Guardian: solve the UK energy crisis for the long term – store more power

Image credit: thecount.com

‘Four storage solutions to help Britain keep the lights on deep into the future’ says the paper’s sub-heading. But given the puny nature of their suggestions, that looks to be about all they could hope to do. What about actual reliable power for heating, transport, industry, commerce, hospitals, shops, services etc.?
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Soaring energy bills rooted in a global gas supply crunch have focused minds on the age-old problem: how can we better store power? says The Guardian.

Attention has turned to the closure of the Rough gas storage facility in the North Sea in 2017, which left the UK with only enough storage to meet the demand of four to five winter days.

But while gas is being phased out, Britain’s growing reliance on renewables, such as offshore wind and solar, does not solve the problem of intermittency – what happens when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine.

The key to securing enough affordable, low-carbon energy is more storage to make the most of the renewable energy available. A storage boom has been forecast over the coming decade as governments race to meet their climate targets.
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Their four suggestions:
— ‘Gravity’ storage
— Concentrated solar power storage [see below]
— Green hydrogen
— ‘Cryogenic’ batteries

Full article here.
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If anyone finds any or all of these a convincing and/or ‘affordable’ alternative to existing fuels as a storage medium, please explain why.

UPDATE 10/1/22, 7PM (UK)
The Concentrated solar power storage project cited by the Guardian (Crescent Dunes) as an example to follow has already been wound up!

U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer A. Dorsey:
‘As a result of alleged misfeasance, nonfeasance, and malfeasance, the project failed, and the plant is now nonoperational.’
[Report dated December 09, 2021]

Energy Anguish Hits Britain

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Don’t we know it. The pain will appear big-time when the energy price cap gets revised massively upwards from April. Piling on green levies adds insult to injury for bill payers.

PA Pundits International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

We are just weeks into winter and already an energy crisis is starting to burn in Britain. Part of this anguish is directed at climate policy, especially net zero.

The Brits are way ahead of the US when it comes to threatening people with direct hits, so this is no surprise. We have high natural gas prices, but they are being told they will have to pay huge sums to insulate and convert their gas heated homes to electric heat pumps. We have high gasoline prices while they are threatened with outlawing new fuel-fired cars. The stupidly green government has even suggested that personal car ownership might be ended. No wonder the Brits are running hot.

One aspect of this green shock is that supposedly conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was elected largely because of his role in Brexit. That he was a roaring green…

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Satellites spot oceans aglow with trillions of organisms

Bioluminescence [image credit: Gov’t. of South Australia]

Such events happen because ‘the microbes can suddenly light up as if a switch were thrown’. Even the smallest occurrence can be ‘100 times larger than Manhattan’.
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The ocean has always glowed, says the NY Times (via bdnews24.com).

The Greeks and Romans knew of luminous sea creatures as well as the more general phenomenon of seawater that can light up in bluish-green colours.

Charles Darwin, as he sailed near South America on a dark night aboard the HMS Beagle, encountered luminescent waves. He called it “a wonderful and most beautiful spectacle.”

Environmentalism Has Lost Its Way

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Funny how all the intensive mining for battery, solar panel and wind turbine components, and all the resulting toxic and other waste, gets billed as clean energy by climate obsessives.

PA Pundits International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

Driven by climate madness, the environmental movement has become the greatest advocate of destructive industrial development in history.

As Kant said: “To will the end is to will the means”. In this case the means to the phantom end of climate control have led environmentalists to abandon all of their principles. Solar and wind require environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale. Electrification requires the use of toxic chemicals on a similar scale. The hazardous waste stream is enormous.

Solar is the worst because the destruction of forests and open land is complete. Perhaps something lives under these vast solar slabs but not much and certainly nothing like what they destroy and displace.

As I pointed out in my recent article on Virginia’s ill-named Clean Economy Act, we are talking about hundreds of square miles of solar devastation today, for just one state. See my https://www.cfact.org/2021/12/27/paving-virginia-with-solar-slabs-is-a-bad-law/

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Ned Nikolov: Dispelling the Milankovitch Myth

Ned Nikolov, Ph.D.
Dec 30, 2021

There has been a long-standing belief in Paleoclimatology that orbital variations (a.k.a. Milankovitch cycles) have been responsible for the initiation and/or duration of glacial cycles (Ice Ages) over the past 800 Ky. Milankovitch cycles are often referred to as a pacemaker of the Ice Ages. This myth dates back to 1970s, when sediment cores revealed a weak correlation in the frequency domain between Earth’s 41-ky obliquity (axial-tilt) cycle and the periodicity of Ice Ages during the early Pleistocene (Quaternary). However, in the late Pleistocene, the frequency of glacial cycles better match the Earth’s 100-ky eccentricity cycle, which further fueled the confusion. Yet, no one has been able to demonstrate a meaningful relationship between glacial cycles and any of the Earth’s 3 orbital parameters obliquity, eccentricity and precession or combination thereof on a linear time scale. A physical causation requires a strong correlation between parameters in the time domain, not the frequency domain!

Energy crisis: Conservative MPs urge Boris Johnson to scrap taxes as bills rocket

Overcharged and overtaxed. UK energy customers are getting clobbered from all directions: the markets, the so-called climate levies, and taxes. The government is in disarray as its renewables-based policies force the pace of cost increases.
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Energy bills have soared as global wholesale prices have risen rapidly – but some Tory MPs and peers say they have increased more in the UK because of taxes the government has the power to remove.

Twenty Conservative politicians have urged Boris Johnson to scrap energy taxes as bills continue to rocket, reports Sky News.

The MPs and peers have written a letter in the Sunday Telegraph to ask the prime minister and Chancellor Rishi Sunak to help consumers facing “fuel poverty”.

Energy prices in the UK are being forced up faster than any other comparable country due to “taxation and environmental levies”, they wrote.