Vegan menu leaves Cambridge council with leftovers
By Paul Homewood
With Edinburgh having just committed to axing meat from all its schools, the burghers of Cambridge seem distinctly unimpressed with their City Council’s vegan agenda!
Last year, when Cambridge city council voted to phase out serving meat and dairy at events and provide vegan alternatives, it was praised for leading the way on climate action.
But the plan has hit a big problem at the first hurdle: people do not want the food.
At the first civic event since the vote, a council report has revealed the vegan menu went down so badly that almost all of the food remained uneaten and had to be thrown away causing “significant food waste”.
It noted that only one in ten attendees tried the vegan options and some guests were left hungry because there was “an insufficient amount of food available that people wanted to eat”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/vegan-menu-leaves-cambridge-council-with-leftovers-sdv87s9bv
The Burghers apparently would prefer to have Burgers!
Meet The Organisation Behind The Media’s Climate Hysteria
By Paul Homewood
In his Mail article this week, Ross Clark wrote about an outfit called Covering Climate Now (CCN):
This tougher tone in the media is partly down to an organisation called Covering Climate Now, an initiative by the Guardian and other outlets with Left-liberal leanings, to which some very high-profile news organisations, such as Bloomberg, Reuters, the Daily Mirror and Newsweek, have signed up.
It offers support to journalists to ‘forge a path towards an all-newsroom approach to climate reporting’. Its guidance includes: ‘Remember, an extreme weather story that doesn’t mention climate change is incomplete and potentially even inaccurate.’
For example, when reporting a hurricane, they were urged to add that ‘this comes at a time when human-caused climate change is consistently making storms more intense’.
So who are Covering Climate Now, who funds them and how do they operate?
This is how they describe themselves:
Gas-Fired Power Is Now Cheaper Than Offshore Wind Again
By Paul Homewood
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https://timera-energy.com/european-gas-prices-drop-to-pre-war-lows/
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There are increasingly strong signs that European gas prices are back to pre-war lows and may stop that way. [TTF is the European benchmark]. As Timera explain, part of the reason is demand destruction in Europe and Asia, with gas replaced by coal and slowing economic growth in China. Gradually as well LNG capacity is starting to expand.
Catalyst Digital Energy, the UK energy consultants, agree, with day ahead UK prices down to 178p/therm at the end of December.
Naturally this has an effect on consumer prices for gas, but there is also an effect on power prices too, and these are back down to £160/MWh on the wholesale market.
You will recall the many references a few months ago to the claim that gas power is now nine times as expensive as wind power. As was pointed out at the time, this was based on a very short spike in gas prices in August. For most of last year gas was much cheaper than that.
And now that market prices for gas are back to 2021 levels, gas-fired power is actually very competitive with wind power again. Let’s crunch a few numbers.
Ross Clark Challenges Climate Hysteria
By Paul Homewood
Ross Clark’s new book challenges climate hysteria:
Fear is very easy to spread. Make a television documentary in which footage of extreme weather events is overlain with vague statements about climate change, and you sow the idea in viewers’ minds that we are headed for a hellish future.
There can never have been a time when some part of the world was not in a heatwave, another part was not flooded, another suffering unusually high temperatures and another unusually low temperatures.
Yet if you report on every extreme event and throw in the term ‘climate change’, you will very rapidly plant the idea that the world is in some freakish transformation.
Even when it demonstrably isn’t. A Pentagon report that came to light in 2004 claimed that by 2007 large parts of the Netherlands would be rendered uninhabitable by flooding and that by 2020 Britain would have a ‘Siberian climate’ as the system of atmospheric circulation broke down.
Ross Clark: The National Grid is falling apart thanks to Net Zero
By Paul Homewood
We’re left with demand management to keep the lights on – rewarding the rich at the expense of the poor, and all using taxpayer funds
So near, and yet so far. A couple of weeks ago, when the air was mild and the wind was blowing strongly, it became fashionable to thumb your nose at Vladimir Putin. We made it through the winter of 2022/23 without the blackouts he tried to inflict on us. Russia can keep its filthy gas and oil – we can do without it thanks to our cheap and plentiful renewables.
Not so fast. Temperatures have plummeted again, Britain is becalmed by an anticyclone, and the National Grid is warning that supply is going to be tight this evening. Coal plants are being dusted down several months after they were supposed to have closed, and the National Grid is activating what it calls its Demand Flexibility Service. This means customers signed up to the scheme can earn up to £6 per kilowatt-hour saved if they agree to turn off their appliances between 5 and 6pm.
It is not hard to spot a slight issue with this offer: the more electricity you use on a normal Monday, the easier it will be for you to cash in today. As with so many green subsidies, it perversely rewards the well-off at the expense of the poor. If you own an 18 bedroom mansion you can easily claim your fee by switching off the lights in the east wing and delaying recharging your Tesla until 7pm. If you normally use only one electric light, there will be no savings for you. And needless to say, the free electricity for some households will ultimately be subsidised through higher bills for everyone else.
But there is a far bigger problem with trying to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar power through demand management. The gaps in supply are far too big to be filled in this way. Britain already has enough installed wind and solar capacity – 38 gigawatts of it – to theoretically meet 100 per cent of average electricity demand. On a good day, such as we had a fortnight ago, solar and wind generate more than 50 per cent of our energy needs. But this morning at 10 am it was down to 19 per cent, and at times in December it fell to less than two per cent. If you are going to try to build a grid based on wind and solar, and try to manage demand by paying people to switch their appliances off, you are going to have to chuck such enormous quantities of money at people that they are prepared to spend days on end shivering in the dark.
The trouble is that that is more or less what the Government is trying to do. For years it has incentivised the green energy industry to build more and more wind and solar farms. Energy storage, on the other hand, has followed way, way behind. A few token – and very expensive – battery installations have been built, but, together with pumped storage systems built between the 1960s and 1980s, they can only store enough energy to keep Britain powered-up for less than an hour. Meanwhile, the steady baseload provided by nuclear is shrinking as old reactors shut down and new ones fail to open; Hinckley C is still years away.
At the moment we fill the gaps with gas-generated power, but once that has been removed from the grid, as the Government intends to do by 2035, all we will have to save us from unplanned blackouts is demand management – which is really just blackouts through bribery.
Global Oil & Gas Discoveries Up, As Drilling Continues Apace
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
While Keir Starmer wants to shut down North Sea oil, the rest of the world fortunately is not so stupid:
In a tumultuous year of change in the world, high impact drilling in 2022 remained at a similar level to 2021, with 81 high impact wells completing (Figure 1). Performance improved with discovered resource increasing from 7.4bnboe in 2021 to a preliminary estimate of 9.2bnboe in 2022, and the commercial success rate, i.e., the proportion of wells which may result in a potentially commercial development, increasing from 29% in 2021 to 36%, Westwood Energy authors wrote in their report this week.
Norwegian Shipping Company Bans Electrified Vehicles Over Fire Fears
By Paul Homewood
One more problem for the ill thought out EV agenda!
Norway’s Havila Krystruten is one of two shipping companies that sails between the coastal cities of Bergen and Kierkenes and says that it will no longer carry electric or electrified vehicles on its ships following the results of an external investigation.
The company mostly carries passengers and goods on the route, but now says that it will only carry private vehicles with internal combustion engines. Havila Krystruten cited fire safety as the main reason for its decision.
While it is not clear what led the company to run the external investigation, fears of fires on ships were stoked by a recent incident in the Atlantic. The Felicity Ace caught fire at sea last year and, although the cause of the fire has not been determined, there were vehicles with batteries aboard the ship, leading to speculation that they may have been responsible for the blaze.
While research shows that, per capita, internal combustion vehicles catch fire more frequently than electric vehicles, Havila Krystruten pointed to its ships’ firefighting capabilities as the reason for its decision, rather than the frequency of fires.
“This is a pure safety assessment, and the conclusion of the risk analysis shows that a possible fire in fossil vehicles will be able to be handled by the systems and the crew we have on board,” said Bent Martini, the company’s managing director, as translated by Google. “A possible fire in electric, hybrid or hydrogen cars will require external rescue efforts and could put people on board and the ships at risk.”
Affordable electric cars ‘not viable’–Kia Boss
By Paul Homewood
The wheels are coming off the EV rollout.
Firstly, as Kia’s CEO inconveniently points out, most drivers cannot afford to buy a new EV. As a result, Kia has no immediate plans to build EVs for the mass market, instead concentrating on up-market cars:
A mass market in affordable electric cars will not happen soon because of the difficulty of producing them on a commercially viable basis, one of the largest makers of zero-emission vehicles for British drivers has warned.
Paul Philpott, UK chief executive of Kia, the fast-growing South Korean car company, said it had no immediate plans for a mass-market electric product.
Some fear there is a prospect of a society of haves and have-nots in the electric car revolution because of the sheer cost of buying or financing a zero-emission vehicle.
Philpott’s prediction also threatens to undermine the government’s ban on selling petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030.
With price inflation roaring ahead in the past couple of years, there are only a handful of electric cars available below £30,000, compared with the less than £20,000 that motorists would expect to pay for mass market or entry-level petrol cars. Even the smallest electric car, the zero-emission version of the Fiat 500, starts at about £30,000.
This month the Advanced Propulsion Centre, the government’s automotive electrification agency, significantly cut electric car forecasts for 2025 because “buyers are expected to stick with cheaper options for longer”.
While European and Asian manufacturers have been stepping up production of electric vehicles, they have been concentrating on more expensive models to make healthy profit margins on the cost of installing electrified systems. The battery pack is the costliest component of an electric car. The smaller the car, the larger the proportion the battery in its production cost.
The lack of interest in the EV market amongst UK carmakers is one of the major factors behind the failure of Britishvolt, who failed to get any real long term commitment for battery orders. And that lack of interest is understandable, given the billions it would cost those carmakers to design and build new electric models.
All of this was totally predictable, and the end result of the government’s ban on new petrol/diesel cars from 2030 will be the decimation of the UK car industry and a society of haves and have nots.
The Express also reports on the growing dissatisfaction in the car industry:
Online car marketplace carwow is warning that growing dissent from car manufacturers could derail politicians’ big plans for electric cars. From 2030, only EVs, and hybrids that can cover a "significant distance" in zero-emission battery mode, can be sold from new, with anything that is not a fully electric vehicle banned from 2035.
Experts at carwow consider that this planned abandonment of hybrid technology, which is popular, practicable and brings a meaningful reduction in exhaust emissions, should be reconsidered as a matter of urgency.
In December last year, the president of Toyota warned that in the car industry, the "silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option," and that we need to be "realistic" about this goal.
Earlier in the year the boss of BMW was implicitly critical of the EU’s plans for banning new petrol and diesel car sales in 2035, explaining that "an abundance of renewable energy, a seamless private and public charging infrastructure network and access to raw materials" were all "essential" for such a project to work.
Hugo Griffiths, carwow’s consumer editor, said: “Utterances such as these do not happen by accident, not least from auto-industry bosses who are traditionally conservative: such statements speak of real concerns for the feasibility of politicians’ plans for electric cars.
Mr Griffiths added: “Ministers can come up with all manner of high-minded policies from the back of an electric limousine, yet there remains a huge gulf between blue-sky political thinking, and how much cobalt and lithium can actually be dug out of the ground for EV battery packs.
Meanwhile the Telegraph reminds us once again that it is now it is now more expensive to run EVs than a petrol car:
Andrew Bolt On Davos
By Paul Homewood
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As Davos winds up, Andrew Bolt sums up:
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By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Now they’re getting desperate!
Households will be paid to cut their electricity use for the first time on Monday between 5pm and 6pm, under plans being drawn up by the National Grid.
With temperatures expected to plummet to -2°C today, ramping up pressure on Britain’s supplies, the power network operator is planning to call on consumers to use less electricity to help it manage the system.
Around a million people have signed up to the scheme, which will see them paid as much as £10 a day to cut the amount of electricity they use at certain times as part of efforts to tackle the energy crisis.
This could mean, for example, not running the washing machine or dishwasher during that hour, or waiting to charge an electric car until night-time.
The scheme has previously been trialled, but proposals to use it at a time of high demand have never reached this stage of planning before. Energy sources on Sunday night said agreements linked to the plans had been made with suppliers that could not be reneged on.
In a further sign of the strain on Britain’s energy supply, the National Grid also asked extra coal-fired power plants to be ready to supply back-up electricity on Monday evening if needed.
National Grid’s Electricity System Operator (ESO) said it was activating the programme, known as the Demand Flexibility Service (DFS) between 5pm and 6pm on Monday.
A spokesman said: “Our forecasts show electricity supply margins are expected to be tighter than normal on Monday evening.
“This does not mean electricity supplies are at risk and people should not be worried. These are precautionary measures to maintain the buffer of spare capacity we need.”
A government source said: "The morning is absolutely fine in terms of demand but we are expecting it to get higher in the evening.
“Like we have done before, we are keeping our coals warm, which is the phrase for having coal-fired stations on standby. They are ready to be backed into action along with the demand flexibility scheme.
“There will come a point where it will be a go or no go decision but the plan at the moment is to use it for the evening.
"This is not about blackouts. The point is that we can always get or produce more electricity. This is about giving people more flexibility and giving the grid more flexibility."
Despite their “reassurance” that it is all about “flexibility”, we simply should not be in the position where we have to rely on people using less electricity.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 