How windfarms charge you twice for the same electricity – Net Zero Watch

Moray East windfarm [image credit: offshorewind.biz]

It turns out that ‘when a windfarm is constrained off or constrained down, it doesn’t actually have to switch off or switch down. It is free to divert power via a private wire to anyone who will pay for it.’ Someone with a big battery, for example.
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I recently noted that Moray East, a very large and very new windfarm situated off the Scottish coast, is spending a remarkable amount of time switched off – something like a quarter of the time, in fact, says Andrew Montford @ NZW.

As is widely known, windfarms can receive so-called constraint payments when the transmission grid doesn’t have the capacity to deliver power from windfarms (typically in the north, and often far offshore) to markets (in the south), so Moray East receiving such payments was not a surprise; only the scale of the payments was.

A constraint payment is worth around £60 per megawatt hour, which is around the fixed price at which Moray East contracted to sell power to the grid.

However, as noted elsewhere, Moray East has failed to take up that contract, and it is therefore able to sell its output into the open market at £200, £300 or even £400 per megawatt hour.

The crackdown on wrongthink: be prepared.

The big tech oligarchs have seized the moment and are purging social media platforms. The Twaliban have been suspending pro-Trump accounts (including the US president himself) and FakeSpook are following suit and forcing a new user agreement on WhatsApp users allowing Zuck to harvest their private data. Google and Apple have removed alternative chat platform Parler from their app stores.

A better, more secure messaging platform called Signal should now be used by people who care about free speech and privacy. More info in this article from Wired.

European EV charging network IONITY hikes price by 500%

Image Credit: freepik.com

Electrek reports:

IONITY, a European EV charging network owned by BMW, Daimler, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, and VW Group (with Audi and Porsche) has announced that prices will be going up over 500% starting January 31 as they transition to a pay-per-kWh system.

Previously, IONITY charged a flat, fixed rate of €8 for a DCFC charging session. This was a good deal if you showed up with an empty battery and filled most of the way. If you arrived with, say, 10% battery remaining, and added 60 kWh during your charging session, then you’d get away with paying about €0.13 per kWh. For context, in France, electricity costs about €0.19 per kWh at home, and €0.24 per kWh at Tesla Superchargers. In Germany, you pay €0.30 per kWh at home, and €0.33 at Tesla Superchargers in Germany.

Goldman Sachs operative Carney slithers from BoE to UN climate con job.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who previously served as Canada’s top central banker, will be taking on a new role as the United Nations’ special envoy on climate action and climate finance.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made the announcement while speaking to reporters in Madrid on Sunday, adding the move will take effect next year.

#Brexit blackmail: EU extorts UK taxpayers by withholding carbon creds from UK industry

Brussels strikes again. The EU commission has decided to withhold the free carbon credits it gives to member states’ industries from the UK ‘until a Brexit withdrawal agreement is ratified’.

A UK government which had any capable negotiators would respond in kind by withholding the much bigger amount in membership fees we are still paying to Brussels every month, despite taxpayers having voted to leave the EU almost three years ago.

Taxpaying voters will get an opportunity on May 23 to let our incompetent government and the Brussels mafia know that they now support the Brexit Party which seeks a mandate to take over negotiations with the EU and leave on WTO terms in the meantime.

IPCC SR15 Report lacks cost/benefit analysis of ‘Goldilocks thinking’

The UN climate report known as SR15 calls for high carbon taxes from $135 to $5,500/ton while a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg of Oct. 9, 2018 says the costs of proposed CO2 cuts are not worth it, leading the Friends of Science Society to slam the UN report as Goldilocks thinking without any rational cost-benefit analysis or practical plan.

Friends of Science says the WSJ paragraph in which Lomborg describes the economic impact on Europe of cutting emissions 80% by 2050 should be front page news in every newspaper in Europe and North America. Lomborg notes that, with a well designed and coordinated climate policy (i.e. the opposite of what European and North American governments have now), the annual costs will reach U.S. $3.3 trillion, “more than twice what EU governments spend today on health, education, recreation, housing, environment, police and defense combined”.

“The policy will make the EU 24% poorer in 2050.”

Grenfell: Plastic firms helped write climate-related safety rules

Grenfell Tower fire [image credit: BBC]

Insulation added to buildings like the ill-fated Grenfell Tower was a result of climate regulations, as this extract from a Sky News report shows. But the manufacturers themselves helped write those rules, and now some critics who tried to point out potential fire hazards in the materials say they were subjected to intimidation by them.
H/T Damian

While legal threats were being made in private, the plastic insulation industry was openly advertising its role in writing the rules that govern the fitting of its products to millions of buildings across the country.

The main lobby group for the plastic insulation trade was, until November 2017, called the British Rigid Urethane Foam Manufacturers’ Association [BRUFMA].

Partly in response to Grenfell Tower – or what it refers to as “events of this year” – BRUFMA changed its name to the Insulation Manufacturers Association.

Monckton: Green policy kills jobs and causes energy poverty

Visit Cartoonsbyjosh.com

Excerpt from an open letter to the head of MIT:

Professor Reif of MIT says, “In 2016 alone, solar industry employment grew by 25 percent, while wind jobs grew 32%.” These numbers are highly misleading. In fact, they underscore how deficient these energy sources are as job creators.

Growing jobs by subsidy is easy, provided that one cares nothing for the far greater number of jobs destroyed by the additional taxation, energy price hikes or public borrowing necessary to pay for the subsidy. Several studieshave shown that the creation of one “green” job results in the loss of two to four jobs elsewhere in the economy. In Spain the estimated ratio was two jobs lost for each one created by renewable energy, prompting the government to finally end most renewable subsidies.

And yet, despite all those subsidies, wind and solar power generation expensively and unreliably account for 5.6% and 0.9% of total U.S. electricity production, respectively. On its own, electricity provides only a small fraction of total energy consumption, including transportation, industrial processes, heating and electricity generation, so these numbers actually exaggerate the contribution of wind and solar facilities to overall energy consumption.

Brexit Costs: EU Commissioner Proposes EU-Wide Climate Tax

Taxing the weather – EU member states may have to cough up climate dues as part of the cost of supporting the seemingly insatiable Brussels bureaucratic machine.

Due to Brexit and other new commitments, the EU will soon be short of € 25 billion, reports The GWPF.

EU Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger, therefore, wants to introduce new revenues for the EU in form of a climate tax.

In addition, he wants to take Brexit as an opportunity to remove not only Britain’s EU rebate but similar discounts for other EU member states.
“When the British leave, the rebate negotiated by Maggie Thatcher falls away; I want to use this opportunity to cancel all discounts, including those for Denmark and Germany,” Oettinger told SPIEGEL.

“After the departure of the British, we are likely to be short of at least € 10 billion a year,” he said. “I can imagine that half of this sum can be saved, and the remaining members will divide the other half among themselves,” the EU Commissioner said.

Germany, for example, receives a discount on the additional costs incurred as a result of the British discount.

Conflicts Of Interest At The Committee On Climate Change

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How obvious does it have to be before people realize they’re being taken for a massively expensive ride by the Greenblob, hiding behind their figleaf of ‘climate change’?

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Dennis Ambler

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2523726/Web-green-politicians-tycoons-power-brokers-help-benefit-billions-raised-bills.html

The Mail’s story, about how the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy cheated to claim govt grants, recalls another investigation by David Rose three years ago:

Other industries would stand accused of damning conflicts of interest but when it comes to global warming, anything goes…

The Mail on Sunday today reveals the extraordinary web of political and financial interests creating dozens of eco-millionaires from green levies on household energy bills.

A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts.

Vested interest: Lord Deben (John Selwyn Gummer) is chairman of the Committee on Climate Change

Enquiries by this newspaper have revealed:

• Four of the nine-person Committee on Climate Change, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until…

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Christine Lagarde to be Roasted, Toasted, Fried and Grilled by French Courts

#Brexit and climate scaremonger and soon, we suspect, not to be IMF chief, Christine Lagarde is to stand trial over a 404 million euro payment of taxpayers money to controversial tycoon Bernard Tapie, who supported former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Lagarde, who famously said we’d all be “Roasted, Toasted, Fried and Grilled” by global warming, more recently boosted her reputation for chronically incorrect exaggerations by predicting that a Brexit vote would be “bad or very bad” for the UK economy. The FTSE100 reached a new record high yesterday.

Expect updates on this one folks.

ESM: New EU treaty in the works will bankrupt nations

The EU is a curious mix of Autocratically controlled crony capitalism (Google and McD’s love it), and socialist redistribution. The poorer countries are in the east (ex-soviet communist, now democracies); and south (Mediterranean siesta economies).

If the EU applied to join the EU, it would be refused on the grounds that it doesn’t respect basic democracy. It is controlled by unelected bureaucrats who dictate new legislation to a rubber stamp of a parliament. The member nation states are in the process of having their sovereignty dismantled, using the European Court of Justice, the borderless Schengen zone, the single currency and the (German dominated) central bank.

It’s a catastrophe unfolding before our eyes. The single currency has all but destroyed Greece’s economy, with 50% youth unemployment blighting the lives of the young. The rest of the mediterranean countries are economic basket cases too. France is headed the same way.

Here’s how the EU intends to deal with the massive structural problem it has created. You won’t believe this. The European Stability Mechanism is about to be injected with steroids. The UK can’t be forced into this, because we didn’t join the single currency, but it will have a huge impact on UK if we don’t get off the sinking ship.

#Brexit: The Movie needs your help

 

UPDATE: The talkshop pledge is now up to £500 + a reserve, see comments.

We see your pledge going up – Thank you @RogTallbloke and your readers! @kickstarter @Martin_Durkin

— Brexit:The Movie (@BrexitTheMovie) February 2, 2016

Brexit: The Movie, is a new project set up by Martin Durkin, of ‘The great Global Warming Swindle’ fame. Martin is a top documentary maker, but none of the big TV channels are going to finance this one. Check out the trailer above and you’ll know why.

Climate sceptics have a lot of reasons to be eurosceptics too, given the nutty energy policy being dictated to the UK from Brussels thanks to their mad climate policies.

Climate change: Crisis or Con-job?

James Delingpole pulls no punches in a new article at Breitbart, part of which I’m reproducing below. Many  in the climate debate try to ‘stick to the science’, to avoid accusations of political bias or motivation. James doesn’t do science, though many think he’s an astute observer of it, and an entertaining, if occasionally over-the-top reporter on the state of the debate.

Global Warming Is Not the Problem. Global Governance Is.
James Delingpole 31:12:2015

To anyone with even half an eye on world events, it’s perfectly obvious that there are many more desperate problems – fundamentalist Islam, say – than the imaginary problem of man-made global warming. So why do our political class persist in pretending to us, in defiance of all the evidence, that “climate change” represents the only global issue serious enough to justify the convening of a conference like the recent one in Paris attended by 40,000 delegates and the leaders of over 150 nation states?

The answer to this is too complicated for one sentence – for the full story read this book – but the consequences can be summed up in two words: global governance.

Climate Change is Now a $1.5 Trillion Industry

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So this is what they mean by ‘runaway climate change’.

American Elephants

The Climate Change Business Journal has calculated that Climate Change is now its own $1.5 trillion global “climate change industry” that is growing at between 17 and 24 percent annually from 2005-2008. Following the recession, growth slowed to between 4 to 6 percent with the exception of a bump in 2011 of 15 percent growth. These results were published in the Insurance Journal, for the climate journal is not available for free online.

The publication includes nine segments and 38 sub-segments including renewables, green building and hybrid cars. It also includes the climate change consulting market which the journal estimates at $1.9 billion worldwide, and $890 million in the U.S. The consulting market is expected to double in the next five years. The report’s authors believe the climate change industry as a whole will grow even faster. The Climate Change Consulting market  had billings of $600 million in 1976 and…

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Mainstream media is finally catching up with the sceptics

A hard hitting article appears in the Mail which slams the climate change act.

Six years ago today, an ambitious Labour politician, newly appointed climate change secretary, set Britain on a ruinous path that threatens our energy-dependent civilisation with collapse.
Such is the devastating conclusion of Owen Paterson, the Tory former Environment Secretary, who yesterday joined Lord Lawson among the highest-profile critics of the political consensus on energy policy.
For it was on October 16, 2008, that the new secretary of state – Ed Miliband, by name – set us the legally binding goal of meeting the EU’s wildly ambitious target to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent before 2050 (and how significant that no other country has followed his lead).

Clive Best: Something Fishy in the air?

Reposted from Clive Best’s excellent blog 
Posted on October 23, 2014 by Clive Best
I have noticed that wind power delivered to the Grid is always less than 6 GW, no matter how windy it gets. This was clearly demonstrated on October 21st when wind speeds across the country reached around 50 mph for most of the day. The wind output was simply bumping along continuously below 6 GW. Something fishy is going on – What is it?

winds

Chris Huhne: Immortalised in the National Portrait Gallery

Artist Perry Grayson has made a vase decorated with motifs related to Chris Huhne, smashed it with a lump hammer, and repaired it, before displaying it in the National Portrait Gallery.

Grayson Perry’s vase features speed cameras, penises, Huhne, his mobile phone, personalised number plates, and wind turbines.

Owen Paterson follows UKIP’s lead and calls for scrapping of climate change act

Ex-Environment minister Owen Paterson is tonight delivering the annual GWPF lecture. In it he will say the climate change act should be scrapped. UKIP has been saying this for years and has had a detailed energy policy document out for years detailing better alternatives for a viable mixed energy policy. The full text of his speech has been published at the Spectator. Here’s an except:

The vital importance of affordable energy

But first, let us consider what is at stake. We now live in an almost totally computer-dependent world. Without secure power the whole of our modern civilisation collapses: banking, air traffic control, smart phones, refrigerated food, life-saving surgery, entertainment, education, industry and transport.

We are lucky to live in a country where energy has been affordable and reliable.

Yet we cannot take this for granted.

While most public discussion is driven by the immediacy of the looming 2020 EU renewables target; policy is actually dominated by the EU’s long-term 2050 target.

The 2050 target is for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent relative to 1990 levels. The target has been outlined by the European Commission. But it is only the UK that has made it legally binding through the Climate Change Act – a piece of legislation that I and virtually every other MP voted for.

The 2050 target of cutting emissions by 80 percent, requires the almost complete decarbonisation of the electricity supply in 36 years.

In the short and medium term, costs to consumers will rise dramatically, and the lights would eventually go out. Not because of a temporary shortfall, but because of structural failures, from which we will find it extremely difficult and expensive to recover.

We must act now.

Boris’ Bigger Burden Causes Congestion Charge Consternation

From 2020 drivers of all but the most efficient diesel cars and older petrol cars will be charged an additional £10 a day to use the London roads they already pay road tax and a ‘congestion charge’ to travel on. Boris Johnson is bringing in the new levy in response to EU pressure to further reduce emissions. The unelected EU commission launched legal proceedings against Britain in February.

Elsewhere, Labour is planning a network of low-emission zones that would force older diesel vehicles out of many cities. Sheffield, Leicester, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and 14 other cities are considering bringing in the zones to cope with poor air quality.