Anyone with 2 brain cells would know that 'NET ZERO' is an utterly insane off the charts idiocy, an absolute mathematical, physical, statistical and practical impossibility that can never be achieved or exist in reality!
Electricity has to come from somewhere, and the only reliable sources are coal, oil and gas (nukes don't cut it, the radioactive waste is too poisonous).
The 'CLIMATE CHAOS' fraud is the excuse and propaganda misdirection justifying attacks on farming and food, concealing a profoundly inimical globalist genocidal enslavement scheme.
Do you want to live in the squalor and drudgery and misery of the pre-industrial age? HELL NO!
HANDS OFF MY GAS STOVE! I LOVE MY GAS STOVE! Ever try to cook on an electric stove - absolute nightmare!
Can't say this often enough! CLIMATE CHANGE IS AN EVEN WORSE FRAUD THAN THE PLANSCAMDEMIC! SO-CALLED GREEN TECH IS A GIGANTIC SCAM! MINING AND MANUFACTURING 'GREEN' PRODUCTS NEEDS COAL, GAS AND OIL AND MINING RARE MINERALS IS MORE ENVIRONMENTALLY TOXIC AND DESTRUCTIVE THAN LEGACY PRODUCTS. SCREW YOUR DAMNED GREEN GRIFT AGENDA! climateviewer.com
All life everywhere is being assaulted by THE TECHNOCRATIC OMNIWAR! RESIST! DO NOT CONSENT TO ALL THINGS DIGITAL, 'SMART', AI, 5G, NO CASH - ALL OF IT! dhughes.substack.com Technocrat ruling class psychos get a sadistic thrill from their powers over life and death and hurting all who stand in their way and they need the resources worldwide to build their digital total slavery control grids (herd survivors into 15 minute city digital prisons)!
AI is designed to be anti-human/anti-life programmed by technocrat control freak psychos - garbage in = garbage out. Everyone got along just fine without all these absurd and downright satanic electronic gadgets that did not exist until recently. NOBODY NEEDS THIS AI CRAP!
It's always since the dawn of history, been about using knowledge for power and control by the psycho portion of the human population that learned how to manipulate 'normies' to obey them in their power-mad power trips.
In these modern times, this evil has become TECHNOCRACY, the vilest threat to the existence of all life on earth since forever!
They can stick their f*cking damned NANO, Digital IDs, AI, jabs and chips up their asses where the sun don't shine!
CREATIVITY! ARTISTRY! IMAGINATION! SPIRITUALITY! HUMOR! LOVING KINDNESS! These are the best ways to fight THEM!
I also have a landline, a wired laptop and a wired monitor screen, and I never had or will have those infernal mobile devices designed to enslave you. I also use cash as much as possible, no cash is TOTAL SLAVERY.
How to fight back against this TOTAL SLAVERY!
RESIST! DO NOT COMPLY! DITCH THE DAMNED 'SMART' PHONES AND THE DAMNED QR CODES AND GO BACK TO LANDLINES OR FLIP PHONES AND USE CASH AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE! INSIST ON CASH! CBDC IS TOTAL SLAVERY!
It is heartbreaking to witness the holocausts happening and so many fellow citizens are brainwashed/bamboozled by the propaganda media, they are oblivious!
MISTAKES WERE NOT MADE! THEY can't get rid of the 'useless eaters' fast enough!
Peddling pure poison! Folks have to wake up to reality: health comes from organic diet, daily exercise and clean living and never from a needle or a pill except in dire, rare traumatic injuries.
It was NEVER about health! The Powers That Should Not Be were ALWAYS about they want you DEAD or a SLAVE! This is a painful truth to accept but we the people must wake up and fight back! And toxic injections/pills were/are a huge part of their arsenal!
This horrifying Gates, Governor 'Gruesome Newscum', 'Lone Scum', Soros, 'Benedict' Biden and Harris and even Trump, Vance, and 'Ramaswampy' et al are blatant fully owned and operated puppets of their globalist technocrat parasite masters same as other numerous 'PUBLIC SERPENTS' infesting by design from above, the bureaucratic apparatus.
Can't say this often enough! The Military/Industrial Complex and the Biowarfare/industrial Complex, WEF agenda and the evils assaulting humanity are from one and the same source - it is the 99% against the diabolical GREED of the 0.01% who should not be in charge of anything!
The monsters in human skin suits who rule the world get a sadistic vampiric thrill and boost from perpetrating the vilest most demonic crimes against the most vulnerable (babies and small children) and then corrupting the system to get away with it scot free! We the People must stop them, there are a lot more of us than them!
JAB INJURIES: GROSS CALAMARI BLOOD CLOTS/AUTISM TSUNAMI/SADS/TURBO CANCER/BIZARRE TERMINAL ILLNESSES: More tragic victims of the ruling parasite genocidal enslavement agenda, sacrificed on the altar of psychopathic greed and hatred of humanity.
And BIG pHARMa is an arsenal making permanently sickly addicted slaves dependent on their products - the complete opposite of actual health.
Can't say this often enough!
SCREW THE HYPOCHONDRIA GERMAPHOBIC FEAR HYSTERIA! DO NOT CONSENT! Avian flu is for the birds! RESIST!
KEEP FIGHTING! All the perps who pushed this greatest crime against humanity, all the way down to the local level, must get their comeuppances!
Proudly ANTI-VAXX! Reiterating for the sake of newbies and to support this post.
Ban all vaccine jabs! There has never been a 'safe and effective' vaccine since Edward Jenner's fraud over 200 years ago as per 'Dissolving Illusions' by Suzanne Humphries and 'Turtles All the Way Down' by Anonymous. Health can never come from a needle or pills, but from healthy eating, healthy exercise and healthy living! virustruth.net
Divide and rule! Agents provocateurs anyone, FALSE FLAGS, propaganda social engineering psyops? Keeping us proles at each others' throats while the globalist technocrat predators laugh all the way to the BIS and The Bank of Rothschild's!
I'll assume that all of your facts are correct and up to date --- but your "pissing into the wind" on this one -- because the UK has a "...2-tier, both tiers for profit..." electric power generation and distribution system in place since your "Iron Maiden", PM Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Government put in place:
The UK electric bill payer is now so "over-charged" - that the UK has some of the highest billing per kW in the World.
The fact that Mr. Vince has put together his "empire" - is called business -- which is defined by the various UK Governments since then -and will only change - when a UK Government is elected in that will really change things.
And be really careful on that- as can be seen here in the US.
This last election, the Lizard Eyed Orangutan Sociopath Donald Trump and his "Republican running mates -- lied through their teeth to the dumber than a rock "former Republican" - now Trump Nazi Evengeical MAGA Party members / all of the really dumb; totally uninformed; undereducated young "male broh" types - in ever increasing numbers over here.
I think submarine reactors would probably be classified as micro reactors not SMRs. I don't think there's much in common between submarine reactors and the RR SMR.
Thanks for the excellent report. He blames high electricity prices on gas but if by some means we could have electricity without any gas at all would it make any difference to the price of electricity?
I'm sure you are right but why would they soar? I think when someone comes out with that thing about gas causing high electricity prices they should be asked what they think would happen if we didn't use gas at all.
I had an idea like this. Suppose half of our electricity came from gas and half from renewables the whole sale market price would be set by the marginal price of gas. Then suppose we only needed 10% gas, the whole sale price would remain the same. Then suppose we only needed 1% of gas. The wholesale price would be the same and yet only 1% of our electricity came from gas. One step further and we need no gas and suddenly the wholesale market price would plummet. But with the CFD scheme the subsidy for renewable companies would jump up to make up the difference and we would be no better off.
They would soar because you have to cover the total costs of a renewables based system. It's not just the excess generation you must pay for to try to cover periods when winds are slight and solar is low or zero, with a lot of output when it's windy/sunny being curtailed for zero value because it's too costly to store. There's all the extra grid you need to transport and stabilise remote renewables output, a huge and heavily underutilised investment.
The viability of storage depends on how fast it can be turned over, earning a margin on each turn. Being able to charge and discharge for morning and evening peaks gives a twice a day turnover for the currently optimal 2 hour batteries, at least provided intra day prices are volatile enough to give a margin over round trip losses. Once you start trying to cover for extended periods of Dunkelflaute or seasonal variations the turnover rate drops dramatically, killing storage economics. So you have to have a parallel system of dispatchable capacity which you must pay to keep idle when the wind is blowing.
As you can see, it doesn't add up to a cheap system.
I thought it would be more expensive. The reason I mentioned it was because of a post on another substack by Irina Slav. She quotes the Financial Times which said that since gas sets the price of electricity most of the time that would be good reason to stop using it altogether. This is the Financial Times so you would think they might know better. The argumenat against that is obviously that if we were able source all our electricity from renewables without gas, electricity prices would rise even higher than they are already. I think this should be repeated and repeated.
Nicki, if we are to be leaders in AI, build an army, navy, air force to fight Starmers wars.the U.K. is going to need a lot of cheap energy. Our Elites must start realising this soon, we can’t do these things and get growth with intermittent expensive wasteful energy.
The energy that "cyber" consumes is at astronomical levels. Those who advocated green policies also think that AI and Crypto is the answer to everything.
Vince is working exactly as designed. HMG offer incentives to make things happen. Just like tweaking car taxes to get us plebs buying different cars. The dodgy part is hiding the figures and telling lies about why electricity is so expensive.
Thank you for this brilliant detective work David. Remembering John Harvey Jones' observation that profit (and loss) is generally the small difference between two much larger numbers, your article inspired me to take a look at the Ecotricity Group Ltd account to end April 2024, found here: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03521776/filing-history
From this (page 30), the revenue was £459.2m, of which energy sales were £447.1m. Taxpayer grants and energy credits come to £11.3m, so 2.5% of revenue. There is also revenue of £2.7 for FIT administration income, which I guess comes from us: if so that's a total of £14m or 3% of revenue, perhaps not huge viewed in one light. Profit and loss is the realm of accountants, but the Strategic Report (page 3) gives the pre-tax profit as £5.1m compared with £44.7m the previous year.
For 2024 I simple-mindedly conclude that the taxpayer kept the company afloat. The statement that profits fell in part due to the fall in Ofgem price cap "returning to a more normalised, albeit still elevated, level", would give me, were I an investor, cause for concern. In summary, this "cheapest form of electricity production" is, no surprise, reliant on high electricity prices.
Great analysis David. I do wish the liars in government would learn. We need the cheapest and most efficient energy to run an industrial nation, intermittent is neither cheap or efficient. FF and nuclear should be used until there is a viable alternative and that will not be wind or solar.
Thing is we are no longer an industrial nation and they will never admit it but its making the job of their haloed net zero easier to achieve. Of course add back imported carbon emissions and we don't look anywhere near as good.
Great work, David, but given that Dale is notoriously tetchy and litigious, expect to be threatened with legal action to try to silence your fair and justified observations of the businesses he operates.
It could also be characterised that Dale is operating a boondoggle that suits mad Ed Milliband and the rest of the NetZero zealots.
If Milibrain was a true socialist who would see how much Vince has ripped off people and used vehicles created by the conservatives to enrich themselves.
But just like his father and Tony Benn, while they spouted socialist dogma about property, they were motivated not to allow others to own property but as soon as the possibility arose that they might themsewlves have to pay some tax on their property, they quickly made sure their own property was outside the prevailing tax liability. They are all hypocrites in my experience. Just like the Glastonbury owners.
The relevance of that to Dale Vince's misdeeds escapes me. You also misunderstand the tax system. Anyway Benn never said a thing about others not owing property.
I briefly bought electricity from Ecotricity, having changed from the standard 'supplier' at a time that electricity retailing was being de-regulated. I asked questions about its sources at different times of the day or week and why it did not have more 'renewables'. Given how much higher its prices were than others, this implied very substantial extra revenue/profits. Ecotricity refused to answer.
I changed to the Co-op in 2013. It had difficulties a few years later and the electricity supply business was taken over by Octopus. They may be on a par with Ecotricity in their behaviour although any malpractice is probably more cleverly hidden.
At the time I used Ecotricity, Good Energy got even worse publicity for its antics. In Private Eye, as it happens.
The relevance of that to Dale Vince's misdeeds escapes me. " Perhaps this is because your thinking is lacking in width and depth.
"You also misunderstand the tax system." That's a bold claim for you to make! Care to enlighten me with specifics, or is sweeping statements the order of the day? Your arrogance in this regard is telling.
"Anyway, Benn never said a thing about others not owing property." Another sweeping statement. Do you always just shoot your mouth off without checking first? Benn was a public figure for a lot of years and said a lot of things!
Benn said this about 'The Establishment', which I would contest is a suitable proxy for the property-owning class.
"I don’t think people realise how the establishment became established. It simply stole the land and property off the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since."
And you need to check the Deed of Variation (2000-2001) on his Holland Park home.
This was the result
"By transferring part of the Holland Park home’s ownership, Benn’s estate was smaller when he died, lowering the IHT liability. The property was sold in 2011 for £4.1 million, and the earlier transfer meant a portion of its value was already outside his taxable estate. Additionally, his Stansgate Abbey Farm estate was placed in a trust, another common IHT mitigation strategy, though this is less directly tied to the will change."
So while TB ensured he avoided inheritance tax, he also said, "We will also take action to make the tax system fairer, including action to reduce the tax advantages enjoyed from inherited wealth.”
The quote appears in the Labour Party Manifesto 1983, titled The New Hope for Britain. Specifically, it is referenced in the section on economic policy and taxation, where Labour outlined plans to reform the tax system to address wealth inequality. The manifesto promised measures to reduce tax advantages tied to inherited wealth, aligning with Benn’s socialist advocacy for wealth redistribution.
So, while you might struggle to think this through, I would suggest this is evidence of his hypocrisy! The Millibands did something similar, had Milliband senior was even more vocal about property ownership.
Oh, and thank you for the riveting anecdote of where you purchased your electrical power supply from. Can't wait for the sequel, The Gas Supply Files: a personal journey on YouSwitch!
Great work David, extracting this sort of data and performing this analysis is no easy task. Where do you get the load factor data from? I would like to look at our local wind farm Scout Moor in a similar way.
Cubico are about to apply for Scout Moor 2 - 18x180m turbines alongside our historic Cotton Famine Road. We have quizzed them on their projected earnings but they would only say that they aren't anywhere near as high as we are speculating using the financial results from Scout Moor 1 which we have explored here:
For ROC-funded wind farms you can download either the REGO or the ROC data from the Ofgem RER site. If you download the ROCs for that windfarm, you can work out MWh generated from the certificates issues and MWH/cert. The station TIC field gives the capacity. SO with a bit of Excel dexterity you can work it out.
You may find that the do updates etc at weekends. Having a 56 hour window provides considerable operational flexibility for maintenance with minimal downside to professional analysts
Thanks for this incredible breakdown, David, once again. We can actually see the taxpayer-funded trough at which Dale and his myriad of holdings are feeding and the reason way he looks like a fish flapping at the end of a line at the moment. We really need to make sure that this is addressed. However, with Liebour's wheels being greased by Dale and his more-than-cosy links to DESNZ, any hopes that this will end soon looks a little bleak. His constant rhetoric and blatant whining on X now all makes sense.
Great analysis. If only the Government looked at the numbers!
Anyone with 2 brain cells would know that 'NET ZERO' is an utterly insane off the charts idiocy, an absolute mathematical, physical, statistical and practical impossibility that can never be achieved or exist in reality!
Electricity has to come from somewhere, and the only reliable sources are coal, oil and gas (nukes don't cut it, the radioactive waste is too poisonous).
The 'CLIMATE CHAOS' fraud is the excuse and propaganda misdirection justifying attacks on farming and food, concealing a profoundly inimical globalist genocidal enslavement scheme.
Do you want to live in the squalor and drudgery and misery of the pre-industrial age? HELL NO!
HANDS OFF MY GAS STOVE! I LOVE MY GAS STOVE! Ever try to cook on an electric stove - absolute nightmare!
Can't say this often enough! CLIMATE CHANGE IS AN EVEN WORSE FRAUD THAN THE PLANSCAMDEMIC! SO-CALLED GREEN TECH IS A GIGANTIC SCAM! MINING AND MANUFACTURING 'GREEN' PRODUCTS NEEDS COAL, GAS AND OIL AND MINING RARE MINERALS IS MORE ENVIRONMENTALLY TOXIC AND DESTRUCTIVE THAN LEGACY PRODUCTS. SCREW YOUR DAMNED GREEN GRIFT AGENDA! climateviewer.com
All life everywhere is being assaulted by THE TECHNOCRATIC OMNIWAR! RESIST! DO NOT CONSENT TO ALL THINGS DIGITAL, 'SMART', AI, 5G, NO CASH - ALL OF IT! dhughes.substack.com Technocrat ruling class psychos get a sadistic thrill from their powers over life and death and hurting all who stand in their way and they need the resources worldwide to build their digital total slavery control grids (herd survivors into 15 minute city digital prisons)!
AI is designed to be anti-human/anti-life programmed by technocrat control freak psychos - garbage in = garbage out. Everyone got along just fine without all these absurd and downright satanic electronic gadgets that did not exist until recently. NOBODY NEEDS THIS AI CRAP!
It's always since the dawn of history, been about using knowledge for power and control by the psycho portion of the human population that learned how to manipulate 'normies' to obey them in their power-mad power trips.
In these modern times, this evil has become TECHNOCRACY, the vilest threat to the existence of all life on earth since forever!
EW! GROSS! HELL NO! technocracy.news
They can stick their f*cking damned NANO, Digital IDs, AI, jabs and chips up their asses where the sun don't shine!
CREATIVITY! ARTISTRY! IMAGINATION! SPIRITUALITY! HUMOR! LOVING KINDNESS! These are the best ways to fight THEM!
I also have a landline, a wired laptop and a wired monitor screen, and I never had or will have those infernal mobile devices designed to enslave you. I also use cash as much as possible, no cash is TOTAL SLAVERY.
How to fight back against this TOTAL SLAVERY!
RESIST! DO NOT COMPLY! DITCH THE DAMNED 'SMART' PHONES AND THE DAMNED QR CODES AND GO BACK TO LANDLINES OR FLIP PHONES AND USE CASH AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE! INSIST ON CASH! CBDC IS TOTAL SLAVERY!
It is heartbreaking to witness the holocausts happening and so many fellow citizens are brainwashed/bamboozled by the propaganda media, they are oblivious!
MISTAKES WERE NOT MADE! THEY can't get rid of the 'useless eaters' fast enough!
Peddling pure poison! Folks have to wake up to reality: health comes from organic diet, daily exercise and clean living and never from a needle or a pill except in dire, rare traumatic injuries.
It was NEVER about health! The Powers That Should Not Be were ALWAYS about they want you DEAD or a SLAVE! This is a painful truth to accept but we the people must wake up and fight back! And toxic injections/pills were/are a huge part of their arsenal!
This horrifying Gates, Governor 'Gruesome Newscum', 'Lone Scum', Soros, 'Benedict' Biden and Harris and even Trump, Vance, and 'Ramaswampy' et al are blatant fully owned and operated puppets of their globalist technocrat parasite masters same as other numerous 'PUBLIC SERPENTS' infesting by design from above, the bureaucratic apparatus.
Can't say this often enough! The Military/Industrial Complex and the Biowarfare/industrial Complex, WEF agenda and the evils assaulting humanity are from one and the same source - it is the 99% against the diabolical GREED of the 0.01% who should not be in charge of anything!
The monsters in human skin suits who rule the world get a sadistic vampiric thrill and boost from perpetrating the vilest most demonic crimes against the most vulnerable (babies and small children) and then corrupting the system to get away with it scot free! We the People must stop them, there are a lot more of us than them!
Please check out this substack! ponerology.substack.com
JAB INJURIES: GROSS CALAMARI BLOOD CLOTS/AUTISM TSUNAMI/SADS/TURBO CANCER/BIZARRE TERMINAL ILLNESSES: More tragic victims of the ruling parasite genocidal enslavement agenda, sacrificed on the altar of psychopathic greed and hatred of humanity.
And BIG pHARMa is an arsenal making permanently sickly addicted slaves dependent on their products - the complete opposite of actual health.
Can't say this often enough!
SCREW THE HYPOCHONDRIA GERMAPHOBIC FEAR HYSTERIA! DO NOT CONSENT! Avian flu is for the birds! RESIST!
KEEP FIGHTING! All the perps who pushed this greatest crime against humanity, all the way down to the local level, must get their comeuppances!
Proudly ANTI-VAXX! Reiterating for the sake of newbies and to support this post.
Ban all vaccine jabs! There has never been a 'safe and effective' vaccine since Edward Jenner's fraud over 200 years ago as per 'Dissolving Illusions' by Suzanne Humphries and 'Turtles All the Way Down' by Anonymous. Health can never come from a needle or pills, but from healthy eating, healthy exercise and healthy living! virustruth.net
Divide and rule! Agents provocateurs anyone, FALSE FLAGS, propaganda social engineering psyops? Keeping us proles at each others' throats while the globalist technocrat predators laugh all the way to the BIS and The Bank of Rothschild's!
BURN BACK BETTER!
PSYCHOPATHS! MEGALOMANIACS!
Bless and thank you for doing what you do.
I'll assume that all of your facts are correct and up to date --- but your "pissing into the wind" on this one -- because the UK has a "...2-tier, both tiers for profit..." electric power generation and distribution system in place since your "Iron Maiden", PM Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Government put in place:
The UK electric bill payer is now so "over-charged" - that the UK has some of the highest billing per kW in the World.
The fact that Mr. Vince has put together his "empire" - is called business -- which is defined by the various UK Governments since then -and will only change - when a UK Government is elected in that will really change things.
And be really careful on that- as can be seen here in the US.
This last election, the Lizard Eyed Orangutan Sociopath Donald Trump and his "Republican running mates -- lied through their teeth to the dumber than a rock "former Republican" - now Trump Nazi Evengeical MAGA Party members / all of the really dumb; totally uninformed; undereducated young "male broh" types - in ever increasing numbers over here.
You get what you vote for.
An article by Dale Vince 3 or 4 months ago on LinkedIn - the comments are interesting too!
Surely Small Modular Reactors are fitted in all our nuclear submarines?
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dalevince_we-keep-hearing-that-small-modular-reactors-activity-7293268827830665218-Jh1C?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android
I think submarine reactors would probably be classified as micro reactors not SMRs. I don't think there's much in common between submarine reactors and the RR SMR.
Why are we not using our own secure fracked gas or the several hundred years worth of coal under our feet?
Thanks for the excellent report. He blames high electricity prices on gas but if by some means we could have electricity without any gas at all would it make any difference to the price of electricity?
Retail prices would soar
I'm sure you are right but why would they soar? I think when someone comes out with that thing about gas causing high electricity prices they should be asked what they think would happen if we didn't use gas at all.
I had an idea like this. Suppose half of our electricity came from gas and half from renewables the whole sale market price would be set by the marginal price of gas. Then suppose we only needed 10% gas, the whole sale price would remain the same. Then suppose we only needed 1% of gas. The wholesale price would be the same and yet only 1% of our electricity came from gas. One step further and we need no gas and suddenly the wholesale market price would plummet. But with the CFD scheme the subsidy for renewable companies would jump up to make up the difference and we would be no better off.
They would soar because you have to cover the total costs of a renewables based system. It's not just the excess generation you must pay for to try to cover periods when winds are slight and solar is low or zero, with a lot of output when it's windy/sunny being curtailed for zero value because it's too costly to store. There's all the extra grid you need to transport and stabilise remote renewables output, a huge and heavily underutilised investment.
The viability of storage depends on how fast it can be turned over, earning a margin on each turn. Being able to charge and discharge for morning and evening peaks gives a twice a day turnover for the currently optimal 2 hour batteries, at least provided intra day prices are volatile enough to give a margin over round trip losses. Once you start trying to cover for extended periods of Dunkelflaute or seasonal variations the turnover rate drops dramatically, killing storage economics. So you have to have a parallel system of dispatchable capacity which you must pay to keep idle when the wind is blowing.
As you can see, it doesn't add up to a cheap system.
I thought it would be more expensive. The reason I mentioned it was because of a post on another substack by Irina Slav. She quotes the Financial Times which said that since gas sets the price of electricity most of the time that would be good reason to stop using it altogether. This is the Financial Times so you would think they might know better. The argumenat against that is obviously that if we were able source all our electricity from renewables without gas, electricity prices would rise even higher than they are already. I think this should be repeated and repeated.
Watch this.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidturver/p/renewables-are-much-more-expensive?r=nhgn1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Plus we would spend a lot more on grid balancing, backup and grid extensions
Nicki, if we are to be leaders in AI, build an army, navy, air force to fight Starmers wars.the U.K. is going to need a lot of cheap energy. Our Elites must start realising this soon, we can’t do these things and get growth with intermittent expensive wasteful energy.
The energy that "cyber" consumes is at astronomical levels. Those who advocated green policies also think that AI and Crypto is the answer to everything.
Vince is working exactly as designed. HMG offer incentives to make things happen. Just like tweaking car taxes to get us plebs buying different cars. The dodgy part is hiding the figures and telling lies about why electricity is so expensive.
Thank you for this brilliant detective work David. Remembering John Harvey Jones' observation that profit (and loss) is generally the small difference between two much larger numbers, your article inspired me to take a look at the Ecotricity Group Ltd account to end April 2024, found here: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03521776/filing-history
From this (page 30), the revenue was £459.2m, of which energy sales were £447.1m. Taxpayer grants and energy credits come to £11.3m, so 2.5% of revenue. There is also revenue of £2.7 for FIT administration income, which I guess comes from us: if so that's a total of £14m or 3% of revenue, perhaps not huge viewed in one light. Profit and loss is the realm of accountants, but the Strategic Report (page 3) gives the pre-tax profit as £5.1m compared with £44.7m the previous year.
For 2024 I simple-mindedly conclude that the taxpayer kept the company afloat. The statement that profits fell in part due to the fall in Ofgem price cap "returning to a more normalised, albeit still elevated, level", would give me, were I an investor, cause for concern. In summary, this "cheapest form of electricity production" is, no surprise, reliant on high electricity prices.
The price cap should have no bearing as the wholesale price has fallen so margins should be the same.
The Green Blob is not going to like this. Keep it up David! But expect kickback.
We've got to take them on head-on. There's been too much smoke & mirrors and BS for too long.
This takes the biscuit. Edited comment in case someone decided to sue!
Great analysis David. I do wish the liars in government would learn. We need the cheapest and most efficient energy to run an industrial nation, intermittent is neither cheap or efficient. FF and nuclear should be used until there is a viable alternative and that will not be wind or solar.
Thing is we are no longer an industrial nation and they will never admit it but its making the job of their haloed net zero easier to achieve. Of course add back imported carbon emissions and we don't look anywhere near as good.
Great work, David, but given that Dale is notoriously tetchy and litigious, expect to be threatened with legal action to try to silence your fair and justified observations of the businesses he operates.
It could also be characterised that Dale is operating a boondoggle that suits mad Ed Milliband and the rest of the NetZero zealots.
If Milibrain was a true socialist who would see how much Vince has ripped off people and used vehicles created by the conservatives to enrich themselves.
But just like his father and Tony Benn, while they spouted socialist dogma about property, they were motivated not to allow others to own property but as soon as the possibility arose that they might themsewlves have to pay some tax on their property, they quickly made sure their own property was outside the prevailing tax liability. They are all hypocrites in my experience. Just like the Glastonbury owners.
The relevance of that to Dale Vince's misdeeds escapes me. You also misunderstand the tax system. Anyway Benn never said a thing about others not owing property.
I briefly bought electricity from Ecotricity, having changed from the standard 'supplier' at a time that electricity retailing was being de-regulated. I asked questions about its sources at different times of the day or week and why it did not have more 'renewables'. Given how much higher its prices were than others, this implied very substantial extra revenue/profits. Ecotricity refused to answer.
I changed to the Co-op in 2013. It had difficulties a few years later and the electricity supply business was taken over by Octopus. They may be on a par with Ecotricity in their behaviour although any malpractice is probably more cleverly hidden.
At the time I used Ecotricity, Good Energy got even worse publicity for its antics. In Private Eye, as it happens.
The relevance of that to Dale Vince's misdeeds escapes me. " Perhaps this is because your thinking is lacking in width and depth.
"You also misunderstand the tax system." That's a bold claim for you to make! Care to enlighten me with specifics, or is sweeping statements the order of the day? Your arrogance in this regard is telling.
"Anyway, Benn never said a thing about others not owing property." Another sweeping statement. Do you always just shoot your mouth off without checking first? Benn was a public figure for a lot of years and said a lot of things!
Benn said this about 'The Establishment', which I would contest is a suitable proxy for the property-owning class.
"I don’t think people realise how the establishment became established. It simply stole the land and property off the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since."
And you need to check the Deed of Variation (2000-2001) on his Holland Park home.
This was the result
"By transferring part of the Holland Park home’s ownership, Benn’s estate was smaller when he died, lowering the IHT liability. The property was sold in 2011 for £4.1 million, and the earlier transfer meant a portion of its value was already outside his taxable estate. Additionally, his Stansgate Abbey Farm estate was placed in a trust, another common IHT mitigation strategy, though this is less directly tied to the will change."
So while TB ensured he avoided inheritance tax, he also said, "We will also take action to make the tax system fairer, including action to reduce the tax advantages enjoyed from inherited wealth.”
The quote appears in the Labour Party Manifesto 1983, titled The New Hope for Britain. Specifically, it is referenced in the section on economic policy and taxation, where Labour outlined plans to reform the tax system to address wealth inequality. The manifesto promised measures to reduce tax advantages tied to inherited wealth, aligning with Benn’s socialist advocacy for wealth redistribution.
So, while you might struggle to think this through, I would suggest this is evidence of his hypocrisy! The Millibands did something similar, had Milliband senior was even more vocal about property ownership.
Oh, and thank you for the riveting anecdote of where you purchased your electrical power supply from. Can't wait for the sequel, The Gas Supply Files: a personal journey on YouSwitch!
" "You also misunderstand the tax system." That's a bold claim for you to make! Care to enlighten me with specifics"
Read about MMT Modern Monetary Theory, taxes as a matter of accounting don't fund gov spending.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKoQAYPU_rE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih9u2xLmZoE
https://www.globalresearch.ca/fiscal-deficit-modern-monetary-theory-progressive-economic-policy/5718509
etc...
Oh Christ, someone else who likes to speak without thinking first. Show me where I say anything about taxes funding government spending?
Interestingly, you assumed I had not already read about MMT. Why?
MMT is something I read and discarded many years ago; it is woo woo.
And please don't tell me you have been watching that cankerous liberal progressive Richard Murphy!
So why do they tax us?
Being a simple man with basic qualifications from school, a military career and a not nonsense approach, Vince is grifting tw@
Thanks to David for yet another brilliant substack.
Great work David, extracting this sort of data and performing this analysis is no easy task. Where do you get the load factor data from? I would like to look at our local wind farm Scout Moor in a similar way.
Cubico are about to apply for Scout Moor 2 - 18x180m turbines alongside our historic Cotton Famine Road. We have quizzed them on their projected earnings but they would only say that they aren't anywhere near as high as we are speculating using the financial results from Scout Moor 1 which we have explored here:
https://saynotoscoutmoor2.org.uk/obscene-profits-generated-by-scout-moor/
Any pointers would be much appreciated.
This is your goto site for load factors
https://www.ref.org.uk/generators/index.php
It has a Scout Moor Wind Farm on there load factor at c27%
For ROC-funded wind farms you can download either the REGO or the ROC data from the Ofgem RER site. If you download the ROCs for that windfarm, you can work out MWh generated from the certificates issues and MWH/cert. The station TIC field gives the capacity. SO with a bit of Excel dexterity you can work it out.
https://rer.ofgem.gov.uk/ (doesn't work at weekends)
Umm thats a new one a govt website that only works during working hours doesn't bode well for the AI revolution they keep harping on about
You may find that the do updates etc at weekends. Having a 56 hour window provides considerable operational flexibility for maintenance with minimal downside to professional analysts
Occasionally maybe but not every weekend and weekday nights
Thanks both - I shall take a look
Thanks for this incredible breakdown, David, once again. We can actually see the taxpayer-funded trough at which Dale and his myriad of holdings are feeding and the reason way he looks like a fish flapping at the end of a line at the moment. We really need to make sure that this is addressed. However, with Liebour's wheels being greased by Dale and his more-than-cosy links to DESNZ, any hopes that this will end soon looks a little bleak. His constant rhetoric and blatant whining on X now all makes sense.
Dale foolishly puts himself in the limelight and he's really small beer compared to the largesse being milked by the big corporate entities
Every little helps! 😁