The Trouble with Bio-Fuels

I was going to post (again) about the Bio-fuel environmental catastrophe and how the EU and particularly Energiewende supporters are promoting it. But Biofuels Reform has beaten me to it.

The short animation below says it all. (h/t to @Thor at twitter for the tip off)

If you thought the Biomass scam was bad (see This Post) then make sure you sit down or stand well clear of breakable objects before you press the play button.



If you want to know some more about the utter environmental carnage taking place in Indonesia with Biofuels and burning Peat forests try this post of mine Fiddling While Sumatra Burns and read links to some of the peer reviewed papers .

Then there is this older post CO2 and Indonesian Peat Fires that gives a comparison of the biofuels scam to favorite Green "enemies" such as air travel.

Government Policy: Leave the Old to Freeze

The interview with Chris Huhne on the Channel 4 news last night was surreal.

He talked continuously, spouting on and on and on. Desperately, he tried to talk out the time time slot and refused to allow the interviewer to get in with her questions.

At times he was literally talking gibberish.

The whole interview amounted to him stringing together sound bites with no coherence or intelligibility. It was a bit like a  Madonna song but without the sex appeal - lots of emotional words strung together that sound good, but in reality  make no sense.

At least Madonna is entertaining.

Huhne point-blank refused to address the issues of fuel poverty and how his policies are forcing millions into penury. He frantically tried to sidestep the government's own figures on how the so called Green Policies are grinding down whole sections of our community. When it got too difficult he simply made it up of the hoof and made himself look even more ridiculous.

I could barely believe that anyone in government could so abjectly and so cynically fail those who need support. Instead he bamboozled and waffled on, trying to deflect focus away from his ridiculous fashion statement "Green Agenda". A policy that is essentially based on hidden taxation. Taxation on the poor to benefit the rich.

When it comes down to it, when you strip away the waffle and obfuscation, Chris Huhne would rather let thousands of pensioners and the poor die of cold rather than call a halt to the current lunatic energy policy.

His laughable solution is to get people to "shop around".

Tell that to the average 80 year old.


Tell the old dear down the road who has never even used a computer that she should use a price comparison site. 


Tell the old boy to "shop around" even though he is in his last days and wheelchair bound.

They all deserve better.

Much, much better than the preposterous Mr Huhne.

When it comes to the final analysis, the Government is responsible for this catastrophe.

This government may well be responsible for picking up many of the failings of the last Labour administration. But they are still responsible. After all that is what they were elected for - to take responsibility.

It is no good trying to deflect the blame onto the veracious big six energy companies. The whole of this debacle is simply down to bad and incompetent government. Both in the past and in the present.

We need a government that is willing and capable of breaking the current energy cartel. We need a government that plans energy policy on best practice not on vacuously fashionable but grossly ineffective solutions like wind power.

There are no excuses. 

If this coming winter, people die or are left freezing, then it is this governments fault.

Of course it is Huhne's fault. But it will also be Cameron's fault. Hague's fault, and all the others.

They are the government. Fixing problem is what they should be about.

Somebody in government has to do something practical about our looming (or loomed) energy crisis. Mouthing platitudes is not enough.

To get things going, one good step forward would be to  give Mr Huhne his P45.

Energy Policy and the Scottish Letter

The letter below appeared in The Scotsman (Here) on the 27th April. To say it ruffled a few feathers would be an understatement.  It is perhaps the most succinct yet powerful indictment of the energy supply policy being pursued in these islands yet published. You will notice it is signed by a star chamber of power generation experts.

On the Scotsman link there is also the "alternative" view. It is signed by those who gain most from this catastrophe of an energy policy. It is the usual spin and obfuscation hiding the emptyness of their position. Have a look. See what you think.
Then read the comments on these two letters. From these comments it sounds to me like the Scots have had enough.

Here is the letter.

[quote]

NO developed economy can function without a reliable and economic supply of electricity but with present UK policies we have been warned that within a few years there will be a risk of power failures while increases in prices to consumers will rise by more than 50 per cent by 2025.

On a standalone basis the situation in Scotland would be even more disastrous. The huge investment required to remedy the neglect and wishful thinking of recent years will require two decades or more to take effect and in the run up to the May elections we urge all political parties in Scotland to put the future of our electricity supplies at the top of their agendas.

The pretence that our electricity can in future be supplied from renewables, mainly wind and marine, has gone on too long. These matters are not a question of opinion; they are answerable to the laws of physics and are readily analysed using normal engineering methods. All of these energy sources are of very low concentrations and intermittent; they are and will remain inherently expensive and no amount of development will have more than a marginal effect on this conclusion.

Nor can wind and marine energy sources be relied on to provide electricity when it is needed; a recent analysis has shown that for over 30 per cent of the time the output from wind farms has dropped to below 10 per cent of their nominal output and during extremely cold weather has fallen to virtually zero. Furthermore it is unfortunately not correct that marine energy constitutes a vast untapped energy resource on our doorstep; studies (now apparently accepted by government) have shown that at best it could provide only a few percent of our electricity supplies and at costs which, including the necessary back up generation, would be entirely unacceptable to consumers.

Fossil fuelled generation (coal or gas) with carbon dioxide capture and underground storage may yet prove a useful technique but it is important to realise that it is an unproven technology on the scale required; that it may never be acceptable to dispose of such huge quantities of gas in underground storage and at present its costs are too uncertain to gamble on its playing a significant part in our forward energy policy.

So by all means let us have some wind power, development programmes for other renewables, home insulation programmes, heat pumps etc but let us not pretend that all these taken together will substitute for proven generation sources such as coal, gas and nuclear.

And if low carbon is to be the principal driver of energy policy, we can build on Scotland's half century of experience with nuclear, generating some 50 per cent of our electricity requirements, reliably and at low cost.

Scotland needs a balanced electricity system which can deliver economic and reliable supplies; we are at the 11th hour and there is now no more time to lose in getting to grips with this task. There can be nothing more urgent on the political agenda.

Colin Gibson C Eng FIEECCMI Network director National Grid 1993-97)

Prof Ken W D Ledingham FInstP

Prof Colin R McInnes FREng FRSE

Sir Donald Miller C EngFREng FRSE, Chairman ScottishPower 1982-92

Prof Anthony Trewavas FRS FRSE

Prof Jack Ponton FREng FIChemE 

[unquote]

Wind Turbines and Spinning Reserve

When the supporters of wind turbines run out of wishful thinking they usually try disparaging the legitimate concerns of those of us who view these ineffective monstrosities with the contempt they deserve.

It has long been pointed out that due to the vaguaries of the wind, there needs to be a backup ready to take over when they stop turning. The latest jolly wheeze our dreamworld compatriots have come up with is that there does not need to be any more backup as there is already enough spinning reserve.

For those who do not know the jargon: We have our power supplied mainly by base load generation. That is power stations running on full load. Nuclear power is particularly good at this. This is then backed up by spinning reserve. This spinning reserve can provide small corrections to the power requirement in which case it is said to go from spinning reserve and into generation. But is there mainly ready to kick in if anything goes wrong, like a major grid failure or power station failure. Spinning reserve power stations are using fuel but providing no electricity. The energy used is dissipated in the cooling towers.

The pro wind turbine lobby assert that as the spinning reserve is bigger than any single power supply unit then it should also be quite capable of coping with any drop of output from wind turbines. On a (very) shallow level that sounds like a good point but really we need to look at what the spinning reserve is there for.

Spinning reserve is an emergency backup. Its  size is calculated to allow the grid to cope with major failure of otherwise reliable and predictable components.

And that is the point. 

The major failure of a power station is a crisis and the spinning reserve is there to ensure there are no power cuts. The spinning reserve currently built into the system is most certainly not there to iron out the erratic output of wind turbines as well. 

If (god forbid) anyone actually builds another of these off-shore wind farm abortions and it then suffered a major grid failure, well: Yes. That is what the spinning reserve is for.  

But  it is most certainly not there to cope with the wind suddenly dropping. If you want to cope with that you need more spinning reserve.

The most shocking aspect of the pro-turbine dreamers is their sheer propensity to be at best, economical with the truth and at worst, lie through their teeth.

One day we will look back on all this lunacy and view it with derision. I just hope and pray that when that day comes the lights will still be working. 

Nuclear: The Only viable Option

The new energy minister Chris Huhne is evidently a nuclear sceptic (see here).

I reckon there are a few things he needs to take a long hard look at. Otherwise he could be remembered as the minister who sentenced the old and frail to death by hypothermia if we get a bad winter in 10 years time.

Currently we have about 20% of our electricity comes from an ageing fleet of British designed nuclear reactors. Very reliable, highly successful but getting old. Many of these are due to be decommissioned due to the their age. 70% of our nuclear reactors will be shut down in the next ten years.

But a another hidden portion of our electricity is actually generated by nuclear. We import electricity from France where almost 80 % of their power is generated by nuclear. Today. French nuclear power is regularly used to top up sagging British supply. This will only get worse as we lose more base-line generating capacity. We could of course simply rely ever further on French Nuclear power (as we do today to an extent) or we can properly provision and provide for our own energy supply.

So what about wind power? Let us get real. Wind power is a non starter. It is intermittent difficult to harvest and requires massive maintenance and support.

This support has to be done over a large area, often serving machines that are barely viable. If and when they break down it will be cheaper to leave them off line than to fix them until their regular servicing period arrives.

Place them off-shore and you have massive problems with transmission and the maintenance costs multiply further The only reason the utility companies are interested is due to the incredible subsidies they get. Wind power simply cannot compete with just about any other form of power generation. That competition can be on just about any criterion: reliability, availability, financial cost and (dare I say it) environmental cost per MWe.

Wind power is, in its current state of development, simply an expensive fashion statement, eagerly clutched at by anti-technology Luddites and those who kow-tow to them.

Due to the the negligence of the last government the country finds itself in an invidious position. There is likely to be a serious shortfall in generating capacity within the next ten years. Labour was simply not prepared (until it was arguably too late) to take any difficult and decisive decisions on how we will power the national grid.

Chris Huhne needs to remember he is in government to support the British people and to ensure that they have sufficient electricity to maintain their lives and jobs.

He is not there to to make fashion statements or fund latter day follies.

Lib-Dems: The Return of the Care Bears.

Or is it the "My Little Ponies"?

After returning to our ruined little England from far away I made the mistake of looking up a synopsis of Lib-Dem policies. All I can say to you my fellow sour faced little Englanders is God help us all if this bunch of tosh gets anywhere near legislation.

Really, I would expect better from a group of nine year olds. Some of this junk simply beggars belief.

First off I will blame the cause of my unpleasant foray into Lib-Dem dream-world on this post by Ian Dale It describes the proposed Lib-Dem tax break for illegal immigrants. Basically, if you evade our laughable boarder protection for ten years, you do not have to repay any of the tax you have avoided (ker-ching!). Illegal immigrants only will be eligable for this concession. Nasty little Englanders need not apply. In fact YOU will be paying for this. So bugger off to the back of the queue as normal.

Regrettibly, after reading Ians post, I then Googled this Lib-Dem policy synopsis.

I was going to make a list of the most ludicrous and vacant of these touchy-feely pie-in-the-sky statements but then I read the section marked "Environment".

Then I got worried. Very worried.

There is crass stupidity elsewhere in their policy synopsis. But in the Environment section it gets worse. Much, much worse. So bad in fact, I fear for the future safety of our frail and elderly.

Get this:

"Setting a target for 40 per cent of electricity will come from renewable sources by 2020 rising to 100 per cent by 2050"

This is totally unachievable.

It is a pair of targets that are so ludicrous you have to question the technical ability (if not the sanity) of anyone suggesting them.

Worse than that, by implying it is achievable they will end up killing people. These victims will mainly old ladies who will freeze to death when the inevitable power cuts stop their gas or electric heating from working.

Now get these two further statements:

"Blocking any new coal-fired power stations"
"Rejecting a new generation of nuclear power stations"

So how exactly are they planning to generate electricity? Obviously no-one has told them that those mighty wind turbine thingys don't actually produce much power. Especially when you need it. Are they going to rely on gas? From the generous Mr Putin no doubt?

I had to take a break in writing this to cool down. This is just so bloody unbelievable. Do these people have any contact with reality at all?

I am really, really, worried that people with apparently no understanding of basic physics let alone real world energy generation and managment are "planning" our future energy strategy. The crass incompetence and cowardice of the Labour party has got us into a situation where there is likely to be real difficulties in avoiding power cuts in the next 5 years anyway. This lunacy from the Liberals would make things much worse.

To ensure this countries energy requirements are met we really must have a set of policies based on the real world and what can actually be achieved.

Ridiculous fashion statements will not suffice.