Norway Proves Our Electrification Strategy Is Doomed To Disaster
By Paul Homewood
There has been no doubt at all that the placemen at the National Grid, OFGEM and elsewhere have been covering up for the looming energy catastrophe for a long time now.
They have assured us that we can rely on intermittent renewable energy, batteries and stupid smart meters to provide all of the energy we need to run our economy.
Real data from the green pioneers in Norway suggests otherwise.
From Bloomberg:
Norway’s push to electrify everything from transport to heating and industry has pushed one of the hungriest power consumers in the world to even higher records.
On Thursday morning between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., five million Norwegian consumers used the same amount of power as twice as many inhabitants in neighbouring Sweden. Freezing winter weather has contributed to the increase in demand, but it also reflects Norway’s efforts to use more electricity in every corner of life, according to the grid manager Statnett.
“A larger and larger share of the energy consumption is being used as electricity,” Irene Meldal, head of communications at Statnett, said. “More than half of the energy Norwegians use is already in the form of power.”
The country’s love of electric cars won worldwide fame through a Super Bowl ad starring Will Ferrel, but electricity is also the dominant source for heating in Norway. Power is used to warm as much as 85% of all indoor spaces which compares to Sweden where district-heating is the major source.
This has contributed to Norway having the second-highest power consumption per capita in the world, according to the World Bank, only beaten by Iceland. The country expects to keep consuming more with the thirst for power set to grow 30% by 2040.
Norway has a population of 5 million, so you can extrapolate UK peak demand to roughly 300 GW, which compares to a current level of about 50 GW. This clearly is not remotely possible for the grid to supply in the UK.
What greenstruck hippies don;t seem to realise is that Norway gets nearly all of its power from hydro, thanks to all the mountains and lakes they have:
http://energodock.com/norway/electricity-shares
Norway can manage perfectly fine with such an abundant supply of natural power. Unfortunately we don’t have many mountains here, and the idea that we could supply a reliable 300 GW from wind and solar power would be laughable if it was not so serious.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
As far as I can see, smart meters were primarily introduced to perform two functions: to be able to cut off individual supplies, should the need necessitate, or to limit supplies in ‘brownout’ situations, should the need necessitate. Our masters knew perfectly well that, under future green policies as dictated by the Climate Change Act, energy supplies would be limited. The ostensible, and publicly advertised, reason for their deployment i.e. to allow householders to monitor and manage their electricity use, was always a smokescreen. In the years to come, as global warming doesn’t, the poor suckers who have fallen for the hype and installed smart meters might be inclined to invest in a sledgehammer and obliterate the damn things!
Every user, domestic or industrial, can be cutoff when the need arises. I cant see how how a smart meter is going to cut off every second house in a street or even ‘those using too much’ during a time of shortage.The business models work on charging more for high usage rather than cutting supply
A recent occurrence for a friend showed they could be cut off remotely for not paying and reconnected when the money is forthcoming. This is far more useful for local energy companies as sending out staff to do this at the physical connection level is expensive and troublesome.
Duker, your comment “I cant see how how a smart meter is going to cut off every second house in a street or even ‘those using too much’ during a time of shortage.” only indicates your own lack of detailed knowledge of the subject.. It most certainly is the proposal.
Paul, on this blog, has already previously referenced the electricity district network operators application to have the facility to remotely disconnect heavy users such as EV charges and heat pumps. Only last week Octopus Energy got the likes of the Guardian to puff up their “type of use” tariffs. In order to charge by “type” of use, those high use appliances have to be separately wired and metered, The modified smart meter enables the DNO to remotely disconnect these high use appliances.
There is also the ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘smart’ appliances that they are pushing to go with ‘smart’ meters. It just shows how the meaning of words can change so that smart now means the opposite. I see nothing ‘smart’ about an appliance that can be remotely disabled so you can’t use it when you want.
“…. smart meters were primarily introduced to perform two functions: to be able to cut off individual supplies …”
AFAIK none of our current Dumb and Dumber ‘smart’ meters are capable of interrupting a supply.
Certainly not without a contractual agreement from a consumer.
Heck most of them are still incapable of communicating meter readings to a consumer’s present supplier.
AFIK is the big clue in your comment. The detailed specifications are available online and include the requirement for remote disconnection. I found this out mercifully after my smart meter went dumb, so I’m OK.
Hi Joe, i think you will find that all Smart Meters have a remote disconnection feature. Suppliers claim they will not do that but….
.https://www.resolver.co.uk/rights-guide/smart-meters
Why has the wretched CCCommittee disbanded and the associated Acts (2008,9) been repealed?
It is very much in the national interst that these changes happen.
Our politicos, elected only to get the best results for us voters and the UK have overlooked that basic responsibility, distracted and corrupted by this “Green Cr@p, as D.Cameron put it.
There is a fundamental flaw in your logic in believing that our elected politicians are there to get the best results for us. That hasn’t been the case for decades and in many cases they don’t even represent you such is our flawed ‘democracy’. If you are unlucky enough to have a minister as MP they are only going to do what the government wants and won’t spend any time representing you. And as for having the Speaker as your MP – I once met somebody who had suffered having the poison dwarf as their MP for a decade. The people of Uxbridge & S Ruislip are not represented either.
Under current law the CCC could only be disbanded if that was its own recommendation.
https://www.thegwpf.com/and-so-it-begins-uk-government-mulls-emergency-measures-that-would-enable-networks-to-switch-off-your-electricity-without-warning-or-compensation/
It’s coming
I reckon about 99% of the population are sleep walking into this situation and have no idea these things are going on nor the ramifications, Even on this blog a poster “Duker” is stating that selective disconnection is not possible and probably will not even register my correction to him.
Only when people awake to a freezing home (heat pump remotely disconnected) and a car with a flat battery (charger disconnected) will they suddenly realise way too late.
Wind turbines do not produce any of the legally required and essential 50Hz energy.
They are a scam and cannot boil a jug.
They do produce useless and dirty harmonics which are fraudulently added to consumers power bills.
The old analogue meter did not register dirty energy.
Wind turbines produce dangerously high earth voltages.
WT’s are Asynchronous, another major problem.
The electricity grids system are legally required to be Synchronous.
The European grid system is on the verge of total collapse.
PV solar cannot power the grid. Insufficient capacity, grunt, oomph.
Prince Charles should not be paid for producing useless dirty energy.
Nor should anyone.
They are even paid to switch them off.
“Norway has a population of 5 million, so you can extrapolate UK peak demand to roughly 300 GW,”
I think the UK extrapolation would be far higher because UK is a more industrialised country than Norway.
The numbers are higher again as Norway, a long thing country, has hydro as its base renewable, which has large turbines humming along at 50 Hz and distributed around their grid. UK would have to have reserve power to maintain the frequency and voltage and other grid parameters. The computers will cut the generators very quickly if the grid is even looking to go unstable. The inter-connectors will follow, I can see Ireland because of its smaller size the first country in Europe to find out the downside of over-reliance on unstable renewable forms of electricity , just like South Australia did.
Duker, “I think the UK extrapolation would be far higher because UK is a more industrialised country than Norway.” Might it not be wise to investigate a bit more before sharing what you “think” with us all.
Did you for example stop to “think” how much electricity an Aluminium smelter uses to make what is often termed as “congealed electricity”? How many smelters are there in the UK compared to Norway?
There is only one UK aluminium smelter located in Scotland. The only reason it exists is because it is off grid and has its own hydro-electric plant and diesel back up. That way it is safe from grid failure and is economically viable in face of the UK’s expensive electricity.
it’s why they kept hold of their north sea assets – they own them and all the income goes into a massive state pension fund – norway is run by intelligent people…
Sent from Outlook
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In Norway things are rather different. Power prices have been enormously depressed by reduced demand and surplus wind, mainly imported from its neighbours to the South. Norway has the advantage that it can simply turn off some of its hydro generation when there are cheap (often negative priced) wind surpluses available to use instead. The surplus has been so big that the hydro reservoirs were threatening to overflow.
https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/nordic-producers-await-demand-surges/1178820
The average domestic bill was about 6 p/kWh in Q3 2020 (latest data), with most of it accounted for by grid charges and taxes.
There was a recent surge in Norwegian (and Swedish and Finnish) power prices which I have not been able to find explanations for, but I presume it was caused by unexpected outages somewhere in Nordpool coupled to cold weather demand and lack of wind import availability.
Hi IDAU, was this price spike around the 8th January by any chance?
https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2021/01/08/system-split-registered-in-the-synchronous-area-of-continental-europe-incident-now-resolved/
I bet the prices were more than just a tad increased by that event – the last time this system split happened was almost 15 years ago
No, it was more recent than that – 14th I think, and it had Scandinavian prices as the highest in Europe, so the problem had to be local. I tried searches in Norwegian and Swedish but still found no explanation. Perhaps the Swedes had an outage on a nuclear plant?
The units on the graph seem wrong. As far as I can tell, on the original graph, they are MWh over the last hour. That is GW. Maybe they did it that way to give smoothing.
‘Norway has a population of 5 million, so you can extrapolate UK peak demand to roughly 300 GW, which compares to a current level of about 50 GW. This clearly is not remotely possible for the grid to supply in the UK.’
When your population is down to 5 million, it will work out.
That’s the plan.
Engineering 101. Despite being called out for the obvious they continued down the “no fossil fuel” path without attention to the future. And they were/are in a better position to transfer to all electric than the VAST majority of users.
I wnder what effect Germany has on the Norwegian grid?
Theoretically they export surpluses (via Norway) when their wind turbines produce, and draw on the Norwegian hydro supply when their own turbines are useless. Fine, if Norway has considerable excess hydro capacity, but what with increased local demand, increased German fluctuations and other countries (UK) trying to get access as well, can the Norwegian system keep going?
There is no doubt “that the placemen at the National Grid, OFGEM and elsewhere have been covering up for the looming energy catastrophe for a long time now”. It is a scandal and these people should be brought to justice for the lying and misleading information they have put out. But they won’t and the rest of us will have to suffer the consequences. Unfortunately we don’t have any politicians in positions of authority who understand the dire situation we are in and can do anything about it. We can just shout from the sidelines and eventually say “We told you so”.
Hi Tim From one of the sources I think you sent to me. Clearly the UK is heading for a big problem.
Graham
>
Off topic but needs following up.
You may have seen the Amazon add about their electric fleet.
Just seen a new ad which alleges that forest fires are directly due to climate change. A “us employee” claims her parents house burnt down in a forest fire, that this was due to climate change , and that Amazon are fitting lots of solar panels etc etc .
I am sure this claim can be proved to be untrue. . Is this something that should be reported to ASA ???
I think the ‘smart’ meter advert must be close but I know there have been complaints on that before.
Just in – National Grid plans to spend a lot to save us a little…
National Grid awards £328m contracts to manage stability of electricity grid
This new approach is expected to save consumers up to £128m over the six-year period
Spending £328m on something that didn’t even used to be a problem.
Government: create a problem; spend big money fixing at it; problem continues.
The comment in that report “Julian Leslie, ESO Head of Networks said: “This approach is the first of its kind anywhere in the world and is a huge step forward in our ambition to be able to operate the GB electricity system carbon free by 2025.” is full on BS.
All they are doing is using conventional generators as synchronous condensers to provide both inertia and manage both the generation and absorption of reactive power.
Triton power will be delighted – they will have the likes of Indian Queens running flat out to cover all its annual O & M costs and yet they will still get paid a fortune when they are called in to fire up the turbine to generate themselves when the renewables fail to deliver.
http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=981
http://www.tritonpower.co.uk/indian-queens
Lucky Norway to have so much hydro they can export electricity to Sweden etc. and it means consumers only pay $0.097 per kWh and businesses pay about half that. We, on the other hand pay $0.257, the same as Italy. The poor Germans have to fork out $0,385
Thats according to this site at any rate.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Norway/electricity_prices/
No wonder they are so enthusiastic about using electricity.
The Greenosphere really needs to get a grip with reality and stop hyping such poppycock about Norway and its Hydro resource. Norway actually has 5 separate grids (North, Mid, West, South East and South West) and their combined flat out maximum hydro capacity
is only 32GW……so much for being the “battery” of Europe. After all has anyone actually asked Norwegians if they fancy every fjord and valley blocked off with a massive concrete wall? The answer might be rather similar to their actions following North Sea Oil discovery when the were applying (along with the UK) to join the EU!
To put the Norwegian position into perspective, when the private North Connect interconnector to Scotland was being proposed, the then (more so than usual) socialist government made privately funded interconnectors illegal for 3 years. Norwegians certainly do not want their electricity prices to go up to the levels that other countries are subjected to.
It also should not to be forgotten that Norway itself has, within the last decade, suffered severe energy shortages and became heavily dependent on Sweden’s nuclear capacity when its hydro suffered drought effects.
https://www.reuters.com/article/greenbiz-us-norway-power/norway-on-alert-as-hydro-power-critically-low-idUKTRE72O3KY20110325
Furthermore HVDC) interconnectors are limited in their carrying capacity (not infinite) and are nothing like as reliable as straight forward AC connections which are not possible from the differently synchronised Nordic Grid.
Here is an interesting graphic that helps explain the situation.
https://www.electricitymap.org/map
So lets make all our everyday life dependent on just electricity and no ICE powered motive power, then who ever controls the supply of electricity will control everybody.
The numb-nut wannabe elitists say we shouldn’t want a mixed market of available power sources, even if they have been refined over the decades (centuries ? ) to deliver more cost effective solutions to our needs?
People driving their cars and heating their homes? “WE HAVE TO BREAK THEIR WILL.”
Massachusetts Climate Tsar Caught Exposing The Plan (41 seconds)
I’m sure this same dialog it happening across all western nations, much to the detriment of their populations!
One major Earth bound CME cough from the sun, and electricity and everything that hangs off it collapses, and the back-up is …?
Just a note on smart meters; there’s a good overview of the present situation and outlook here:
http://www.nickhunn.com/smart-meters-fake-news-and-the-iot/
As well as the well-known problems of meters going dumb when switching supplier, there are other issues looming:
“If the Government wants to deploy smart meters, something needs to change. The original target of 2019 was pushed out to 2020, then to 2024 and more recently to June 2025. That highlights another problem. At a recent Cambridge Wireless seminar on Low Power IoT, the panel were asked when they thought that the UK would turn off its 2G and 3G cellular network, which is used for around two thirds of Britain’s smart meters. Many countries have already done this, as it is far more efficient for network operators to use this spectrum for 4G and 5G services. The recent introduction of 5G in the iPhone 12 will accelerate this desire to “sunset” the 2G and 3G services. The conclusion at the seminar was that it’s likely to happen shortly after 2025. This means that at the point where we might complete the smart meter roll-out, two thirds of them would stop working. To bring them back to life, the Government would either have to replace the communication hub in these meters (which would cost around £1.5 billion), or compensate the network providers to keep on running an obsolete network, which would probably cost them even more. “
What’s the betting this will be blamed on climate change and not Hydro projects etc. destabilizing it or just a random event!
https://more.talktalk.co.uk/news/2021/02/07/homes-and-power-plant-flooded-after-glacier-breaks-in-northern-india
start working seriously on the nuclear power. As simple as that.
I say this now and then, but one cannot say enough of the following:
–> if one wanted to extend North American oil consumption to 8 billion people, world oil production would have to increase by 600%
–> to the EU level, “only” 300%
Either is unlikely to happen. So, stop whining and start thinking, what \can provide enough energy in the future. Fossil fuels are a dead end not because of global warming (that one is, indeed bunk), but because there are not enough of them. You can push modern day colonialism only so far. The unwashed masses of the world will demand and ultimately obtain their share of scarce resources. Think of alternatives and implement them while you still can.
100% agree. Burn up the existing waste stockpile (Breeder cycle) to get passively safe reactors supplying baseload AND peaking power with tiny amounts of relatively short term residual waste from remarkably small sites.
https://www.moltexenergy.com
An analogy I often give to people is the relative energy density of power sources.
1kg of water atop a 100 metre high dam has an energy density of 0.001MJ/kg which is why hydro electric lakes are so goddam big.
1kg of diesel fuel has an energy density of 48MJ/kg which is 48,000 times more than the water and why we use fossil fuels.
1kg of Uranium in a Breeder reactor has an energy density of 80,620,000MJ/kg…..as in
Eighty Million Six Hundred and Twenty Thousand.
That usually helps people to understand the benefit.
60 years Mr Sanders, and we are still waiting on it. At some point, you might consider that it isn’t going to happen.
Water freezes and does not flow easily through power stations ( NOTE tonight’s News INDIA Glacier breaks up and creates havoc – 2 Dams BURST , People killed etc )
What’s Norway to do then if we have a proper “Mini Ice Age” – no liquid water and Fjords frozen. Can’t access some of their Pipeline infrastructure to manufacture More / extra pipelines to receive adequate GAS / OIL from N Sea ?
But UK / (our daft Sniggering Nits Party ) don’t want to know or admit to good sense, either.
You people are not listening. Wind turbines do not produce any 50Hz energy. They are useless. A massive fraud.
Brian, would you expand on your claim in quite a bit of detail please, or link to an article/paper on the subject? I’m well down the food chain and have not the knowledge required to understand where you are coming from with your statement. Thanks.
The worlds electricity grids is the most complicated thing man has designed.
Lets take for example a hydro power station with several turbines.
A turbine must operate at a fixed speed as required by law.
When for example a community/consumers rises to go to work and switch on all their jugs and toasters the power consumption will slow the turbine thus to compensate a greater water pressure must be applied to maintain speed.
A turbine must supply a 50/60Hz sinusoidal waveform as required by law.
(Our appliances, homes, factories and industries all require 50/60Hz
50Hz Europe 60HZ America).
Subsequent turbines must also operate at a fixed speed and produce exactly the same 50/60Hz at exactly the same time as required by law.. This is termed synchronous.
Wind turbines are asynchronous and really are a 3 phase motor on a pole.
They flap about at all sorts of speeds, out of control.
They do not produce 50/60Hz energy. They produce useless harmonics termed in the industry as ‘dirty energy’.
The useless harmonics are through smart meters fraudulently added to consumers power bills.
The whole wind turbine industry is bogus.
The wind turbine industry followed the climate change scam.
There have been serious grid blackouts in recent years and since renewables have been connected to the grids.
The grids are very close to major failure. Europe, parts of US and of course South Australia.
Many thanks for a great explanation, appreciated. As an ex aircraft propeller man. The way to regulate prop speed was by way of variable pitch. Do the wind turbines not have this facility, and thus be able to deliver a constant voltage/ Hz within a certain wind speed velocity range? They do ‘feather’ the blades during excessive wind speeds to prevent running away. You seem to be saying the wind turbines don’t have what we called Propeller Control Units, or PCU’s to provide constant speed, within the engine power capabilities of course.