc etc etc
These PR puff pieces usually area load of … rubbish. There’s a battery storage facility near me, just very much smaller. Their primary purpose is control – rapid (sub-second) changes in output to stabilise the grid as the gusts of wind go past the windmills. As pointed out, the cost for a unit of storage is not realistic for anything but small short-term measures.
There is historical precedent for a stable anti-cyclone to sit over northern Europe for up to a couple of weeks at a time. And when it does, not only do our own windmills produce “not a lot”, but so do those in all our neighbours. The result is that any scheme that relies on buying in more lecky when needed will fail as when we need it, our neighbours will also need it.
Of course, if we can add a lot of nuclear and wind (and I mean a lot, several times what we have already, more in the case of nukes) so that we mostly have an excess of low carbon lecky, then (and only then) can we start thinking about using that excess to create hydrogen which is a lot easier to store than lecky. But of course, once we get to that stage, we’ll also find lots of uses (such as replacing methane for heating homes, making synthetic fuels for road transport) for low carbon hydrogen which means we’d need several times the current capacity again before we got to a state of being able to run on nukes and renewables only.
But the intelligent people already know this. The problem is that in many (most ?, all ?) cases, their livelihood relies on them not putting facts out in public that don’t support their employer’s PR stance on it. And for many more people, it’s not a case of they can’t understand, it’s a case of they don’t want to understand as it doesn’t fit with their dogma.
The cult of Net Zero has become the Establishment religion. It has its high priests and true believers but most pay lip service because that is what is required by polite society. And they know that it is the proles who will pay.
There is no grand plan / plot. ESG regs and taxes are the new tithe, the in-house ESG team the new family priest. A blind eye will be turned to flying in 1A to the Maldives, just as no-one berated the gentry for nobbing the servants. The failure of the world to burn will bother them no more than the failure of Christ to rock up again bothered the church.
Ducky McDuckface
Other way round – it’s not 3EVs = 1 House, it’s 1 EV = 3 Houses…
Tesla battery is either 50 or 100 kWh. Even my PHEV has 11 kWh battery which gives me ~20miles or so range.
My thumb-in-bum estimate is avg load for a house is 1kW = 24 kWh per house per day.
A single Tesla charge is therefore somewhere around 2-4 houses, not 1/3rd of a house…
You can tell this because if you want to run a Tesla, they recommend you install a 3-phase supply to allow you to push 20kW into it…
@MC “The failure of the world to burn will bother them no more than the failure of Christ to rock up again bothered the church.” I like that, a lot. I intend to use it from now on…I can call it recycling your words instead of stealing them 🙂
Interested @ 1.32. You are spouting nothing more than ‘Tin foil hat conspiracy nonsense’. Of course, the timeline between what is considered ‘Tin foil hat conspiracy nonsense’ and what is then agreed to be ‘reality’ is currently running at around 2 years or so, so shortly after the next election we shall see these tin foil hat conspiracy theory nonsense theories being pushed into the mainstream lexicon and then become law.
“The government has a plan alright – it just doesn’t involve you (or at least, not in any way you’re going to enjoy).”
I really don’t think governments have any plans. We are beginning to see what happened in covid – a complete f*ck up from start to finish. No grand plan, just middle aged milk monitors running around like headless chickens, while simultaneously trying to make themselves look good in the press.
I mean if there was a grand depopulation plan, why are they importing half the third world to the first? The third worlders won’t go easily into the Net Zero equivalent of gas chambers, the likes of Gove et al will have their throats slit first. The Establishment Blob can’t control the third worlders they have now, imagine what things would be like when there’s no predominantly caucasian police forces to order down to the ghettos to try and keep order.
Nope, I’m afraid its down to mind boggling utter stupidity of the first galactic order, coupled to mindless zealotry for a pseudo religion, the very worst type of governing class one can ever be subjected to.
Yer right Jim. I can see absolutely no sign that the current bunch of morons have the intellect to tie their own shoe laces let alone hatch long term conspiracy plots. It’s not as if they’re well educated is it? Half were at Oxbridge.
But more to the point, what are they supposed to be gaining out of it long term? (I can well see all the short term incentives) Are these people even capable of thinking long term? If they can they’ve been concealing it well. And for half of them, medium term they’ll be dead of old age. I can’t see where the advantage’s in it for them. Think about something like the banning of ICE transport in ’35. That’s 12 years away. A quarter of someone’s working life time. And most movers & shakers will be in the final quarter of that. It’s what’s happening now they’re interested in, not 2036.
. . . the banning of ICE transport in ’35.
The UK is banning the sale of new cars and vans powered by petrol and diesel in 2030 – that’s just 7 years away.
Can’t see it happening myself (insufficient vehicles and power infrastructure) so expect to see it pushed back to 2035. Which, as if by magic, is the EU date. We really haven’t left.
@bis
2035 is just the banning of sales of new (hybrid) ICEs too – actually banning from the existing fleet from the road is probably no sooner than the 2050s. So nothing at all for today’s senior administrators to worry about, frankly a lot of them are going to be six feet under by that point.
No doubt ICEs will be rumbling on in countries with low population density / poor electric infrastructure until the end of the century. It would surprise me if synthetic fuel isn’t widespread by then, but I wasn’t the one paid to pick the winning tech from a hat (never a great idea letting governments do that) and I’ll be dead before I get to find out.
@Boganboy Would I agree with BiS?
Not about the Divine Will bit.. We kicked the Spanish out to get rid of that particular notion.
But in general? If us Cloggies can’t make wind power work, it’ll be damned hard anywhere else.
“Batteries can charge on windy or sunny days cheaply, or even for free . . .”
BS.
I have a ton of panels and batteries on/in my RV. I run everything – TV’s, stereos, fridge, lights, microwave, fans – on solar-generated electric.
But . . . “cheap, or even for free”? Nope. I paid $5k in advance. These are not cheap installs.
Batteries become necessary in the electricity grid once you have lots of windmills because the level of wind power can vary so rapidly. Only batteries or hydro can react rapidly enough to compensate. The energy storage provided by batteries is never going to be more than something to even out demand.
I blame Margaret Thatcher – she misled a whole generation’s worth of intelligent people into believing that it was safe for none of them to go into politics 🙂
@PJF
“Which, as if by magic, is the EU date. We really haven’t left.”
I’m going to die of laughter if the (mostly German) car manufacturers persuade the EU to scrap their original timetable on the grounds of how promising synthetic fuel looks, and the UK carries on with the original date…
Anon
I agree it’d make sense for the car manufacturers to persuade the EU to scrap their original timetable on the grounds of how promising synthetic fuel looks.
I’d naturally then assume that an awful lot of that ‘synfuel’ would actually be fossil fuel sold under false pretences. After all, carbon offsets are already a big business.
In order for their sums to be correct, you would need avg consumption to be only ~300W per household.
…300W is a fridge. That’s it.
I just looked up my fridge-freezer on the manufacturer’s site: they claim it uses 210kWh/annum, which would be 24W on average.
I looked up household electricity consumption on the Ofgem site: “Ofgem estimates the typical household in Britain uses 2,900 kWh of electricity…in a year”. That would be 331W on average.
Stupidity, alas, has always been with us (and always will be), but when combined with infantilism and entitlement.
Well it becomes a religion, an actual religion. This holy trinity results in green/gaia becoming god.
These Dresden scale incendiaries are veritable cathedrals to the god stupidity.
It’s not a matter of if, it’s simply a matter of when.
But will there be any consequences for the priesthood or the tax and other immunities of same?
Well, looking at the peccadilos of more established cults with their worship of “youth”, I’d guess not.
I think of that episode of star trek (TOS, so much better) where shagger Kirk and the boys turn up at a planet around a star about to go nova looking to begin evacuation, but find the place deserted.
There’s a library with visual records of past times and it turns out that it’s an extremely sophisticated time portal. The entire population has disappeared into the past.
Oh, if only there was such a thing here!
oh.. my kingdom for an edit button to correct some obvious tag typo’s… 🙁
“Cheaply, or even for free!” except, of course, for the expense of having to install enough generating capacity to supply the entire grid daytime demand plus charge the batteries in suboptimal waether conditions between no-generation weather conditions.
300W is a fridge while the compressor is running. Most of the time it isn’t. 24W average sounds quite believable. I put a meter on my chest freezer a while back and it was 90-something Wh per day.
We’re a household of 5 including 3 young children who create a _lot_ of laundry, plus I have a fair amount of kit required for my home office lab plus we have a PHEV which runs an average of ~10 miles/day on mains power. Our electricity consumption is about 24kWh/day in summer and 28 in winter (I suspect the bulk of the difference being the tumble dryer and dehumidifiers which are barely used in summer). That’s a kW (+change in winter) average and we are way above average household consumption. 300-400W average with sane amounts of laundry, no car charging and no work kit to power sounds pretty reasonable.
Worth adding to Grikath’s excellent explanation that many appliances will momentarily pull far over their rated power consumption when they commence operation. Applies particularly to anything with a heating elements, electric motors etc. So any power supply system needs some “headroom” to accommodate this. Obviously, not all appliances connected to the supply would be expected to power up at the same instant.* But the law of chance says there will be times that significant numbers will coincide & the headroom has to allow for this. Or the entire system will periodically overload & drop out.
*Always worth bearing this in mind if you’ve had a power cut. If you had a lot of appliances running, good idea to go round & switch some of the heavy users off. When the power comes back on they’ll all be drawing their start-up currents at the same time. So the house circuit breaker can overload & drop out. As far as I’m aware it’s one of the problems getting the grid back up after an outage. It has to be a controlled, phased, start up. Even the grid itself draws power as the magnetic fields around the cables re-establish themselves
bis, wasn’t there the old story about the surge in demand at half time during the FA Cup?
All those kettles going on at the same time?
Also re power cuts, I seem to recall someone (here perhaps) explaining that renewables do not have the grunt to power up the grid after a power cut – it has to be coal (or Hydro/ Nuclear maybe?).
@bb
“I’d naturally then assume that an awful lot of that ‘synfuel’ would actually be fossil fuel sold under false pretences.”
I think at least in Europe/UK/North America if they join in the fun, fake synthetic fuel is unlikely to be a big problem. The big oil producers will be compliant with whatever certification scheme there is and I suspect the product would be chemically distinguishable to some kind of inspection regime. Presumably at the pump you’d just a mix of a fossil and synthetic fuel with some legally mandated proportions. If that’s the way it works, my guess is that the fossil % will stay high for some time, since there’ll be capacity issues building up a synthetic fuel industry and the government mandating a higher % synthetic would push prices up in a not-very-popular way.
According to my spreadsheet, I use about 22kWhr per month. One person, one-bed flat.
You’re using the Wrong Kind of Average
It’s the right average if you want to know how much storage you need to keep things running for a week. Which is what we were calculating.
@Adolff It’s not that renewables don’t have the grunt, but that you start up from a distributed power supply as opposed to a central power supply.
Which causes some issues.
The major one is synchronisation. Fun Things/Interesting Times happen when you hook up power sources that are out of phase. Quite Interesting when supplies are taxed to the max, and the frequency starts to drop below the mandated 50/60Hz.
This is why a distributed net needs to be supplied with a centrally supplied “core/pacer frequency” that all the intermittents need to tune into to add to it. Locally, because even from a central source you do get phase changes due to transport, transformers, and field effects.
Not a massive technological challenge, and mostly sorted anyway, but it does make starting up the grid, along with some other considerations, like the intermittency of the supply itself ( which our current grids aren’t built for..), “a tad” more tricky.
And, naturally, makes it take longer to stabilise before you get to the point where you can start switching in the block distribution points and catch those wobbles.
Next year I’ll have the absolute joy *ahem* /sarc to experience this firsthand, as smaller events (<10k visitors) where I do the Sparkie thing are going to experiment with Renewables (mostly solar + battery) to avoid the byzantine ( and insanely expensive) nitrogen bookkeeping needed for the environmental permit.
It's either that, or not having an event at all, the way things are going….
@jgh
“22kWhr per month”
Your frugality is well known by all but, even for a one-bedroom flat, an average consumption of 30W is low! Did you decide to skip either having a fridge or having a freezer? Or just have a very small one?
@Sombf. Sure.. Use that average.. Go ahead.
I think the consensus over here is that the whole Net-Zero malarkey will never end until things have gone south sufficiently to have people shiver in the dark for a bit to have them take notice of the insanity of it all and decide that it’s Lion Time.
Using averages like that will help to make that Happy Day happen sooner than later. 3:)
Surely average use of the grid is kind of irrelevant.
Isn’t peak load the important thing and whether there is sufficient generating capacity/current carrying capacity/thermal sinking to accommodate those peak loads?
Being able to cope with the average is fine, but it also needs to be able to handle the coincidental end of EastEnders, Coronation Street and a World cup final in the middle of winter when it’s cold and snowy.
Or else we would feel a disturbance in the grid, as if tens of thousands of kettles suddenly turned on and were then silenced.
@Grikath
You’re confusing generator capacity, which needs to cope with peaks, with energy storage, which needs to cope with total demand over the time period considered.
But the energy storage needs to be able to cope with an output of magnitude of the difference between max generation and peak demand, if there is any.
The guff implies that the batteries would effectively be an alternative to a power station if needed.
You’d need a lot of batteries to keep things going for a week. Because if you don’t have a lot, and then you suddenly have to cope with a peak current demand, you’re going to overheat your batteries and we All know how much Li batteries love a good thermal runaway…
If you look at storage projects which are intended for serious long-term storage not just smoothing, you’ll notice that they state both the total energy storage capacity (journos often reduce this to “enough to power X houses for Y time units” but that isn’t how the people who build them think of them, and the X/Y journos give are often mangled, eg an inappropriately long Y for a project only intended for short-term smoothing) but they also state the maximum power at which this stored energy can be released. The people who build this stuff aren’t idiots and are well aware of the kind of peak power issues Grikath is bringing up. But in terms of the design of the system, that mostly applies to making sure your facilities can cover the peak power output you need. Getting an appropriate capacity for storage and sufficient maximum power when that storage is called upon are two slightly different things but you’ve got to nail both of them if your system is going to work (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mainstream/generalist journalist explain this properly, though the trade press get this stuff right). In terms of back of an envelope calculations of how much energy you need to store in the first place to cover longer term (ie multi-day) periods of low renewable production, the correct power to use is indeed the mean. It isn’t the wrong sort of average at all.
Yes, of course the storage needs to cope with peak demand.
According to reports, the plan is to be able to deliver 1040MW for two hours. That’s 84 times the load if it discharges over a week. So the facility can cope with peaks in demand.
I have a small fridge, I prefer to use the Co-op’s electricity to keep my food fresh. 🙂 I’ve not used my electric cooker in years, I do all my cooking with a microwave oven and a kettle.
“I prefer to use the Co-op’s electricity to keep my food fresh” – cunning!
@Jim
This is probably too late a reply but
I really don’t think governments have any plans.
I don’t think governments are in charge. My fault for using the phrase’ the government’ – I think elected politicians and to an extent their civil services are doing what they’re told to by bankers and others.
I mean if there was a grand depopulation plan, why are they importing half the third world to the first?
The depopulation – if it is a plan – comes later, and it can only be attempted with a cowed and compliant population. The best way to cow your people and get them to comply with what you want – principally, surveillance, and submission to repeated and regular vaccination with unknown shit – is by terrifying them via street riots, rape, murder and so on. Divide and rule, it’s not new.
Yes, it does sound like tinfoil hat nonsense, but then that is what they would want people to think, isn’t it? I’ve exhausted all other explanations for what is happening; the idea that the people who rule and run the world are all stupid, and wise heads like ours are way ahead of them is for the birds, I’m afraid.
Re the importation of the third world, what’s your explanation?
We’re sending the RY and the Coastguard and the fucking RNLI out every day and bringing in hundreds of people – almost all blokes of the fabled fighting age.
Not only do we not know who most of them are, we make no attempt to find out.
We are spending £22.2 billion a year housing them in hotels and military bases all round the UK.
There are no jobs for them to do, mostly they’re not even allowed to work.
There seems no end whatsoever to the flow.
I’d love someone to explain the plan if it isn’t to cause chaos and create demand for something verging on martial law, because I’m already hearing these sorts of demands in the pubs etc.
‘The police need to get tough.’
How?
‘By insisting that they carry ID at all times.’
But they’ll just chuck it.
‘Ah, simple – we’ll implant it. And we can put their medical history, criminal record, means of payment and everything else on it too. Think of the money it will save. And if they commit crimes we should build camps and chuck them all in there.’
Yay! You’re speaking my language!
‘Of course, we can’t discriminate against migrants – this will have to be used for us all. But don’t worry, it will make your life so much easier. And you won’t end up in a camp.’
Yep, could all be bollocks. But it’s a fucking sight more likely than ‘they’re all stupid’. Pretty sure there were louche brothelkeepers who laid around in Berlin in 1935 laughing at Hitler. Pretty sure lots of intelligent Chinese thought Mao would run out of steam. Who believed Pol Pot really would kill a quarter of his population for wearing spectacles?
Some people are putting all their chips on the fact that there are no psychopaths at the top of the system…
and that even if there are institutions like the police, the courts and the press will keep them in check…
and that even if they don’t the mere fact that the psychopaths now have the technology to enact what Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and, fucking hell, most kings of England would have done if they’d had that tech and didn’t need Wat Tyler and his mates to do the heavy lifting in the fields etc would have done.
The very same people who keep telling you depopulation is needed to save the planet are doing stuff which looks highly like an entree to depopulation. Funny that.
£2.2 billion, soz
“Re the importation of the third world, what’s your explanation?”
My explanation for all the idiocy thats going on is that the ruling class have become infected with an ideology that is all encompassing in its scope, it provides them with both an excuse for wielding more power and also gives them a sense of moral superiority, thus they have convinced themselves they are doing all this for the good of everyone. Its a mix between a medical virus and a religion. And its now become highly contagious – there are massive advantages to ‘contracting’ it now that people already infected control the levers of power, you join a club of similar minded people who can give you money and power.
And like with all perverted ideologies, reality doesn’t really come into any of it. Look at Nazi Germany – Nazi ideology was batshit insane, yet they ran an entire country into the ground by following its tenets. Similarly communism in many places.
We are in a similar position the people in charge (politicians/State apparatus) are all infected with (for want of a better term) the woke virus. And all their insane policies that make no sense whatsoever flow from that infection. There is no grand plan. These people can’t organise the proverbial, its why everything is so sh*t these days. I really can’t believe that if you are capable of implementing such an overarching strategic vision you wouldn’t make a better job of the basics while you’re at it. I mean, if you plan to kill half the population wouldn’t it be better to hide the fact as much as possible?
“The depopulation – if it is a plan – comes later, and it can only be attempted with a cowed and compliant population. The best way to cow your people and get them to comply with what you want – principally, surveillance, and submission to repeated and regular vaccination with unknown shit – is by terrifying them via street riots, rape, murder and so on. Divide and rule, it’s not new.”
Yes, but whats the end state in this scenario? The PTB end up ruling over an imported population that hates their guts, and is hardly the most docile. Its all very well replacing Harry Smith with Mohammed Aziz, which of those is most likely to slaughter his local MP if the mood takes him?
Which is why I say its not a plan. Its a f*ck up of the most stupendous order. Of a ‘civilisation ending’ order. We look back at civilisations from the distant past that just disappear, leaving no trace of why they vanished. They probably made similar errors to what we are making now. They allowed some mad idea to infect the rulers and the rulers took them over the cliff without realising what they were doing.
Interested;
“I don’t think governments are in charge. My fault for using the phrase’ the government’ – I think elected politicians and to an extent their civil services are doing what they’re told to by bankers and others.”
If governments didn’t feel the need to borrow, then there wouldn’t be an issue with the bankers, would there?
Anyway, the Press were generally once known as the Fourth Estate, with the other three being Crown, Church and Commons (or those commoners that mattered). Politicians would fill a mediating or arbitration function between the three, and the Press would be some sort of information transmission mechanism between the three plus the politicians.
You could take the Church out, and sling investors/markets/bankers in instead, without too much trouble. There’s a game here, around the balance of power, where each Estate needs to get at least one other as an ally, or defect.
So, Rule of Law gives rules by which that game is played, and Parliament is Sovereign – it gets to decide the Rules. Sovereign, in the sense that it is unable to bind it’s successors, or no limits on rule changes. Which is bollocks, as parliament does that binding all the bloody time.
By passing laws, and by signing international treaties. Which constrain Government, being the Politicians, and the operational or implementation arm, the Civil Service. More laws/treaties, the fewer degrees of freedom to act, or limited pathways.
The Commons doesn’t get to vote directly on many of these; the normal GE mechanism is a bit vague and indirect, in that a whole set of potential policies (options/rule changes) are mushed up into a single option, and the Commons only gets to select from two or three generic mushes.
You end up with path dependencies, sunk costs, as the processes look like a tree, or bi/trinomial options model with actual/expected costs/payoffs at each node or decision point. Travel along the tree, and the costs of suddenly swapping paths, re-tracing your steps and starting again, get excessive.
What to do?