Boris Johnson to use conference speech to reveal that ALL of the UK’s electricity will come from green sources by 2035
Where is it going to come from on nights when the wind isn't blowing? Offshore wind farms seem to be the hope but doldrums are not confined to the tropics
Boris Johnson is set to announce all of Britain’s electricity will come from green sources by 2035, it emerged last night.
The Prime Minister will reportedly reveal the new policy this week as he seeks to reduce the country’s dependence on gas and other fossil fuels.
He will use his conference speech to commit the Conservatives to plans to invest significantly in renewable and nuclear energy, The Times reported.
Mr Johnson is expected to say that sourcing all electricity from renewables would be a clear step towards the Government’s ambition to hit net zero emissions by 2050.
It would also reduce the country’s dependence on gas, the surging price of which has left Britons facing an energy crisis and soaring bills.
Green sources generated 43 per cent of Britain’s electricity last year, while gas, oil and coal produced around 40 per cent. The rest of the country’s needs were filled by nuclear sources.
The new 2035 target will mean a significant growth in offshore wind generation as well as in nuclear capacity to provide a ‘baseload’ of electricity which will met variable supply and demand.
It will require, over the coming decade, a minimum quadrupling of offshore wind from the current level.
Joss Garman, UK director of the European Climate Foundation, said: ‘This will go a very long way to putting Britain on track to net zero, and it will help to end the exposure of millions of households to volatile gas prices.
‘Coming on top of a matching pledge from President Biden and prime minister Trudeau, this will give a boost to prospects for Cop26.’
It comes after Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng ruled out future fracking in the UK yesterday amid warnings that the Government would need to raise taxes on gas.
The minister said that too many communities would be disrupted in England and said nuclear and renewables was the answer to the energy crisis.
Kwarteng told Conservative Home that he was previously ‘very pro-fracking’.
But he added that while he was an energy minister he discovered that fracking was far more disruptive than had been predicted.
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UK: The plot against fracking: How cheap energy was killed by Green lies and Russian propaganda
Environmentalists have hit upon another money spinner: opposition to fracking. When the shale gas revolution first came along, some environmentalists welcomed it, and rightly so. It “creates an unprecedented opportunity to use gas as a bridge fuel to a twenty-first-century energy economy that relies on efficiency, renewable sources, and low-carbon fossil fuels such as natural gas,” wrote Senator Tim Wirth, a prominent environmentalist. And so it has proved: the country that adopted shale gas first and most — the United States — is the country that lowered its carbon dioxide emissions first and most, because gas displaced coal, a much higher-carbon fuel.
But then the vested interests got to work. Renewable energy promoters panicked at the thought of cheap and abundant gas. Their business model was predicated on the alleged certainty that prices would rise as fossil fuels ran out, making subsidised wind and solar power look comparatively cheap. David Cameron’s coalition government produced three projections about what might happen to gas prices: that they would rise fast, medium or slow. In fact they fell, a possibility the government had entirely ignored.
It is hard to recall now just how sure almost everybody was in 2008 that natural gas was running out. Its price had risen as gas fields in North America and the North Sea began to run dry. Peak gas was coming even sooner than peak oil or peak coal. Yet in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas, something was stirring. Engineer Nick Steinsberger, working for a company called Mitchell Energy, tried different ways to fracture shale rocks deep underground so that the gas would flow. Hydraulic fracturing had been invented the 1940s, generally using petroleum gels, but it did not work in shale, which contained an enormous amount of gas and oil. Nobody much minded you pumping gels down into rocks in those days. After all, the rocks themselves are — by definition — already soaked in toxic mixtures of oil and gas.
Steinsberger noticed water worked a bit better than gel. In 1998, he tried sending water down first, then some sand to prop open the cracks and — whoosh! — out came a lot of gas. And it kept on coming. “Slick-water fracking” had been invented, using far fewer chemicals than previous methods, allowing vast shale reserves around the world to be exploited.
Most experts said shale gas was a flash in the pan and would not much affect global supplies. They were wrong. By 2011 America’s declining gas output shot up and oil soon followed suit. The US has now overtaken Russia as the biggest gas producer in the world, and Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer. Cheap gas brought a stream of chemical companies rushing back from Europe and the Persian Gulf to manufacture in America. Gas import terminals were rebuilt as gas export terminals. The Permian basin in Texas alone now produces as much oil as the whole of the US did in 2008, and more than any Opec country except Iran and Saudi Arabia. This — not wind and solar which still provide only 2 per cent of world primary energy — is the big energy story of the past decade.
One country that should have taken sharp notice is Britain. As late as 2004 Britain was a gas exporter, but as North Sea production declined it rapidly became a big net importer, dependent on Norway, Qatar or Russia. As Britain was paying far more for its gas than America, that meant that our huge chemical industry was gradually moving out.
Russia Today television ran endless anti-fracking stories, including one that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”
Fortunately, it then emerged that Britain has one of the richest and thickest seams of shale: the Bowland shale across Lancashire and Yorkshire contains many decades of supply. Fracking it would mean drilling small holes down about one mile, then cracking the rocks with millimetre-wide fractures and catching the gas as it flowed out over the next few decades. Experience in America showed this could be done without any risk of contaminating ground water, which is near the surface, or threatening buildings. The seismic tremors that have caused all the trouble are so slight they could not possibly do damage and were generally far smaller than those from mining, construction or transport. The well pads would be hundreds of times smaller than the concrete bases of wind farms producing comparable amounts of energy.
Still, friends of the earth, which is effectively a multinational environmental business, spotted a chance to make hay. Despite being told by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw misleading claims about shale gas, it kept up a relentless campaign of misinformation, demanding more delay and red tape from all-too-willing civil servants. The industry, with Cuadrilla fated to play the part of Monsanto, agreed to ridiculously unrealistic limits on what kinds of tremors they were allowed after being promised by the government that the limits would be changed later — a promise since broken. Such limits would stop most other industries, even road haulage, in their tracks.
The Russians also lobbied behind the scenes against shale gas, worried about losing their grip on the world’s gas supplies. Unlike most conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in Western politics, this one is out there in plain sight. The head of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the Russians, as part of a sophisticated disinformation operation, “engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organisations working against shale gas — to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas”.
The Centre for European Studies found that the Russian government has invested $95 million in NGOs campaigning against shale gas. Russia Today television ran endless anti-fracking stories, including one that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”. The US Director of National Intelligence stated that “RT runs anti-fracking programming … reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.” Pro-Russian politicians such as Lord Truscott (married to a Russian army colonel’s daughter) made speeches in parliament against fracking.
As night follows day, Tory politicians lost courage and slipped into neutrality then opposition
No scare story was too far-fetched to be taken up and amplified. Tap water would catch fire (no: though it’s a natural phenomenon in some places in America where gas naturally contaminates ground water). There would be significant gas leaks (no: there are more gas leaks from natural sources and pipelines). The water that comes out of the well is dangerously radioactive (no: it is not). Fracking uses a lot of water (a lot less than farming). And so on. The unelected quangocracy that runs these things on behalf of taxpayers, mainly in the form of the Environment Agency, appeared at times to be taking its instructions directly from Friends of the Earth. So, of course, did the BBC.
The endless delays imposed by regulators played into the hands of shale gas’s opponents, giving them time to organise more and more protests, which were themselves ways of getting on the news and hence getting more donations. Never mind that few locals in Lancashire wanted to join the protests: plenty of upper-middle class types could be bussed in from the south.
As night follows day, Tory politicians lost courage and slipped into neutrality then opposition, worrying about what posh greens might think, rather than working-class bill-payers and job-seekers. A golden opportunity was squandered for Britain to get hold of home-grown, secure, cheap and relatively clean energy. We don’t need fossil fuels, the politicians thought, we’re going for net zero in 2050! But read the small print, chaps: the only way to have zero-emission transport and heating, so says the Committee on Climate Change, is to use lots of hydrogen. And how do they say most of the hydrogen is to be made? From gas.
After genetically modified crops and fracking, what innovation will be next to get stopped in its tracks by vested interests? Vaping, I reckon. It’s an open secret that the pharmaceutical industry pours money into anti-vaping campaigns because the technology is a threat to their lucrative nicotine patches and gums, which they have been getting doctors to prescribe to smokers trying to quit for years. Unlike e-cigarettes, which are the most effective aids to quitting yet found, Big Pharma’s products don’t work very well. So they are worried. Next time you hear somebody arguing that e-cigarettes (like coffee) burn the blood, dry the kidneys and attract the lymph, ask who benefits.
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-2019/the-plot-against-fracking/
**********************************************Vermont does something right about solar
[Thomas Hand] took an option on a plot of land on a road near the town of Manchester, and began drawing up plans for a 500 kilowatt solar array on the eight-acre parcel, not far from a group of homes. “We knew folks wouldn’t want to see it, so we offered to screen it from the start,” he said. He spent $20,000 hiring an “aesthetics expert” and coming up with the plan for plantings—three hundred trees and bushes. Those didn’t placate the neighbors, but after six public meetings over the course of a year the town granted it the necessary permits, at which point Hand applied to the state’s Public Utilities Commission for a “certificate of public good.”
And that’s where the process went off the rails.
With the state now in charge, the neighbors issued a reprise of their objections. Their letters are listed in the record: “this is unfair to property owners who will see property devaluation and suffer detraction to their daily life.” “This solar array will detract from their view and their pocketbooks due to the decrease in property value. In turn this will drop prices for property and every homeowner.”“It will change the feel of our neighborhood and it will decrease the value of our property. In my opinion, there is no place for it.”
And fair enough. These are not millionaire second-home owners (of which Manchester has its share); these are just normal people. No one likes change, and solar arrays are not, in and of themselves, beautiful. I have two of them in the backyard—they dominate the view to the north, about twenty feet from the porch. They’re ungainly racks of steel and glass; I’ve left a beachball-sized wasp nest hanging from the bottom of one, both because it means they won’t build in the same spot next year and because it makes it look a bit less sterile.
But as Hand points out, the Manchester land is zoned “mixed use.” Any developer could buildt dozens of condos on the site, or a warehouse, “or a paddle tennis court with 16-foot-high lights.” (There’s a warehouse down the road.) And if those had been proposed, the state’s public utility commission would not have been in a position to do what they did in this case: turn down Hand’s proposal, entirely and explicitly on aesthetic grounds.
Indeed, the sole and only quibble that the state’s hearing examiner raised concerned the appearance of the arrays. And here he had to overrule not only the aesthetics expert that Hand had hired, but also the aesthetics expert designated by the state’s own Department of Public Service, who had given his official blessing:
“the limited views where the Project will be visible are mitigated by the proposed landscape mitigation plan in conjunction with existing mitigating factors like the relatively short duration of view and highly limited viewshed area. In addition, the Project fits with existing land uses.”
Against all that, the commission and their hearing officer ruled instead that because some of the screening trees would be deciduous, views might not be fully blocked in winter; that (like most spots in the Green Mountain State) there was a mountain—in this case Mt. Equinox—in the '“viewshed;” that the color scheme of solar panels (“dark or galvanized steel in color”) is “out of context with the area;” and that in sum the project would be “offensive or shocking to the average person.” Because the screening trees would take several seasons to fully grow, the commissioners opined, “all residents of the subdivision would see the Project as they enter and exit.”
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-thing-so-shocking-and-offensive
********************************************Australia: Bald Hills Wind Farm cover-up exposed
IT’S a wind farm, not a mushroom farm.
But as the Supreme Court of Victoria heard last week, that old adage about keeping them in the dark and feeding them on horse manure, certainly applies to the relationship between the operators of the Bald Hills Wind Farm and neighbouring farmers.
What can only be described as an extensive cover-up to hide such things as evidence of the highly irritating noise coming from faulty turbine gearboxes, came to light during a searching cross-examination of key Infrastructure Capital Group (ICG) employee, James Arthur.
It revealed, among other things, how the owner-operator of the Bald Hills Wind Farm, the IC Group, tried to remove, avoid or hide evidence of non-compliance, even to the point of accepting “liquidated damages” payments because of “tonal audibility defects” with a majority of the Senvion turbine gearboxes, while at the same time denying the complaints of neighbours about exactly that issue and pursuing the State Government for compliance approval.
In a feature of Day 9 at the Supreme Court hearing last Friday, Georgina Costello, barrister for the plaintiffs, local landowners, John Zakula and Noel Uren, demonstrated how ICG had known about the “special audible characteristics” coming from the faulty turbine gearboxes, not only from the complainants, but also from Marshall Day Acoustics, their own acoustic experts, and the turbine manufacturers Senvion Australia, as early as April 2017, but by 2021, the problem has still not been rectified.
Since the demise of Senvion in May 2019, ICG has been working with Vestas Australian Wind Technology Pty to try to fix the problem which may ultimately require the replacement of the gearboxes in most, if not all 52 turbines.
In August 2020, Vestas provided a condition report to ICG which included the following details:
“The Bald Hills Wind Farm, completed in 2015, consists of 52 Senvion MM92 wind turbines. Since commissioning, Senvion had been working with the owner, Infrastructure Capital Group, ICG, to resolve a gearbox tonality issue present in the majority of the turbines which breached Senvion’s contractual noise warranty and generated noise complaints from the community.”
Ms Costello pursed Mr Arthur over Vestas’ statement:
“There’s still a tonal problem affecting the turbines today, isn’t there?” Ms Costello asked Mr Arthur.
Mr Arthur: “That’s correct, yes.”
Ms Costello had earlier demonstrated that by April 2017, Marshall Day Acoustics had also told the Bald Hills Wind Farm operators that there was a tonal noise issue with the gearboxes in the turbines.
It was around the same time as Mr Arthur acknowledged reading letters from John Zakula complaining “the noise was causing him considerable disturbance and seriously affecting his sleep” as well as “affecting his health, causing anxiety, stress, headaches and other issues”.
Mr Zakula said: “The noise is severe and at its worst at night and it’s continuous through the entire nights and days… exceeding night-time levels as specified in the planning permit,”
And he also specifically reported, in October 2016 and November 2016, that “there are significantly notable special audible characteristics”.
Ms Costello went on to say that while the operators of the wind farm claimed to have successfully implemented a curtailment program, to reduce noise levels under certain conditions, it hadn’t been operating successfully in 2015, 2016 and 2017 when neighbours started complaining about the noise.
Ms Costello also demonstrated how uncertain wind speed measurement, due to interference from surrounding turbines, meant some turbines continued to operate in unrestricted mode, and are still making excessive noise.
Ms Costello went on to describe how the Wind Farm operators had changed its complaints’ handling process without telling the neighbours, effectively allowing them to ignore any repeated issues.
A company secretary for ICG said in an email (May 12, 2017): “We don’t want to engage with the complainants until the Marshall Day report confirming that the wind farm noise is compliant with the regulations is confirmed by the EPA”.
Mr Arthur agreed, that in consultation with “the relevant government department” and “the National Wind Farm Commissioner”, they didn’t believe they had to investigate repeat complaints and the policy was changed in 2018 without telling the neighbours until 2020.
Ms Costello: “So you didn’t tell the plaintiffs – Mr Uren or Mr Zakula – that you were going to change the complaints handling process so that you weren’t going to investigate repeat complaints, did you, until much later? That’s right, isn’t it?”
Mr Arthur: “That’s right, we didn’t tell them at the time, that’s correct.”
Ms Costello: “And poor old Mr Zakula kept writing to you, didn’t he, before you told him that you weren’t going to bother investigating repeat complaints. That’s right, isn’t it, Mr Arthur?”
Mr Arthur: “Yes, Mr Zakula was still writing, I believe, yes.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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