Broken Dreams: Constant Calm Weather Wiping Out Britain’s Wind Industry

The wind industry treats natural meteorological phenomenon – like calm weather – as a grand conspiracy. They’ve even coined their very own curse, calling such lengthy events “wind droughts”. Wind and solar-dependent Germans call gloomy, windless weather ‘dunkelflaute’.

Wild claims being smashed by nature is a common feature of earthly hubris. Icarus learnt the hard way.

In the case of the wind industry, they started out with a big lie – which they’ve only embellished – only to be brought crashing back to earth by reality.

Publicity pitches about a power source that’s only available 30% of the time, and then only in chaotic spurts, powering millions of homes were never going to survive first contact with the enemy.

Now that their exceedingly ambitious production claims have been revealed as pure fiction, the wind industry (and solar players, too) have started pumping up another whopping lie: viz, that with the help of a few giant lithium-ion batteries and/or so-called ‘green’ hydrogen, they can overcome wind and solar’s hopeless, weather-dependent, intermittency, as Chris Morrison and Paul Homewood detail below.

Revelation That U.K. Climate Target is Based on One Windy Year’s Data Threatens to Unravel Net Zero Credibility
The Daily Skeptic
Chris Morrison
24 January 2024

In October the Daily Sceptic reported on a paper written for the Royal Society led by Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of Oxford University that concluded batteries were not the answer to the huge storage requirements of intermittent ‘green’ electricity power. Despite the prestigious academic fire power on parade, the paper died a death in the popular prints, presumably because of its unwelcome message about the much-touted battery solution. But recent revelations suggest the report could act as a loose thread that helps unravel the collectivist Net Zero agenda in the U.K.

The Royal Society analysed decades of local wind speeds and found the electricity system needed the equivalent of at least a third of green energy to be stored as backup. Such a cost would be astronomical. Now it appears that the Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) fudged the issue by using just one year of high wind data in persuading Members of Parliament in 2019 to donkey-nod through Theresa May’s insane legislative rush to Net Zero by 2050.

Sir Chris’s report showed that wind could fall away for days at a time during periods of intense cold dominated by high atmospheric pressure. It also found wind speeds varied between years, all of which is in fact known and has been studied widely by other scientists.

The Telegraph has reported on remarks made by Sir Chris after the paper was published in which he noted that the CCC has “conceded privately” that reliance on one year’s data was a “mistake”. It appears that the information given to MPs committing to 2050 Net Zero assumed there would be just seven days when wind turbines would produce less than 10% of their potential electricity output. According to Net Zero Watch that compares with 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018.

In reporting that the CCC has conceded the “mistake”, the Telegraph noted that Sir Chris said the committee was still saying it doesn’t differ much from Sir Chris’s calculations. “Well that’s not quite true,” observed the Oxford Emeritus Professor. Asked by the newspaper if it disputed the account of Sir Chris, a CCC spokesman said it had “nothing further to add”.

Of course the ‘Noble Lie’ that Net Zero must be foisted on an unwilling population whatever the economic and societal cost will need to be preserved. Nothing to see here, move along please, is likely to guide most mainstream media in covering these latest revelations. The investigative science and Net Zero writer Paul Homewood is less inclined to ignore the serious matter. “It is now clear that Parliament authorised Net Zero without any proper assessment, whether financial or energy, and the whole Net Zero legislation must now be suspended until a full independent assessment is carried out.” He goes further and states that current and past members of the CCC must be held to account, and “excluded from any further influence over the country’s energy policy, or indeed on any issue of public policy”.

In general, nobody wants to talk about the lack of wind and solar backup, so there is a widespread pretence that the problem will somehow be solved in the future. But having dismissed any role for batteries, the Royal Society suggested hydrogen as a solution, an idea, alas, only slightly less dumb than batteries.

Highly explosive, low kinetic energy compared with hydrocarbons, expensive to produce, difficult to store and move around – the disadvantages are all too obvious. Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian saw the report as an “enormous improvement” on every other effort on the subject of large scale energy storage systems. But in the end, the authors still have a “quasi-religious commitment” to a fossil-free future, and this means that the report, despite containing much valuable information, “is actually useless for any public policy purpose”.

What is becoming clear is the level of statistical deception that is practised across climate science and the promotion of Net Zero. Surface temperature measurements are frequently adjusted upwards on a retrospective basis despite ignoring growing urban heat corruptions, activists use computer models to run up garbage-in, garbage-out scares on an almost daily basis, and bad weather is deliberately confused with long-term climate to suggest the latter is changing due to human caused carbon dioxide. All lapped up without a critical word between them by members of the mainstream media increasingly funded by elite billionaires.

The donkey-nodding politicians and the poodle media often hide behind the notion that they are just following the ‘science’. There is no such thing as the ‘science’, settled or otherwise, just the ongoing scientific process. The distinguished scientist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman captured the integrity of the process when he wrote: “If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it. … Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.”

Renewable energy is not a low-cost substitute for fossil fuels, notes a forward in Rupert Darwall’s recently published report on Net Zero and Britain’s “disastrous” energy policies. High and rising energy costs have locked Britain into economic decline, a suggestion given weight by last week’s savage destruction of the steel economy of Port Talbot. Renewables are not cheap, nor can they provide the reliability that modern societies expect and on which they depend. His report is said to convincingly demonstrate “how Britain was conned into Net Zero by deceptive and illusory promises of cheap wind power”.

The CCC is a dedicated green activist group that sits at the heart of U.K. Government. It is a pernicious, untrustworthy force in British politics giving cover to policies that will lead to de-industrialisation and massive changes in future lifestyle including restriction on diet, transport and personal freedoms.

Here’s hoping the wind scandal blows the damn thing away.
The Daily Skeptic

Andrew Montford: Does the Climate Change Committee understand the energy storage problem?
Not a Lot of People Know That
Paul Homewood
25 January 2024

Yesterday, I reported that four national institutions – the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the National Infrastructure Commission, National Grid, and the Royal Society – have got their energy system modelling wrong and have thus underestimated the cost of Net Zero.

Last night, the CCC’s Chief Executive, Chris Stark put out a long Twitter thread addressing these issues. But while it’s dressed up as a rebuttal, it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, it’s a masterpiece of bureaucratic obfuscation.

Recall firstly that this blew up when the Sunday Telegraph reported Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith’s criticisms of the CCC’s energy system modelling: they had failed to look at the possibility of back-to-back low wind years. This meant that they underestimated the amount of hydrogen storage the system would need, and thus the costs involved. There are 24 tweets in Stark’s thread. On number 10, we get this:

“We could certainly look further at a sequence of years. We are hoping we can do this in later work.”

Clearly then, Stark accepts Sir Christopher’s central point. He would have had to, of course, because he had already done so in correspondence with the Sunday Telegraph’s Ed Malnick, who reported in his article:

“…in response to further questions from this newspaper, the [CCC] admitted that its original recommendations in 2019 about the feasibility of meeting the 2050 net zero target, were also based on just one year’s worth of weather data.”

And since the CCC had the underlying modelling for the 2019 Net Zero report dragged out of them under FOI, we can see in the model itself that only one year’s worth of data is analysed! But while Stark has to accept the point, in true bureaucratic fashion, he dresses it up so that it appears to be a rebuttal:

• quote tweeting someone saying that the Royal Society’s criticisms are misleading
• calling the Sunday Telegraph piece “nasty” (it isn’t) but not linking to it
• multiple tweets describing the (incorrect) modelling that they did
• claiming to have made a strong rebuttal.
• saying “there’s nothing ‘right or wrong’ here.
• calling it a “silly story”
• etcetera.

Stark introduces a 2023 report, for which he says they looked at five different years of weather data, so he is once again accepting Llewellyn Smith’s central criticism, namely that they haven’t looked at back to back low wind years and will thus have got the costs wrong. He also says:

“we modelled two sensitivities looking specifically at the impact of low-wind periods (‘wind droughts’) up to 30 days. An understanding of these extremes is essential to system design (although its impact on the overall net zero transition shouldn’t be exaggerated).”

This appears to betray an alarming misunderstanding of the issue. A period of a few weeks with little or no renewable generation (usually referred to as a “dunkelflaute”) is a secondary problem. Dunkelflautes are typically a couple of weeks long, but even one lasting 30 days would only reduce annual output by 10% or so. In simple terms, it would mean that we would need 10% of annual demand in the store at the start of the year.*

I use the term wind “drought” to refer to years in which wind is low over the whole year. In 2021, for example, annual wind output was down 20% or more. To get through a year like that, we’d need 20% of demand in the store. To survive back-to-back wind drought years, we’d need to store 40% of demand (and to have a commensurately larger generation fleet so that we can quickly refill it). Thus the costs will be grossly understated.

That Stark appears not to understand this, even after Llewellyn Smith has explained it to him, should be a cause for concern.

It may be, of course, that bringing dunkelflautes into the thread is just part of his efforts to obfuscate his admission of failure, but we need to be clear. So, does Chris Stark accept that back-to-back wind droughts mean more storage, more generation equipment and higher costs, or doesn’t he?

We need to know.
Not a Lot of People Know That