National Grid has reported, that for the first time, over 50% of UK electricity came from renewable electricity (RE) on 7th June. Is this a cause for celebration or not? With biomass generators being subsidised to the tune of £43/MWh and offshore wind producers to the tune of £89/MWh (source Drax), this effectively doubles generation costs. I imagine that the RE generators will be breaking out the Champagne. While if you are a hard-pressed, energy poor pensioner, you are probably wishing you’d bought another blanket.
Britain, shrug. A stupid little country. What Canada wants to be when it grows up.
Buy your own genset.
This willful blindness will continue until the idiot “Progressives” are freezing in the dark, only then will the fools who continue to support them, feel enough pain to start thinking..
Base Load?
Never heard of it, sounds like work.
Renewable,sustainable, subsidized.. so much better..
Obviously a government enforced monopoly of the right to generate and sell electricity, leaves the citizen totally at the mercy of fools and bandits.
Such mechanisms are the hallmark of Kleptocracy.
State run utilities(including run by regulation) are a license to control and steal.
For the Canadian Kleptocrats,energy is something delivered by the wall plug.
and nothing will reset their stupidity until it stops being delivered.
Canada Modern Thought .CMT.
.Money? Comes from government.
Water? Comes from tap.
Electricity? From wall plug.
Food? From supermarket.
Where else would you get “Growing the economy from the heart?”
Or “Investing in Government” Welfare?
I will never get it. When it’s 40 below and we need electricity the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. In Alberta and likely everywhere else 100% of the power produced by solar and electricity is redundant. For this redundancy we pay billions in subsidies. Not only that, the pressure in the boilers of the thermal or nuclear plants has to be maintained because of the lag time in firing them up when needed.
Jamie, amen to that. Britain is now a crappy little country that can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be part of Europe or not, can’t decide if Moslems are friends or enemies, and with its no-questions-asked welfare handouts to Jihadis from all over the dark corners of Araby, is skirting dangerously close to being a state sponsor of Jihadist terror. So far Britain is only financing terror against its own people, but Trump would be justified in declaring them a terrorist-supporting state. Until they end welfare, I consider them a state sponsor of terror.
Meanwhile … here in CA … the eco-psychos are calling for 100% RE across the entire state. Now ! As IF that were even -slightly- possible without covering the entire state in windmills and solar panels … fouling the environment far worse than any fossil fuel plant.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/time-100-percent-clean-energy/
This … based on the “fact” (flimsy) that for 1.2 hours … Marin County operated on 85% RE (never mind that a substantial portion of that came from hydroelectric power … which required the damming of “Wild” rivers … also HATED by eco-leftists.
This is being sold on the idea of “social justice” for the POOR (mostly black) people who live next to the Chevron Refinery in Richmond, CA (among others). Yeah … that’s like saying we should ground ALL commercial air traffic … to “save” … all the POOR (mostly immigrant families) who live next to airports.
Yes … Puff the Magic Dragon … is running the State of CA. And they’re smoking some real STRONG sh*t !!
its actually a disease isn’t it…?? I mean really. “wild” Rivers..?? WTF does that even MEAN.??
Again…I wonder what it will take for normal North Americans to get so outraged – so Pissed off to actually do something physical and concrete about it..??
what will it take indeed..??
Marxism running rampant: Media – politicians – academia
Eco-Nazism
Islamic infiltration
Our world is crumbing beneath our feet and it seems no one wants a hand hold….
“Our world is crumbing beneath our feet and it seems no one wants a hand hold….”
It seems that many American people did when they elected Trump, while we elected a moron.
PM Harper refused the Copenhagen fraud and now our CPC MPs sell us down the river to Maurice Strong and Al Gore.
What Jamie and Bdsm said.
ya know sitting in Calgary:
I look East and see a progressive pansy with pink socks, shirt off – tongue sticking out and I near puke. …The Prime Minister of Canada no less. An Obama admiring Moron imbued with a balance of Soros’ induced ideology, brother Alexanders’s Marxism & Gerald Butts’ ECO-Nazism…all with a dose of Islamic Flavouring and ensuring that every bit of policy has Social Licence.
I look North and see Alberta Premier No-mind Unionizing the province as she decimates our labour laws, all part and parcel of her Marxists Anti-Fossil Fuel Anti Capitalist strategy.
I look West and see a Province that does not even HAVE a Conservative party, completely in the shitter with 3 Green NAZI’s holding the balance of power between Left Light Liberals and Far Left NDP
and come to the conclusion that we are well and truly F’kd.
have a nice weekend folks…enjoy the decline..
Yet, here in CA … we elected FOR THE FOURTH TIME … Jerry Brown as our governor (after doing a term-limit work-around). So Jerry flies off to China urging them to SELL lots of their Paris eco-Treaty fossil fuel credits (indulgences) to CA industries (aka Cap+Trade). All the while bashing Trump and inviting MORE illegals to get FREE sh*t here in CA. This State (the coastline cities) has gone completely off the rails of sanity.
If those poor blacks had jobs at that oil refinery, they wouldn’t be poor.
Green activists and journalists who brag about RE producing 50% of electricity (for a short period of time at tremendous cost to customers) aren’t substantially different than gambling addicts bragging they won $500 on slots (but lost $2000 over the last month). At least the gamblers are using their own money.
Lomborg had charts on Facebook a couple of years back that illustrated the difference between the wholesale cost of electricity (what green addicts and journalists like to quote) and the retail price – huge difference. Green electricity only produces “cheap” energy if you exclude most of the actual costs like subsidies and unreliability/non-dispatchability. It also showed how big business got heavily reduced rates while average retail customers and paid the full green inflated price. The bigger the proportion of green electricity, the higher the retail costs and the bigger gap between big business and households.
Media reports on the awesomeness of RE is cognitive bias, cherry picking and motivated reasoning at best, outright propaganda at worst.
Restricting access to energy is the best tactical weapon progressives of all parties can use in the war on prosperity. This war has been waging for the last 50 years. Green priests provide cover for all the statists engaged in battle. Both agree on the same strategy of dispensing liberty first. The mindless masses, innumerate and devoid of critical thinking, can only parrot pieties from media propagandists.
As the watermelons, other statists and progressive totalitarians lurk:
Government excess and politicization of all aspects of life, from civil to civic society, as the progressive loop closes, voter says no,
Someone steps in and puts a stop to the gravy train, enraging and inciting infinite hatred of the purloined ones, greased by tax dollars,
Obvious examples are Reagan, Harper and Trump. As their vision of limiting government (at least the growth of it) takes hold,
Prosperity rises, liberty ensures, employment increases, innovation increases, productivity increases, and we’re all fat and happy,
Radar goes down, it wasn’t so bad before when we hit the debt wall, 21% interest rates, won’t happen now. Spend, spend, spend.
Then the lurkists swoop in and tell us we’re killing the planet, we’re not really happy, we have appropriated others’ glee,
And, they can fix that, in fact make everything “perfect,” so you don’t have to feel guilty about it, and best of all “someone else” will pay,
Result: Giant governments and their indebted societies addicted to war (history’s lesson), taken off the rails here and there by the likes of JFK and the others above, temporarily. Slight pullback in government intrusion, debt growth and taxation, then back to Justin’s from the heart easy way out, resulting in … brief respite from economic moderates …. well, it’s 2017 isn’t it?
Energy, climate change, defense policy, you name it – it’s about the narrative which benefits the elites, not you, with you getting the bill.
Here’s another interesting set of stats for Canada:
In 2013, the leading type of power generation by utilities in Canada is hydroelectricity, with a share of 60.1%. Nuclear (15.8%), natural gas (10.3%), coal (10%), wind (1.8%), fuel oil (1.2%), biofuels and waste (0. 8%), wood (0.4%) and solar (0.1%) follow. Other sources, such as petroleum coke make up the remaining 0.5%.
Over 75% of Canada’s electricity comes from non fossil fuel sources, hydro and nuclear. I suspect natural gas has gained on coal. As remaining coal plants age they can be replaced by natgas, hydro or nuclear (possibly biomass). All of which are good to excellent sources of reliable, dispatchable baseload power with lower CO2 content at affordable prices for customers. Only an idiot would choose solar and wind electricity in one of the harshest climates in the world, especially since our electricity sector is already one of the lowest CO2 emitting in the developed countries.
Tell the guilt mongering politicians and activists in Canada to shove their scolding and shaming where the sun doesn’t shine.
Much of that ‘biomass’ comes from clear-cutting forests for material to burn, of course.
Not that the greenies will discuss that. After all, it’s happening across the sea, so it obviously doesn’t affect them!
@ Alyric: I am familiar with the claims that wood pellets begin life in US and Canadian forests. I need clear evidence that NAM forests are being cleared to generate electricity in the UK. I have ample evidinece of woodlands being cleared in the UK. But the bulk of the action is on your side of the pond.
Forests in North America are harvested for products far more valuable than pellets. Pellets are made from residue from log handling, barking, planing, and sawing those products. Raw material going into pellet production is 5 to 10% of the price of the pellet FOB the crazy jurisdictions using it to replace coal. It’s possible that plantations in the US South near tidewater (low cost harvesting) could fetch prices close to pulpwood, making it the prime product but marginal at best. Half of the energy input of the LCA from British Columbia, for example, is in Ocean transport to the UK which is a far greater environmental atrocity than the green priest concern over forest harvesting which is part of an industry that is likely the most sustainable and environmentally benign on the planet.
Isn’t it more like “what Canada wants to be when it becomes senile”?
I feel much the same. Further, we were back stabbed by the new CPC leader.
Al Gore’s big lie has sure taken hold.
the base load has to be supplied by something other than solar panels and wind turbines.
At first blush, 70% electricity from non-fossil fuels sounds impressive for Canada. But our country has signed on to very large CO2 emission reductions in the Paris Agreement. If we took all our cars off the road and switched all coal generation to nat-gas we would not even meet half our obligations. This means we will have to pay heavy carbon taxes. If I wasn’t cynical I would suggest the governments are setting unrealistic emission reductions to ensure carbon taxes will always be needed to “make up the difference”.
By design there isn’t any end point. Even the “tipping point” of 2C since the industrial revolution has changed to 1.5 once it became obvious that catastrophe warming was exaggerated and the models were running too hot. The only concrete numbers, which must never be questioned, are the flawed models predicting environmetal catastrophe and equally flawed econimc models. If you ask how much mitigation and carbon taxes will cost in terms of dollars and jobs – directly and indirectly – there’s no numbers available. If you ask how much the proposed solutions will alter the temperature in degrees Celsius over various time periods, there’s no numbers. Cost/benefit and risk/reward are only presented for the purpose of fear mongering and guilt trips but never for critically evaluating the effectiveness of the imposed solutions. Such an obvious manipulation.
It will continue until voters stop playing their game. The first step is realizing we are one best countries in the world for environmental conditions. One of the cleanest electricity producers. Clean air, clean water (except for big “green” cities dumping raw sweater into their local water bodies). Huge carbon sinks in the boreal forest and prairie range land. Large sections of land set aside for parks and wildlife. Strict environmental regulations. It’s never good enough. Apparently only forcibly taking large amounts of money from the poor and middle class and giving it to politicians and crony capitalists will do. It is one of the biggest transfers of wealth from average people to the rich and well connected…all to prevent an imperceptible fraction of a degree of warming.
Canada has the lowest emissions of any industrial country in the world. When the rest of the world catches up then we can worry about doing more. Of course doing nothing will not hurt us or the planet. captcha, closed follow.