***
In this pair of pearlers, James Delingpole spans the globe: firstly detailing the growing and staggering cost of subsidised wind power in Britain; and then turning his attention Downunder to the disaster that is Australia’s wind power capital, South Australia.
Post-Brexit Britain Wants To Escape Its EU Renewables Targets. About Time Too
Breitbart
James Delingpole
5 April 2017
Britain is using Brexit to try to wriggle out of its EU-driven renewable energy targets, says Bloomberg, quoting an anonymous insider.
Officials in the Treasury and the business department are looking for a way to abandon the national goal of getting 15 percent renewable energy by 2020, which is almost double the current level, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.
Erasing the target would allow Britain to skirt fines that could reach tens of millions of pounds since it’s on track to narrowly miss the 2020 goal. It would also move the U.K. out of step with other European Union nations that maintain targets as part of their membership in the region’s energy market. The U.K. wishes to preserve its link to the market and smooth cross-border trading of electricity, which has helped lower power prices, the person said.
Let’s translate that into English, shall we?
Under its current status as an EU vassal state, Britain is committed to suicidal, unaffordable “clean” energy targets based on the green religious prejudices and junk-science-driven scaremongering of unelected, unaccountable, borderline-Commie technocrats in Brussels.
These targets were made law by the 2008 Climate Change Act, drafted with the help of a left-wing activist from Friends of the Earth Bryony – now Baroness (!) – Worthington, supervised by the dim eco-zealot and unpopular Labour leader Ed Miliband during his stint as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. This will cost the UK taxpayer, by 2030, around £300 billion – while making no measurable difference to the planet’s climate.
But now Britain wants out because it can’t afford it, because it’s running out of countryside to carpet bomb with bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes which no sane person wants within fifty miles of their home, and because meeting these targets is going to be logistically impossible, which will mean that Britain is liable for “tens of millions of pounds” in Euro fines on top of all the other taxpayers’ money it has already squandered on the renewable energy scam.
What’s just as fascinating as Bloomberg’s inside information that the UK government is contemplating a renewable energy U-turn is the slant that Bloomberg has put on the story.
It wants us to believe that this is a bad thing; that it will “sour” Britain’s relationship with its European neighbours by putting it “out of step with other European Union nations that maintain targets as part of their membership in the region’s energy market”.
No. Duh. It’s precisely to regain this kind of competitive advantage and to escape from the prison of EU groupthink that so many of us voted for Brexit.
But now we’ve regained our sovereignty we have to take responsibility for our own stupidities rather than forever blaming everything on the EU.
That means that we have to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act. Unless we do that, at least where energy policy is concerned, we might just as well have voted with all the pillocks who wanted us to remain.
Breitbart
Where’s the due diligence on renewables?
The Spectator Australia
James Delingpole
25 March 2017
You know that lovely warm glow you get on a summer’s evening when it’s still 42 degrees outside and you’re reaching into your fridge for your first restorative tinny when suddenly the lights go out and your air-con too?
Of course you do, especially if you live in South Australia, where, thanks to ambitious ‘green’ energy targets, power outages like this have become the new normal.
‘No worries!’ you say. ‘I accept that personal discomfort, inconvenience and mild danger are but a small price to pay to save the planet from global warming. Only a dinosaur would expect to go on being able to use electricity as and when he wants it. I for one welcome the bright new age of darkness, clean energy and government rationing!’
Except you don’t, do you? If you’re anything like all the commonsense Aussies I met last time I visited, you’ll be absolutely bloody livid: ‘We’re Australia, the lucky country, not some third world backwater. We invented commercial refrigeration. We’re sitting on top of a continent’s worth of cheap energy. What kind of eco-fascist madness is this?’
The madness is the result of the global warming scare which has dominated Western policymaking for the last four decades. Some countries are starting to get over it – notably Donald Trump’s United States – but in Australia it continues to exert a grip tighter than the bite of a ravenous saltie.
Climate change lunacy has affected everything from your right to clear trees off your property (often you can’t: they’ve been designated a carbon sink) to where you can’t build your waterfront home (junk science paranoia about rising sea levels) to how many millions of dollars you waste on desalination plants (for the permanent drought that never came).
Most damaging of all are Australia’s renewable energy targets. In South Australia they stand at 50 per cent (by 2025), in Queensland 50 per cent (by 2030) – rightly described as ‘bonkers mad’ by deputy PM Barnaby Joyce, in Victoria 40 per cent (by 2025). Even under the Liberal federal government, the national target is 23 per cent by 2020. All of these are doomed to fail – even the national one would require the impossible feat of a 50 per cent increase in Australia’s renewable energy (mainly solar and wind) within three years. Meanwhile, the havoc they have already wreaked is considerable.
South Australia has been the hardest hit so far by the great renewables disaster. No doubt it sounded good when premier Jay Weatherill and Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis first began evangelising about their world-beating clean energy targets. The consequence, though, has been blackouts, job losses and economic chaos caused by rocketing power prices and intermittent supply.
But instead of apologising, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) is asking customers to take it on the chin. In a process euphemistically known as ‘load shedding’, the AEMO can order customers’ power supplies to be switched off in times of extreme stress so as to prevent wider system failure.
Why is this happening now in a developed nation in the 21st century? The simple answer is that renewables, apart from being two or three times more expensive than fossil fuels, are intermittent, unreliable and unpredictable.
If the sun isn’t shining (which it doesn’t, at night, not even in Australia) or the wind isn’t blowing, then the power needs to come from more conventional sources like coal and gas. The more renewables in the energy mix – 40 per cent of South Australia’s energy capacity is now wind – the more inherently unstable the grid becomes.
Hence the great blackout of September last year: a storm forced a shut down of wind power to prevent surges; this in turn crashed the entire local grid.
All this man-made chaos might be excusable if it served any useful purpose. It doesn’t.
Increasingly, it is becoming apparent that renewables are one of the great, truly bad ideas of the last 100 years: a boon for troughing rent-seekers, virtue-signalling pollies and posturing greenies but terrible for the rest of us poor saps who have to subsidise them; disastrous for the environment (all those birds and bats sliced and diced); utterly ineffectual in ‘combatting climate change’ (Australia produces less than two per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases).
So what’s to be done? What’s painfully clear is that – with rare exceptions like Cory Bernardi and One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts – Australia’s politicians have no appetite for reining in the problem, for fear of suffering the same fate as Tony Abbott, whose political demise was partly wrought by the Green Blob. It doesn’t help that most of the media – especially the ABC –is so heavily in thrall to eco-zealotry and refuses to question the (fake) green ‘consensus’.
That means people who believe in regaining the cheap, reliable energy Australia used to have before the green madness took hold have a fight on their hands. One way they might yet win is through the courts via judicial review. What, after all, is the most basic requirement taxpayers ought to expect from their governments? Due diligence on public expenditure.
This is going to be one of the tactics of Cool Futures Funds Management – a contrarian Aussie hedge fund of which I’m an enthusiastic supporter because it is, as far as I know, the first financial institution to try to profit by holding the Green Blob’s dodgy dealings to account.
It has approached the government with a low-cost, shovel-ready, clean-coal technology solution which could solve all Australia’s baseload energy supply problems. But because this solution involves fossil fuel, it will inevitably be resisted heavily by the greens and their useful idiots in government and business. And that’s where the courts may have to adjudicate.
Australians deserve better than to be held to ransom by the duff ideology of a few eco-zealots. If governments can’t provide their voters with something as basic as reliable energy, then they must be held to account for their negligence.
South Australia is a warning the rest of the country should heed before it’s too late. And the answer to your problems, my Aussie friends, is most definitely not blowing in the wind. It’s right there, underneath your feet.
The Spectator Australia
STOP THESE THINGS 
Facebook didn’t like this when I tried to share it. Apparently it too is in the hands of the ecofascists on the lookout for false news, which is to say the news they don’t like.
Thanks for your comment, we think it is working now.
I just tried to share on Facebook again and again without success – surely FB are not censoring?
George
We reposted it on FB. Go to our FB page and try your luck again.
THE ALIENS HAVE LANDED.
Imposing in there hundreds,
Such an army on display,
Those alien grey metal monsters
I saw while on my way.
Aliens on our shores have landed,
So tall, backs straight and true,
At night they watch through flashing eyes
Of red, at me and you.
Some have scaled the mountains,
Others near schools and homes,
Of one thing I am certain,
Those aliens have no souls.
No “whispering” from their ranks at all,
An unearthly sound they make,
It envelops each and everyone,
No more can humans take.
Three giant arms revolving,
Enveloping all around,
They’re here to ‘save the planet’,
The biggest “con” I have found.
Such hideous tall grey monsters,
Invade green and pleasant lands,
To stay for generations,
Unless the people make a stand.
These aliens feed on power and wind,
Without either, they will die,
They’re NOT environmental friendly,
They’re for profit, (at a cost), that’s WHY.
The Facebook link does not appear to be working for this post.
Rgds
Thanks for your comment, we think it is working now.
No body really likes wind turbines, that’s a given, but to blame renewables for increasing electricity prices is really cherry picking the facts. Deregulation and privatisation is the primary driver of these price ( and security ) issues. An intelligent government, one we are unlikely to see until we escape the supposed ‘Westminster system’ which by the way is not what we have, we have left and right hostage takers popularly elected rather that a group of perves who at least know their job description.
These articles bear no relevance unless they address the profiteering, albeit quite justified of corporations that use this type of forum to garner huge handouts to reboot coal. It’s a mess for sure and government would have the answer if they were smart enough to understand the question.
We disagree, in the following posts we lay out the facts (not cherries) as to how government regulation (namely mandated targets and subsidies) is directly responsible for rising power prices in Australia. In short the subsidies directed to wind and solar have destroyed the profitability of conventional generators to operate as designed and opened the power market to rorting and gaming based on wind power output collapses.
The profiteering you complain of (as detailed in the post above) is only possible by reason of Australia’s renewable energy target and for no other reason; if the RET was removed the market distortion would cease and prices would fall and reliability would soon return.
Conventional generators, especially those using coal, don’t need ‘handouts’, they just need to get the access to the grid they once had before the RET ensured that subsidised wind and solar got preferential access to the grid. Perhaps the Delingpole articles did not make those points, but hundreds of our other posts most certainly do.
The genie is out of the bottle, your rhetoric is three years out of date. I blame government, so should you.
We do. You haven’t bothered to read the posts or our response. The RET is the problem and the Federal government created and maintains it. It is a $3bn a year tax on all power consumers directed to wind and solar. Try and find another single industry subsidy scheme that matches it in cost. Then find one with so little benefit, indeed one with grid and community wrecking costs on top of massive subsidies. Our message isn’t out of date, we were pointing this out 4 years ago and as proven by South Australia’s wind power fiasco we were right. If you live in Australia, then the consequences of the RET will meet you soon, too.
I thought that renewables were the first in line to sell electricity. Then when there isn’t any, the fallback is conventional. Except when that happens the conventional plant just can’t shut down and start up, which makes the grid unreliable and conventional power companies not profitable. Especially when they blow them up for demolition. Who buys the same exact item at the more expensive price? Oh, all this green energy will, what, reduce future warming by 0.1 C. Where’s the cost benefit in that? Are we still thinking that Co2 last hundreds of years in the atmosphere or there is some tipping Point?
Rob, “address the profiteering, albeit quite justified of corporations that use this type of forum to garner huge handouts to reboot coal.”
I think you must be confused and do not understand what you are writing.
You see while Corporations exist to make money for their share holders – do you actually believe the Wind Industry is not doing the same? Their lackey’s work to pressure Governments into doing their bidding, they have secreted themselves into the physic of many of our Politicians and have formed ‘blogs’ and other forums, and use compliant academics, media figures and outlets to further their cause and lies.
On the other hand STT has been a force for them to contend with because of their forthright discussing and provision of evidence of the workings of this industry and how it has destroyed the viability and access to electricity at an affordable price for all industrial, commercial and personal use. They have detailed how this industry has manipulated our Governments into wantonly destroying our environments, eco-systems and health.
This forum is available for anyone to read and garner truthful information so they can assess the right and wrongs of this industry for themselves. They do not present themselves as having a ‘title’, academic or other (whether have one or not) therefore they are not looking for personal or professional glory.
They have exposed the belly of this industry to the sunlight and we have found it wanting.
If any industry has profited by its ability to ingratiate itself into our life without providing any benefit to the environment, industry, commerce and the people of this nation it is this industry. They have only taken – taken our right to object to turbines being installed willy nilly, they have taken our right to live without pain, to live where we want in peace and to enjoy the natural environment. They have taken our money by stealth, they have promised much and delivered little. They have stolen our right of a modern society to have electricity whenever it is needed and at an affordable cost, they have taken jobs, industry and peoples livelihoods.
So, if you don’t wish to be educated to the truth then go back to those other plentiful sites where compliant and complicit warbling’s of the wonders of this degenerate industry exist.
Rob what you say about STT cherry picking is patently untrue, in fact if you want to see cherry picking I suggest you just look at the propaganda continually put about by the green/left spruikers of the wind industry. They repeatedly assure the punters that wind generation is now cheaper than coal fired generation, this delusion is justified on the basis of the low wholesale power price of wind, which surprise, surprise isn’t the subsidy inflated retail price that electricity users must pay. If this absurd “wind cheaper than coal” fiction were true then wind generation obviously wouldn’t need the $90 per MWh subsidy it now receives. The truth of course is that if it were not for this massive economy crippling, compulsory subsidy no wind generation would have been built, our ancestors had it right when they abandoned, intermittent wind power in favour of cheaper, more reliable sources.
Bear in mind also that the RET subsidy is only the tip of the iceberg so-to-speak when it comes to the real additional cost of wind generation. There is a plethora of hidden taxpayer subsidies that go to uneconomic grid augmentations needed to connect wind, there is the massive cost of additional fossil fuelled balancing generation needed to accommodate the wild, unpredictable swings in wind generation. Now as if to add insult to injury, we face the absurdity of being forced to subsidise new coal generation, desperately needed to replace the base load energy and grid stabilisation once provided by low cost coal fired generators that have recently been forced out of business because of the electricity market distortions created by the RET legislation.
As for STT expressing out of date “rhetoric” that’s a bit rich, the fact is the problems created by wind generation remain pretty much the same as they were three or even five years ago, only more so. So repetition is very much necessary and the more people who spread the word the more likely it becomes that the average power punter starts to twig just how much he’s being fleeced by this scam, and the extent of economic damage it is doing to the country.
All of this of course ignores the negative impact of wind farms on the health of rural people plus the massive devaluation of their properties and let’s not forget ongoing senseless slaughter of birds and bats…..but that’s another saga in itself.
For a good summary of case against wind power see Ian Plimer, NOT FOR GREENS p 99ff. One of the many interesting points he makes is that wind power itself could never efficiently make enough power to build one of their towers, and it is not as though once built, they last for ever: ” With a 1000 mw wind generator producing 1, 752,000 mw hrs per year of electricity, it would take 10.11years to create the energy needed just to manufacture the steel and concrete [let alone all the other embedded costs which he goes on to enumerate] 101 .”