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| One of the so so green energy by products. |
If you have followed Nigel Farage’s career it has shown a dogged determination in his quest to get us to leave the EU and triumphing. It has come at a cost: the bile and sheer hatred that has been thrown his way has on occasions been off the scale, he was never afforded the protection he needed and had to pay for his own security but not before he was publicly threatened physically.
Despite all that he persevered and revealed through intimate knowledge the failures within the EU. Some of his Brussels speeches were seat squirming for the political elite in charge there, in particular the unelected bureaucrats that ran the show.
Nigel then appeared to lose the plot a little after Brexit was achieved. He seemed not to know to do with UKIP and the party disintegrated with infighting and curious, to put it mildly, leadership choices. He also allowed himself to be used by the Conservatives by not standing in certain seats during the election, a fact that they were extremely ungrateful about afterwards; that was naive at best.
Now he is a wasted force shuttling between TV presenting and flirting with comebacks and new parties, so it has come to pass that he sees an opportunity to hold the climate scam up to the light and the effect that government green policies are having on energy supplies and prices.
All well and good one would say, these policies are with the rising energy prices likely to drive many consumers to the 'heat or eat' camp, not something any government wants to be accused of creating during its tenancy of Westminster.
So we have ‘Nigel's Crusade on net zero’…
Unfortunately his Talking Pints on GB News on Monday night was not a good start. I did not see all of it but the majority that I saw did not put Nigel in the driving seat. If you are going to invite green zealots with fingers in the green pie on to your program for discussion you need to do your research, they have had years to formulate answers to questions on climate change and energy production. Nearly all presenters who interview these people either go along with the thesis or are not readily equipped to put points that contradict the mantra; sadly, Nigel fell into the later group.
If your guests come back with questionable answers then you have to have the relevant facts at your fingertips, Nigel didn’t; saying ‘Well, we will have to disagree on that one’ is not an answer without those facts and he didn’t have them.
See here…
The ideologue he was interviewing would as with all others who are in this field put forward reasons for green energy; fine, but his simplistic answers were never challenged,. To trot out the '40% of our energy now is green' is a bare faced lie, several weeks this winter there has been no wind and very dismal skies, so no solar, and we had many days when when wind was contributing just over 1% to the national grid and solar less, meanwhile we imported energy and our diminishing nuclear plants were almost into the red supplying what was needed.
This graph from Grid Watch shows the enormous fluctuation in energy supplied by wind. To talk of 40% and more on those few good days is pure hype, the troughs when virtually nothing was being produced are evident and of course during the winter to rely on such unstable supply would mean rolling blackOUTs or worse. Solar in the northern hemisphere is not really justifiable as a grid contributor during the winter months, the troughs easily outweigh the peaks.
The rebuff from Dale Vince, carefully groomed to look every inch the eco warrior, about smart grids is a nod to the fact that green energy alone cannot supply energy in a way that could ever be acceptable to the population or industry. Talk of breaks in supply and getting up in the middle of the night to use your energy ‘allowance’ is a step back in to pre industrial revolution times; why should anyone accept that and pay through the nose for it?
Smart meters are of course now revealed as a way to implement rationed energy when the time comes, not as a way of saving mone; water meters led the way on that one.
Dale then waffled on about new technology giving us storage to overcome the lack of wind. Once again Nigel had no facts on this and sat there looking lost, yet there is plenty of material out there refuting the claims of Dale Vince. Maybe one day they will crack the problem but this is mystic Meg territory at the moment and if there is no solution we should not rushing into a state where rolling blackouts become the norm. Somehow Dale seems to think this is all OK - maybe it is, for him: his warm feeling about what he is doing may well be enough to stave off freezing to death in the winter as many old people undoubtedly would. Still, if that resulted in saving the planet no doubt Dale would think it all worthwhile.
The earlier predictions from the likes of the National Grid that we would need a sixty percent increase in base load to satisfy all the new clean electric devices including EVs and heat pumps blows the whole green thinking on the matter out of the water.
Boris believes that increasing windmills fourfold will solve all our problems, but of course having four times the 1% we now get on a windless day means we get 4%; not exactly a game changer, is it?
Dale then made himself wide open to ridicule when he wanted all nuclear to be phased out and no new plants built. This revealed his thinking on the lines of the old CND campaigns - wind good, nuclear bad - and again no solution to how the unreliability factor in supply is solved.
Naturally not all is good about wind production in an environmental sense either.
This article also shows how reports on what so called renewables are producing and actually contribute are being manipulated…
Plus Dale would not like any competition for renewables as another form of energy is being systematically trashed after it was discovered to be reliable and cheap to produce, any more than he would admit to being paid, as the contracts allow payment when windmills are feathered down in adverse conditions and cannot produce anything; I think that is called a subsidy.
Wind already has a chequered history in other countries, none so headlining as in California with its rolling blackouts; now that ridiculous placement in the White House Kamala Harris wants to extend the failed California model to the rest of the country…
Dale has obviously not seen what is going on there or doesn’t want to see.
Much was made of the old nuclear plants being buried for thousands of years at great cost and the inherent danger. That money, he said, should be put into research in sustainable energy instead. There was no mention, because it hasn’t happened yet on a scale to be noticed, about disposing of solar panels, something I referred to in an earlier piece. The same problem pertains to the short life carbon fibre off shore windmills and the coming very high cost of the same off shore wind units exposed to sea ravages. The cost of disposal of the short lived windmills, especially off shore has never ben mentioned anywhere other than by those who are not involved in the industry but it is significant.
Dale spoke of the cheapness of wind power and how it receives less subsidy than other forms of energy, not quite the whole picture though…
There have been several studies on the true costs of wind power, none of which support Dale's statements, but then he runs runs a green power company and as they say if you have skin in the game…
And the UK government reinstated subsidies in 2021 for wind and solar; in Australia the turn of phrase on the costs is a little more aggressive.
True this is a biased web site but there figures are official.
This is part of the introduction to a paper on solar energy production below:
“Publications in increasing numbers have started to raise doubts as to whether the commonly promoted, renewable energy sources can replace fossil fuels, providing abundant and affordable energy. Trainer (2014) stated inter alia: “Many reports have claimed to show that it is possible and up to now the academic literature has not questioned the faith. Therefore, it is not surprising that all Green agencies as well as the progressive political movements have endorsed the belief that the replacement of the fossil with the renewable is feasible”. However, experience from more than 20 years of real operation of renewable power plants such as photovoltaic installations and the deficient scientific quality and validity of many studies, specifically aimed at demonstrating the effective sustainability of renewable energy sources, indicate precisely the contrary.”
There is as an aside the belief that the recent steep rises in the price of ICE auto mobiles is not just from the price of materials and supply, but a deliberate move by the industry to try and create a market for overpriced EVs by levelling up to a degree; a fallacy maybe but as with so much these days conspiracy theories appear to be coming home to haunt those who talked about misinformation in spades; no doubt more will be revealed.
Dale would also like to go back to the vexed question of tidal power; this has been dammed (!) as being hugely costly and while being reliable it is only producing power at the high tide times, not as and when we might need it, and it is only ever going to be a niche contributor for geological reasons.
Dale has a belief all the problems could be overcome in time. That is no solution to our current problems and anyway there is no guarantee with any any of them coming good in any meaningful way at this moment in time. The battery storage belief is so far fetched as to be laughable; maybe just maybe, the capacity needed to have any bearing on demands is not even on the horizon never mind a reality.
All of this Nigel should have researched, it is not difficult, yet he thought a headline popular banner would see him become a leader against eco zealots. He failed miserably at the first hurdle, he really should have known better.
And hovering above all this is Climate Change which drives all these changes we need to save the planet. As with Covid the right sort of scientists have declared that man is evil and we have to change our ways come what may. Maybe we do have to revise the way we live within certain parameters, but the question of how much man is making a difference to the weather is despite the science not very convincing against a background of the way the weather has shaped the earth over the millennia.
The science over Covid is bit by bit being shredded, but the enormous cost in all senses and the damage has been been done. A repeat over climate change could be equally catastrophic, and the west seems to be heading that way; we never learn.
And don’t expect much deviation from the agenda by politicians, they rarely if ever these days admit they are wrong on anything, plus why should they worry? They can claim heating bills on expenses, kerching!
And finally if you Nigel Farage are going to pursue this attack on net zero, get your ducks in a row, it is not that difficult.
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| Must do better. |
4 comments:
Good piece
I have never understood why nuclear power is not considered 'green'.
@Paddington
Who cares if Nuclear Power is 'green'. It is an accident waiting to happen (as with Nuclear Weapons).
Have you visited a Nuclear Power Station? I have visited two, one on a school trip and the other later in life. I was not convinced by the glossy presentations of how wonderful and how safe this technology is!
Then later the accidents I worried about happened - Chernobyl and Fukushima.
@CherryPie - and yet, if you count air pollution and the health and economic effects of mining and drilling, far fewer people have died as a result of nuclear power, year by year.
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