Over the years and increasingly, we’ve had grid engineers and ex grid engineers warning in the strongest terms that the grid and the systems connected with the grid were not going to be fit for purpose, and the more renewables, wind in particular, which were added would mean a grid catastrophe would be likely.

Not the catastrophe it could have resulted in, on 9 August ’19 but more by luck than judgement. The blackout still meant that a million people in England and Wales lost power, there was chaos on the railways and at the worst possible time; in the evening rush hour. On the roads, too, with traffic light failures – as someone tweeted ‘It’s like Grand Theft Auto out here’. Water pumping stations were disconnected too. An airport and hospitals. Chaos all round.

We’ve posted about this many times. Two generators failed in a lightning strike – the RWE Little Barford and the Ørsted Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm and there was much batting to and fro as to which failed first.

There was an interim Ofgem report and here it is -9-august-2019-final-report, released today.

On Page 7 there is this quite amazing statement:

‘Given the changes which are required in the energy system to achieve Net Zero we believe that the core roles of the system operators are worthy of review. Hence, we have committed in our forward work plan to a strategic system operation review from January 2020. The concerns raised by our investigation into the events of 9 August 2019 and associated lessons learned will inform that work. We will also work closely with BEIS ahead of its position paper on system governance in 2020’

Worthy of review?

We’re reminded that the former Government had the benefit of a thorough review from Professor Dieter Helm which included, inter alia, warnings about the grid and systems, and how to overcome potential catastrophes – the government chose to ignore the report.

Dieter Helm wrote on the subject following the blackout – second link – in which he said:

‘The two years of inaction have had a price. It is to allow the electricity systems to come closer and closer to the edge of the capacity and flexibility margins, and to have much more cost than they need to. This is a price that customers are paying as the legacy costs pile up on their bills. It is now aggravated by the lack of security and resilience in the system that the power cut revealed.’

That relates to that review which BEIS has had on its agenda for so long it’s probably forgotten about it.

Back to the Ofgem report (first link).

Key players in this Green (Tragi) Comedy of Errors:

ESO – National Grid ESO, the transmission network owner in England and Wales.

National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET)

14 distribution network operators (DNOs)

RWE Generation UK plc (Little Barford)

Hornsea 1 Limited ( Ørsted)

The investigation focused on whether any of them met their obligations – and the answer is no.

What has come out of it is that Hornsea 1 did fail before Little Barford, although by a short head.

The report, which is detailed and should be read because what it contains is mind-boggling, highlights the utter shambles of the whole system of generation, the free-for-all which has been allowed to build, and the fact that nobody has grasped this green nettle until now.

There was, and is, miscommunication and no communication; generators were, and are, allowed to do their own thing, provide their own statements on worthiness with no checks in place – and that includes Hornsea 1 – individual generators look as if they have internal protection systems in place which are known only to themselves.

How can the Grid run like this? It can’t, and Ofgem has produced a very detailed and, in its anodyne way, scathing report. They would have done better to be upfront, though, and called it ‘Shambles in Green’.

RWE and Hornsea 1 have agreed to voluntarily each pay £4.5 million for their part in it.

Eastern Power Networks plc and South Eastern Power Networks plc have each acknowledged their technical breaches of their Grid Code requirements by reconnecting customers without being told to do so which could have caused even more of a doomsday scenario. They’re paying in aggregate £1.5 million, voluntarily.

We will keep an eye on whether Dieter Helm responds to this.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/…/9_august_2019_power_outage_repor…

http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/…/power-cuts-and-how-to-avoid-…/

The Role of Distributed Generation in the UK Blackout of 9 August 2019
JANUARY 5, 2020 By Paul Homewood

John Constable has taken a closer look at the final reports into last summer’s blackouts.
Hidden away is the critical role played by embedded generation, typically wind and solar farms.

John’s post is pretty technical, but the take home message is that the loss of this embedded generation was much greater than originally thought, and probably played the major role in the blackouts. As the share of such unreliable renewable generation rises, so the instability of the grid will increase.

And more concerned letters about the cost to consumers and our environment:

Letter in the Telegraph on 31st December 2019 and Press and Journal

Is Britain blowing billions on wind power?

“SIR – On Christmas Day, just like last year, as we popped our turkeys into the oven the entire wind industry collapsed and struggled to supply 4 per cent to the National Grid. By teatime, as we rolled up our sleeves to wash up, hoping for lashings of hot water, the output had dropped to a derisory 0.93 per cent. We could have got more wind from a Brussels sprout.

Annual subsidies for wind and solar to British households will soon reach an incredible £12 billion. The wind industry, it seems, is not exactly “cheap cheap” but more “gobble, gobble, gobble”. Will we be refunded the countless billions for poor or non-existent service? Our gullible politicians, who have been so comprehensively stuffed by the wind industry, certainly deserve a roasting.

George Herraghty”

“When a truth bomb drops the ripples should spread out far  and wide. It is down to us, all of us who seek to expose the absurdity of wind, to make it happen.

Many are too feart to put their heads above the parapet and speak out against this farce of a wind policy but many more are now stepping up and asking the difficult questions the policy makers would prefer not to answer.

Let’s take the ludicrous constraints situation that we have in the UK – and most probably in most other countries. The figure paid out up until yesterday 10th January 2020 to wind operators, mainly Scottish, to turn their turbines off is £658,098,834. That is to not produce electricity. Not only do they get the money they might have received if their persnickety (good word!) turbines had actually produced electricity, and there is absolutely no way of knowing if they would or not but let’s pay them anyway, but they also get any lost subsidies refunded AND compensation. That is not the same as constraining off reliable generation that gets paid only for what they predictably would have produced and they refund the fuel not used back to the grid. It is because it is the most expensive to ask to shut down to protect an overloaded grid that wind is constrained off the least. If there was a level playing field you can bet that volatile wind would be turned off first. Trying to balance a grid with erratic gusty wind is an engineer’s nightmare.

Then we have the Forward Energy Trades – a sort of secret constraints – that the public pays for but is not allowed to know who is getting it because it is too ‘commercially sensitive’. We could hazard a guess as to which companies are in receipt of these secret payment to not generate as we are sure many others could. The behaviour of some wind abominations indicates they are being constrained off but they are not on the list in the public domain. We turbine watchers are not stupid.

So as we stumble blindly into 2020, another year and another decade, the constraints bill in TEN days has reached £8,593, 623. Nearly one million pounds a day.

What in the name of sanity is going on?

Well we mentioned a truth bomb at the beginning and here it is. A letter in a local paper printed in full with no editing has flushed the serious question out at last. Many have thought it, discussed it but we haven’t seen it published anywhere before – correct us if we are wrong.

Here in Scotland we have regularly asked ourselves and each other why SSE and Spanish owned Scottish Power Renewables have so many wind developments. How they seem to get nearly all through planning. How they are often ones with the greatest numbers of turbines. How they apply to extend and extend them again even though the originals are regularly paid to switch off. How something like the abomination that was Stronelairg in the hills above Loch Ness was approved in an area that was somehow left off the Wild Lands Area map, yet surrounded by WLAs, and, therefore, had no protection whatsoever from industrial development. Despite a valiant attempt by the John Muir Trust the Scottish court came down in favour of the Scottish Government ministers who approved this environmental vandalism and SSE who had applied to build 66 turbines in the now violated Monadhliath Mountains.

We see SPR snorting up around a fifth of all constraints in the public domain in Scotland for just ONE wind development – Whitelee.

We read that SSE and SPR are both just too vocal in their demands for more public money to be thrown at onshore wind – we suspect more than any other developers. These two companies of all companies should know the grid in Scotland simply cannot cope with more turbines connected to it yet, bizarrely, they want to get more approved to go on it, why?

The answer our friends is certainly appearing to blow in the wind.

SSE and SPR operate the Scottish electricity grid. Broadly speaking it is SSE in the north and SPR the south.

We will leave it there.

Draw your own conclusions and ask your elected representatives what the hell is going on and why your money is being abused in this way when our services can’t cope, our hospitals are in crisis, fuel poverty is on the increase, our environment is being torn up and our wildlife butchered.

“Toot toot” the constraints gravy train really has left the station.

Well said Lyndsey and well done to the John O’Groat Journal for having the cojones to publish her letter in full yesterday.

The text is below as sometimes these press cuttings are hard to read on some devices. We can’t always do it but when a writer responds to our request to supply the text we will reprise it in the intro.”

“WIND FARCE MUST BE BOUGHT TO AN END

Sir

Constraints payments to mainly Scottish wind operators to not generate hit £649,573,357 as we entered 2020 and we have to wonder what buffoon thought it was a good idea to flood the grid with volatile wind energy and charge the already financially burdened consumer for the resulting difficulty in managing it.
Cue UK energy ministers starting with Labour’s hapless Ed Milliband who dreamed up the catastrophic ‘Connect and Manage’ system after pressure from the wind industry, outraged because the National Grid was quite reasonably refusing to connect their turbines to the grid until it could cope with the energy produced. The following coalition government implemented the scheme without understanding the appallingly consequences of it and ‘toot toot’ the constraints gravy train left the station.
Non engineering savvy policy makers allowed industrial wind development to rampage almost unabated across our country. Once planning is granted a bizarre promise of connection to the grid is made, no matter how many miles it may be, how much damage is done to the environment or whether the infrastructure can actually cope. Following Milliband’s ‘cunning windy plan’ energy ministers in Westminster and Holyrood continued with the buffoonery instead of using a wee bit of common sense and calling a halt to this insane, expensive and destructive arrangement.

Spanish Scottish Power Renewables manage the Scottish grid with SSE and benefits by around 20% of the figure paid out in Scotland for just Whitelee windfarm on its own. Both these companies are clamouring for more public money for yet more turbines – many of which will be paid to switch off to protect the grid almost as soon as installed. There is no economic sense in allowing more development – not for consumers anyway. Nor is there any benefit to the environment.

We continue to watch in horror as our landscapes are concreted over, CO2 absorbing trees are hacked down, carbon holding peat lands ripped up and our wildlife displaced or risking life and wing flying through the rotating bird shredders. Our electricity bills continue to rise despite being told wind is getting ‘cheaper’ which suggests this consumer backed industry is increasing its profits and delighting its shareholders.
The wind operators are gobbling up public money faster than their turbines are providing useable energy and we can only hope that the new UK government will put an end to this wind farce once and for all because there is no point hoping that Scotland’s energy minister, Paul Wheelhouse, or the Scottish Government will come to their senses anytime soon. Lyndsey Ward”

A Decade of Constraint Payments by Lee Maroney

This REF Blog gives a very detailed description of how constraints have gone and is a very useful resource.

Click here to see the full analysis of constraint payments by the Renewable Energy Foundation 

“2019 was the tenth year in which British wind farms have received constraint payments to reduce their output because of electricity grid congestion. There has been a total of £649 million paid out over the decade for discarding 8.7 TWh of electricity…….”                                Figure 3 with an animated map of constraints around Scotland is a great visualisation of the problem.

Mark Macaskill covered this story in the Sunday Times on 29th Decenber 2019 “Turbines spread amid £127m. bill”

“Scottish wind farms are the main beneficiary of compensation as the network is unable to cope with the power produced

Scottish ministers have been accused of an “irresponsible” dash for green energy as new data reveals that wind farms have expanded while being paid record sums of money to power down turbines. This year, the operators of 86 wind farms across Britain were handed more than £136m in constraint payments to reduce output and discard surplus energy, a new annual record and £12m more than was paid in 2018. Most of the compensation (E127m) was paid to Scottish onshore wind farms, including several that have either extended in recent years – with the Scottish government’s approval – or are seeking permission to do so. The disclosure has prompted disquiet among opposition politicians and environmentalists who said compensation payouts should be a key consideration in whether to allow wind farms to be built or extended. Energy firms are compensated for turning off turbines when the network is unable to cope with the power they produce. Such constraint payments are paid out by the National Grid but ultimately charged to consumers and added to electricity bills. Analysis carried out by the Renewable Energy Foundation, a charity that monitors Britain’s energy use, shows that in 2019, six onshore Scottish wind farms received about 50% of the £127m bonanza. They include Fallago Rig in Berwickshire, which received £7.8m in constraints this year, yet is seeking an extension to add a further 12 turbines. The Clyde wind farm was completed in 2009 but permission to extend the site with an additional 74 turbines was granted in 2014 and completed in 2017. Its operators, which includes the energy giant SSE, received almost £15m in compensation this year. The big six also includes the 96-turbine Kilgallioch wind farm in South Ayrshire, which was extended in 2017. Its owners, Scottish Power Renewables, is seeking to extend the site by up to 11 turbines. Whitelee, Europe’s largest wind farm, opened in 2007 and added a further 75 turbines five years later. Since 2013, it has received £106.5m in constraint payments, including £12m this year. The Stronelairg wind farm near Fort Augustus went live a year ago and received more than £llm in constraint payments this year. Critics have questioned the wisdom of proposals to build two neighbouring wind farms. “The probability of constraint payments is not given any significant weight in the planning system when considering applications for new or extended wind farms, with the result that the Scottish government is needlessly, and some will feel irresponsibly, contributing to the constraint problem and to UK consumer bills,” observed Helen McDade, the Renewable Energy Foundation’s Scottish policy adviser. Alexander Burnett, the Scottish Conservative energy spokesman, said: “The fact that the SNP are still allowing wind-farms to expand despite this staggeringly high level of constraint payments already in operation is astonishing. Indeed, this absurd situation simply demonstrates the foolishness of the SNP’s renewable energy policy.” Since 2010, when constraint payments were introduced, more than £600m has been paid to Scottish wind farm owners. Because of a rapid growth in onshore wind, payments have increased steadily, in spite of grid reinforcements and upgrades such as the Elbn Western Link between Hunterston and Deeside, which was built to export Scottish power. The foundation claims that some wind farms lie behind grid bottlenecks, yet are given ministerial approval for upgrades to generate more power. The charity points to increases in turbine heights at the extension to the Gor-donbush wind farm, near Brora in Sutherland. The original wind farm has been paid more than £16m to reduce output since it was commissioned in 2012. Paul Wheelhouse, the energy minister, said constraint payments will fall as investment in the grid increases. “Adding more demand load onto the grid, as we electrify Scotland’s own transport and heating systems, will also reduce the need for constraint payments. The importance of continued grid investment to facilitate transmission cannot be over-stated and this need featured in our Networks Vision Statement which we published earlier this year”.

I attended a conference in Glasgow on 22^nd September on infrasound in relation to wind turbines and the effect on people’s health. A concerned group of acousticians have bravely formed an Independent Noise Working Group because of their concerns that a proportion of people living in proximity of turbines report similar symptoms of ill health all over the world. It is surprising that the Industry and Government dismiss this problem considering in the history of the world people have never lived next to anything like these structures. The message to sufferers is that it is a psychological problem.

The presentations by two well qualified acousticians, one from France and one from the UK and from a Portuguese Professor into health effects convinced me there is a problem. Infrasound is not measured in the Environmental Statements used to assess wind farms. “A” weighted decibels are used which were devised in the 1930’s for telephones and only measure the audible range. The wind farms conform to current regulations but these result in assessing the measurement of sound excluding the vital low frequencies. Not all people complain, but then everyone responds differently. The Professor proved to me from her investigations that infrasound can produce physiological harm. Her funding has been stopped.

This reminds me of the case of ulcers. In the 1980’s, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovered most ulcers were caused by bacteria. Barry Marshall said in an interview, “Whenever we presented our stuff to gastroenterologists, we got the same campaign of negativism. I had this discovery that could undermine a $3 billion industry, not just the drugs but the entire field of endoscopy. Every gastroenterologist was doing 20 or 30 patients a week who might have ulcers, and 25 percent of them would. Because it was a recurring disease that you could never cure, the patients kept coming back. And here I was handing it on a platter to the infectious-disease guys.” It took ten years to break the hold of the vested interests in the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry. Will it take ten more years for anyone to listen to these wind farm victims?

The industry will not be worried about compensation claims because they will say they followed regulations. It will be the public who would have to pick up the tab because of ignorance in Government of scientific matters. Urgent research is needed and resources to pursue this work. It is inhumane to have sufferers being bounced between the NHS and Environmental Health with no one taking responsibility.

Yours sincerely,

Celia Hobbs

Dykeneuk

Midlothian

Communities should be able to say no to wind farms

HOW outrageous that ScottishPower Renewables CEO Keith Anderson is asking for more political support (and our money) for onshore wind in Scotland (“Wind power passes output milestone”, The Herald, September 25).

The greed of the wind industry knows no bounds. Not once was the plight of communities targeted by ruthless wind developers even considered.

Communities across Scotland are sick and tired of being chucked to the wind industry wolves by a Government which refuses to give them the same ranking as their counterparts south of the Border and allow them the community veto. If local people want a wind farm that is up to them, and so it should be if they don’t.

We also need to wake Westminster up to the fact that the SNP’s reckless deployment of onshore wind is costing every single UK consumer, domestic and industrial, hundreds of millions of pounds to switch turbines off.

Of course Whitelee is a success – for ScottishPower. It reaps juicy rewards from the subsidies and even juicier ones from the constraints to turn the turbines off.

When all the thousands of turbines we have now are generating and demand is low these rotating cash machines have to be shut down or they will blow the grid. We don’t need more erratic weather-dependent energy that is often at its most productive in times of low demand. We need reliable generation that can be ramped up in colder weather when demand soars to keep the lights on and us warm. If we had a million turbines in Scotland on cold, still winter days they would be standing stock still and we would be wrapped in blankets huddling around candles. It is disingenuous to say that one wind turbine will charge 7,000 vehicles when even the least informed amongst us knows that if the wind isn’t blowing the cars won’t be running if we rely too heavily on wind power.

Why Mr Anderson thinks we should be deploying even more onshore wind when the grid cannot cope with what we have is mindboggling unless, of course, constraints to switch off are so very lucrative he would be doing his shareholders a disservice by not pushing for it. This is not about saving the planet, it is all about putting profits before people, many of whom do not want to live in the shadow or hearing distance of Mr Anderson’s monsters.

Lyndsey Ward,

Darach Brae, Beauly.

But does it go far enough?

Peers Report On Energy Fails To Address The Real Problem

“The Committee examined the impact of the policies of successive governments on the electricity market. In its report the Committee identifies two key failures in the current market: the narrow amount of spare capacity, particularly in winter, and the rising cost of electricity to consumers and businesses. The Committee concludes that constant intervention by successive Governments in the electricity sector has led to a complicated, uncompetitive market that is failing consumers and businesses. The Committee highlights:

• Domestic electricity bills in Britain have gone from being second cheapest in Europe in the mid-2000s to the seventh cheapest today. Decarbonisation policies accounted for around 10% of the average domestic bill in 2013.
• Industrial electricity prices in Britain are amongst the highest in Europe. The Government has taken steps to compensate some energy-intensive industries, but it still estimates 13% electricity costs after compensation relate to decarbonisation.
• The growth of renewable energy, supported by contracts that guarantee a given price for a fixed period, has left the UK facing a possible shortage of capacity as private investors have not been willing to build new conventional power plants.
• The UK’s capacity margin is narrow. The Government introduced the Capacity Market in an attempt to reintroduce competition into the electricity sector. However, it is still struggling to procure new power stations.

In order to address the failures in the energy market the Committee recommends the Government should:

1. Ensure that security of supply is always the first and most important consideration in energy policy. Affordability and decarbonisation must not be prioritised ahead of security.
2. Ensure that decarbonisation is achieved at the lowest cost to consumers. This may mean waiting for the development of new technologies which can reduce emissions. The Government should make sure that the pace of reductions is flexible and not a rigid path to be achieved at all costs.
3. Reduce and remove Government interventions in the market. The best way to do this would be to ensure that electricity generating capacity is secured through a single, technology-neutral, competitive auction for electricity supply. This auction would ensure that consumers are paying the lowest prices for low-carbon electricity.
4. Establish an Energy Commission to provide greater scrutiny of energy policy decisions. This independent advisory body would report to the Secretary of State and advise on the best way for all the objectives of energy policy to be delivered.
5. Create a world-class National Energy Research Centre which would search for new methods of producing cheap, clean energy and translate them into commercial applications.
6. In the light of the uncertainties remain about the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station deal, outline its ‘Plan B’ in the event the project is delayed or cannot produce the anticipated power.”

Lord Hollick has recorded a video setting out the key recommendations in the report. It is online here.

The full text of the report can be viewed here:

PDF version – https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldeconaf/113/113.pdf

HTML version – https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldeconaf/113/11302.htm

Christine Metcalfe: Submission for the Inquiry into UK energy policy market failure over rising prices supply threats.27.09.16

Susan Crosthwaite Submission for the Inquiry into UK energy policy market failure over rising prices

Before the public get too excited, they should know what Sir David MacKay, ex-chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said recently about renewable energy during his final interview before his sad and untimely death.

He stated that there is an “appalling delusion” about the potential for renewables to power the UK, which is “dangerous“. When asked how much wind and solar power the UK should have he replied “almost zero”.

Geoffe Moore comments in a letter today on the new SNP draft Climate Change bill….very scary stuff and the question is, do our elected members read it before voting?

This article reiterates this

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/28/collective-act-make-believe-devastating-environment-budgets/

By Christopher Booker

Wind farms produce electricity eratically Credit: Yves herman/Reuters

The oddest thing about the political crisis gripping Northern Ireland was what triggered it. In 2012, under an EU ruling that burning wood was “carbon neutral”, the Northern Irish government, led by Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness, adopted a “green” scheme introduced by the UK the previous year, the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), offering lavish subsidies to businesses to use wood chips to heat their premises.

RHI was launched in Belfast without any control over how the money was spent. When businesses discovered that they could be paid £160 for every £100 they spent on wood, so many signed up, even using it to heat empty buildings, that, by 2020, it was estimated, the bill to UK taxpayers could have risen to £1 billion.

But this is only one of the countless unforeseen consequences of that obsession which has long held our politicians in its grip: the belief that, to “save the planet”, we must replace the fossil fuels on which our entire way of life rests with new sources of supposedly “carbon-free” renewable energy.

Arlene Foster is at the centre of the RHI scandal Credit: Liam Burney/PA Wire

We are committed to spending almost unlimited sums on subsidising ways we can tap into “clean, green” energy. Yet scarcely a week goes by without one of these schemes being revealed to be making a mockery of the purpose for which they were set up.

Each new example is shocking enough. But when we put them all together we see just how far this relentless drive to “decarbonise” is based on a colossal act of collective make-believe. Here are some examples.

1) The “Renewable Heat” Fiasco

Northern Ireland is only the most publicised instance of the absurdities created by the Renewable Heat Incentive. When in 2014 the Government extended this scheme to domestic premises, many owners of large houses across Britain realised that the more they kept their boilers running, even in summer, the more profit from the taxpayer-funded subsidy they could make. Since 2013 our bill for all this has been soaring so fast that, within four years, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, it will have totalled nearly £5 billion.

One consequence is that Britain is now burning more wood than at any time since the industrial revolution (hence inter ala last week’s first-ever ”Very High Pollution Alert” in London). Just as disturbing have been revelations of where much of the fuel to feed this subsidy bonanza comes from. Alarming pictures have shown the appalling damage being done to some of our most treasured ancient woodlands, even including a Cheshire estate owned by the National Trust.

Burning wood for heat is an ancient practice Credit: Pierre Edouard Frere/www.bridgemanart.com

2) The “Biomass” Farce

On a much grander scale is the sad story of Drax in Yorkshire: until recently the largest, cleanest and most modern coal-fired power station in Europe, supplying 8 per cent of Britain’s electricity. When in 2010 fossil-fuel power stations began to be squeezed by George Osborne’s “carbon tax”, intended to make them increasingly uneconomical, Drax decided to spend £700 million on converting its giant boilers to “biomass”, burning wood. For the three already converted, instead of being “carbon-taxed”, Drax now receives a whopping subsidy under the “renewable obligation” worth nearly £500 million a year.

But what has made this really shocking is that most of the 7.5 million tons of wood Drax uses each year is being shipped from the south-eastern states of America, where 4,600 square miles of forest are annually being felled, to be turned into wood pellets for burning 4,000 miles away in Yorkshire. Scientific studies have shown not just that much of this is virgin forest, uniquely rich in wildlife, but that, far from saving CO2, the whole process, including production and transporting of the pellets, has been estimated to result in emissions actually much higher than if Drax was still only burning coal.

3) The “waste into gas” threat

More controversy has lately been spiralling around another subsidy bonanza, again under the RHI and costing taxpayers £216 million a year. Developers have rushed to build nearly 100 giant “anaerobic digesters”: massive industrial plants in the countryside, designed to supply methane to the national gas grid made from food waste and crops such as maize, now specially grown on hundreds of thousands of acres formerly producing food to eat.

A particular concern for those living near these unsightly operations is not just their smell and the thousands of vehicle movements needed to bring in their fuel, but the growing list of pollution incidents from leaks of toxic ammonia, killing farm animals and wildlife. Investigations are currently underway into whether a spillage which killed more than 1,000 fish in one of Britain’s best-loved salmon and trout rivers, the Teifi, came from one such site.

4) Tidal fantasies

Many have long dreamed of harnessing the energy of the sea to produce electricity. Recently yet another such project collapsed, with a giant wave-powered turbine on the Welsh sea-bed, costing £18 million (£8 million of it from the EU), having broken down after just three months of operation.

Far more ambitious is the proposal to invest £40 billion in the world’s first huge “tidal lagoons”, first in Swansea Bay, with five others to follow. But, as I wrote two weeks ago, the derisory amount of power these might produce, paid for by mind-boggling subsidies, should make this a pipe-dream.

An artists impression of part of the Swansea tidal lagoon Credit: PA

5) When the wind doesn’t blow

Of the £52 billion Britain has invested in “renewables” since 2010, by far the largest chunk has gone into wind and solar farms, which, for a subsidy of more than £5 billion a year, now produce 14 per cent of the UK’s electricity, But the penny has now widely dropped that when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, these are not only useless, but require immediate and very expensive back-up from gas-fired power stations (and even thousands of diesel generators), to keep our lights on.

Even more absurd is how, when there is “too much wind”, to prevent this destabilising the grid we must pay £90 million more a year in “constraint payments”, to compensate their owners for not sending electricity into the grid.– pay ing them very handsomely to do nothing.

6) The electric car debacle

Although we have now paid more than £50 million to bribe motorists into buying “green” all-electric cars, barely 50,000 have been sold, at £25,000 or more each. This represents just 0.0091 per cent of the cars on Britain’s roads.

Carefully hidden, of course, is that most of the power used to charge their batteries comes from fossil fuels. So, when the manufacturing process and transmission losses to charging points are added in, these vehicles emit significantly more CO2 than they supposedly save, Yet MPs last July nodded through the “Fifth Carbon Budget”, imagining that within 13 years 60 per cent of all our cars will be electric.

Tesla’s Model X is an electric car Credit: James Lipman

Endless more examples could be cited, such as the environmental catastrophe inflicted on tropical countries by replacing vast areas of virgin rainforest with palm oil plantations, fuelled at least in part by the need to meet the EU’s legal requirement for us to use “biofuels”, which again have been shown to generate more CO2 in their production than they save.

Nor should we forget the “Diesel-gate” scandal which followed from the EU’s drive to reduce CO2 and other polluting emissions by engineering a switch from petrol to supposedly “greener” diesel-powered cars. Only in 2015 did it emerge that Volkswagen and other European car makers had been systematically cheating on their emissions tests.

It is time we woke up to the fact that all this nonsense represents one of the most bizarre collective flights from reality in history. But so long as the Climate Change Act is in force, we remain firmly in its grip.

by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers

“We need to stop adding solar and wind for ideological reasons”.

Excellent presentation report with some interesting data:

“Some readers may remember MSP Mike McKenzie’s eulogising ode to wind energy titled ‘The answer is blowing in the wind.’ So he will be pleased that Loch Aweside is now beleaguered by three huge wind farm applications at various stages of planning – Upper Sonachan (Egotricity); Balliemeanoch (Sgurr Energy) and Blarghour (Coriolis Energy). Each will be determined by the Scottish Government due to their sheer scale & size. E.ON intend to test wind speeds in Inverliever Forest near Dalavich prior to yet another application. Whether more are ‘waiting in the wings’ is as yet unknown.

http://www.iesisenergy.org/assets/files/IESIS-closure-Longannet.pdf

Experts: total closure of Longannet next year could leave Scotland without power for up to 36 hours

David Ross Herald, 23 Nov 15

ENERGY experts have called for some of the Longannet power station’s generators to be kept switched on when it closes next year to help prevent a scenario where Scotland could be without electricity for up to 36 hours.

Some of the most experienced figures in the industry have urged the UK and Scottish governments to intervene to prevent Scottish Power’s Fife plant, the last coal-fired power station in Scotland, closing completely in March next year.

Sir Donald Miller, former Chairman of Scottish Power, Colin Gibson, retired Power Network Director of National Grid and Professor Iain Macleod, Past President of The Institution of Engineers in Scotland, have now had three meetings with officials in Energy Minster Fergus Ewing’s department and have also briefed the Secretary of State David Mundell.

They say that under the privatisation arrangements neither the power companies nor National Grid have had any responsibility for planning long term security of supplies.

But following a request last year from the regulator Ofgem for National Grid to assume responsibility, the latter had recently published a schedule of studies.

However Sir Donald said: “It is estimated these studies will probably take two years.”

He and his colleagues say it is crucial that at least half of 2,400MW of conventional capacity provided by Longannet is retained until these studies are completed and assessed as there would be major implications if there was a shutdown of the power supply before then.

Currently, if there is a problem, Scotland relies on the Cruachan pumped storage hydro station at Loch Awe which can be started in under a minute, supplying power to start Longannet allowing the rapid restoration of supply.

But if Longnannet is no longer operating, the only recourse would be Cruachan combining with the small hydro schemes throughout the Highlands and Galloway.

Sir Donald said even if this was possible it would be a lengthy procedure.

“The joint working party set up by National Grid , Scottish Power and SSE, estimated it could take some 36 hours, a wholly unacceptable scenario,” he said.

Sir Donald added: “Bearing in mind the catastrophic consequences we strongly urge that until such time as the National Grid studies are completed at least 1200 MW of Longannet should be retained.”

He said the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Scottish Government between them had means of compensating Scottish Power for the costs of retaining some plant in commission. “Given the potential threat, the modest cost would surely be worth it,” he said.

Prospect’s negotiations officer Richard Hardy said the union, which has been trying to save more than 200 jobs at Longannet, shared the experts’ concerns.

A Scottish Government spokesman said National Grid and the UK Government had been repeatedly warned of the consequences of declining capacity margins in the UK electricity system and ministers shared concerns expressed by a range of external experts.

He said: “The Energy Minister has worked closely with Longannet’s owners Scottish Power, the unions and key businesses within the Longannet supply chain to explore all possible options to avert the plant’s untimely closure and is more than happy to meet with Prof Macleod, Sir Donald and Colin Gibson to discuss matters further. However, electricity generation is a reserved matter and all payments made to power generators are the responsibility of the UK Government and National Grid.”

A DECC spokeswoman said: “Keeping the lights on is non-negotiable. National Grid has the right tools in place to manage the system this winter and we will ensure that they continue to do so in future.”

ScottishPower would only say that every potential option to keep Longannet open had been explored.

A spokesman said: “The station will now close next year and our focus is consulting with staff to ensure we find the best outcomes possible for all of the impacted employees.”