Oh I do enjoy how you do this, to put it in the vernacular (apologies to those who don’t understand the Irish relish for swearing) the whole carbon agenda is complete bollocks!
By the way, as to the low wind periods that the meteorologists and the planners managed to ignore, they must have been common knowledge in some circles for centuries.
Tasmania is an island to the south and it is practically 100% hydro and so is not susceptible to the vagaries of the wind supply, although a rain drought caused a problem when the connector to the mainland was down. They had to fly in diesel generators.
I find the 1500TWh figure somewhat amusing, it’s what a bunch of engineers must have been thinking a decade or more ago when we concluded that deep decarbonisation of the UK needed 200GW of nuclear. At 85% load factor, around the long term average of Sizewell B, that’s 1489TWh. The wonder of a spare half hour, tea & biscuits, a few centuries of experience, and a piece of A4.
The calculation was the easy bit, getting the cretins in government to accept this, forget forever subsidising ‘renewables’ and stop wasting precious fossil fuels by burning them is an impossible task. As the green blob has infiltrated every aspect of our society so we are royally stuffed. I won’t be around to see it, I doubt I’ll see 2030 let alone 2050, but despite that I truly despair for the future of our offspring.
The thing is that the Net Zero plans are meant to destroy the economy. That's why there's been such resistance to nuclear planning - all goes back to Herbert Marcuse in the early 60s and the influence he had on Green Marxism.
The Green fantasists will soon learn that Dunkelflautes are like spontaneously combusting 'zero emission' London buses; you wait ages for one to happen along, then three go up in flames all within days.
My stance on Net Zero is that there is zero need and zero point in trying to reduce CO2 emissions at all. Net Zero is a massive hoax. Whatever the Uniparty politicians spend on Net Zero, be it £28 billion a year (Labour a week ago) or a mere £10 billion a year (Conservative), it is money straight down the drain to no useful purpose to the ordinary people of this country.
The Uniparty seem to go along with the likes of BlackRock and Mark Carney in thinking that £billions or even trillions from private investment funds can be funnelled into Net Zero. This seems to me to be delusional as that money is already invested and can’t be spent twice.
The Conservatives had the opportunity to stop the wind power boondoggle in its tracks last year when the AR5 wind power auction flopped. Instead they have awarded wind power a whopping 66% price increase and the wind industry grifters are already salivating over the next round. That 66% increase will go straight onto our energy bills.
It will be the same with their pointless schemes for hydrogen storage, carbon capture and storage and whatever other inanities they come up with. Industry will only “invest” in such intrinsically uninvestable projects if they are guaranteed juicy subsidies which will go straight onto our energy bills.
The Uniparty politicians are never going to scrap Net Zero as they are mere poodles to their Malthusian globalist overlords who are pushing Net Zero for the dark ulterior motive of deliberate impoverishment and deindustrialisation. In the words of the Club of Rome, they believe that “the real enemy, then, is humanity itself”. Their masks slipped during their globally-coordinated Covid “plandemic” but unfortunately not many of the general public realised that they had been cruelly duped.
The only hope for the country is to stop voting for the treasonous Uniparty.
We are trapped now by which political party is the least green but even they are still going to pretty green. Yes there are the extreme political groups but they have no chance and lets be honest being anti green isn't what they are really about.
Over AR5 the green lot have largely got away with the fact that it exposes that renewables were going to be free they never were but that's what's been sold to people as an old TV series says The Truth is Out There. Reality is now setting in that this is going to cost us serious money and the air cover they were getting from Ukraine crisis is being blown (pun intended) away as gas prices drop back to closer to pre 2022 levels with all likelihood of further downward pressure. Then on top of this the anti pylon brigade are really motoring now thwarting NGs build out plans which are essential to stop the current constraining of wind energy regularly over 60GWh/day although i suspect some of the windmill owners are gaming the system on forecast generation. Until this is fixed NO more windmills should be allowed where there are known system constraints until they are removed its just costing us and we dont even get the benefit of the so called free energy as we have to substitute gas.
Then thats look at the mission critical battery storage market. Well that imploded big time two weeks ago when the two biggest BESS providers had to come clean and tell the stock market, despite the need for all this storage supposedly, there was no money to be made from it and promptly cancelled their dividends with the suggestion that one face an existential existence. No doubt this will lead to clarion calls from the hemp flak jacket brigade (had to use it!) that storage now needs subsidies as well.
Ultimately what will win out in the end over greening is when it impacts individuals either in the pocket or being forced to make lifestyle changes ie only one EasyJet flight/year etc or what we really need is the three day week back for those old enough to remember now that will change peoples minds overnight.
Bear in mind that the figures being quoted by Lab/Con are just the incremental spend over current levels, which are already well north of £20bn p.a. by the time you add in some of the more hidden items like select consumer subsidies, costs of grid expansion, etc. that aren't visible in the direct ROC/CFD/RHI/EcoHomes etc. numbers.
I must add that the situation in Tasmania owes nothing to the recent administration, the hydro system is almost 80 years old and the electricity supply was commonly called "the hydro" for example one might ask "What was your hydro bill this month?"
Lately the government has bought into the net zero project and they describe Tasmania as "the battery of the nation" because they are looking to have more wind facilities (five at present) and a big pumped hydro scheme, plus a hydrogen hub.
Still, however much money they waste, the hydro will continue to generate a reliable supply, as long as the connector is intact to enable Tasmania to maintain the water level in the dams by importing power whenevery there is spare power on the mainland.
This is a live display showing the contribution of the different sources, state by state.
At present, just after sunset, leaving out Western Australia, the wind is contributing 12% of demand in the grid that servers the other states in the South-East. The capacity factor is 28%, near enough to average (30%) and they need twelve times as much installed capacity at that capacity factor. to run on wind alone.
But of course during a serious wind drought when the CF is below 10% for a day or even three days, no amount of overbuilding will avert disaster unless conventional power is available to fill in.
A bit more about the bar chart, there are two bars for each state, the top bar is the generation, colour coded, with blue for hydro and green for wind. The bottom bar is the demand, so you can see, right now, both Tasmania and South Australia are importing power from Victoria. You can see the flows on this display.
“If you want to have cheap energy, you need to be gas fired. That’s the cheapest way, the most secure way if you calculate the whole thing, from the beginning to the end.”
How can the Siemens guy say that after the gas price turmoil over the last couple of years?
That may be true but gas prices set the prices paid to generators so we are hostages to fortune to future gas prices. If we built lots of nukes wouldnt gas prices still set the market price?
I think it is less true that gas is setting prices. At times of renewables surplus it is quite clear that market prices go way below gas cost, and are effectively determined by the renewables subsidy regime. Gas run does so because it gets paid to do so to provide inertia. There are clear diurnal price swings much of the time which are probably partly to do with gas merit order, and the additional cost of running gas intermittently, but they also appear to be linked to interconnector trade and hence Continental prices. This should not be a huge surprise given how big they have loomed into the supply picture.
I have been studying 2023 generation, interconnectors, demand and price using hourly data. It'll be quite a bit of work to write it all up, but the data analysis is basically done.
Thanks David, another master piece of quality, investigative journalism
There are growing signs net zero is unravelling and being pushed back - due, in great part, to the publics growing dissatisfaction with high taxes, particularly for the greenfoolery crap
The masses need to realise, they are really the ones in power, especially as the GE looms and politicians are falling over themselves to appear to be listening, to be on the side of consumers - we need to stop voting for the same old policies Uniparty and realise, with different choices, there is a better way ahead
Another straw in the wind was the Envionmental Audit Select Committee Chairman Phillip Dunne MP suggesting that maybe carbon budgets ought to be examined by Parliament BEFORE being passed, rather than being passed first and then asking questions later. (Probably the wrong ones, but he wasn't bold enough to say that). Imagine priming some MPs to debunk the CCC scenarios in Committee. The result would be consternation.
Oh I do enjoy how you do this, to put it in the vernacular (apologies to those who don’t understand the Irish relish for swearing) the whole carbon agenda is complete bollocks!
See if you can entice Daniel Westerman to go back to England where he set your course to net zero before he came to Australia to help us.
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/Meet_Daniel_Westerman.pdf
By the way, as to the low wind periods that the meteorologists and the planners managed to ignore, they must have been common knowledge in some circles for centuries.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/list-of-briefing-notes
Thanks for this great resource. Why do you advocate moving to Tasmania?
Tasmania is an island to the south and it is practically 100% hydro and so is not susceptible to the vagaries of the wind supply, although a rain drought caused a problem when the connector to the mainland was down. They had to fly in diesel generators.
Sorry, this is the story of the Dunkelfluates that nobody in official circles noticed.
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
I find the 1500TWh figure somewhat amusing, it’s what a bunch of engineers must have been thinking a decade or more ago when we concluded that deep decarbonisation of the UK needed 200GW of nuclear. At 85% load factor, around the long term average of Sizewell B, that’s 1489TWh. The wonder of a spare half hour, tea & biscuits, a few centuries of experience, and a piece of A4.
The calculation was the easy bit, getting the cretins in government to accept this, forget forever subsidising ‘renewables’ and stop wasting precious fossil fuels by burning them is an impossible task. As the green blob has infiltrated every aspect of our society so we are royally stuffed. I won’t be around to see it, I doubt I’ll see 2030 let alone 2050, but despite that I truly despair for the future of our offspring.
The thing is that the Net Zero plans are meant to destroy the economy. That's why there's been such resistance to nuclear planning - all goes back to Herbert Marcuse in the early 60s and the influence he had on Green Marxism.
I watch the Rolls Royce SMR video and think what’s not to like. British invention, engineering, jobs and exports.
https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/
One must assume the globalists have found another fake issue to rent seek from, as looting taxpayers was the only cause of the green insanity.
The Green fantasists will soon learn that Dunkelflautes are like spontaneously combusting 'zero emission' London buses; you wait ages for one to happen along, then three go up in flames all within days.
My stance on Net Zero is that there is zero need and zero point in trying to reduce CO2 emissions at all. Net Zero is a massive hoax. Whatever the Uniparty politicians spend on Net Zero, be it £28 billion a year (Labour a week ago) or a mere £10 billion a year (Conservative), it is money straight down the drain to no useful purpose to the ordinary people of this country.
The Uniparty seem to go along with the likes of BlackRock and Mark Carney in thinking that £billions or even trillions from private investment funds can be funnelled into Net Zero. This seems to me to be delusional as that money is already invested and can’t be spent twice.
The Conservatives had the opportunity to stop the wind power boondoggle in its tracks last year when the AR5 wind power auction flopped. Instead they have awarded wind power a whopping 66% price increase and the wind industry grifters are already salivating over the next round. That 66% increase will go straight onto our energy bills.
It will be the same with their pointless schemes for hydrogen storage, carbon capture and storage and whatever other inanities they come up with. Industry will only “invest” in such intrinsically uninvestable projects if they are guaranteed juicy subsidies which will go straight onto our energy bills.
The Uniparty politicians are never going to scrap Net Zero as they are mere poodles to their Malthusian globalist overlords who are pushing Net Zero for the dark ulterior motive of deliberate impoverishment and deindustrialisation. In the words of the Club of Rome, they believe that “the real enemy, then, is humanity itself”. Their masks slipped during their globally-coordinated Covid “plandemic” but unfortunately not many of the general public realised that they had been cruelly duped.
The only hope for the country is to stop voting for the treasonous Uniparty.
We are trapped now by which political party is the least green but even they are still going to pretty green. Yes there are the extreme political groups but they have no chance and lets be honest being anti green isn't what they are really about.
Over AR5 the green lot have largely got away with the fact that it exposes that renewables were going to be free they never were but that's what's been sold to people as an old TV series says The Truth is Out There. Reality is now setting in that this is going to cost us serious money and the air cover they were getting from Ukraine crisis is being blown (pun intended) away as gas prices drop back to closer to pre 2022 levels with all likelihood of further downward pressure. Then on top of this the anti pylon brigade are really motoring now thwarting NGs build out plans which are essential to stop the current constraining of wind energy regularly over 60GWh/day although i suspect some of the windmill owners are gaming the system on forecast generation. Until this is fixed NO more windmills should be allowed where there are known system constraints until they are removed its just costing us and we dont even get the benefit of the so called free energy as we have to substitute gas.
Then thats look at the mission critical battery storage market. Well that imploded big time two weeks ago when the two biggest BESS providers had to come clean and tell the stock market, despite the need for all this storage supposedly, there was no money to be made from it and promptly cancelled their dividends with the suggestion that one face an existential existence. No doubt this will lead to clarion calls from the hemp flak jacket brigade (had to use it!) that storage now needs subsidies as well.
Ultimately what will win out in the end over greening is when it impacts individuals either in the pocket or being forced to make lifestyle changes ie only one EasyJet flight/year etc or what we really need is the three day week back for those old enough to remember now that will change peoples minds overnight.
Bear in mind that the figures being quoted by Lab/Con are just the incremental spend over current levels, which are already well north of £20bn p.a. by the time you add in some of the more hidden items like select consumer subsidies, costs of grid expansion, etc. that aren't visible in the direct ROC/CFD/RHI/EcoHomes etc. numbers.
I must add that the situation in Tasmania owes nothing to the recent administration, the hydro system is almost 80 years old and the electricity supply was commonly called "the hydro" for example one might ask "What was your hydro bill this month?"
Lately the government has bought into the net zero project and they describe Tasmania as "the battery of the nation" because they are looking to have more wind facilities (five at present) and a big pumped hydro scheme, plus a hydrogen hub.
Still, however much money they waste, the hydro will continue to generate a reliable supply, as long as the connector is intact to enable Tasmania to maintain the water level in the dams by importing power whenevery there is spare power on the mainland.
This is a live display showing the contribution of the different sources, state by state.
https://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/reneweconomy/
At present, just after sunset, leaving out Western Australia, the wind is contributing 12% of demand in the grid that servers the other states in the South-East. The capacity factor is 28%, near enough to average (30%) and they need twelve times as much installed capacity at that capacity factor. to run on wind alone.
But of course during a serious wind drought when the CF is below 10% for a day or even three days, no amount of overbuilding will avert disaster unless conventional power is available to fill in.
A bit more about the bar chart, there are two bars for each state, the top bar is the generation, colour coded, with blue for hydro and green for wind. The bottom bar is the demand, so you can see, right now, both Tasmania and South Australia are importing power from Victoria. You can see the flows on this display.
https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem
One more display is illuminating, this is the rolling 24-hur picture at Aneroid Energy.
https://anero.id/energy
If you are particularly interested in the wind, you can select wind energy at the bottom of the page and get this https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy
You can look at individual states by ticking and unticking the boxes and the coloured lines are individual wind facilities.
This is all spelled out in this briefing note, with links to the original wind watchers Paul Miskelly and Anton Lang. https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/renewables/20-2-four-icebergs-in-the-path-of-renewables-titanic
“If you want to have cheap energy, you need to be gas fired. That’s the cheapest way, the most secure way if you calculate the whole thing, from the beginning to the end.”
How can the Siemens guy say that after the gas price turmoil over the last couple of years?
Still cheaper. In addition, drill baby drill, will bring it down further.
The recent record CfD subsidies for wind, and the rising cost of ROCs & FiT payments demonstrate that wind and solar are much more expensive than gas.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidturver/p/record-cfd-subsidies-for-wind-power?r=nhgn1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
That may be true but gas prices set the prices paid to generators so we are hostages to fortune to future gas prices. If we built lots of nukes wouldnt gas prices still set the market price?
I think it is less true that gas is setting prices. At times of renewables surplus it is quite clear that market prices go way below gas cost, and are effectively determined by the renewables subsidy regime. Gas run does so because it gets paid to do so to provide inertia. There are clear diurnal price swings much of the time which are probably partly to do with gas merit order, and the additional cost of running gas intermittently, but they also appear to be linked to interconnector trade and hence Continental prices. This should not be a huge surprise given how big they have loomed into the supply picture.
I have been studying 2023 generation, interconnectors, demand and price using hourly data. It'll be quite a bit of work to write it all up, but the data analysis is basically done.
I’d love to see that analysis!
Great article David. You highlight the lack of sophistication and impartiality in the Net Zero / energy modelling space.
Thanks David, another master piece of quality, investigative journalism
There are growing signs net zero is unravelling and being pushed back - due, in great part, to the publics growing dissatisfaction with high taxes, particularly for the greenfoolery crap
The masses need to realise, they are really the ones in power, especially as the GE looms and politicians are falling over themselves to appear to be listening, to be on the side of consumers - we need to stop voting for the same old policies Uniparty and realise, with different choices, there is a better way ahead
Another straw in the wind was the Envionmental Audit Select Committee Chairman Phillip Dunne MP suggesting that maybe carbon budgets ought to be examined by Parliament BEFORE being passed, rather than being passed first and then asking questions later. (Probably the wrong ones, but he wasn't bold enough to say that). Imagine priming some MPs to debunk the CCC scenarios in Committee. The result would be consternation.