From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
The clueless Ben Marlow is back to normal, with this utterly naive article:
In the Marlow household, all it took was a couple of chillier nights for us to panic and swap the paper-thin summer duvets for something more robust, a move I instantly regretted after seeing the weather forecast for the next five days.
If your thoughts hadn’t yet turned to the prospect of donning the thermals once again, then they probably will after the National Grid announced plans to pay families to cut their electricity usage again this winter.
As a way of ensuring the lights stay on, it certainly beats firing up the country’s old coal power stations – the tactic so often previously employed. There’s a certain creativity to it too – not something you’d expected from an organisation that Octopus Energy boss Greg Jackson has accused of “a phenomenal failure to innovate”.
But more broadly, it’s another sticking plaster solution to the energy crisis, and a pretty primitive one at that.
There are several far more grown-up solutions National Grid and the Government could employ. But don’t hold your breath – if there’s one thing that the great energy crisis unleashed by Vladimir Putin has taught us, it’s that neither our political masters nor the regulator have the answers.
Bills are still obscenely high and we need to wean ourselves off oil and gas. Yet it’s becoming increasingly clear that the costs of reaching net zero risks being prohibitively high, and No 10 continues to rely on a price cap that is acting as much as a floor on household bills as it is a ceiling.
So far, so good!
But Marlow’s solution is to build more wind and solar, and spend £40 bn that we have not got on upgrading the grid infrastructure to distribute it:
If Claire Coutinho wants to be taken more seriously in the post than her predecessor, then she should start by trying to drag the Grid into the 21st century so that electricity supply can keep up with ballooning demand.
Lobbyists boast that the UK has one of the most resilient grids on the planet but if that’s the case, then why the need for such convoluted measures to reduce the threat of blackouts – measures that critics have dismissed as “a gimmick” and customers have complained has only saved them pennies?
Isn’t the very threat of the lights going out in an advanced economy pretty firm evidence that the Grid is “not fit for purpose”, as Octopus’s Jackson has also claimed?
If you’re still not convinced, then perhaps it’s worth remembering that it takes seven years on average to connect a wind farm to the grid, while there are parts of London where it is impossible to build more homes because there isn’t capacity to support them.
In 2022, National Grid committed to a £40bn spending program on critical infrastructure over the next four years. Heaven knows it’s needed. Britain is moving to a modern digital economy in which electricity demand is expected to soar threefold by the middle of the century.
Yet, parts of the system were built in the aftermath of the Second World War. We need new connections and more modern transmission infrastructure, such as pylons and underground copper cables, otherwise hopes for 50 gigawatts (GW) of new wind and 70GW of additional solar power by 2030 will remain nothing more than that.
Apparently Mr Marlow has not managed to work out that the looming blackouts will be the result of shutting down tranches of dispatchable coal power, not a lack of intermittent renewable energy.
The commenters on the article seem to recognise this better than Marlow. For instance:
The fundamental problem is that our political class are hopelessly incompetent, economically and scientifically illiterate and completely corrupt.
They have committed the country to net zero lunacy without any referendum or mandate which will result in economic suicide and our transition to third world status.
Anyone impartial with any sense that has looked into it can see that renewables are intermittent and therefore unable to ever provide the reliable base load power required for a 1st world nation. Energy storage on the scale required using batteries or hydrogen is not and will never be viable.
Therefore the only realistic solution is to focus on nuclear, gas and coal based power to provide reliable base load power at sensible cost.
The only conclusion one can reach is that our politicians are effectively captured by a hostile foreign entity and are deliberately trying to destroy the future of our nation and its people.
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