New coal-fired power plants: All the news that’s convenient to print

It’s almost a week since Steag GmbH, started up the new 725-megawatt Walsum-10 coal-fired power plant, in eco-friendly Germany.  The plant is due to commence full commercial operation before the end of the year.

Germany is consistently cited by environmentalists in the UK as a stunning example of the use of renewables, and evidence that the UK should follow Germany’s ‘wise’ example in moving away from fossil fuels.

How curious it is, therefore, that the same environmentalists have been completely silent about Walsum-10.  For that matter, how curious it is that while the UK is being saddled with more disproportionately expensive and grossly inefficient wind turbines, the UK lamestream media has completely ignored the Walsum-10 story.  You could perhaps understand a single coal plant’s opening being ignored, but no less than ten new hard-coal power stations, or 7,985 megawatts, are scheduled to start producing electricity in the next two years.

The difference between the German approach and the UK approach is stark.  The German government is determined to produce affordable and reliable energy for its industry and domestic consumers and is building substantial new coal to meet its needs.  Meanwhile the UK government is determined to put up wind turbines regardless of the cost and at the expense of reliability and is more concerned with forcing people to use less energy rather than striving to meet demand.

The compliant UK media remains silent.  They only publish the news that’s convenient to print, and in any case the journalists who cover political issues have other more pressing concerns than something as trivial as keeping the public informed.

Whose cash cows?

And so it continues.  The BBC has been given an advance copy of Ed Davey’s forthcoming speech to Energy UK:

Gas and electricity customers are “not just cash cows” to be “squeezed” to create bigger profits for shareholders, Energy Secretary Ed Davey will say.

In a speech later, the Liberal Democrat minister will call on the industry to “open up your books” to show how it is trying to minimise tariffs.

But it’s OK with Thick Ed that gas and electricity customers are ‘squeezed’ with visible and hidden government taxes and levies – being used as cash cows to enrich corporations and land owners with rental fees and grossly inflated feed-in tariffs for the most inefficient and unreliable energy generation available… wind turbines.

Perhaps it is time Davey and the Common Purpose-loving, human-hating drones at DECC opened up their books to show us how much is really taken by government, through energy bills and general taxation, as they pursue the Agenda 21 inspired strategy to force down energy consumption as part of the campaign to achieve a warped version of ‘sustainability’.

Yet this man will have the nerve to utter these words:

You deliver an essential public service, so your industry must serve the public – and the public must have trust in what you do.

And what of government?  When will government serve the public? When will we ever have trust in what government does?  Ed Davey and his fellow troughers should get their own bloody house in order before engaging in this ‘nothing to do with us guv’ nonsense and telling others what to do.

How offering false choices produces meaningless answers

Over on Political Betting yesterday, there was a post about recent polling as reported by You Gov for the Sunday Times.

PB, which has been keeping an eye on Labour’s polling fortunes since Ed Miliband’s junk status promise to enforce a 20 month price freeze for energy,  focused on one question which offered respondents a clearly biased selection of choices…

The Miliband pledge of an energy price freeze for 20 months:

Not only unworkable because it assumes wholesale market prices are static and factors that can increase or reduce price do not exists, but easy to circumvent by companies putting up energy prices before and after the period to recoup the same revenue they would have collected anyway.  It’s a false choice, a bit like the mythical ‘renegotiation’ option as an alternative to leaving the EU.

Excess profits tax on energy companies:

The key word here is ‘excess’.  Who determines what is reasonable and what isn’t?  Add to this the fact that most of the money energy companies make is from generating and selling energy to the wholesale market.  Is that what will be taxed?  They don’t say.  The profit from energy customers is around 5%.  Is that what will be taxed?  If so, is 5% profit ‘excessive’?  In any case, how does a tax help we consumers?  Will it be paid back to us, or just become another sum bundled in with general taxation for the government to fritter away as it sees fit? Anyway, we have to ask, how many companies would happily trot along working for just a 5% mark up on the cost of delivering a good or service?  Another false choice.

Reducing green taxes:

More popular than a windfall tax, but less popular than the Miliband con trick.  The obvious thing here is reducing green taxes and keeping them down will have a longer term effect on prices than a 20 month price hike holiday that only delays the inevitable.  But what this does not do is change the policy that sets a target for the percentage of renewable generated power in the energy mix.  So we still end up paying, whether through our bills or through general taxation, unless the Climate Change Act is repealed.  So this is also a false choice.

All of this shows that the polling was utter garbage.  Heads are being filled with ideas that are unworkable or non existent options that are no antidote to the problem of politically motivated rises in energy costs.

As a result the poll responses are utterly meaningless and does nothing but keep consumers in ignorance of the real reasons for much of the energy price rises.  There was no more value to it than asking people whether a phoenix, a minotaur or a winged horse should be the next 10 Downing Street pet.

Want to understand why those energy prices really keep rising?

It’s been documented and explained for years by Richard North and Christopher Booker.  But those who have not seen their many warnings about what was in store for us as a result of policies, that so many people cheered for being ‘green’, might benefit from this very quick summary that Booker puts in his column today.

Two weeks ago, in a column headed “It’s showdown time for our insane green energy policies”, I observed that this is the moment when the roof is finally starting to fall in on a collective flight from reality that I have been reporting here for years.

But what few people yet realise is how far this catastrophic mess we are in was not only predictable, but has also been quite deliberately brought about, through the Government’s own policies.

Their central aim, though never openly explained, has been twofold. One leg has been to build, by 2020, some 30,000 wind turbines, so ludicrously expensive that we must pay double or treble the market rate for the power they so inefficiently produce.

The other leg is that, to make this seem competitive, we should also eventually be made to pay twice the going rate for all other forms of electricity: hence the “carbon tax” on coal and gas, and the colossal price we are to pay for power from Hinkley Point and other new nuclear power stations (four times the cost of nuclear, estimated by a Royal Academy of Engineering study only nine years ago).

That is why our energy companies pathetically try to explain that a third of the increased costs driving their latest price rises are made inevitable by the various levies we must pay directly for those “green” policies, such as the hidden subsidies being showered on the owners of our ever-growing number of wind farms and acres of solar panels.

Another third represents what we must pay for the thousands of miles of cabling needed to connect those “renewables” to the grid (which Ofgem estimated might, by 2020, cost us another £40 billion).

Then there are the other measures needed to counteract the unbalancing of the grid by the intermittency of “renewables”, such as hiring those thousands of diesel generators to provide back-up, which makes a further mockery of the “de-carbonisation” policy mandated by the Climate Change Act that Mr Cameron was so keen on.

The truth is that we are being brought face to face with the utter absurdity of everything this Government’s bizarre ragbag of policies has been trying to achieve.

For Mr Cameron to blame all this on Mr Miliband only shows that the fuses in his brain have at last begun to blow. By mindlessly going along with all this nonsense, it is our entire political class that has created this shambles. It is the rest of us, alas, who must now live with the consequences.

Given all this, does anyone believe a word these pompous hypocrites have to say, and does anyone believe the laughably and ridiculously low amount DECC claims we pay to support this insanity?  Little over £100 per year on energy bills doesn’t come close to covering the cost to energy consumers and taxpayers of all these politically mandated measures.

You might be asking yourself why the political class has done all this.  The answer to that is simple.  ‘Sustainability’.  But it’s essential to understand that the notion of sustainability has been corrupted.  Instead it encompassing the development of low impact sustainable ways of providing sufficient energy, water, shelter and other basic human needs to meet the demands of a growing population – which technology can achieve – it has been twisted into meaning that people must use less of everything.  How can they be sure people will use less?  By restricting supply (e.g. unreliable turbines instead of reliable coal and gas, no new reservoirs combined with water metering) and driving up prices to a level that many people cannot afford.  Simple, and vicious.   But then, these are the very people who continually argue that the world population needs to be reduced because they consider humans to be a virus that is destroying the planet.  But the politicians believed (and some still believe) that aligning with these people mark them as responsible and virtuous, therefore more electorally appealing.

In light of the anger these supply and price measures are provoking and the slowly growing awareness of just what lays behind these measures, I think back to those ‘enlightened’ environmentally aware people who queued up to ridicule North and Booker for their projections of the effects the policies would have.  One wonders where these previously vocal people are now, as the chickens are starting to come home to roost.

The pips are already squeaking and we are not even close to the full impact of this political insanity.  This issue is one that will keep coming back to the fore as the prices continue to be ramped up.  The politicians have created a mess they have no solution to.  Time to get the popcorn, while making sure you do what you must to stay warm this winter…

Guilty

Each time a provider has put up their prices, Labour has spun its smoke and mirrors on their ludicrous plan for a 20 month price freeze.  Meanwhile the Tories have said people need to change provider to get a cheaper deal.

Both are trying to convince the public they want to ‘do something’ even though both have laid the blame for the huge and continuing price rises at the door of the energy providers and have tried to ignore the government’s significant role in driving up energy costs – which are far greater than the 10% admitted to by DECC.

But today, against a backdrop of Tories and Socialists at least going through the motions of claiming they want to see the rapidly increasing burden of energy prices reduced, the Lib Dem energy minister, Ed Davey, has said he is pledging to turn the screw even harder.

I am not going to give up on renewable energy, they are not going to touch it, and I am not going to betray the fuel poor. That’s for me is a complete red line. I feel passionate about that.

The green taxes we have been pushing as Liberal Democrats in this government have been extraordinarily successful and point to an extremely green, clean energy future. They’re not being touched and they won’t be touched. It’s incredibly important for investors that they hear that.

His pledge to help the fuel poor just creates more fuel poor to pay for it.  But his real priority is renewables.  He wants to carpet bomb the country with wind turbines so he can rid the energy mix of coal fired energy – at a time when environmentalist Germany is building more competitive and reliable coal fired plants, to ensure its people and industry can afford to power homes and businesses.

While Germany thinks about its power needs and acts on them, Britain has the insipid Davey thinking about investors’ needs and crippling consumers.  These investors are the people and companies that coin in a fortune from our taxes and energy levies to put up wind turbines that earn them vast sums, even when the turbines deliver only around a 1/5th of their energy capacity – and they even make money when the turbines generate nothing!  It is ideology-driven insanity.

The sustainability agenda has a new figurehead in the UK.  Ed Davey, a man who is guilty of dogged determination to make things worse because he refuses to accept his direction is damaging.

He thinks he is a force for good.  He is merely a puppet of delusional environmentalists, with little concept of the real world and is in thrall to those who believe humans are a plague that should be controlled, by reversing industrial progress and undoing the humanitarian progress that has enabled many people of even meagre means to heat the property they live in.

Ed Davey is possibly the most dangerous extremist in this country today.  The damage he is capable of wreaking far exceeds that of armed terrorists.  His sustainability jihad should be of serious concern to everyone who does not have a parasitic interest in making money from underperforming novelties that attract ludicrously inflated feed in tariffs: and whose low output must be purchased by energy providers irrespective of the cost – the pain of which is then borne by all powerless energy consumers.

Davey is out of control and impervious to the wishes of the people.  He is aided in this by the fact we do not have democratic control that enables this idiot to be called to account.  More than any other politician today, he embodies the pressing need for structural reform of governance in this country to ensure people have the power, not dictatorial ideologues elected by around 28,000 voters in one corner of south west London.

The cheapest unit of energy is always the one that isn’t used

It may be a cliche, but it’s true.  The cheapest unit of energy is always the one that isn’t used.

Those are the words of RWE npower’s Chief Executive, Paul Massara (on the video below).

Once again we see reinforced and overtly articulated, the implementation of the global sustainability agenda, which is seeking to force consumers to use less energy by driving up prices.  It is staring us in the face, yet still it is shrouded in deception and dishonesty – even with the price comparison sites pretending better deals can be had, so they cash in each time some desperate customer switches supplier to postpone the inevitable hike of more than 10% when their ‘fix’ deal ends.

All the comments from David Cameron, Michael Fallon and the cast of bare faced liars at the heart of government, including Ed ‘justify your price increase as I load on the levies’ Davey, about shopping around for a better deal, is nothing more than theatre.  It’s all an act.  There is no plan, no impetus and no desire to increase energy supply to meet demand.  The politicians know the agenda they are working to.  They know they are pricing people out of the ability to afford energy to heat their homes and cook their food, all for the corrupted ideal of environmentalism.

Only the most deceitful or utterly incompetent and deluded fool could possibly argue that almost doubling the wholesale cost of electricity from nuclear power, in 10 years time, could result in cheaper energy bills.  But that was David Cameron, speaking about the plans for the construction of Hinkley Point C.  Only a moron like him could suggest that getting a French company to build the power station with oodles of Chinese money equates to kick starting the UK’s nuclear industry.

It is an outrageous lie.

If all this does not provide sufficient evidence that our rulers – who are supposed to be our servants – are serving interests other than ours, then nothing will.

More media stupidity on energy

With very few notable exceptions, it seems the British media is stuffed with hacks who exhibit no evidence of an enquiring mind, no willingness to question and test the stories they are being fed and no interest in publishing challenging pieces that readers need to be told, no matter how difficult the conclusion is for people to accept.

The Mail on Sunday has one of its increasingly half baked, cor blimey editorials today where is proclaims ‘We must sort out fuel prices… right now’.  It doesn’t perform any real service to its readers because it doesn’t recognise and set out the real problems about energy prices.

At the most simplistic level, prices are rising for four reasons:

1. Increasing energy prices on the wholesale market are being passed on to customers by the regulated providers
2. Increasing government-imposed ‘green levies’ imposed to pay subsidies and grossly inflated tariffs to corporates and land owners for building and hosting inefficient and expensive wind turbines that are incapable of replacing the conventional energy generating capacity
3. Additional government-imposed levies designed to drive up the cost of energy in order to leave many people with no choice but to use less energy than they do now, regardless of how cold it may get in the winter
4. The regulated providers seeking to maintain a margin, which in the retail market is only around 5% profit, as reward for the good they provide

But you would never understand this from reading the Mail piece.  Instead it adopts the economically illiterate position of the Archbishop of Canterbury – a man with a commercial background who should know better – which effectively calls for the energy providers to absorb the rising cost of energy themselves and provide it to people at cost, or even at a loss.  The Mail barely touches on the significant impact of government policy.

Where is its 4 page spread examining the policy of using pricing as a means for forcing reduced energy use?  Where is its editorial attacking the imposition of vast levies to install turbines at a cost of billions of pounds, which generate on an average less than 25% of their stated capacity – and where the guaranteed price for what little energy they produce offshore will be £155 per megawatt hour (MWh) and onshore is £110/MWh – falling to a still eye watering £135/MWh and £95/MWh respectively in a couple of years?  That compares to a current guaranteed price for nuclear power of £48/MWh.  Even that price is expected to almost double to around £90/MWh for new nuclear build as the government fritters away our money as it desperately tries to make up for outrageous strategic failure on new energy build over the last three decades.

What the Mail also fails to grasp, let alone report, is the disturbing fact that the structure of energy prices and what they are made up of is now so complex, not even the most savvy analyst can break down where the money we pay actually goes to.

There are so many impositions and elements in energy today that working out who the money is going to is virtually impossible.  Which could explain why we see Scottish and Southern Energy declaring that the cost of energy has gone up 4% in the last year, while British Gas say it is 13% in the last year.  The only way to achieve transparency in energy pricing is to start again from scratch and identify exactly what goes where.  Then we could have some confidence in British Gas’ breakdown, shown below:

What is clear is that while there are pressures from government and consumers on energy companies to rein in their costs, no one seems to be connecting the dots about how government and regulation is driving up the wholesale costs to energy companies, how transmission charges are rising unchecked and how direct levies and taxes by government are also not subject to proper scrutiny or downward pressure.

Until a lot of light is cast on this and the government is called to account for its part in this – and forced to explain to people the global and EU dimensions to the vicious policy of forcing down demand through higher prices in the name of ‘sustainability’ – the cost of energy is going to continue to rise.

The lightweight intervention of Dr Justin Welby and the weak arsed commentary of the Mail achieves nothing and helps no one.

Energy prices: Reality bites as the grotesque political deception continues

The Agenda 21-originating strategy for its notion of the ‘sustainable’ use of energy is now out in plain view.  We can see this in the Telegraph today with the headline above.

The story, by the Beano’s fearless dynamic duo Steve Hawkes and Jessica Winch, actually offers readers some value in its opening paragraphs:

Britain’s biggest energy supplier blamed Government costs as it pushed the average annual dual fuel bills up by £120 a year to almost £1,470 – the highest typical tariff ever seen in the UK.

Ian Peters, head of residential energy, said British Gas understood energy bills were a “real worry” but there was little the company could do.

But he faces a fierce backlash after telling customers a price rise didn’t necessarily mean they would have to pay more. He said: “The amount you pay depends not on the price, but on how much gas and electricity you use.”

And this is exactly what we were highlighting the other day in our post about energy.  I explained my personal situation where my only option to avoid paying more for my energy is to use less.   I explained that is exactly what the government’s energy policy is designed to achieve, to force everyone to use less by driving up the prices.  And now British Gas is explicitly telling customers to use less energy.

With that in mind, the sheer contempt and cold hatred I feel for the Axis of Weasel, warming their fat, taxpayer funded arses on the green benches on all sides of the House of Commons, should be understandable.

Instead of pursuing a strategy to devise effective, efficient, affordable and low impact energy generation and distribution systems, to comfortably meet the demand from a growing and, thanks to human progress, an increasingly energy-intensive population in these Isles, the entire political class has glued itself to an environmentalist driven agenda to reverse progress and force us to use less energy.

The moronic hypocrites in the Labour party naturally seek to make political capital of this latest price rise, declaring it was yet another example of why Ed Miliband’s price freeze was needed – as if they bear no responsibility for these measures being enacted when Miliband was the Secretary of State who pushed them through.  Thus we see the putrid Caroline Flint declaring that:

Britain’s energy market isn’t working for ordinary families and businesses.

Yet she and her colleagues are the ones to blame for this, and the execution of the strategy that ensures the market doesn’t work and prices are being forced up by government delusion over cutting CO2 emissions.  But the Tories and Lib Dems bear equal responsibility.   Which is why, when the likes of Michael Fallon spout shite about the energy sector needing more competition and that people can save money if they shop around; and Ed Davey demanding energy companies justify the price increases brought about by the very policies he is actively pursuing and seeking to make even more burdonsome, as the current Minister at DECC, I am left in a simmering rage at the whole shoddy, incompetent, deceitful, sick inducing lot of them.

Getting back to today’s news, Chris Weston, British Gas managing director, is quoted as saying the cost of green subsidies and environmental programmes such as ‘Eco’ – free loft and cavity wall insulation – were to blame for almost half of the increase.  Yet for most properties the amount saved off energy bills from reduced use would take many years to cover the cost of the measures government has forced energy companies to offer.  And there are many properties where the design does not allow for such measures, meaning they are stuck with higher bills in return for nothing.

Did you vote for this?  Did you want this?  I’ll wager the answer is no.  Yet, as a citizen of the EU (whether you want to be or not) you have supposedly been represented in the discussion and decision making that has resulted in our energy prices being driven up.  No, really.

But for that to be true, in the UK, unless you would need to be a paid up, consulted and voting member of:

• The Wildlife Trusts
• The Woodland Trust
• Waste Watch
• Scottish Environment Link
• Friends of the Earth
• Environmental Protection UK
• Client Earth
• Compassion in World Farming
• Wildlife and Countryside Link
• Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
• Green Alliance
• FERN – EU Forest Programme
• Campaign to Protect Rural England

For it is only these organisations that ‘represent’ UK citizens in the discussion that informs such energy policies.  This is because, under the guise of listening to what ‘citizens’ have to say, these are the campaign groups the EU chooses to recognise as part of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB).

Public funding from the EU and national governments flows to these groups to lobby back at them and sit alongside ministers and national representatives as equals.  This gives the ability to the senior leaders of these groups to dictate the approach to environment and energy that impacts all of us, and it is they who have driven and are driving many of the decisions that result in the increases in energy costs that are punishing the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

But ask the members of these organisations how many of them were asked to vote on this approach to energy, or approve their organisation’s position, and I will warrant the vast majority had no say and probably could not articulate the political stance their membership is validating.  But there we are.  Realpolitik in action.  Democracy as interpreted by governments.  And we poor bastards continue to foot the bill – some of us dying for the lack of affordable energy to stay warm in past and coming winters.

The political class needs to be stopped.

Getting energised about energy

Barely a day goes by without the media (particularly the BBC with its desire to air Labour’s current favourite topics) focusing attention on something we are all very acutely aware of, namely energy prices.

In recent days we have had Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) lead off the regular cycle of price rise announcements with an 8.2% hike on gas and electricity bills.  The political response was all too predictable.  Labour – the party which, with Ed Miliband as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, wilfully took ‘green’ measures in the 2008 Climate Change Act it knew and admitted would drive prices upwards and increase the cost of living – described the rise as scandalous.

As an example of rank hypocrisy, this is head and shoulders beyond anything we’ve seen in a long time.

Meanwhile the Tories maintained their mind-numbingly stupid refrain that the energy sector needs more competition and that people can save money if they shop around.  This is patent bollocks.  I have used every available price comparison website and I’ve checked for every available deal based on the energy my household uses.  I am on a tariff that expires in 2014, but which is cheaper than any tariff or fixed deal currently available on the market from any energy provider.

When my current deal expires I will have to pay more for my energy.   All I can do is limit the increase to the smallest amount possible, which will be well over an additional £100 per year.   And my provider is yet to increase prices this winter, so the amount will be even more.

My only option to avoid paying more for my energy is to use less.  And that is exactly what the government’s energy policy is designed to achieve, to force everyone to use less by driving up the prices.  This goes to the heart of the sustainability mantra.  This is based in the enviro-belief that humans are a plague on the planet and must use fewer resources.  They resent the idea of technology being used to provide abundant energy that is affordable for most people.  They want people to have a difficult existence.  Richard explained this on EU Referendum this week when he wrote:

Never properly explained, though, is that the price increases are the result of deliberate government polity, using the price mechanism to reduce demand and thereby enable successive governments to meet self-imposed targets for “decarbonisation”.

Where the politicians have been caught out is in listening to Green propaganda, offering the fools’ paradise of increased energy efficiency, though more efficient appliances and insulation, without realising that low-income families are quite unable to offset increased costs in this manner, making fuel poverty the problem of our times – and again one which was entirely predictable.

What was interesting to note last week was SSE echoing what is becoming an industry-wide mantra that government ‘green’ levies are responsible for a substantial proportion of the price increases people have been and will continue to experience and struggle with.  They have made clear that while wholesale energy costs have gone up by about 4% in the past year, the cost of government-imposed levies on energy bills has increased by three times as much – 13%, and will continue to rise due to the cost of connecting useless wind farms to the energy grid, where they can provide a fraction of their potential and far less than the equivalent of nuclear or conventional installed capacity.

Today, Christopher Booker reminds us of more mind numbing Tory stupidity from the fool Michael Fallon:

While SSE called for a curb on these green levies – such as the crazy “carbon tax”, designed eventually to double the cost of electricity from fossil fuels, which still supply 70 per cent of our needs – the only official response was a fatuous call from our energy minister, Michael Fallon, for consumers to boycott SSE. Mr Fallon was oblivious to the fact that his Government’s policies will soon force all other energy companies to follow suit.

Just as the government and the media  twist themselves into contortions to hide the fact the Royal Mail privatisation has only happened because the EU said it must, the government and the media are twisting themselves into contortions to attack the power companies and conceal from the public the fact that rising energy bills are largely due to government policy; which is taking our money to pour into unjustified subsidies for wind turbines and lavish payments for wealthy landowners to have them on their land.  And all this despite the evident inefficiencies and failings of turbines as a source of energy generation.

People can be forgiven for being sick and tired of energy price rises, but they need to be aware of where the upward price pressures are coming from – and the majority of it is from the hypocritical, deceitful and delusional morons that infest the corridors of Whitehall, taking their orders from Little Europe, which has taken its orders from the global power brokers most of us have never heard of.

Reversing the CO2 madness on energy – it can be done

It can be done, oh yes.

On Friday, Sean Carney writing on the Emerging Europe blog in the Wall Street Journal, explained that:

Support for the European Union’s climate and energy policy eroded further Friday as the Czech Republic became the latest member to denounce subsidies for clean but costly renewable energy and pledged to double down on its use of fossil fuels.

It followed Poland’s declaration that it would use its abundant domestic coal supplies for power generation rather than invest in costly renewable energy facilities. Spain abolished subsidies for photovoltaic power generation in July and the U.K.’s power markets regulator last month froze solar power subsidies for the rest of the year.

If renewables gave value for money and provided a reliable source of energy, this would not be happening.  But the reality is these subsidy sinkholes are good for nothing but making landowners and renewables companies a huge amount of money, robbed from taxpayers and ever rising costs passed on to energy customers.  But as Carney’s piece explains, there are other consequences to this ludicrous largesse:

The Czech Republic has seen a surge in renewable power production over the last four years due to rich cash payouts for investors in the sector. Since then public outrage over fast-rising power prices has forced politicians to put the brakes on subsidies. The payouts have been a drag on the economy, creating uncertainty on energy markets and preventing utilities from investing.

So Germany continues to build more coal fired power stations, the Czech Republic and Poland are reverting back to coal and economic reality bites in Spain.  Yet the UK has in Ed Davey a minister for Energy and Climate Change who bitterly opposed the UK’s freeze in power subsidies and is demanding we go further down the road to the renewables abyss by ramping up the amount of underperforming wind turbines for the sake of ideology.

Ed Davey is doing this irrespective of the possible harm to our energy security, the ever rising cost to taxpayers and consumers, and the fact our European neighbours are calling time on a shocking financial waste that has delivered nothing close to what was promised in return.  The EU is hamstrung, member states are rushing back for reliable and affordable energy sources, evidence that reversing the CO2 madness on energy can be done.

Yet despite this the British are being dragged into penury by a delusional idiot who is happy to squander other people’s money to satisfy his vanity and desperation to be seen as virtuous.  And while Davey picks our pockets to push his policy agenda and describes realist opponents in the Conservative Party as its stone age wing, without any sense of irony his Lib Dem socialist mate Vince Cable has the nerve to describe the Tories as the nasty party.  Satire is truly dead.

BBC covering up for their friends?

Which of the following headlines do you consider to be the more newsworthy and being of greater public interest?

1. 25% of the population have been victims of a violent attack this year, or

2. 38% of the population are concerned about being violently attacked in the coming year

If a news organisation ran a story with headline one, then changed it to headline two later the same day, people could be forgiven for thinking that the organisation was perhaps trying to tone down the story by diverting attention away from the serious impacts that have been experienced by people and on to a statistic dealing in hypothesis rather than actuality.

The BBC has done just this today, not on the subject of violent crime but on the consequences of rising energy prices, particularly on low income and vulnerable households.

We will never know why they have changed the focus of the story, because any request for an explanation of an editorial decision or the process that led to the change is summarily rejected thanks to the BBC’s broad and routinely abused exemption under the Freedom of Information Act.  But there are some things we do know.

We do know, as covered in the previous post, the BBC is firmly on the side of environmental organisations, indeed any departure from the BBC’s ranks of environment reporters is invariably to positions in such eco groups or to become formal campaigners for such groups.  We also know as this earlier post reminds readers, that environmental organisations are the driving force at governmental level behind the insipid approach to energy policy that is pushing up energy prices to force people to use less energy.  And from the BBC’s survey findings we now have a clear picture of the consequences of this energy policy on real people, who are going without heat in their homes.

The effects of the energy policy going to get much worse.  More elderly and vulnerable people are going to perish this winter and in future winters because the cost of heating their homes has been dramatically increased, with much of that increase driven by direct and indirect levies and taxes demanded by the environmental NGOs, who sit alongside government and make the rules, unscrutinised, unaccountable and unmoveable.

If 25% of people surveyed have already suffered cold homes because heating is unaffordable, heaven knows how bad things will get for them in future years, let alone how many more households will be dragged into fuel poverty by this madness.  Who knows, even the BBC might struggle to conceal the impacts of the actions of their fellow travellers.

Don’t be surprised, this is exactly what is supposed to happen

And so, after publishing a festering pile of distorted and deliberately misleading rubbish that deceives people about the power and influence Norway enjoys by being outside of the EU, but having access to the single market (read how the journalist who did the piece was forced to concede his distortions by The Boiling Frog), the public suffers some more as the BBC rides again … this time with another festering pile of distorted and deliberately misleading rubbish that deliberately conceals the root cause of the suffering being experienced by households across the UK that cannot afford to heat their homes.

This is exactly what was supposed to happen.  The policy imposed on the UK by the EU is designed to reduce energy demand by driving up prices and limiting supply.  It is the same with forcing down demand for water by driving up prices and preventing an increase in supply.  ‘They’ have decided energy use is driving the planet to global warming thermogeddon so something must be done.  So we have to suffer the consequences.

‘They’ are the environmentalist  and sustainability NGOs at work, sitting by invitation at the EU top table as the supposed citizen body representatives.  Given equal weight to that carried by the national representatives they sit alongside, they are unelected, unaccountable and lavishly funded by the political class to lobby and inform or even direct the policies the political class impose upon us.

This is what passes for democracy in the EU.  Self professed ‘experts’ in the field of ‘sustainability’, reversing the positive progress mankind has made over decades to provide affordable energy to heat and light homes in even the poorest households in our society, because they believe the source of that energy is dirty and harmful to the planet and they demand we use less energy in order to accommodate the useless renewable solutions also forced on us as a partial replacement at enormous cost.

These are people who have been given huge power to determine how we should live our lives, without the inconvenience of having to seek our approval via the ballot box for their agenda and the implementation of their deluded and damaging worldview.

So it is that while:

Sixty-seven percent of people said they would support more coal, oil and gas stations being built in the UK if it brought energy prices down.

the prospect of it happening does not exist.  We are in thrall to the eco warriors who would have us living our lives in a de-industrialised society akin to the world portrayed on the US TV drama ‘Revolution’.  But where is the BBC’s analysis about why this is happening?

Heaven forbid that the environmentalists’ biggest and loudest cheerleader, the BBC, should shine a light on how we have been brought here and where we are being taken. Such coverage is not permitted in the echo chamber.

Heaven forbid we should be told how we are governed, who makes these policies, why they make them and that without a fundamental change to our ‘democratic’ structures that we cannot get rid of them.

UPDATE: The BBC has updated its story and the headline, in a typically slippery way.  Instead of focusing on 25% of the population ‘enduring cold homes’, which is a hard hitting fact based upon the survey results, they have changed headline to ‘Heating bills concern 38% of population’, which plays down the consequences of the legislation’s impact.

STOR: Are even higher diesel generator costs just over the horizon for energy customers?

On current figures, as Richard North, Christopher Booker and James Dellingpole have explained in recent days, the Short Term Operating Reserve (STOR) scheme that provides back up for wind power and renewables in the form of a national network of diesel generators controlled remotely by the National Grid, is expected by 2020 to cost UK energy consumers close to an extra £1 billion.

However it is possible that figure could increase substantially for energy consumers because of factors that investors, who are rushing to install generators to cash in on incredibly lucrative standby payments and grossly inflated tariffs per MWh, may not have considered.

There is a very reasonable possibility that the propensity of the EU to impose regulation on anything that moves could be extended to things that don’t, such as stationary diesel generators that comprise the STOR network.  The subject of regulation of diesel generators forms a discussion piece on the website of the Association of Manufacturers and suppliers of Power Systems (AMPS).

The EU is nothing if not a fan of harmonisation and standardisation.  For while at this time the EU Stage IIIA regulations affect emissions from portable and rental generator sets in the power range of 18-560 kVA, but not emissions from stationary, non-road diesel generator sets such as those used for STOR-type prime, peak shaving, load shedding or emergency standby power, the EU could decide to move to adopt US Tier IV-style regulation for diesel stationary engines.

Stage III A of the EU regulations covers engines from 19 to 560 kW including constant speed engines, railcars, locomotives and inland waterway vessels, Stage III B covers engines from 37 to 560 kW including, railcars and locomotives and Stage IV covers engines between 56 and 560 kW.  If these regulations were to be applied to stationary diesel generators, which arguably pose a greater risk to people because of their fixed locations and their in situ emission of the nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and other particulates the regulations are designed to limit in fixed locations, existing generator sets may need to be modified or replaced.

The investors who are piling in for their cut of the STOR largesse are not going to want to see margins eroded by the need to replace or update at significant cost their gen-sets.  The costs will be passed on when the government’s operating reserve becomes a hostage to fortune upon which it is ever more reliant due to its obsession with renewables at the expense of conventional energy generating plant.

In the AMPS piece it is clear the power systems manufacturers have already been anticipating what this means for their profits.  As Richard Cotterell, the General Manager at the Perkins Engines Company Large Engine Centre in Stafford makes clear:

France, Germany and Switzerland and other European countries have their own regulations. India, for example, regulates diesel engines up to 800 kVA, whereas the EU only regulates [non-road, portable gensets] up to 560 kW.

Furthermore, the emissions regulations set for electric power engines are several years behind highway engines, so as Perkins also manufactures on-highway engines we are less apprehensive about more stringent emissions legislation. Our electric power division in Stafford, UK will be able to leverage Perkins in-house expertise and knowledge that our brothers have in Peterborough, as well as our parent company Caterpillar has around the world.

In other words, they can bring modification solutions to the market quickly – but it will be at a cost to the owners of the gen-sets.  Perkins stands to do well out of a change in the regulations, as does its fellow Caterpillar company, FG Wilson (now Caterpillar NI), which is Europe’s largest manufacturer of diesel & gas generator sets and power generating solutions.

Interestingly last summer, FG Wilson as it was then, began to implement a significant redundancy programme across its plants at Larne, Monkstown and Belfast when it decided to move the manufacture of retail size gen-sets to China because that’s where its major market for the units is. A Caterpillar employee tells me its strategy is to build its equaipment as close to its customer market as possible.  So it is noteworthy and very telling that the manufacture of large gen-sets of the type used in STOR diesel parks has been kept in Northern Ireland, as demand for them in the UK is robust.

Ultimately the inescapable fact is that the UK government has put this eye wateringly costly STOR in place at our expense and we could soon see our supreme government in Brussels take regulatory measures that further add to the cost, which we will also be expected to cover through our energy bills.  We are in a lose – lose – lose situation and despite the huge implications for energy customers the mainstream media and the likes of its eco-activist, climate defending superstars like the BBC’s Roger Harrabin, remains silent.

Energy prices, energy gaps and ignoring the elephant in the room

The appearance of Paul Massara, chief executive of RWE npower, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning signalled a continuation of the slow burn of superficial media coverage about the issues of energy prices and energy gaps.

Massara was there to explain his argument that government policy is the major factor behind rising energy costs.  It is hard to disagree with when one considers the imposition of levies and charges that are being tacked on to the cost of gas and electricity.  But Massara certainly isn’t telling the whole story and is deftly attempting to play down the ways in which the energy companies – and other investors highlighted in recent stories about the Short Term Operating Reserve (STOR) scandal – are cashing in at consumer expense.

However, nothing the government or the energy companies are saying is acknowledging the elephant in the room.

For at the heart of all these measures, charges, initiatives and regulations that consumers are being hit with is one simple fact – the aim of the government is to drive up prices to reduce demand.  In other words, the policy is to force people to use less energy, rather than governments seeking to provide enough energy to meet the demand of a growing population.

The cart is being put before the horse in this way to satisfy a wrongheaded and retrograde direction of travel, one that seeks to reverse decades of human progress while describing this plan, in classic doublespeak, as progress.

Behind this is the nefarious ‘sustainability agenda’, which dictates that the ever growing number of people must get by with less, and to ensure they do consume less governments will impose measures to limit supply and force prices up.

The very notion of encouraging innovation to find cleaner, more affordable and more efficient ways of meeting the growing global demand for energy, is heresy.  It must not be discussed, for no one must be given the impression there is an alternative to the vicious agenda being followed by the global political elite and the corporates that stand to make a fortune for delivering less to their customers.

While the media, government ministers, assorted talking heads and the lavishly remunerated cartel of CEOs from the big six energy firms continue to postulate, comment, argue and prattle their various offerings about our energy future, the root cause of all this remains a globally determined diktat that has never been put to the people in consultation or presented to them for their approval – yet for which the people are expected to pay vast amounts more in return for very much less.

This is the huge elephant in the room from which they are averting their eyes, in case the rest of us notice what is happening and take a stand against the political and corporatist class.

STOR Scandal: Ripping you off to line corporate pockets

Richard is away plane spotting so I’ll try to do my bit for the cause… Booker’s column in the Sunday Telegraph today spreads the word to more readers that under the Government’s STOR (Short Term Operating Reserve) scheme, the National Grid has been signing up, at vast expense, thousands of diesel-driven stand-by generators to provide instantly available power to “balance the grid” when the wind isn’t blowing.

 
As Booker explains, so huge are the sums the grid is offering to make this power available that hundreds of canny investors have seen that this is one of the great money-making rackets of our time. In old industrial sites, quarries and supermarket premises all over the country they are piling in to install dedicated “generator parks”, capable of producing up to 100 megawatts (MW), in return for “availability payments” of up to £47,000 a year for each MW of their capacity. They then receive additional payment for the amount of electricity they actually feed to the grid, giving them an equivalent of £600 for each MW hour supplied – 12 times the going market rate.

What does this mean for energy customers?  Before long STOR alone will be adding five per cent, or £1 billion a year, to our electricity bills. Yet no one involved wants to talk about it. This is a scam so colossal that it makes the owners of those useless wind farms, who get subsidies of 100 or 150 per cent, seem miserably underpaid. As Booker puts it, this new energy scandal makes the wind industry look underpaid.  And that is exactly what this is, a scandal.

In the name of decarbonising our economy and fighting climate change, ordinary customers like you and me are footing the bill for inadequate and grotesquely expensive wind energy solution that simply doesn’t work.  To make up the shortfall in wind energy’s capacity to deliver the power we need, the government is encouraging – with even more of our money – the construction an even more grotesquely expensive back up solution powered by hydrocarbon fossil fuel.  STOR is best described as the Government scheme to make corporates richer at your expense, which exposes the fight against CO2 as a blatant fraud.

Delusions of the Living Dead, aka Europlastic Tories

A Victor Kiam moment here at AM Towers.  This blog post over at EU Referendum hit the nail on the head so accurately and articulated my own thoughts so precisely, I have ripped it off almost entirely, with only a few minor personalisations.

——————

Normally, I ignore Conservative Home. That part of the blogosphere remains the hunting ground for tribal warriors, and I have neither time nor patience for its party-before-principle guest and the attendant petty-mindedness.

Others, with tougher constitutions, still frequent the site, and I have thus had my attention drawn to this from Andrea Leadsom (above), who is still pushing her mantra of “meaningful reform” of the EU. And there is also this from George Freeman, also of the Fresh Start Group.

Actually, having read the pieces, I wonder why I bother – why anyone bothers. Neither are saying anything new, nor anything interesting – there is nothing at all that informs or inspires. We are not getting argument – simply leaden propaganda, repeated again and again, presumably to reinforce the belief systems of the faithful – for no one else will believe it.

Richard North’s answer to this was given in June 2004, repeated many times, but particularly in January of this year. These are Richard’s “barking cats” pieces, to which – in conceptual terms – neither he nor I can add very little. Leadsom and her ilk – including her Open Europe minders, say we must “reform”. I, and many others, say that “meaningful” reform is not possible and will never happen.

And those are the positions – fixed, unchanging. There is no debate, nor any possibility of debate. Disagree, and make the mistake of disagreeing too forcefully or too often, as you get “disappeared”. The other side do not want to know, any more than we want to hear the repetitions of their flawed, evidence-free and indeed ridiculous arguments.

From that, though, does not emerge a counsel of despair – simply a recognition that head-butting gets you nowhere. It seems to Richard – and I wholly agree – that a better strategy is to introduce new facts and ideas, which by-pass the blockage. Leadsom might want to bleat about “over-regulation” and “negotiating over tedious directives”, at EU level. We simply point out that the regulation is at dealt with at a global level and that is where the UK needs to be engaging.

On wind turbines, we can rehearse the arguments for and against until the cows come home and the macerated birds fall from the sky. But sell the idea that, if you buy wind, you get diesel, and pay an additional £1 billion extra for the privilege, and the argument looks very different. Similarly, take the claims of our influence inside the EU, and tell people we can’t even argue for our mackerel quotas and again the terrain looks very different.

But talking about the reality and sharing it with others who are not as well informed is why the opposition wants to control the flow of information. It does so mainly by ignoring new facts – by not discussing them, not debating them, not even recognising them. When, for instance, have you ever heard about Codex on Conservative Home?  Where have they added value or anything worthwhile to the sum of their readers’ knowledge?

Thus, we do not speak to the close-minded. It is a waste of time. The likes of Leadsom will go to her grave still arguing for “meaningful reform” of the EU, long after we have left the EU and it has crashed and burned. We can’t deal with that. This is the dialogue of the living dead.  The stake through their heart or axe through their head will be when reality – that thing they desperately ignore as they play party political games for a party political audience – bites hard.

STOR scandal: Putting the scale of the theft from us into context

Following on from our previous post about the emerging STOR scandal, it would be helpful for people to understand just some of what this means in monetary terms.  To what extent are energy consumers and taxpayers being ripped off to make expensive diesel powered electricity generation worthwhile for ‘investors’ and big businesses to provide to the grid?

So lets put it into context, in the words of an energy company:

National Grid (2011b) sets out reserve tender outcomes and RWE npower has estimated that the price paid when stand-by generation capacity is called for by the short-term operating reserve market mechanism was £180-280/MWh in 2010. There is also a payment of around £7-10/MWh.

This is worth around £30,000-45,000/MW per annum to an owner of stand-by generation (RWE npower, personal communication).

That is roughly eight times the industrial tariff for power. As demand for operating reserve increases, shown in Figure 8, the price will rise and the incentive to participate will grow stronger.

Indeed, by 2015, National Grid (2011b) estimates that the utilisation payment will have risen to £544/MWh, and by 2020 the figure is £685/MWh, all in real terms in 2010/11 money. That is an increase of 96 per cent in ten years providing a strong incentive for new owners of generation to participate. Across the whole market, the total payments for being available and for generating could reach £945 million per annum by 2020, up from £205 million in 2010. That is an increase of 350 per cent in ten years.

There are profitable opportunities to be seized and they are open to existing generation assets which have already been paid for and sometimes even depreciated.

While the firms benefit, society does too. The mechanism allows the market to find the cheapest way to maintain an uninterrupted power supply whichever scenario the UK finds itself in. It will be to the benefit of all consumers if stand-by generation is put to its best possible use.

Source: nPower

It is interesting to note that over on the Bishop Hill blog, Andrew Montford points to a conclusion that no fossil fuels are subsidised in the UK, in rebuttal to the imbecilic climate alarmist mouthpiece, Bob Ward.  However, STOR clearly shows there is subsidy being made available for diesel powered electricity generation at peak times – albeit to back up virtually useless wind power.

STOR scandal: The establishment conspiracy to fleece energy customers by design

A story broken by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph and Richard North on EU Referendum on Saturday evening heralds one of the biggest consumer rip off scandals in UK history.

This concerns the existence of a vast network of standby diesel generators, which make up what is known as a Short Term Operating Reserve (STOR), that can be called upon by the National Grid in the event of a shortfall in electricity should electricity generating capacity go offline.

The theory is simple.  When there isn’t enough power being generated to meet demand, this network of diesel generators can be brought online within minutes to provide gigawatts of electricity to keep the lights on.  Booker and North detail the system and how it has been hidden in plain sight for years – which explains the confident performance of energy minister, Michael Fallon in his interview with Andrew Neil last week when he said the lights would stay on, even as power stations close without replacement and wind turbines fail to deliver power reliably when it is needed.

STOR brings into sharp focus three major issues that are unlikely to be pored over by the media. First and most immediate of these for energy customers is the cost of running this system that will be passed on to them.  As Booker explains in his piece:

These new power sources are far from cheap; the current wholesale cost of electricity is around £50 a megawatt hour (MWh). Thanks to the subsidies levied through our electricity bills, we are already paying nearly £100 per MWh to the owners of onshore wind farms and £150 for those offshore. But, as the National Grid reveals, the tender prices submitted by those signed up to the STOR scheme can be as high as £400 per MWh, eight times the market rate. The average payment in 2011 was £225 per MWh, plus a fee of £22,000 for every megawatt of their capacity (for these fees in 2010-11 alone we stumped up £75 million).

This is another subsidy gravy train run in the interests of corporations at the expense of hard pressed customers, and businesses whose costs are driven up accordingly and are passed on in the price of most goods and services.  The evidence of this is detailed by Richard in his piece when he explains:

Under normal circumstances using this back-up capacity is not an economically competitive form of generation; it is generally only called upon in emergencies when price rises can cover the costs of generation. But as we lose power stations from the system, there will be no option but to use it as replacement capacity and, in particular, as back-up when the wind is not blowing.

So lucrative is this option that it is being regarded as a major investment opportunity, “anticipated to experience significant growth due to increased reliance on reserve sources of power to meet fluctuations in electricity.

Investors are told that the “significant upward trend in the requirement for reserve services” is due to “decreased power supply following from the decommissioning of ageing nuclear power plants” and “increased volatility of power supply caused by increased reliance on renewables (due to the high proportion of wind power, renewables are not a consistent source of power) “.

The second is yet another example of fear being as a tool to condition people into accepting a grotesquely expensive ‘solution’ that shouldn’t be required in the first place.

Make no mistake the emergence of the STOR story, and its revelation of the gigawatts of failover capacity that are available to the system, shows us that the current focus on the energy gap being played out in the media with suitable dramatic effect, is a contrived narrative designed to worry people about power cuts and blackouts so that when they are asked to stump up significantly more money to keep the lights on via diesel generators, they will grit their teeth and pay up – the metaphor that sums this up being ‘they’ve taken my arm and cut off my leg, but thank God it means I’ve been able to stay alive’.

The third of the two issues is how this theft has been engineered by the establishment by its utterly illogical and nonsensical policies on energy.  Whereas common sense would dictate this country’s government to have an energy strategy to meet the needs and demand of powered infrastructure, businesses and residential customers using the most reliable forms of power generation, the strategy has been designed around the unworkable goal of relying on unreliable and intermittent wind energy to meet our baseload energy supply, coupled with ‘demand management’ – namely the forced reduction in energy demand through increased cost.

Businesses and households are being priced out of using tomorrow the same amount of energy they already find difficult to afford today; and this scenario is being compounded by purposely built-in scarcity through the policy of closing down generating capacity without reliable replacement, so the gap between total reliable energy supply and peak energy demand has narrowed to a dangerously small percentage.  Instead of replacing conventional power in need of decommission with nuclear power to provide our baseload energy, and topping that up with coal and gas which, already spinning below capacity but not wasting what is being generated, can quickly be called upon to meet additional demand when it peaks, we are getting subsidy chomping wind turbines that provide only a fraction of their potential and rely on intermittent weather conditions.

At the end of this trail of state driven larceny is a special interest collective of subsidy farmers, corporates and big money investors who reap a huge return in profits at our expense for our substandard and flawed-by-design energy infrastructure.  An infrastructure that is forced on us by a deranged sustainability agenda that is sponsored and nourished by those special interests who hoover up our money, and the anti-progress environmentalists who are determined to de-industrialise the world and enforce untold misery on billions of people.

As you can see, this is not just a story about carbon emitting diesel generators being used to keep our lights on.  It runs far deeper and is far more disturbing than that.  The question that needs answering is will the media step up and educate people about this, or will it look away to continue sucking up to those influential and ‘powerful’ people of ‘prestige’ who are calling the shots to enrich themselves by robbing us blind?

A look back at Nick Clegg’s comments on energy

Whenever the reality of the UK’s dwindling energy generating capacity comes to the fore – as insane government policy on energy and the leftist fetish for wind power instead of coal starts to bite – it’s always worth reminding ourselves of the oh so valuable insight provided by Nick Clegg on this subject some years ago…

The Government has spooked everyone into thinking that we need nuclear by saying there’s going to be a terrible energy gap – the lights are going to go out in the middle of the next decade.

There’s actually no evidence that’s the case at all. They’ve raised the wrong problem in order to push the wrong solution.

The real problem is that our energy mix is not green enough and we’re over-dependent on oil and gas from parts of the world that aren’t very reliable.

So it’s nothing to do with lack of reliable capacity and closure of coal-fired power stations, at a time when Germany is building more coal-fired plant to ensure adequate energy supplies, it’s just we don’t have a green-enough energy mix.  No, really…

Small wonder then that when the leader of the Lib Dems holds such ludicrous views, his party underling, Ed Davey, continues pushing the dash for wind and refuses to acknowledge we need new coal-fired plant alongside gas-fired stations and new generation nuclear capacity for our baseload power needs.

But perhaps it’s because the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are bought in to the eco-fascist sustainability mantra that instead of providing affordable energy and innovating to ensure we can continue to do so, people should instead be forced to pay much more in order to get less – namely reduce their energy consumption and pay ever higher costs for the energy they can use.  The same mantra is used to prevent new reservoirs being built to provide fresh water to homes.

Of common sense, there is no sign.

The great wind power rip-off revisited

In the Telegraph today is a piece about the ‘true cost of Britain’s wind farm industry’ which underlines the extent of direct (let alone the indirect) consumer-funded subsidy deployed to propping up one of the most unreliable and inefficient forms of energy generation available.

The piece opens:

A new analysis of government and industry figures shows that wind turbine owners received £1.2billion in the form of a consumer subsidy, paid by a supplement on electricity bills last year. They employed 12,000 people, to produce an effective £100,000 subsidy on each job.

The disclosure is potentially embarrassing for the wind industry, which claims it is an economically dynamic sector that creates jobs. It was described by critics as proof the sector was not economically viable, with one calling it evidence of “soft jobs” that depended on the taxpayer.

It’s an interesting take, to focus on the extent of subsidy paid to wind farms against the number of wind farm jobs that exist.  But that doesn’t take into other subsidy that pours into the industry from other taxpayer funded sources.  Also it encompass jobs that were focussed on building and installing the subsidy farms in the first place, so the piece undermines itself.  When that happens it doesn’t do any favours to those of us opposed to the government’s insane and utterly disastrous reliance on wind farms for baseload power, for such pieces leave us open to attack for inaccuracy.

What the piece should do is remind people that creating jobs which are reliant on public subsidy does nothing to boost the productive sector of the economy.  It is simply another government mandated burden on the consumer/taxpayer.  That is because the roles that have been created at these subsidy farms would not have been without legislation designed to skew the energy market to underpin uneconomic wind farm development, and without rules put in place to confiscate extra money from us to service their upkeep we would not be paying so much for our energy.  The energy market would not have opted for wind if left without interference to develop the most cost effective and reliable energy solutions that would be delivered at less cost to the companies and their customers.

But while we are on the subject, let’s take a quick look at the contribution being made to our power needs by all those grotesquely expensive wind turbines pitting the countryside up and down our nation, within the last hour…

 
1.4% is a disgraceful return for the huge sums of money that have been taken from us to service the government’s unjustified and pressure group driven decarbonisation agenda.  Hanging would be too good for these people as punishment for the wholesale theft we have suffered at their hands and their justification for it on the strength of an unproven hypothesis.

They should count themselves fortunate that most people have, as intended, been distracted from real issues affecting all our lives by mind numbing TV programmes and glitzy trivia.