Written by by Chris Morrison at wattsupwiththat.com
The cat is finally out of the bag. It is planned that Britain by 2030 will produce 95% of its electricity from so-called green sources with 5% coming from gas. The pretence that electricity can be stored at scale to support unreliable renewables is nowhere to be seen in a recent Guardian interview with Fintan Slye, the head of National Energy System Operator (NESO). “There will continue to be a significant amount of power plants in reserve for the cold, dull, windless weeks of winter, but they will run for only limited periods,” observes Slye, whose operation was recently nationalised and is responsible for balancing supply and demand across the National Grid.
His remarks both clarify and strike fear at the same time. There is no back-up at scale for intermittent breezes and sunbeams and this has been obvious for some time, although the subject is rarely discussed in mainstream media and politics. Reserve gas generation is the only game in town if all life in Britain is not to grind to a halt during a windless, winter freeze. But keeping an entire fleet of gas turbines on standby will cost a huge amount of money, causing electricity prices to soar. The planned destruction of Britain’s own gas and oil industry will hardly help future sourcing and pricing, let alone national security.
Britain already has some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world and doubling, trebling or quadrupling charges will help destroy what is left of industry and condemn the population to drastically falling standards of living. As always with green punch-down lunacy, the poorest in society will be the hardest hit. Many people will be priced out of basic necessities they have always taken for granted such as light, heat, refrigeration, cooking facilities and electronic goods to access the online world.
One commonly peddled fantasy can be found in the Guardian article. “Conversely, there will be days when Great Britain generates far more electricity from renewable sources than it can use or store, so there are likely to be greater exports to neighbouring countries,” notes Slye. But of course weather does not stop at national boundaries. Nearby countries are likely to share similar windy conditions and with every operator trying to offload energy, the price offered would drop like a stone towards zero.
Already in the U.K., the National Grid is forced to pay renewable operators to stop producing energy. Last year, ‘constraint’ payments of nearly £1 billion were paid. It might be noted that this is not far short of the amount recently saved by scrapping the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance. But these sums are chicken feed compared with the overall subsidies paid to renewable energy operators, with over £12 billion added to the annual fuel bills of consumers. The more renewable generating capacity is added to the mix, the more the constraint payments and subsidies are likely to increase. With bunce like this, it is hardly surprising that Ecotricity boss Dale Vince, who runs onshore windmills, recently gifted £5 million to improve the election chances of the Labour party.