renewable energy – Delingpole World

‘Nothing to See Here’ Claims Preliminary Whitewash Report into Massive UK Power Failure

BRIGHTON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 20: One of the final 55m turbine blades is manoeuvred into position on September 20, 2017 in Brighton, England. The last of 116 wind turbines have been installed at the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm 13 kms off the Sussex Coast. It will provide enough electricity to â¦ — Getty Images

The National Grid has released its preliminary report into the power cut which caused massive disruption across the UK on August 9th, affecting over a million people and creating chaos in rail and road services.

Paul Homewood summarises the main points here:

Lightning was the original cause, even though such strikes are perfectly common, and do not usually result in such catastrophic blackouts
Hornsea wind farm tripped first, contrary to original reports.
They still don’t seem to know exactly why either Hornsea or Little Barford tripped, though it was obviously due to the lightning.
Along with the loss of 500MW of small embedded generation (wind and solar), the total loss was about 1878MW
National Grid has 1000MW of automatic back up power available, incl 472MW of battery storage. Clearly this was not enough.
Following the lightning strike, the grid’s protection systems worked properly

But more interesting, he goes on to argue, is what the report doesn’t tell you:

Read the rest on Breitbart.

Trump Is Right – Renewables Are an Expensive Joke

US President Donald Trump Florida Governor Rick Scott and First Lady Melania Trump hand out bottles of water as they tour damage from Hurricane Michael in Lynn Haven, Florida, October 15, 2018. - President Donald Trump visited Florida on Monday, nearly a week after Hurricane Michael slammed the southern US â¦ — SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty

“No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric. Let’s hurry. Darling? Darling is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.”

President Trump – speech to CPAC 2019

Congratulations President Trump on yet another historic milestone: the first world leader to tell the truth about renewable energy – that it’s nothing more than an expensive joke.

Trump, as we know, has a gift for making complicated issues very, very simple.

On the subject of wind turbines – aka bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes – for example, he could have talked about the facts that they are only economically viable with hefty taxpayer subsidies; or about the damage to humans and livestock caused by their low frequency noise; or the environmental destruction wrought during their manufacture by the mining in China of rare earth minerals; or their visual blight; or their downward pressure on property values; or the people they drive into fuel poverty; or the economic costs of promoting a power source which is inefficient, intermittent, hugely expensive; and so on…

Read the rest on Breitbart.

‘Renewable Energy Is a Corrupt Scam, Go Nuclear!’ Says Green Guru James Lovelock

city — FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

The green movement is a religion rife with corruption, bad science and hysteria, and nuclear – not renewables – is the best solution to our energy needs.

So says James Lovelock, 98, one of the world’s pre-eminent environmentalists in a wide-ranging interview on today’s Delingpole podcast for Breitbart.

Lovelock is probably best known in environmental circles as the progenitor of Gaia theory – the idea that the planet is a self-regulating, living organism. In 2006, he boosted his green credibility even further with his bestselling book The Revenge of Gaia, whose doomsday narrative predicted that by 2100 climate change would have wiped out 80 percent of the world’s population.

But Lovelock has since renounced this view. Though he still thinks carbon dioxide is a problem because of its warming effects on the climate, he now believes the threat is not immediate.

His change of heart was brought about partly by being in Oslo when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was not impressed by the calibre of the scientists attached to the IPCC – least of all its then-head Rajendra Pachauri “who turned out to be somewhat corrupt.”

“There is global warming. But the stupid bloody academics screwed it up,” he says now – meaning that they got their sums wrong and exaggerated the speed with which the planet is warming.

A bigger worry, he says, are the wrong-headed policies being introduced supposedly to combat “climate change.”

He particularly loathes wind turbines because they are expensive, inefficient and environmentally damaging. The only reason they are being built, he says, is because “there is so much money in renewable energy. I’m sure there’s giant corruption going on.”

The solution, he argues, is nuclear power which has had a terrible press because of green propaganda most likely funded by fossil fuel industries. Nuclear’s health risks have been exaggerated by credulous greens who say “there’s no amount of radiation that can’t give you cancer.”

But this is nonsense, says Lovelock.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

‘Trougher’ Yeo recants on global warming | James Delingpole

May 30, 2013

Yeo: “Even though I’m wrong I’m totally right”.

So even Tim “Trougher” Yeo admits he was wrong about climate change. (Well done young Matthew Holehouse for screwing this admission out of him.)

Here’s what he said in 2009:

“The dying gasps of the deniers will be put to bed. In five years time, no one will argue about a man-made contribution to climate change.”

And here, less than five years on, is what he is saying now:

“Although I think the evidence that the climate is changing is now overwhelming, the causes are not absolutely clear. There could be natural causes, natural phases that are taking place.”

We’re going to see a lot of this in the coming weeks and months: “the even though I’ve been proved completely wrong, I was right all along really” non-apologetic retraction from all those former full-time climate alarmists – eg the Met Office; Oxford’s Professor Myles Allen; even certain of my Telegraph blogging colleagues – who are now trying to escape from the collapsing edifice of the great AGW scam while trying to salvage as much professional dignity as they can muster.

Notice that weasel phrase “I think the evidence that the climate is changing is now overwhelming…” It’s the sort of technique you might learn in an advanced NLP class as a way of pulling wool over the eyes of the unwary. What the phrase implies is that there has been a long-running debate as to whether “climate is changing”, that Yeo has always been on the right side of it and that now he has been vindicated. Truly this a slimy trick worthy of the man they sometimes call “Trougher” and sometimes “Ebola”. As we all know here, there has never been a debate about whether the “climate is changing”. Not even Mr Thick the Thickest person on the planet; not even Mr Fossil Fuel, the most lavishly Big-Oil-funded denialist denialista; not a single person anywhere on earth ever in our lifetime has ever suggested that climate doesn’t change. Indeed, that has been the whole point that those of us on the right (ie my) side of the argument have been making all along. Climate change is a normal, natural and perpetual process which occurs, and has always occurred, with sublime indifference to man’s puny input.

Still, it’s good to see Yeo taking at least the first tentative step on the path to redemption. Admitting you were totally wrong about something, that you’ve been made to look an utterly despicable, greedy fool, that even the Conservatives in your constituency hate you, that no one trusts you as far as they can spit, that you’ve done immeasurable damage to your country’s landscape and economy with the abysmally counterproductive environmental policies you not only helped promote but from which you may have benefited financially: these are things no man would ever wish to admit to himself.

But it’s OK Tim. I can help. In the last two years, for example, you have earned getting on for £250,000 on top of your MP’s salary, from your various green interests. Imagine how much happier you’d be in your skin if you could divest yourself of that money which you have now realised is tainted money. Imagine if you’d been given a blood diamond by Charles Taylor; imagine if you’d produced a DVD called “Now Then, Now Then: the Very Best of Jimmy Savile”: you couldn’t, in all conscience, keep the profits from that, could you?

Well, Trougher, me old mucker, I’m afraid the same rules apply with your green business interests. Here’s the thing: that industry you’ve profited from simply WOULD NOT EXIST had it not been for that toxic combination of junk science and hysterical fearmongering to which you have made such a vocal contribution.

I know quarter of a million quid is small beer next to the profits being raked in by your mates in the renewables industry. But for some people out there it would make a real difference, especially the victims of the wind industry which the Committee for Climate Change (Prop: Tim Yeo) has done so much to encourage.

£50 buys someone a decent night’s sleep in a B & B away from the insomnia-inducing low frequency noise of a wind farm

£500 buys a sporting rifle which – not that I’m recommending such illegal behaviour, heaven forfend! – might be used to blast away at the nacelle of the nearest wind turbine

£30,000 pays for a QC to represent a local community at the wind farm planning appeal to which, of course, by rights they should never have had to be subjected. After all, it’s not as though the planning committee of their district council didn’t already turn down this application to plonk an industrial turbine in the middle of their cherished beauty spot on two occasions, once by 11 to 1 and second time by 11 to 0. But hey, that’s the situation we’ve got at the moment with Dave’s Greenest Government Ever: still committed to building more of the turbines which no one save scrounging landowners and principle-free renewable energy companies actually wants….

£50,000 pays for the subsequent judicial review.

£250,000 buys a bespoke resignation speech, written by top author James Delingpole, for when you finally realise that being a decent Tory MP doesn’t fit comfortably within your skillset and that there are careers more closely aligned to your moral outlook. I’m thinking, maybe rare-earth mineral mining in China. Growth industry. Really green!

Green Jobs? Wot Green Jobs? (pt 2/2)

A glimpse inside David Cameron's head

A glimpse inside David Camerons head

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has published a report into the future of “Green Jobs” in Britain. It is damning indeed. Though it doesn’t actually say as much the GWPF is too austere and restrained for such flippancies this Government’s green policies are the equivalent of trying to pay off the national debt by breeding unicorns to sell to Chinese millionaires.

Among the conclusions of The Myth of Green Jobs by Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics at Edinburgh University, are:

1. “Green jobs” are a chimera. Though diverting taxpayers money into the renewable energy sector may indeed “create” jobs in the renewable energy sector, it will cost many more jobs in the broader economy.

2. Policies to promote renewable energy will add 0.6 to 0.7 per cent per annum to core inflation from now till 2020. This is equivalent to a rise in the same period of the Consumer Price Index by 6.5 per cent. if the Government sticks to its inflation targets and applies restrictions on speed of growth through higher interest rates, then the “sacrifice cost” ie what the economy could have made, but was prevented from doing so by monetary policy is £250 billion.

3. These same policies will, on top of that £250 billion cost, reduce GDP by 2 per cent to 3 per cent for at least ten years. This will cost Britain the equivalent of 60 per cent of the amount the government spends each year on primary and secondary education.

4. Renewable energy will cost £120 billion making it 9 to 10 times more expensive than energy from conventional sources.

5. Claims about “innovation” and the development of “new industries” are a nonsense. “Almost every country in the world wants to claim the same benefit so the numbers do not add up.For the longer term, there is little doubt that the primary beneficiary will be China. That is already apparent from the way the market is developing.”

6. Not only is there no evidence to support lobbyists’ and government ministers’ claims that green “investment” will create green jobs, but also such a policy will result in lower real disposable incomes and higher prices. Little thought appears to have gone into considering the real consequences of this government policy. Indeed, all these claims about green jobs “seem intended to divert attention from the consequences of setting arbitary and poorly considered targets for renewable energy.”

Not, of course, that we didn’t know all this already. I’ve written before about those non-existent “green jobs” here, here (the one where we learned that for every “green job” created in Britain 3.7 jobs are lost in the real economy) and here (my evisceration of the beyond-dismal Climate Change minister Greg Barker). What’s more significant, though, surely, is that for all the overwhelming evidence out there of the environmental and economic damage being done by the Government’s green policies, the Government is making no effort whatsoever to change course.

The story is the same in Obama’s America, as described in this brilliant piece by Walter Russell Mead. HT Chris Horner. The examples he cites of Obama’s green jobs quest what he calls “feeding the masses on unicorn ribs” almost beggar belief.

150 green jobs created in Southern Michigan, at a cost per job of $2 million.

$700,000 city and state investment in Green Vehicles in Salinas, CA, which has failed to produce a single car

Even the New York Times admits that Obama’s Green Jobs aren’t working.

Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.

and

Job training programs intended for the clean economy have also failed to generate big numbers. The Economic Development Department in California reports that $59 million in state, federal and private money dedicated to green jobs training and apprenticeship has led to only 719 job placements — the equivalent of an $82,000 subsidy for each one.

And earlier this week, a US solar company which had received a $535 million government subsidy filed for bankruptcy due to falling panel prices and global demand.

Solyndra is the third U.S. solar manufacturer to fail in a month as falling panel prices and weak global demand are driving a wave of industry consolidation. President Obama visited Solyndra’s factory in May 2010 to promote investments in renewable energy and its closure will provide fuel to critics of his policies.

You bet they will. One of the questions these critics may well be asking Obama is: isn’t squandering half a billion of taxpayers’ money on a failed project a rather cheeky way of funding your election campaigns?

A solar energy company that intends to file for bankruptcy received $535 million in backing from the federal government and has a cozy history with
Democrats and the Obama administration, campaign finance records show.

Shareholders and executives of Solyndra, a green energy company producing solar panels, fundraised for and donated to the Obama administration to
the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser, a key Obama backer who raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for the president’s election campaign, is one of Solyndra’s primary investors. Kaiser himself donated $53,500 to Obama’s 2008 election campaign, split between the DSCC and Obama For America. Kaiser also made several visits to the White House and appeared at some White House events next to Obama officials.

Campaign finance records show Kaiser and Solyndra executives and board members donated $87,050 total to Obama’s election campaign.

Yep, it seems like there’s one rule for the political class and its cronies and another one for the rest of us. If, say, you’re Sir Reginald Sheffield Bt the father-in-law of the British prime minister you can make getting on for a £1000 a week from the wind farms on your estates; if you’re the wife of the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg you can make hundreds of thousands of pounds as a legal adviser to the Spanish wind farm company whose unsightly bat-chomping eco-crucifixes are going to be wrecking the British countryside.

If on the other, hand you’re an ordinary punter, you’re expected to sit there and take it as the cost of your energy is doubled, your standard of living lowered, the countryside you love is ruined, and the destruction of your ailing economy is accelerated by the policies of a Government which no longer gives a damn what you think about anything.

Tag: renewable energy