A British paper asks: Has any minister in history seemed more hopelessly unfit to do his job?
The penny is fast dropping that by far the most disastrous appointment made by David Cameron to his Coalition Cabinet was that of the ultra-green, Lib Dem Chris Huhne as our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.Yesterday, after Mr Huhne issued his first annual statement on Britain's energy future, it was clear that we should all be very, very concerned about the future of Britain.
...the £100 billion-plus energy question that confronts us all in Britain today is how we are going to fill that massive, fast-looming gap in our electricity supplies when the antiquated power stations which currently supply us with two-fifths of the power needed to keep our economy running are forced to close. The answer given by Mr Huhne is that we must build thousands more giant wind turbines.
He boasts about how the 3,000 wind turbines we have already built have the 'capacity' to generate 4.5 gigawatts of electricity. Capacity is the crucial word here. As he could see from figures on his own department's website, thanks to the fact that the wind blows only intermittently, the amount of power these windmills actually produce is barely a quarter of that. In other words, the amount of electricity generated by all those turbines put together, at a cost of billions of pounds, is no more than that provided by a single medium-size conventional power station - equivalent to a mere two per cent of the electricity we need.And wind generated electricity costs three times more than the conventional one. I think of Britain as one of the best governed countries, yet sometimes I wonder: Are the inmates taking over the madhouse?.
11 comments:
That Tony Blair is one of the most sinister of men. I believe that in another age he could have been a demagogue on par with Lenin or Trotsky. As much as any man he has screwed up the UK.
As I've said before, these geniuses subscribe to the broken windows theory of economics - to them, the fact that this form of energy requires more inputs per unit of output is a feature not a bug. By their reckoning, government requirements for such inefficiencies create more "green jobs". They are idiots.
K
I get the feeling that the environmental movement was a considerable extent manipulated by the Soviets to prevent Western energy independence. This seems the simplest explanation for their otherwise irrational opposition to nuclear power.
Maybe Chernobyl was a plot to make nuclear power look bad. Or maybe the Soviets really were a bunch of drunken incompetents? I'll never forget the drunken old Russian general who attempted a coup against Gorbachev - he needed a little "liquid courage" to fortify himself. A little became a lot and he went on TV drunk as a skunk.
K
Have you seen Medvedev on TV? He is generally too drunk to walk unaided. Dont misunderstand me, I am praising him. Drunks are good people.
The UK "governments" have been making serial mistakes for over a decade now.
The country has long prided itself as "punching above its weight". Soon it will be punching below its weight, and then not punching at all.
Anon.
I call such windmills "feelgood towers" - that seems to be why they exist.
RM
Windmills have fascinated humanity from Don Quijote's time. There should be one on every house, to be spinned by an electric engine when there is no wind, and be done with that craziness. We would me all mentally healthier watching them. They could be painted with different colors and have cocks or other figures on them.
In the time of Don Quixote they made sense since power from fossil fuels had not yet been discovered so they had no alternative (in places where there were no rivers to dam for water mills). Now their energy density is too low and the cost too high. They disappeared for 100 years only to come back due to the green wackos.
K
While I agree that massive green energy projects are a gigantic government goatfuck, I see potential in small ones like this : http://greenupgrader.com/3525/energy-ball-super-efficient-wind-turbine/ and microhydropower turbines.
I've thought about going and setting up a Balkan dealership in microhydropower-I speak the language(s,) the place is full of mountains with mountain streams running everywhere and everybody is constantly bitching about the government's power net, left over from Tito's 1960s. Taxes are uniformly low, too. What do you guys think?
A lot depends on the economics - the cost of the turbine/ generator/ dam vs. the cost of local power. The volume of water, the head pressure (drop), whether it flows all year - how many kilowatt hours /$/per year you can generate. Will the local utility pay you for excess power and how much? Will they even let you compete with them or undermine you? The devil is in the details. I imagine that on certain streams it would be profitable but I don't know how many. Getting an inexpensive (Chinese?) yet good enough product to sell would make a big difference in the breakeven points.
My mother's father had a water turbine powered mill in the mountainous part of southern Poland (used not to generate electricity but harnessed directly to grain mill, circular saw, etc.) so this is nostalgic but that was in a time and place where there was no power utility to compete with.
K
Post a Comment