Energy policy goes physics-free;
The Scottish supply is now based on nuclear, wind and imports with a little hydro and gas on the side. I think nuclear and wind is likely the worst combination for any grid that no sane power engineer would design. Variable and intermittent wind does not sit well with constant, base load nuclear power. We have reached this point in pursuit of Green dogma.
In this post I examine the policy and politics that led to this event and go on to consider the social and economic consequences of a nation-wide blackout that power engineers now believe is far more likely than before.
one hundred years from now, when all the bs about CO2 is seen for the nonsense it is, coal will still be there and will be used world wide to keep people from freezing, sweating and dying. only when the fools in power start to suffer will normality return.
No problem. Agenda 21 moving along quite nicely. I wonder if the Scots will wear their silly skirts this time as they freeze in the winter dark. All of Europe will hopefully experience a lot fun as they move back into the Dark Ages,just to please a few eco-terrorists. Gotta love mass suicide by a population.
see how it works? keep the masses ignorant via a decrepit edjukashun cystem, churn up all manner of excuses to panic, then undo the technology that in a couple generations (pun intended) no one will really understand anyways.
voila !!! chaos and catastrophe !!! just what the big money boyz ordered. who the fcuk can hang on to property when it’s falling apart or too expensive to run a bizznizz? thus millions of foreclosures by the ones who can afford to sit on an empty property indefinitely using OUR money to do it no less.
yeeee HAAAAAAA !!!!!!
“in Germany “die Bundesnetzagentur” can prevent a plant closure if deemed necessary for the stability of the grid………No such mechanism in the UK which seems to be a country full of happy go lucky people”
Unfortunately the people in charge of the grid really do believe the world can be run on pixie dust and unicorn farts.
Looking on the bright side, blackouts are sustainable.
It’s fortunate, then, that Scots can burn peat in their stoves and cuddle up to sheep at night.
All of the above. Rabbit, I am laughing.
“Gotta love mass suicide by a population.” This is the end game of the rabid eco-terrorists as they believe that there are 6 billion too many people on earth. After all, Dianne Frances told us so in a National/Financial Post article a few years back. The Scots might just have a head start.
Interesting dilemma. This is how the US Navy is dealing with an aspect of power loss.
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/u-s-navy-resumes-celestial-navigation-training-04042016/
“Unfortunately the people in charge of the grid really do believe the world can be run on pixie dust and unicorn farts.”
They believe no such thing. The people responsible for the grid are not the ones making the decisions. Ignorant politicians in cahoots with Greens are making them. The predominance of the Scottish National Party (SNP) is the result of its electoral alliance with the Green Party in Scotland. This is why in every election the SNP forms the government, and the Labour Party (not that they are any better) has been steadily losing ground for the past two decades.
It’s the VOTERS who are effing stupid. And they will get their just desserts good and hard when the blackout comes.
Motley has taken the base power out of the Alberta equation. The undepreciated capital left on the plants will go into the rate base. The cost of all the replacement generators will also go into the rate base.
OK. ‘the politicians in charge of the grid’ and the voter put them there and the voter is always right.
There is ‘green’ and there is ‘full mental green’.
We have relatives living there and believe me, the average Scot is in the latter category.
“The Scots might just have a head start.”
Scotland already has big demographic woes anyway. In 1979 there were 5.2 million Scots. The population began dropping and it was not until 2010 that it went back up to 5.2 million again. Now it is increasing at a snail’s pace.
(By comparison, Canada went from around 24 million in 1979 to over 34 million by 2010.)
A sharp, prolonged siege of Arctic air has shattered daily, even April monthly records in the Northeast and Great Lakes, and more record cold is expected this weekend.
Subzero cold was observed near the Canadian border in northern Michigan, northern New York and northern Maine Tuesday morning and daily record lows were set in parts of the Northeast Wednesday morning.
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2016 is the hottest year ever….
“We have relatives living there and believe me, the average Scot is in the latter category.”
Agree with you strongly on that point. Only with truly deluded voters would Alex Salmond ever have become the head of anything, and not once but multiple times. As for the real engineers who actually run the grid, they are well aware of the dire consequences of things like the closure of Longannet. The politicians seem even more oblivious to the impending closure within 10 years of both of Scotland’s nuclear power stations Torness and Hunterston. Incredibly, they regard this as a good thing.
Scotland is not a pleasant, comfortable environment most of the year. You can’t run a business from a laptop on the beach. How anyone could imagine that Scotland is inhabitable without a reliable energy supply is beyond me. Ah well, they will learn the hard way.
The physics equation of rolling blackouts goes like this … if you live in a predominantly conservative community or neighborhood of healthy ‘deniers’ … then your power will go out. If you live in a luxury leftist neighborhood, your power will never go off. What problem with green power ? My lights never went off. What’s wrong with all those Deniers ?
If there are frequent blackouts or one long, disastrous blackout then people will react. First, they’ll turn to government to fix it for them. That won’t help because politicians, who tend to be ego maniacs, will refuse to admit they were wrong. (I had a chemist like this who truly believed every one of his ideas was a brilliant success no matter how badly it failed.). So, politicians will blame someone else – capitalism, the opposition, other countries, electricity corporations and greedy consumers. Eventually, unhappy customers will make the rational choice to purchase their own backup systems – either individual diesel backup generators or community fossil fuel powerered backup systems. The poor will be hit the hardest because they can neither afford their own system or pay taxes, fees for multiple electricity systems. Pretty much like how electrification projects started in the 20th century. Somehow I don’t think this is what environmentalists meant by distributed, decentralized, community based power.
Years of teaching arts, belonging, dance, etc.
No room for science
Physics by feelings. The laws of physics can be broken if one just wants something deep in your heart, or give 110 %
LC, that’s exactly what the green slime want: a decentralized system without a dominant grid. They’ve made this quite clear with things like the prognostications of Amory Lovins and others since the mid-1970s. It is their fond delusion that all this can be achieved with wind and ultimately solar power. Since this isn’t possible for a population in the billions, this is one of the reasons why they are also malthusians.
Their religion is coherent and consistent. It just makes absolutely no sense from any technical point of view. But you never get anywhere arguing theology with its priesthood.
Alberta’s benevolent NDP government very recently announced that they intend to consolidate all “feuding” environmental agencies into one. (One ring to rule them all).
I think it’s a blatant power play (pun intended) to advance their mis-guided agenda of so-called sustainable power – i.e., wind and solar at the expense of decommissioning all coal-fired or NatGas generation – in spite of our current plants being the most environmentally benign on the planet.
Universal suffrage has unintended consequences.
Amazed at some of the quotes. People without any food beyond a couple of days. They probably don’t have any flashlights or batteries either. They might have a few candles. If there is a prolonged blackout, it will be ugly.
Yes, for whatever reason, Greens dislike centralized power. However, I doubt it’ll be decentralized wind and solar that will be powering communities in the cold parts of the northern hemisphere. Moral superiority and self-righteousness can’t keep you from freezing to death at -30C. I think people forget that in places like Canada heat and electricity are not a luxury, they’re a life or death necessity. Nope, individuals and community power systems will be belching out CO2 from diesel and natgas generators, first as backup systems then later as primary power if electricity reliability regresses further. Carbon rationing and climate expert scolds be damned.
The UK is already paying for emergency backup power and stand-by power from privately owned diesel powered generating skids, which has higher C02 emissions/MW than a modern coal plant. In the end, politicians will have transformed simple, affordable and successful energy systems into dysfunctional systems where every producer (green and conventional) needs taxpayer funded subsidies at every stage -research and development, to build, to sell electricity, to not sell electricity, to be on hot/cold standby, etc- in order to maintain a reliable supply and grid. But hey, the fraction of a degree of warming averted in 50-100 years per billions of dollars spent will make it all worth it.
BTW, do you notice that most economists fail to ever say what fraction of a degree of warming will be averted by aggressive carbon pricing. Do they not know? Are they too embarrassed to put in writing how small that number actually is compared to the price of mitigation? Do they know that people might realize that using the money to adapt to whatever climate/weather we get is more cost efficient? Building a water reservoir protects against drought and flood; sending more money to politicians just makes you poorer.
The idea of adding backup support is rather dumb.. Much easier to regulate with a HUGE dummy load that dumps 80% of wind & solar (normally) & run Nuclear @ ~95%…..The waste becomes waste without the additional cost…. If you only use 5% of the crap, it becomes easier to cost
LC, the reason is straight-forward. The Greens believe in full the old 1960s mantra of the classic hippies that small is beautiful and large is evil. Amory Lovins made it quite clear in his infamous paper in 1976 is that nuclear is inherently evil because it can only operate on a large scale and particularly because it cannot be comprehended by ordinary folk, leading to what he called “a nuclear priesthood”. In their view, this is both undemocratic and anti-egalitarian. (Trust me, I’m not defending this rubbish; I’m merely outlining their group-think so far as possible.)
It should also be noted that, to religious fanatics, unintended consequences are never part of the dogma and hence to be disregarded. When they occur, what is pronounced are various conspiracy theories or the prevalence of ignorance on the part of those varying from the prescription.
Re. the actual avoidance of warming and its costs. Yes, this happens all the time. The last serious attempt to produce an economic statement of the value of avoided emissions in terms of lowered temperature was that produced by the infamous Stearns study. To make the numbers work, Stearns had to use a discount rate of near zero. The direct implication was that adaptation was always vastly cheaper than ANY mitigation measure including carbon taxes of any kind. But Stearns’ work continues to be used by the green slime as the economic justification for all this eco-tripe. And it is on this basis of rigged discount rates that all of the IPCC and a host of other organizations base their future costs of global warming.
This is the key piece of fakery. Jigger with the future discount rate, and the putative savings from global warming measures can become quite large. On paper. And assuming that the worst of a range of IPCC projections is true.
Remember, this is the ‘dismal science’ of economics. The old joke is true: pose a problem to 10 economists and you will get 11 different answers.
And so, in the face of this propaganda lavishly supported by state-owned media like the CBC, the average citizen is helpless. As Joseph Goebbels accurately noted, a lie repeated often enough becomes truth.
Jimmy Carter lectured us to … “put on a sweater”. He even delivered his sermon from the Oval office with a crackling fire, wearing his own cardigan. Yeah, and Abe Lincoln read by candlelight. THIS is the eco-leftists wet dream … so long as the lights come back on before their iphones peter-out.
Face it, it will take freezing in the dark, before the utility bill payers finally realize they have been conned.
Just as canadians never seem to see the kleptocracy shuffle,before they retire or fall ill..
We have to charge you these exorbitant rates, look what we provide you with.”
Until you actually need it.
Government provided services/monopolies are so free that we ,the govt, must take over 50% of your income.
So we can afford to provide you with…..Useless crap I don’t need or can’t use.
Meanwhile …
[ Endangered salmon blocked for nearly a century from hundreds of miles of the Klamath River in Oregon and California are expected to return en masse under unusual agreements signed Wednesday to tear down four hydroelectric dams.]
Governors Brown & Brown say it is for the fish, electrical generation and agriculture be damned. This!, in a country that is $20 Trillion in debt. And $Trillions more in the hole with unfunded pension liabilities. How can this end well?
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/officials-sign-unusual-pact-tear-down-klamath-dams-191400843.html
I thought everyone who had a passing interest in climate change, and even economists, knew that the Stearn report was GIGO. Do the self-appointed saviours at places like Eco-fiscal commission use this discredited accounting method with a future discount rate of 0? If they’re not doing an accurate cost-benefit analysis then they should be honest about their intent – bigger government. Or, perhaps they need to hire engineers and mathematicians to walk them to a more realistic understanding climate and energy realities. While they’re at it a cost-benefit analysis of tradition (reliable, affordable) electricity needs to be done, assuming they have any interest in balanced research.
The religious aspects of climate change has always interested and suprised me. Especially coming from people who profess to have a commitment to science, humanism and atheism.
Some of the bggist lies by enviromentalist is ecsepted as the truth like DDT Rachal Carson lied or totaly left out the truth then can anyone remember all this bull twaddle about the Rainforests back in the 1990’s and back in the 1970’s is was Global Cooling and a New Ice Age and the eco-freaks are telling this BS to the kids and Obama and the Useless Nations is behind them the entire enviromental movents based upon lies and junk science
Good thoughts, LC. First, this isn’t about accurate cost-benefit analyses. It’s about cooking the numbers to produce the desired answer. After all, if they’re willing to cook raw measured temperature data then they are way past feeling any guilt about mere economics manipulations. It’s about Vox Ex Cathedra. Stearn has pronounced and Green Gospel has proclaimed it so.
Second, science, humanism and atheism? Let’s take those in order. Science is a posteriori where data is sacred; hypotheses and theories are disposable junk. But these twits reverse that; the Revealed Truth is all and the data simply adopted, disregarded or changed to suit that Truth.
Humanism is generally regarded as affirmative of the importance of the collective AND individual experiences of humanity. It means to expand the understanding and capability of humanity, both collectively and individually. The Greens are nihilists. They want the sheer numbers of humanity reduced, and they want the collective AND individual capacity of humans reduced by abolishing a large number of technology developments they don’t like. That’s nihilism, and the Greens are one of the very few religions that’s ever existed in history which supports such diminishment.
As for atheism, that simply means for them the discarding of established religion and substituting their own: Mother Gaea and a host of other forms of animism. That’s not atheism, that’s simply another religious war.
In closing this screed from me, remember these people are all platonists. They accept that some are born to lead, and the hoi-polloi like you and I should know our place, get with the program, and fall in line. They are the Philosopher Kings and thus to be respected and obeyed. Hence the not-infrequent attacks on anything resembling democracy or free choice. Our own Prime Minister once admiringly referred to China for its ability to ‘get things done’.
Good “screed”, cgh.
The only thing I’d add is the profit motive. Business class environmentalists are partnering with the Philosopher-Kings to enrich each other. Like most religions, salvation and redemption is linked to cash payments.
Agreed in full, LC. The Philosopher-Kings provide the faux moral and ethical justification for crony capitalism predicated on government regulation and policy favouritism. The crony capitalists keep the largesse flowing to the self-righteously outraged, not to forget the kickbacks to politicos seeking re-election, while government creates the court politics for them both, and the PKs smile and nod approvingly of the entire cabal. It’s a nice, tight little triad.
It’s only problem is that it doesn’t work in actually making electricity, hence the problems encountered by Germany, Britain, Ontario, California, with real industry fleeing hither and yon.
Good comments! I need to add “buy a sheep” to my list of things to do;-) Anyway, if my blog goes black next winter you’ll all know why.
Good comments! I need to add “buy a sheep” to my list of things to do;-) Anyway, if my blog goes black next winter you’ll all know why.