Clueless Marlow Thinks More Intermittent Energy Is The Answer To The Problems Of Intermittency!!!
By Paul Homewood
The clueless Ben Marlow is back to normal, with this utterly naive article:
In the Marlow household, all it took was a couple of chillier nights for us to panic and swap the paper-thin summer duvets for something more robust, a move I instantly regretted after seeing the weather forecast for the next five days.
If your thoughts hadn’t yet turned to the prospect of donning the thermals once again, then they probably will after the National Grid announced plans to pay families to cut their electricity usage again this winter.
As a way of ensuring the lights stay on, it certainly beats firing up the country’s old coal power stations – the tactic so often previously employed. There’s a certain creativity to it too – not something you’d expected from an organisation that Octopus Energy boss Greg Jackson has accused of “a phenomenal failure to innovate”.
But more broadly, it’s another sticking plaster solution to the energy crisis, and a pretty primitive one at that.
There are several far more grown-up solutions National Grid and the Government could employ. But don’t hold your breath – if there’s one thing that the great energy crisis unleashed by Vladimir Putin has taught us, it’s that neither our political masters nor the regulator have the answers.
Bills are still obscenely high and we need to wean ourselves off oil and gas. Yet it’s becoming increasingly clear that the costs of reaching net zero risks being prohibitively high, and No 10 continues to rely on a price cap that is acting as much as a floor on household bills as it is a ceiling.
So far, so good!
But Marlow’s solution is to build more wind and solar, and spend £40 bn that we have not got on upgrading the grid infrastructure to distribute it:
If Claire Coutinho wants to be taken more seriously in the post than her predecessor, then she should start by trying to drag the Grid into the 21st century so that electricity supply can keep up with ballooning demand.
Lobbyists boast that the UK has one of the most resilient grids on the planet but if that’s the case, then why the need for such convoluted measures to reduce the threat of blackouts – measures that critics have dismissed as “a gimmick” and customers have complained has only saved them pennies?
Isn’t the very threat of the lights going out in an advanced economy pretty firm evidence that the Grid is “not fit for purpose”, as Octopus’s Jackson has also claimed?
If you’re still not convinced, then perhaps it’s worth remembering that it takes seven years on average to connect a wind farm to the grid, while there are parts of London where it is impossible to build more homes because there isn’t capacity to support them.
In 2022, National Grid committed to a £40bn spending program on critical infrastructure over the next four years. Heaven knows it’s needed. Britain is moving to a modern digital economy in which electricity demand is expected to soar threefold by the middle of the century.
Yet, parts of the system were built in the aftermath of the Second World War. We need new connections and more modern transmission infrastructure, such as pylons and underground copper cables, otherwise hopes for 50 gigawatts (GW) of new wind and 70GW of additional solar power by 2030 will remain nothing more than that.
Apparently Mr Marlow has not managed to work out that the looming blackouts will be the result of shutting down tranches of dispatchable coal power, not a lack of intermittent renewable energy.
The commenters on the article seem to recognise this better than Marlow. For instance:
The fundamental problem is that our political class are hopelessly incompetent, economically and scientifically illiterate and completely corrupt.
They have committed the country to net zero lunacy without any referendum or mandate which will result in economic suicide and our transition to third world status.
Anyone impartial with any sense that has looked into it can see that renewables are intermittent and therefore unable to ever provide the reliable base load power required for a 1st world nation. Energy storage on the scale required using batteries or hydrogen is not and will never be viable.
Therefore the only realistic solution is to focus on nuclear, gas and coal based power to provide reliable base load power at sensible cost.
The only conclusion one can reach is that our politicians are effectively captured by a hostile foreign entity and are deliberately trying to destroy the future of our nation and its people.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“The fundamental problem is that our political class are hopelessly incompetent, economically and scientifically illiterate and completely corrupt.”
But that is understating the problem.
It’s also true of the Legacy Media, but they do do irony to perfection:
Ben Marlow: “Isn’t the very threat of the lights going out in an advanced economy pretty firm evidence that the Grid is “not fit for purpose”, as Octopus’s Jackson has also claimed?”
That is what happens when you change the “purpose” of a very good Grid designed for Base Load Electricity generation.
” That is what happens when you change the “purpose” of a very good Grid designed for Base Load Electricity generation. ”
The CEGB had its faults but it was probably the “Greatest of All Time” for generation and distribution. Particularly when compared to the current mob of incompetents.
The supreme irony was surely claiming that turning the lights out was a way of keeping them on.
Paid for power cuts are still power cuts.
I wonder if Marlow’s boss was got at by the PTB and told to get Marlow to write his usual rubbish, rather than the facts.
A call from Bill Gates to get back on the message he pays them for?
” … The Answer To The Problems Of Intermittency ”
The engineered solution – based on facts rather than groundless beliefs – is to build coal-fired power stations.
There is no answer unless we quit buying the causes of intermittency. Next!
That is, coal-fired powerstations sitting atop coal fields, of which there are plenty.
He gets off to a bad start by suggesting he has faith in weather ‘forecasts’ that will be different tomorrow morning.
Jo Nova makes good reading as the Australian grid manager has admitted to massive problems setting in from 2027 with ‘blackouts that are not called blackouts’ looming. It is not mentioned but I presume the trigger is the closing down of coal-fired plant. Ahead of 2027, South Australia looks like it will see problems much sooner.
Gezza, I apologize for calling you “Gemma” in a comment on another post. (Gemma is my sister-in-law’s name.)
Texas has had rolling blackouts for much of the month of August. They have the most windfarms of any U.S. state, exceeding even California.
I was glad to read this https://www.skynews.com.au/business/energy/things-have-changed-victorian-mp-david-limbricks-plan-to-scrap-40yearold-ban-on-nuclear-energy-in-state/news-story/31e9a326f48966c90fee3f331aee34e7 a few weeks ago, but the scales fell from their eyes rather late; nuclear power plants aren’t built overnight (or by 2027, if even allowed).
No problem – I have had worse.
Well, if current experience is anything to go by, nuclear plants built by EDF have been TWELVE years late and of course that is on top of the original build time so 2027 has no chance. An SMR might make it but as far as I know nobody actually has one in production yet so unlikely. Other countries such as Sweden, Poland for example are seeing the logic of having a nuclear baseload running to underpin their grids.
Encouraging news. The Australian renewables crowd always try to pretend that Australians would never support nuclear. The trick will be to deal with countries that know how to build on time and on budget, and let them do it. Japan and Korea spring to mind – it would not be wise to let the Chinese in.
When I reached the point where Mr. Marlow blames Vladimir Putin for Britain’s energy crisis, I stopped reading as this fool is decidedly spouting, misinformation. Everyone knows there is a NATO Proxy War in Ukraine, but everyone also knows that Barrator Beijing Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. Joe is on video telling us his plans one day, “That will not stand” and soon it was BOOM.! “Son of a b***h, someone blew it up–must have been Putin, right? C’mon, man, I’m not jokin’ here. Putin blew up his own, very profitable pipeline, right? Anyone for ice cream?”
Putin has cut pipeline supplies on his pipelines – even Nordstream was pumping no gas for weeks before it was blown up. Supply was cut first via Ukraine back in 2020, then via Poland, and then via Nordstream. Chart, originally from Timera’s blog:
https://image.vuukle.com/9ffc6604-feed-474e-a82d-c2de2f561502-f8535a96-edfe-49d0-bc7d-ef7c583396b4
I don’t think he cut because Sleepy Joe asked him to. He thought he could twist Europe’s arm into support for invading Ukraine. Indeed, he nearly succeeded, with Germany prevaricating for ages, not letting arms for Ukraine overfly German territory etc.
Ha ha. The gas was cut by western sanctions – remember them? We stopped paying so they stopped supplying. Its Western sanctions not Putin that have created gas supply problems.
We are sanctioning ourselves into poverty.
‘Isn’t the very threat of the lights going out in an advanced economy pretty firm evidence that the Grid is “not fit for purpose”’
The lights going out marks the end of your advanced (sic) economy.
Your big problem, sir, is not so much distribution, as it is generation.
‘Britain is moving to a modern digital economy’
What is that?
‘in which electricity demand is expected to soar threefold by the middle of the century’
Oh, I see. It’s where everyone starves.
Obviously a scholar of The Miliband School of pipe dreams. And I subscribe to The Torygraph!
There was an interesting article in the Guardian yesterday about the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme in Australia. It focused on the soaring costs (now estimated to be $16billion) to provide about 330GWhs of electricity. In winter this would provide the UK with about 12 hours of power. The company behind the scheme defended the cost by saying that storing that amount of electricity using lithium batteries would cost about $10trillion. This says all we need to know about the economics of grid scale storage if the UK tries to run the grid on mostly renewables and a small amount of nuclear.
While I believe stored-hydro is but another boondoggle, at least the reservoir will not suddenly burst into an un-extinguishable blaze like a so-called Power Wall. Nuclear is the green answer.
Burn coal