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Turn on your heat pump when wind is blowing, Government pleads

So what do we do in those cold, still, spells that arrive every winter?

40 thoughts on “Err”

  1. I have noticed a number of comments / pleas / guidelines along these lines recently. This suggests the government is extremely worried about blackouts this winter. I recall there was a bit of a panic last winter about potential cuts but we got ‘lucky’.

    I actually hope that it does fall apart this winter. I appreciate this means people will suffer, but better a few now than millions later. People need to realise where the net zero madness is leading and it won’t hit home until they lose power in winter.

    Sunny today with light winds, but we have to import 8% of our electricity and gas is still the main source of power.

  2. Do what we do in Sweden? Start the wood burner!*

    *I burnt 8m3 of wood last winter, & it was a mild one! Got 10m3 stacked for this winter.

  3. When the wind is blowing… where and at what speed?

    Heat pumps work on low temperature (~50C) accumulated heat over time. Turning them on and off to synchronise with the intermittency of wind energy, will not get you warm but will waste electricity.

  4. Ministers are pressing ahead with new legislation that could see families made to adopt “smart” appliances to ease pressure on the grid.

    Tory MPs are opposing the proposals, contained in the contentious Energy Bill which will come back before the Commons on Tuesday.

    The Government insisted it was “in no way asking people to ration electricity” and that consumers will benefit in the form of cheaper bills.

    In official guidance, ministers have said the switch to smart appliances like heating systems, fridges and car chargers is key to delivering net zero.

    “They enable consumers to shift their electricity usage to times when it is less costly for the energy system,” the document states.

    Dear MP’s,

    Fuck Net Zero, and fuck you.

    Love,

    Lions x

  5. consumers will benefit in the form of cheaper bills.

    I already don’t pay anything for my bills. All I pay for is my gas and electricity.

  6. Mandating heat pumps as a way of reducing life expectancy and tackling the pensions crisis and NHS waiting lists is evidently not enough. If people aren’t dying fast enough, the state needs the ability to turn off the heating altogether via smart meters.

  7. Agreed, MC
    I don’t see any hope of stopping the runaway trolleybus until a serious grid event occurs. People need to have a short sharp shock to awaken them to the absurdity of net zero.
    Perhaps then we can boot out Tweedledee and Tweedledumber (Rishi Smartypants and Sirkeer Woodentop) and get someone with some common dog fuck.

    People are always saying that “the people deserve better”. On the contrary, the people deserve to get some reality, good and hard.

  8. “In no way asking people to ration electricity”

    That is exactly what they are proposing, only it’s called demand management.

    We have a gas boiler but it needs an electricity supply to work. We have a small genny which will have to be set up to make it work.

  9. Stoneyground – If using a portable supply for a gas boiler, you will need to join the floating neutal (of the supply) to the house neutral or earth. This is to allow the flame detection device to operate.
    Otherwise, the boiler will light, then turn off ‘cos it cannot detect the flame (leakage current to ground).

    You keep the lives seperate of course (egg sucking I expect).

  10. @MC – “better a few now than millions later”

    Better a few now when their neighbours still use gas, oil, wood etc and can take them in. Once all those are banned a failure will be deadly.

  11. @ Jb

    The drop in cost of Li batteries in that paper is as likely as billions dying from the climate emergency/crisis/whatever.

  12. @ jb
    Certainly the cost of storage in current use is lower than peak-lopping because Dinorwig was built in the 1970s so the depreciation charge based on Historic Cost Accounting is a small fraction of what it would be using Replacement Cost accounting.
    But that’s just a quibble.
    What matters is that (according to the experts) there are only 13 sites in the UK suitable for building a pumped storage plant, we are already using the best three and if we built all the remaining ten, we should little more than three times Dinorwig.
    SO – *any* extrapolations from current storage costs to the pipe-dream of 100% renewables belong in an alternate universe.
    What do you estimate to be the cost of retrofitting every house in the UK with pipes that are not porous to H2 molecules? Or are you suggesting replacing coal-/gas-fired power stations with thermal H2-fired power stations? The safety meassures would put their cost on a par with Nuclear despite their much lower efficiency ratio

  13. @JB
    Yes the report clearly shows that for short durations battery storage is cheaper than gas peaker plants. This is hardly surprising, Cost equivalence happens for a duration of 4 hours according to the report. After that the battery is depleted and the lights go out. If you want 24 hours margin your lithium battery cost goes up by a factor of 6, though flow batteries should fare better. The problem is that near windless weather can last for an unknown number of weeks, so in addition to whatever level of battery storage you choose you still need that 100% hydrogen backup. Unfortunately in that backup, hydrogen is burnt in gas turbine plants near identical to the peaker plants. So the full system needs the windmills, the batteries and the peaker plants. Common sense suggests this must be far more expensive than the peaker plants alone.

    Batteries and pumped storage etc. are great for smoothing out demand. They are not capable of utility level storage.

  14. Storage of hydrogen is not green, no matter how you extract it.
    Burning hydrogen in air make copious NOx, far worse than diesel engines.

    For “green power”, when the wind isn’t blowing, you either use the real power station you’ve also [paid to build and paid to paid to keep running on idle, or you freeze to death in the dark.
    There is no option 3.

    We need some serious power cuts, and a significant number of dead politicians (who froze, obviously).
    Only then will the surviving politicians start conforming with Reality.

    It’s gonna make a mess.

  15. @AndyF
    You make good points. You suggested that wind + storage may be more expensive than gas. I think that this may not actually be the case because as you may know there are times when wind power/hydrogen is free because supply exceeds demand. However gas always has a fuel cost. It is my understanding that capital is now moving away from gas peakers because it will be uncompetitive over a 25 year life.

    I have not yet found good papers modelling grids with very high 60%+ renewable use and no wind. If I find them I will post.

  16. Green hydrogen is utter bullshit. The idea that enough surplus electricity could be generated by renewables to make enough hydrogen to support the UK’s electricity requirements is just utter manure. Never mind the cost of making, storing, moving and using it.

    The CCC plucks random numbers out of the air for its charts and projections, presumably in the hope that, like the trougher Gummer, they get to retire before the dishonesty / delusion of their forecasts becomes obvious.

  17. Fixed:
    People made, under threat of £15,000 fine or jail, to adopt Buy “smart” appliances to ease pressure on the grid

    No heating, cooking, boiling kettle without gov’t permission

    BTW: This isn’t comiing from Sunak, Cons, Lab – it’s UN Orders

    At last, someone publicly apeaks out about UN (and WEF) running our and other countries. Biden, Macron, Sunak etc are mere puppets

    Neil Oliver:
    . ‘Whatever the puppet government and the puppet opposition say about anything is always and only to distract from the real plan and therefore the real threat to our freedom and way of life.’
    .
    – Neil reveals lockdowns green, woke, immigration, CBDC, mass survellance is all by UN orders
    .
    – UN Agenda 21 is not 2021, it’s 21st Century
    https://youtu.be/oTSnYOlTG7c?t=528
    .
    .
    – khan, UN’s C40’s Meat and more Ban: Chris Morrison, DS
    https://youtu.be/oTSnYOlTG7c?t=1599
    .
    .
    – United Nations Threatining national sovereignty as world approaches breaking point
    .
    UN Agenda 21: Facts, Real Science irrelevent. It’s communist ideology
    https://youtu.be/oTSnYOlTG7c?t=2515
    .
    @johnlemon1863
    The biggest worry is the clueless masses who think that rebellion gainst Tory rule means voting Labour or Lib Dem.
    .
    @diyg5854
    Standing ovation for Neil Oliver. He is absolute right. We have to stand up against these psychopaths who called themselves “politicians”. We have to stand up against the WEF and UN. Thanks for this useful video from the Netherlands

    @Jb
    BS fantasies, lies. If it were true they’d be in unsubsidised, unmandated wide spread use

    Hydrogen? Production requries 5Kw of electricity to produce 1Kw of hydrogen

    If you believe that’s good value, I have a bag of £1 coins for sale: £5 note each

    Special offer: buy 10 coins for a £50 note (to comply with coming 1 October regulations)

  18. Bloke in North Dorset

    It is my understanding that capital is now moving away from gas peakers because it will be uncompetitive over a 25 year life.

    Only because the government and green lobby has its collective thumb on the scales and apportioning imaginary costs and subsidies to suit their cause.

  19. Michael van der Riet

    BTW Tim the new template would be greatly immeasurably improved if it followed the format of every other commentable blog on the entire internet and had comment threads with replies and flames and the whole katutti. Shit even the extremely staid ASI blog has that. You will know that it is working when Devil’s Advocate turns up. With a bit of luck you might even get a flash mob like when Sabine Hossenfelder dared to say that capitalism is good and necessary.

  20. MvdR @ 6.38, ” You will know that it is working when Devil’s Advocate turns up”. Good reason to leave the thing the way it is then……..

  21. @AndyF

    https://orsted.com/en/insights/expert-take/what-happens-when-the-wind-does-not-blow

    This is a good summary of what needs to be done to ensure that the lights don’t go out. It is from a wind company so does not mention nuclear which might if our political masters follow through on their announcements (unlikely) be used in the UK.

    The experience curve has resulted in the cost of renewable falling below that of fossil fuels and this trend will continue until it stops.

    https://www.arabianbusiness.com/industries/energy/irena-report-shows-renewable-energy-costs-now-beating-that-of-fossil-fuel.

    I would like to find a paper/see a bid, that showed the levelised cost of base load generation from wind which would necessarily include storage . However electricity markets don’t work that way. Baseload and swing producers are different market participants. I guess this makes sense to grid operators because they can see the prices charged and choose the lowest. Thus although we can be confident that the lights will not go out it’s difficult to know what we will pay. Answering this question is also made more difficult because users will suffer/benefit from real time pricing which could dramatically reduce bills for some and increase it slightly for others.

  22. 1. For fuck’s sake, just move to Substack. It’s free, and it’s better, and it enables all the monetisation you want.

    2. I’ve become something of a conspiracy theorist over the last three years (previously, I essentially believed the government was incompetent but not evil, now I think it’s evil and unfortunately actually quite competent).

    However, I have belatedly come to understand that I can’t be a conspiracy theorist, because the word ‘conspiracy’ entails agreements made in secret, and they are not being remotely secretive at all.

    Still, fuck it, Conspiracy will have to do.

    I really do struggle with understanding the sheer bovine complacency of my fellow Britons.

    One of the hallmarks of the Conspirators is their understanding of human nature. I’m pretty sure they’ve worked out that even when old people are freezing to death enough of the population, supported by the boys in blue, will be out for blood against the ‘deniers’ whose ‘climate intransigence enabled this catastrophe’.

    Meanwhile, death rates remain stubbornly and bizarrely high, and univestigated and largely unremarked upon by the Media end of the Conspiracy, and those deaths are closely correlated with the jab rollouts.

    But repeat after all the smart guys: ‘correlation is not causation’.

  23. Meanwhile, death rates remain stubbornly and bizarrely high, and univestigated and largely unremarked upon by the Media end of the Conspiracy, and those deaths are closely correlated with the jab rollouts.

    Yarp.

    We’re at the Kids’ Table.

    Funny how your political views change as you get older. In 2010 I’d have been content to see a bit less green crap, a tax cut or two, and some immigration control. Y’know, normal stuff from the early 90’s.

    Now that I understand the British government’s intentions towards me, my children, and my property, I hope I live long enough to see Tony Blair and his friendly friends do a funny little dance while their tongues turns blue.

  24. I don’t know what to be more concerned about Steve – the fact that some of this stuff is getting out but is having no impact on governments, or the fact that some of this stuff is getting out but is having no impact on people, or the fact that both of these things are true and none of it is of interest to the media or the supposedly non-political elements of western states eg the police/US Justice Dept etc.

    Call me naiive but I’m amazed that something hasn’t happened – don’t cops have kids? Don’t journalists? Don’t bureaucrats?

    Jeff Childers (US lawyer) had a good piece up yesterday about FOIA requests to the US government showing from internal emails that various government agencies knew in August 2021 that the vaccines didn’t work as advertised, at the same time as the US government and lots of large corporations was forcing employees to have them or face financial ruin.

    Government: And what do you plan to do about it?
    People: What’s on telly tonight?
    Media: Love Island!

    In the same piece, Childers discusses a couple of studies showing how the vaccines are killing people – not that that is in dispute, there have been (in the UK) coroners’ court findings and vaccine injury compensation payouts for death – but, again:

    Government: And what do you plan to do about it?
    People: What’s on telly tonight?
    Media: Love Island!

    Childers is well worth following:

    https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/remarkably-consistent-tuesday-september?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

  25. @ jb
    I think you need to take both of those with a Siberian salt mine. Irena carefully chooses a comparison with fossil fuel costs when prices has risen by more than sixty times (6549.6%) in two years; they have since fallen by 80%. So they are utterly misleading.
    Orsted is talking its own book, of course; the airy-fairy ideas they suggest are understandable – except touting biomass which is vastly more polluting and generates far more CO2 per kWh than CCGT stations and should be a complete “No, NO!” for any genuine “Green” as part of a solution – but are not going to be a solution except in Norway (with lots of hydro) or Iceland (with geothermal). We have very little hydro and no thermal. Sweden has ample nuclear and some hydro. Of course anyone reading Orsted in the original Danish would not object that its back-up claims are nonsense but some of us reading the English translation can and do point this out.

  26. Interested – the New Zealand prime minister (you may remember New Zealand’s regime being constantly fellated in press when they had a horse-faced woman imposing some of the most aggressive medical authoritarianism in the world) now claims nobody was forced to get vaccinated:

    ‘There is a process for people who are injured in a medical procedure, there’s already processes in place for dealing with that,’ Mr Hipkins said.

    ‘In terms of the vaccine mandates, I acknowledge that it was a challenging time for people but they ultimately made their own choices.

    ‘There was no compulsory vaccination, people made their own choices’

    See? They didn’t openly threaten to remove you from society and make it impossible for you to hold down employment, go into a supermarket, or send your children to school unless you accepted Mystery Jabs. You did it to yourself, proles.

    No doubt this is completely unconnected to the following admission from February this year:

    New Zealand records biggest increase in registered deaths in 100 years

    Covid narrative collapse is almost complete, but does anybody who can do anything about it care? We had a coup d’état in Britain last year and apparently that’s fucking hilarious, so I’m not waiting to exhale.

  27. How the lying climate “consensus” propogates:

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12482921/climate-scientist-patrick-brown-wildfires-started-people.html

    “I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.
    . . .
    To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

    One voice isn’t the turning of a tide, but it might be a sign that some of these twats think it’s worth hedging against the inevitable backlash.

    .
    Meanwhile, I noticed my local coal-fired power station fired up today, one of the least cold days of the year. I suspect it’ll be very busy over the winter, but that won’t stop the morons shutting it down next year.

  28. Substack?

    No. It’s been classed as “far-right, racist, conspiracy theories” as per usual for any disagreement with gov’ts, msm, google, social media

    Better to be independent, especially as blog well established and no reg required to read, comment – freespeech

  29. Pcar

    Substack is just better for comments etc. You only have to register for comments if the site owner requests it (I think?) but either way you can register with a protonmail address or similar.

    More robust too – there was clearly some sort of DDS attack on this blog this morning – multiple posts were not opening because of ‘too many requests’

  30. @Interested

    Substack will go same way as every previoous site: infiltrated and taken over by left admiin or bought by leftist

    Better to be independent and free

    DDoS?
    No offensee to @TW, but blog is not important enough

    Anyway, site is behind Cloudflare, thought you’d know that

    Maybe scheduled server reboot

  31. @Michael van der Riet

    I’d seen Sabine’s YouTube video on Capitalism but hadn’t read the comment. Jesus Fucking Christ on a bike – is it Spud’s moronic followers who have targeted her?

    All of them are whinging about how capitalism is bad without a single one making a suggestion on what would be better.

    If they think politicians that can (in theory) be voted out are bad, wait until the State Communist Party takes over and does away with even that veneer. I’m sure Xi lives in a cramped tofu dreg apartment block and Zil Lanes were a figment of right wing propoganda.

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