Just Enough To Boil The Kettle

By Paul Homewood

 

Today, here in the UK, the temperatures have just about crawled above zero, after a night of hard frost. And how much electricity have our obscenely subsidised windmills contributed to the grid over the last 24 hours?

 

0.6% !

 

 

 

http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm

 

This is about a tenth of their normal output, and about 3% of their rated capacity.

The recent Energy Bill 2012 commits the UK to sourcing 30% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. In 2011, the contribution from renewables was :-

 

	TWH	% Of Total
Hydro	5.69	1.6
Wind	15.75	4.4
Other Renewables (Mainly Biomass)	12.97	3.7
Total Renewable	34.41	9.7
TOTAL ELECTRICITY OUTPUT	353.73

 

Solar power contributed a measly 0.1% to total electricity generation, and can be utterly discounted from making any real contribution in the next few years, and there are no plans to significantly expand biomass, which in any event has environmental and food production problems of its own.

 

Which leaves us with wind. To get to the 30% target, we will need to generate about 5 times as much wind power as we do now. But its actually much worse than that, because demand for electricity is forecast by the government to double by 2050, as petrol for cars and gas for heating homes, etc, is replaced by “low carbon “ electricity.

But just taking the “5 times” example, on days like today, when demand is running about 20% above normal, something like 20% of the country’s electricity capacity will have gone missing.

And that’s just by 2020. Within a few more years, the cretins who rule us have committed to shutting down most of the country’s coal, gas and oil power stations.

 

We are already paying a huge price to satisfy our politicians’ vanity. But our children and grandchildren will have to pay an even bigger one.

Whoever is last to leave the country won’t have to bother switching the light off. It will have gone off already.