With power consumers suffering the disastrous consequences of the wind and solar transition in Germany and Britain, the MSM are still doing their best to deflect attention from the obvious cause.
How we found ourselves in a world where power prices are simply unaffordable, and power can only be delivered according the vagaries of the weather, isn’t all down to rent-seeking crony capitalists and politicians on the take. No, the mainstream media have been in it, up to their necks. They still are.
Notwithstanding the renewable energy driven disaster unfolding in Europe, the MSM keep dishing up propaganda memes about wind power being cheaper than coal (it isn’t) or that the ‘transition’ to an all-wind and sun powered future is simply ‘inevitable’. Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Another classic line is about such and such wind farm ‘powering’ 100,000 homes. Which is clearly meant to give the impression that those homes will be powered exclusively by wind power, generated around-the-clock and available on demand, irrespective of the weather.
It’s the myth that provides the backbone for equally spurious claims made by towns or cities – like Canberra, Australia – that they’re being powered by nothing but wind and solar. Claims that always ignore the fact that the claimants remain connected to a coal or gas-fired grid, as Canberra does.
Paul Homewood provides an example of the above, below.
What The BBC Did Not Tell You About Hornsea 2
Not a Lot of People Know That
Paul Homewood
3 September 2022
More renewables propaganda from the BBC:
The world’s largest offshore wind farm is now fully operational, 55 miles off the coast of Yorkshire.
The Hornsea 2 project can generate enough electricity to power about 1.3 million homes – that’s enough for a city the size of Manchester.
A decade ago renewables made up just 11% of the UK’s energy mix. By 2021 it was 40%, with offshore wind the largest component.
Hornsea 2 is part of a huge wind farm development by energy firm Orsted.
“The UK is one of the world leaders in offshore wind,” Patrick Harnett, programme director for the Hornsea 2 wind farm told BBC News.
“This is very exciting after five years of work to have full commercial operations at the world’s largest offshore wind farm.”
Hornsea 2 has taken the title of “world’s largest” from its neighbour Hornsea 1. It covers an area about four and half time the size of Liverpool. With even larger projects under construction nearby in the North Sea it’s unlikely its title will last long. The Dogger Bank wind farm, which when fully built will be able to power 6m homes, is due to start coming on stream next year.
Each of the 165 turbines in Hornsea 2 stands about 200m tall from the sea level to the top of the 81m blades. Mr Harnett says a single rotation takes six seconds and provides enough energy to power a home for a day.
Over the last decade the size of wind farms and turbines have both increased, helping to bring down the cost of the electricity they generate.
“The last time I checked it was roughly £450 per megawatt hour to buy electricity generated by gas,” says Simon Evans from Carbon Brief, a website that follows renewable energy issues.
“That’s about 9 times more expensive than the current cost to build new renewable capacity.”
In the UK government’s latest auction round in July, 11 gigawatts of renewable energy was commissioned which is enough to power about 12m homes. As part of it’s Net Zero targets the government has committed to de-carbonising electricity generation by 2035, with offshore wind playing a crucial role.
BBC
The claim that Hornsea can supply 1.3 million homes is the usual renewable lobby spin – they only account for domestic consumption, which accounts for a third of all electricity, and ignore other users of electricity such as industry, commerce and the public sector.
Somehow, I suspect Manchester would end up looking like Deadwood Gulch, if schools, hospitals, industry and transport were not supplied with any electricity!
In overall national terms, Hornsea 2 will supply about 1.5% of the UK’s power, still a sizeable amount, so why doesn’t the BBC tell the full story?
But much more importantly, Hornsea will be hopelessly intermittent, just as other wind farms are. We now have three years of data from Hornsea 1, and the charts below show just how variable the output there has been:
Hornsea 1 – Phase 1 is rated at 400MW, and output has varied anywhere from 1 MW and 390 MW since 2019.
Maybe the BBC would like to explain what the good folk of Manchester are supposed to do for about half of the year when output is below average?
Then we get the claim by Carbon Brief that wind power costs a ninth of gas generation, about £50/MWh for new generation. Hornsea 2 has a CfD for £73.71/MWh. But as The Times revealed this week, Orsted, who own Hornsea 2, have not taken up their contract, and are instead selling on the open market, something you will be unlikely to hear from the BBC.
All of the electricity generated by Hornsea 2 will be sold by its parent company, Orsted A/S, the Danish state owned company, formerly known as DONG.
Their Half Year Accounts show they have been selling all of their electricity generated at an average of £219/MWh this year, up from £82/MWh last year. In a full year, this price rise means a windfall profit of £4.5bn, most of which will accrue from UK operations.
But neither the BBC nor Carbon Brief will ever tell you this.
This is ‘news’?
About stopthesethings
STOP THESE THINGS 
Around half a century ago, during the UK’s 1970s Left Wing Trade Union problems that culminated in the 1979 “Winter of Discontent” I rode right through Manchester on my BSA A10 motorcycle one night during one of the many power strikes.
Not a light on anywhere, no traffic lights, no pedestrians, not even another vehicle on the road beside me, the only other sign of life was a solitary cat.
A very interesting, impressive, rather scary experience, apocalyptic even.
I didn’t realise at the time that it was in fact prophetic…
At last, someone calling out the BBC on their biased renewables reporting. Very rarely do the BBC allow HYS (Have your Say) on these sort of news items. They seem to be scared of allowing any alternative / realistic views, which conflict with their reporting, to be aired on their site.
Is that 1.5% of the UK power “provided power” or is that “capacity”? A great point about how “homes” are only about 1/3 the power use, there should be a law forcing them to be more accurate including all power use besides homes which in reality do not use electricity as they are structures of wood, concrete, brick , steel maybe, they do not use power so the statement “will power 100,000 homes” is another of many used in slithery marketing campaign propaganda that is correct AND incorrect depending on perception. We could say all those homes could be powered by a potato which has been scientifically shown to provide power needed for homes wood and plumbing (which of course is zero) as homes do not use power. A whole sack of potatoes or even junk from a land fill will power even more homes that do not use power.
more liers in phottvoltaic,solar generetors.