These do - try their intro - they are even more insane than the Net Zero mob, but at least they are honest about it. Their intro shoots down the Net Zero technology myths - I know, I wasn't going to reply, but I was stunned to discover you didn't know who says what. Follow Doomberg and David Turver - you'll learn a lot it seems.
PS Just consider what NO shipping, NO Flying and NO Fossil fuels means for an Island not self-sufficient in food, with 80+ Million people and only the Chunnel to connect us to the rest of the World. When you've figured that out - and look up how many billion ton-miles the 44 Tonne Arctics travel to keep us fed. - then you'll see why having Prof or Dr in front of your name cuts no ice with me. The numbers don't lie, Profs and Dr's do, especially any associated with Green Climate Change grants. As Prof Lovelock explained when he recanted his 'alarmist beliefs'. So I've pointed you in the directions as a starter for your to educate yourself on the insanity on Net Zero - and shown you the even more insane Absolute Zero report. Now you are on your own.
Sarah Jones is the Minister for Industry. Her role includes overseeing industrial strategies and policies.
Lord Hunt serves as the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, focusing on nuclear energy, individual planning decisions and all departmental business in the House of Lords.
Michael Shanks is the Minister for Energy, responsible for Great British Energy, renewables, energy systems and market reforms.
Kerry McCarthy takes on the role of Minister for Climate, handling international climate policy, carbon budgets and net zero strategy.
Miatta Fahnbulleh is the Minister for Energy Consumers, focusing on fuel poverty, consumer issues and energy efficiency.
Getting rid of competent people was the principal reason why South Africa had rolling blackouts for almost a decade. Once the government started appointing competent engineers again, they realised that SA actually had retired coal plants that they could have turned online.
Dont be too quick about STEM boosting, during the COVID scam a lot of STEM credentialled mouthpieces spouted similar nonsense to the STEM credential free listed above.
Nothing new to say here The Labor politicians will find out the hard way, at great cost to the citizens of the UK, that they are dealing with the LAWS of Physics, not the Opinions of Physics or the Talking Points of Physics. Ignorance of STEM is not a virtue.
This is typical in Britain where society never got over Huxley’s quip about how ugly facts destroy beautiful hypotheses. Best just to ignore reality and live in dreamland.
But also I think many people believe that technological aspects of our society run from academic thinking. I mean there’s always a professor of some sort on TV talking about the subject.
Life works through hard engineering, accountability and strict auditing. Or most of the pleb stuff does and that includes Boeing. But climate change is magic and exempt from such annoyances as signal to noise and verifiability. Same actually as the Covid pixie dust experimental drugs.
Most people don’t know what that is or are too afraid to say the simple truth. The science is pure conjecture and frankly in a professional setting, lies and negligence.
Ed Miliband should watch the Energydashboard website for how wind (1.21Gw as I post) and Solar (Excellent at midday midsummer - 9.58Gw) are still over 17Gw short of a sunny Sunday demand of a measly 28.48Gw He'd only need primary maths to work out that ain't good news. I believe that is the 28th day in a row in July that around midday solar & wind have been WAY short of demand.
They may not be new to ESO execs, but once the blackouts start hitting the rest of us I can assure you they will come as a BIG surprise to many people. AND if Manchester Airport and Hampshire Hospital are anything to go by, they won't be a 'popular' surprise.
So you are going to be as surprised as everyone else when they start to happen
Windmiills/Solar are insane for anyone who wants to run a modern electric grid. Only Nuclear and Gas is going to save us ,AND Miliband isn't interested in those.
Indeed but he believes that all you to do double or triple up solar and wind and the maths tell you everything will be fine - which it would be of course for a few hours in the middle of summer. What he doesn't get or certainly doesn't want to address, i favour the former, is int he middle of the winter when demand is 50% higher and there aint no sun or wind hows that going to work. We need journalists that ask that pretty simple question of him but they don't.
Great review David - it’s tragic that in a Govt Dept responsible for the nations energy, there are no credible staff, with relative competence (skills, knowledge, experience, training, qualifications) in energy, or related topics
As a competent, professionally qualified Electrical Engineer & HV PM, in the power generation & distribution sectors, with over 40 years, hands on experience in building complex, £ multi million projects, I regularly despair at Govt energy policy, because it often flies in the face of physics, chasing some unattainable economic nirvana
Electrical Engineering requires a significant grasp of physics & maths, without it, you’re lost - DESNZ as you point out, is stuffed with taxpayer funded people, who wouldn’t know their reactance, from their impedance and that’s a major problem in delivering the reliable, affordable energy our nation needs 24/7/365
The dash to net zero further indicates their ignorance of grid characteristics, transmission needs and distribution problems - their head long dash to the abyss of oblivion continues unabated and I strongly believe only a severe dose of reality (power cuts, rationing and sky high bills with ensuing increased energy debt) will drag them to their senses
...who don't know or understand why they are affluent, why they could study humanities and why they aren't simply serfs labouring in the fields... but I digress...
Fortunately the ESO is run by engineers as are the transmission operators and they know how to keep the lights on. What I suspect though is there is increasing tension between the ESO control engineers and the deluded NZ evangelists in the plush offices pushing to undermine it. The transmission operators aren't that bothered now as they aren't responsible for keeping the lights on like the ESO are and are quite happy to overbuild the grid as thats how they earn additional income. So it all depends on how much cut through the engineers get to policy makers and if it was anything like my former industry rail transport not much so you continue headlong into oblivion until its too late.
I am not so sure about that. More than 6 months on they don't know what happened:
To me that worrying thing is that National Grid don’t know what is going on. There was a major grid frequency incident on 22nd December last year at 13:10. The frequency fell to 49.273Hz in about 4 seconds with some 155GVAs of inertia available.
NG plan to operate with as little as just 96GVAs next year, which means that the frequency would have dropped in about 96/155ths of the time, and because its rate of change would have been about 155/96 times as fast, it would likely have resulted in further losses of generation that would have seen the frequency fall faster and further, likely to at least 48.8Hz at which point automated demand disconnection starts occurring (as it did in August 2019).
Last week in the Open Transparency Forum Q&A there was the following exchange
Q: In the System Incidents Report (GC0105 & GC0151) for the 22nd December 2023 event:
which was previously presented at this OTF, there is no reference to the tripping of the Caithness Moray HVDC link (in the GC0151 transmission faults tab). From inspection of the calculated ROCOF data in this event, with three major trips in 10s, the HVDC trip is associated with the loss of ~500MW of infeed/generation. Nor is there reference to any generation trips associated with the HVDC fault.Please can ESO revisit their reports on this event to provide an update?
Answer: We are still working on answers to this question.
In other words they still haven’t a clue what happened to cause outages all the way between the IFA connection at Sellindge in Kent, Cottam power station in the Midlands and offshore wind farms in the far North of Scotland. There would have been a lot more publicity but for the fact that National Grid reported that the frequency remained below 49.5Hz for 59 seconds: one second more would have been a breach of the SQSS grid stability standard that triggers major independent investigation. Whether the frequency record is accurate is itself an interesting question. It would have been very tempting to tweak the data for the 60th second after the fall below 49.5Hz to avoid a nasty enquiry.
The reality is that we came very close to major power cuts: batteries appear to have failed to stomp on the frequency fall, which was only arrested by Dinorwig and Cruachan pumped storage winding up to maximum output some 12 seconds after the initial trip. We should be worried. OFGEM should treat it as a SQSS breach.
It didn't though and the ESO recovered the situation which could easily have happened if Sizewell B tripped off or we lost the Norway or Denmark i/cs. Also that is what Dinorwig and Cruachan are designed to do and despite their age can still deliver that emergency shot in the arm. Hail to the CEGB engineers of 40yrs ago. I agree though that what should be concerning OFGEM is the fact they can't get to the bottom of it and this an ever increasing risk of the over complicated system we are building using ever more computers to run protection not plain old mechanical relays. In my world it is KISS keep it simple stupid otherwise you risk the law of unintended outcomes or as Rumsfeld said its the unknown knowns.
That's missing the point. They were lucky in that they had 155GVAs of inertia, but next year they might well have been struggling with only 96GVAs. Dinorwig takes 12 seconds to reach full power. It would need to get there in 8 seconds at the lower inertia level. Can't be done. Grid batteries, which normally stomp on an interconnector trip and arrest the frequency fall, even with the loss of NSL, failed here. The IFA trip was only 500MW, yet the frequency decline indicates a total of 2GW or more was lost. They can't even identify what the infeed losses were, or why there appears to have been cascading trips.
I suggest they need to pause their aspirations to run on renewables only at low inertia, because things will cascade very rapidly If they start going wrong.
Thank you David - another very informative and thoroughly dispiriting article!!
One hopes that if these people need plumbing work, their car fixed, their aircraft flown, or surgery, they get similar expertise with good humanities degrees.
"....this government is here to govern, not merely preside like our predecessors did. When a country is going downhill, it is time for someone to get into the driving seat, and put his foot on the accelerator." (from Yes Minister)
In our net zero Idiocracy future, perhaps the Fahnbulleh Free Energy will become a similarly fundamental property in New Normal thermodynamics, where there is no theoretical limit on the maximum amount of work which can be extracted from turbines and solar panels, eventually reducing bills to zero for everyone.
The very existence of a 'Net Zero' policy, in violation of the laws of physics, known and obvious to anyone with a school STEM qualification and a calculator, is proof that no such person exists in government - either the legislative or administrative branches (and not on the judicial branch, either, though that's perhaps less of a surprise).
What we have to ask ourselves is, do any of these people in charge at DESNZ and NG ESO have a parent who was a scientist or engineer, because that would then qualify them to 'bring a lifelong familiarity with science' to their job, despite having degrees in history, politics and economics, and no actual job experience.
"As the daughter of a cancer researcher, Kamala Harris would bring a lifelong familiarity with science to the presidency, experts say."
Experts say you can be an expert if your mum was an expert!
"Health and science have been a part of Harris’s life since an early age: her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who Harris cites as a major influence, was a leading breast-cancer researcher who died of cancer."
So, when, just like in Britain, Harris says she is in favour of banning fracking, we can rest assured that this is her lifelong familiarity with science talking, and not a cackling, scientifically illiterate idiot.
These do - try their intro - they are even more insane than the Net Zero mob, but at least they are honest about it. Their intro shoots down the Net Zero technology myths - I know, I wasn't going to reply, but I was stunned to discover you didn't know who says what. Follow Doomberg and David Turver - you'll learn a lot it seems.
https://www.icax.co.uk/pdf/Absolute_Zero_Report.pdf
Youve utterly lost me now. Im still waiting for Turver to at least recognise my points on his FES piece
PS Just consider what NO shipping, NO Flying and NO Fossil fuels means for an Island not self-sufficient in food, with 80+ Million people and only the Chunnel to connect us to the rest of the World. When you've figured that out - and look up how many billion ton-miles the 44 Tonne Arctics travel to keep us fed. - then you'll see why having Prof or Dr in front of your name cuts no ice with me. The numbers don't lie, Profs and Dr's do, especially any associated with Green Climate Change grants. As Prof Lovelock explained when he recanted his 'alarmist beliefs'. So I've pointed you in the directions as a starter for your to educate yourself on the insanity on Net Zero - and shown you the even more insane Absolute Zero report. Now you are on your own.
But why would you want to stop shipping, flying and fossil fuels? As Ive asked before, have youread the FES?
The responsibilities of the various ministers are outlined here
https://www.energylivenews.com/2024/07/31/new-ministers-appointed-at-department-for-energy-security-and-net-zero/
Sarah Jones is the Minister for Industry. Her role includes overseeing industrial strategies and policies.
Lord Hunt serves as the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, focusing on nuclear energy, individual planning decisions and all departmental business in the House of Lords.
Michael Shanks is the Minister for Energy, responsible for Great British Energy, renewables, energy systems and market reforms.
Kerry McCarthy takes on the role of Minister for Climate, handling international climate policy, carbon budgets and net zero strategy.
Miatta Fahnbulleh is the Minister for Energy Consumers, focusing on fuel poverty, consumer issues and energy efficiency.
Getting rid of competent people was the principal reason why South Africa had rolling blackouts for almost a decade. Once the government started appointing competent engineers again, they realised that SA actually had retired coal plants that they could have turned online.
Dont be too quick about STEM boosting, during the COVID scam a lot of STEM credentialled mouthpieces spouted similar nonsense to the STEM credential free listed above.
Wow! Does not sound good. Leaders should know the area they're leading in.
Nothing new to say here The Labor politicians will find out the hard way, at great cost to the citizens of the UK, that they are dealing with the LAWS of Physics, not the Opinions of Physics or the Talking Points of Physics. Ignorance of STEM is not a virtue.
This is typical in Britain where society never got over Huxley’s quip about how ugly facts destroy beautiful hypotheses. Best just to ignore reality and live in dreamland.
But also I think many people believe that technological aspects of our society run from academic thinking. I mean there’s always a professor of some sort on TV talking about the subject.
Life works through hard engineering, accountability and strict auditing. Or most of the pleb stuff does and that includes Boeing. But climate change is magic and exempt from such annoyances as signal to noise and verifiability. Same actually as the Covid pixie dust experimental drugs.
Most people don’t know what that is or are too afraid to say the simple truth. The science is pure conjecture and frankly in a professional setting, lies and negligence.
Ed Miliband should watch the Energydashboard website for how wind (1.21Gw as I post) and Solar (Excellent at midday midsummer - 9.58Gw) are still over 17Gw short of a sunny Sunday demand of a measly 28.48Gw He'd only need primary maths to work out that ain't good news. I believe that is the 28th day in a row in July that around midday solar & wind have been WAY short of demand.
But Ed doesn’t manage the ESO control room, so we’ll be fine
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/power-chiefs-fear-net-zero-blackouts-in-london/ar-AA1omW6k
Not according to the ESO execs in private. Pity they are willing to go public, at least officially.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/power-chiefs-fear-net-zero-blackouts-in-london/ar-AA1omW6k
Nothing new there, those market reforms have been “need to do” list for a couple of years. The sooner the better
They may not be new to ESO execs, but once the blackouts start hitting the rest of us I can assure you they will come as a BIG surprise to many people. AND if Manchester Airport and Hampshire Hospital are anything to go by, they won't be a 'popular' surprise.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c722ppxldldo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg555ykx4go
I suspect not everyone follows Doomberg and David Turvers Eigenvalues sub-stacks.
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/inverted-priorities
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/wait-for-the-blackout
But blackout will not happen. One of the ESOs roles is to make change happen, and it will
So you are going to be as surprised as everyone else when they start to happen
Windmiills/Solar are insane for anyone who wants to run a modern electric grid. Only Nuclear and Gas is going to save us ,AND Miliband isn't interested in those.
Indeed but he believes that all you to do double or triple up solar and wind and the maths tell you everything will be fine - which it would be of course for a few hours in the middle of summer. What he doesn't get or certainly doesn't want to address, i favour the former, is int he middle of the winter when demand is 50% higher and there aint no sun or wind hows that going to work. We need journalists that ask that pretty simple question of him but they don't.
You are not being fair to Ed Miliband. He did double maths and physics at A level.
and then promptly did nothing with it afterwards.
Until you make a few technical mistakes you've learned NOTHING
It's not done him any good though, has it?
He always got top Marx in school, did Ed.
Great review David - it’s tragic that in a Govt Dept responsible for the nations energy, there are no credible staff, with relative competence (skills, knowledge, experience, training, qualifications) in energy, or related topics
As a competent, professionally qualified Electrical Engineer & HV PM, in the power generation & distribution sectors, with over 40 years, hands on experience in building complex, £ multi million projects, I regularly despair at Govt energy policy, because it often flies in the face of physics, chasing some unattainable economic nirvana
Electrical Engineering requires a significant grasp of physics & maths, without it, you’re lost - DESNZ as you point out, is stuffed with taxpayer funded people, who wouldn’t know their reactance, from their impedance and that’s a major problem in delivering the reliable, affordable energy our nation needs 24/7/365
The dash to net zero further indicates their ignorance of grid characteristics, transmission needs and distribution problems - their head long dash to the abyss of oblivion continues unabated and I strongly believe only a severe dose of reality (power cuts, rationing and sky high bills with ensuing increased energy debt) will drag them to their senses
...who don't know or understand why they are affluent, why they could study humanities and why they aren't simply serfs labouring in the fields... but I digress...
Fortunately the ESO is run by engineers as are the transmission operators and they know how to keep the lights on. What I suspect though is there is increasing tension between the ESO control engineers and the deluded NZ evangelists in the plush offices pushing to undermine it. The transmission operators aren't that bothered now as they aren't responsible for keeping the lights on like the ESO are and are quite happy to overbuild the grid as thats how they earn additional income. So it all depends on how much cut through the engineers get to policy makers and if it was anything like my former industry rail transport not much so you continue headlong into oblivion until its too late.
I am not so sure about that. More than 6 months on they don't know what happened:
To me that worrying thing is that National Grid don’t know what is going on. There was a major grid frequency incident on 22nd December last year at 13:10. The frequency fell to 49.273Hz in about 4 seconds with some 155GVAs of inertia available.
NG plan to operate with as little as just 96GVAs next year, which means that the frequency would have dropped in about 96/155ths of the time, and because its rate of change would have been about 155/96 times as fast, it would likely have resulted in further losses of generation that would have seen the frequency fall faster and further, likely to at least 48.8Hz at which point automated demand disconnection starts occurring (as it did in August 2019).
Last week in the Open Transparency Forum Q&A there was the following exchange
Q: In the System Incidents Report (GC0105 & GC0151) for the 22nd December 2023 event:
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/299266/download
which was previously presented at this OTF, there is no reference to the tripping of the Caithness Moray HVDC link (in the GC0151 transmission faults tab). From inspection of the calculated ROCOF data in this event, with three major trips in 10s, the HVDC trip is associated with the loss of ~500MW of infeed/generation. Nor is there reference to any generation trips associated with the HVDC fault.Please can ESO revisit their reports on this event to provide an update?
Answer: We are still working on answers to this question.
In other words they still haven’t a clue what happened to cause outages all the way between the IFA connection at Sellindge in Kent, Cottam power station in the Midlands and offshore wind farms in the far North of Scotland. There would have been a lot more publicity but for the fact that National Grid reported that the frequency remained below 49.5Hz for 59 seconds: one second more would have been a breach of the SQSS grid stability standard that triggers major independent investigation. Whether the frequency record is accurate is itself an interesting question. It would have been very tempting to tweak the data for the 60th second after the fall below 49.5Hz to avoid a nasty enquiry.
The reality is that we came very close to major power cuts: batteries appear to have failed to stomp on the frequency fall, which was only arrested by Dinorwig and Cruachan pumped storage winding up to maximum output some 12 seconds after the initial trip. We should be worried. OFGEM should treat it as a SQSS breach.
It didn't though and the ESO recovered the situation which could easily have happened if Sizewell B tripped off or we lost the Norway or Denmark i/cs. Also that is what Dinorwig and Cruachan are designed to do and despite their age can still deliver that emergency shot in the arm. Hail to the CEGB engineers of 40yrs ago. I agree though that what should be concerning OFGEM is the fact they can't get to the bottom of it and this an ever increasing risk of the over complicated system we are building using ever more computers to run protection not plain old mechanical relays. In my world it is KISS keep it simple stupid otherwise you risk the law of unintended outcomes or as Rumsfeld said its the unknown knowns.
That's missing the point. They were lucky in that they had 155GVAs of inertia, but next year they might well have been struggling with only 96GVAs. Dinorwig takes 12 seconds to reach full power. It would need to get there in 8 seconds at the lower inertia level. Can't be done. Grid batteries, which normally stomp on an interconnector trip and arrest the frequency fall, even with the loss of NSL, failed here. The IFA trip was only 500MW, yet the frequency decline indicates a total of 2GW or more was lost. They can't even identify what the infeed losses were, or why there appears to have been cascading trips.
I suggest they need to pause their aspirations to run on renewables only at low inertia, because things will cascade very rapidly If they start going wrong.
Thank you David - another very informative and thoroughly dispiriting article!!
One hopes that if these people need plumbing work, their car fixed, their aircraft flown, or surgery, they get similar expertise with good humanities degrees.
"....this government is here to govern, not merely preside like our predecessors did. When a country is going downhill, it is time for someone to get into the driving seat, and put his foot on the accelerator." (from Yes Minister)
The Gibbs Free Energy is a thermodynamic physical property of a system and quantifies the balance between entropy and enthalpy.
"Gibbs free energy can be defined as the maximum amount of work that can be extracted from a closed system."
https://byjus.com/jee/gibbs-free-energy/
In our net zero Idiocracy future, perhaps the Fahnbulleh Free Energy will become a similarly fundamental property in New Normal thermodynamics, where there is no theoretical limit on the maximum amount of work which can be extracted from turbines and solar panels, eventually reducing bills to zero for everyone.
I have another definition: the useful Fahnbulleh Free Energy output is zero.
It has negative value, being potentially destructive and having disposal costs, and has to be curtailed.
Chaos is howling at the gates of our closed system Western civilisation, inviting Entropy to do its worst from within.
It's like someone requiring brain surgery being allocated a chiropodist, a shop assistant, a taxi driver and a road sweeper.
Just because they agree you need surgery doesn't make them suitable to undertake it!
Can't think of anything that could go wrong.😡
The very existence of a 'Net Zero' policy, in violation of the laws of physics, known and obvious to anyone with a school STEM qualification and a calculator, is proof that no such person exists in government - either the legislative or administrative branches (and not on the judicial branch, either, though that's perhaps less of a surprise).
What we have to ask ourselves is, do any of these people in charge at DESNZ and NG ESO have a parent who was a scientist or engineer, because that would then qualify them to 'bring a lifelong familiarity with science' to their job, despite having degrees in history, politics and economics, and no actual job experience.
"As the daughter of a cancer researcher, Kamala Harris would bring a lifelong familiarity with science to the presidency, experts say."
Experts say you can be an expert if your mum was an expert!
"Health and science have been a part of Harris’s life since an early age: her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who Harris cites as a major influence, was a leading breast-cancer researcher who died of cancer."
So, when, just like in Britain, Harris says she is in favour of banning fracking, we can rest assured that this is her lifelong familiarity with science talking, and not a cackling, scientifically illiterate idiot.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-a-kamala-harris-presidency-would-mean-for-science/
Half a century ago I used to treat myself to an occasional copy of Scientific American. I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole now.
ScAm.
New scientist too. It's now the New Normal Scientist.