Britain fell for the scheme. That wind and Solar are cleaner and the energy source of the future. Neither of those things is true. And while no one has ever argued that they would be cheaper than fossil fuels, maybe they could have mentioned how you’d have to pay for nothing on top of that.
Related: Michael Moore – “Solar and Wind are Not Going to Save Us”
You may recall a conversation or two about the US government paying farmers not to grow anything. Well in the UK they do the same thing with Green Energy.
Wind farms in Britain were paid a record £.9.3m to switch off their turbines on Friday, The Telegraph can disclose.
More than 80 plants across England and Scotland were handed the so-called ‘constraint payments’, when supply outstrips demand, by the National Grid, as thousands of buildings lying empty following the coronavirus lockdown contributed to a nosedive in demand for energy.
That’s an interesting fiscal problem.
You have to pay the wind farms that were (probably) built with taxpayer-backed incentives (and likely include price credits from the government to make the cost appear competitive) to produce nothing.
Why not just put giant hamster wheels on the tops of all the buildings and make people run in them to create their own electricity. You could pay them and still save a small fortune and imagine all the wildlife that won’t get chopped up though that’s not an issue when you pay them not to run at all.
So, you may ask, what’s the problem? Why shut them off at all? Well, wind and solar suck at almost every conceivable opportunity.
“Overdeployment of renewables in the UK, particularly uncontrollable wind and solar, has resulted in a very fragile electricity system, which is inflexible and unable to deal with accidents and unexpected circumstances at a reasonable cost to consumers.
“Grid balancing expenditure so far this year is already horrific and by the end of the summer it will be terrifying.
“This is a national embarrassment and a disgrace to the management of the electricity sector who have complacently allowed this crisis to develop over the last decade.”
Both wind and solar lack any reliable ability to meet the on-demand need. You get power when it’s sunny or windy (but not too windy) and none when there is neither. Storage is an issue, so if you are not using it, you don’t need it. And when you need it and don’t have it, you need fossil fuel backups, typically natural gas, to fire up and fill in the gaps.
It would be like hiring a temp service to put the people in the hamster wheels when both the temps and the service cannot be counted on to provide the resources. Except that in the hamster-wheel example, you’d be paying the temps and the agency to do nothing.
Brilliant!
| WUWT
