UK smart meter upgrade fiasco

Smart or not?

Introduction of predictably obsolete technology gets rubbished by the UK’s ‘Queen of the Select Committees‘. What a waste of money.
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Billpayers will be forced to foot the cost of upgrading seven million smart meters which will become obsolete in less than 10 years, the spending watchdog has warned. — The Telegraph reporting.

In a damning report highlighting a number of failures in the smart meter roll out, the Public Accounts Committee said seven million smart meters would need to be replaced before the 2G and 3G networks they use are switched off in 2033.

It warned that the financial burden of replacing the redundant smart meter hubs will be ultimately borne by energy bill payers and could be “very significant”, exceeding previous estimates.

The report went on to say that demand for the smart devices, designed to help consumers monitor their energy use and cut bills, had dried up.

South Western Railway disruption after biofuel clogs engines

For how much longer?
[image credit: thecostaricanews.com]

Derailed by climate obsession? According to The Telegraph the problem is that ‘algae produced by green fuels blocks engines’, if they’re left unused for a certain period of time. Potential implications for other motorised transport here.
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A train operator has reduced services after diesel engines were clogged with biofuel, reports BBC News.

South Western Railway (SWR) said a fault was discovered on Wednesday in much of its diesel fleet at depots in Exeter and Salisbury.

It said the issue would disrupt services in the Romsey area and west of Salisbury until further notice.

BBC South transport correspondent Paul Clifton said SWR would run a fraction of normal services on the routes.

He said the issue would affect the West of England line for the next week.

Full report here.

Achieving Net Zero In The Graveyard Of The Failed Green Religion

Leaders posing as controllers of the weather demand impossible to achieve and damaging energy policies. Is this (cartoon) where net zero is taking us? Ignoring the sun won’t work.
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According to the clerics of the Green Cult, once we blow up our last coal mine, send all diesel engines to the wreckers, stop using concrete, reinvent sailing clippers, cover the grasslands and hills with solar clutter and wind machines, and then slaughter all of our cattle… global climate will become serene – not too warm, not too cold, writes Viv Forbes (via Climate Change Dispatch).

Wild weather will cease, and there will be no more droughts, floods, cyclones, or snowstorms and no more plant and animal extinctions.

But the records written in the rocks tell a far different story about climate changes. Even when nature was in full control, it was not a serene place.

Man ‘facing £7,000 energy bill’ after switching to £25,000 government-backed ‘green’ heat pump

Domestic Air Source Heat Pump [image credit: UK Alternative Energy]

Who wants a lack-of-heat pump now?
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A man claims he is facing a £7,000 energy bill after replacing his heating system with a £25,000 Government-backed ‘green’ heat pump, says The Independent (via Yahoo News).

Officials are currently providing grants for up to £5,000 to home owners who remove a gas central heating and hot water system and replace it with a heat pump.

But the new system, backed by many in the green lobby, has apparently left many UK homeowners in the cold.

Liz Truss to ban solar projects on farms

Image credit: BBC

Some pushback against the excesses of climate obsession.
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Liz Truss is poised to ban solar projects from most farms in England in a move that will dismay climate change campaigners and some Tory backbenchers, says Yahoo News.

The prime minister has long been opposed to solar farms on agricultural land, condemning them as “a blight on the landscape” when she was environment secretary in 2014.

And during the Tory leadership campaign this summer, she said she wanted to see farmers producing food with crops and livestock, “not filling fields with paraphernalia like solar farms”.

A Plague Of Green Elephants Is Stampeding Across Australia

Adelaide desalination plant [image credit: Acciona]

Monuments to green stupidity on the rampage.
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Legend says that if you displeased the King of Siam, he would give you a white elephant, writes Viv Forbes (via Climate Change Dispatch).

These rare and protected elephants were incredibly expensive to keep.

So a “White Elephant” came to mean a possession that is useless, troublesome, expensive to maintain, and difficult to dispose of – like a Sacred Cow, but much bigger.

Today, the deluded rulers of the Western world are gifting us and future generations with plagues of Green Elephants – useless, expensive, protected green rubbish.

‘We are not ready’: Divisions deepen over rush to finalise deep sea mining rules

Seabed mining

The ‘energy transition’ is supposed to replace thousands of coal-fired power stations and over a hundred million barrels of oil per year, amongst other fuels like gas and wood, in the name of an invented ‘climate crisis’. Not going to happen on the scale required, even if this new supply of minerals were to become available – with the aid of fossil fuel powered machinery. All that mining will, or would be, waste product one day.
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A growing number of countries are demanding more time to decide on rules that would allow companies to mine the deep seabed for minerals needed to manufacture batteries for the energy transition, says Climate Change News.

Last year, the small island state of Nauru, triggered a never-before-used procedure giving the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body which regulates mining activities in international waters, until July 2023 to fast-track deep sea mining exploitation rules.

Countries have discussed mining the bottom of the oceans for years but no commercial extraction has started in international waters. The ultimatum would allow the nascent industry to apply for mining permits as soon as next year.

Green fuels adding almost £10 to the cost of filling up a family car

For how much longer?
[image credit: thecostaricanews.com]

One of the many costs of carbon dioxide paranoia. How long do people want to go on paying, and allowing themselves to be bludgeoned into believing suspect climate theories while struggling to afford to run their own lives?
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Green fuels are adding nearly £10 to the cost of filling up an average family car, according to new analysis that will add more pressure on the Government to scrap their use, says the Daily Telegraph.

Petrol and diesel contain between five and 10 per cent biofuels, made mostly from wheat, maize and used cooking oil, the price of which has shot up since the war in Ukraine, even more than the cost of regular fuel.

As part of the Government’s net zero drive, E10 petrol was made the standard last summer, while B7 diesel was introduced in 2019.

World’s biggest carbon removal machine ‘freezes over’ in Iceland

Priceless!
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Enormous device to halt global warming brought to heel by unusually cold weather, reports The Independent.

Alternative source: World’s Largest Carbon Removal Facility Designed to Fight Global Warming Suffers Major Setback After Arctic Blast Freezes Machinery.

Watch: Tesla Owner Told Repairs Will Cost 20,000 Euros. He Chose Dynamite

Tesla plant [image credit: Steve Jurvetson @ Wikipedia]

Sometimes you’ve just had enough…
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Automobile giant Tesla leads the EV sector with innovations and new technology, says NDTV.

But that was not enough to stop a disgruntled customer from blowing up his Tesla car using 30 kg of dynamite.

Jaala, an idyllic and ice-covered village in south Finland’s Kymenlaakso region with just a few thousand people, witnessed a bizarre incident as the owner of a 2013 Tesla Model S set his car up for an explosion.

The crew of a YouTube channel – Pommijatkat – shot the entire episode that premiered on Sunday with the help of a few volunteers.

Full report here.

2020: The year of climate craziness

Climate laws have been passed by carbon dioxide fearing governments that won’t be in office when the due dates arrive. What happens if evidence-free climate superstition is still rampant when these legal requirements are not met?
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BEFORE it even began, 2020 was already marked to be a year of climate hysteria, says The Conservative Woman.

It was the UK’s turn to host the annual UN climate meeting, which was scheduled to take place in Glasgow earlier this month.

Hence, the first eighteen months of Boris Johnson’s premiership saw the erstwhile ‘libertarian’ attempting to establish himself as a global pioneer of green policymaking: banning all that moves ahead of the conference, like some kind of overweight peroxide Ed Miliband eco-virtue-signalling on ‘our’ behalf.

The arrival of Covid-19 caused the meeting to be postponed, but this has not dented the government’s green ambitions to make the UK’s economic suicide the first in what they hope will be a global pact.

About those ‘Green Energy’ unicorns… – The GWPF

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

The Manhattan Institute reckons: ‘By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.’

Before then, all that future waste has to be manufactured, largely from mined materials. Is the world ready for this?
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You think those baby unicorns grow on trees? Better think again, says Michael Walsh @ The Pipeline.

“Green” energy, in fact, comes with a very high price tag as this report from the Manhattan Institute makes clear.

As policymakers have shifted focus from pandemic challenges to economic recovery, infrastructure plans are once more being actively discussed, including those relating to energy.

Planet Of The Greens

Standard green response to criticism: ‘Shoot the messenger!’ They like to travel around the world telling people it’s a bad idea to travel around so much, due to some flaky climate theory.
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Attempts by eco-activists to censor and shut down Planet of the Humans reveals the green movement’s authoritarian nature that turns most aggressively on its own apostates.

Jeff Gibbs’ and Michael Moore’s new film, Planet of the Humans has been watched more than eight million times, says The GWPF.

It has cast doubt on the green movement’s claims to be concerned with the environment and questions the motivations and integrity of its leaders and backers.

In reply, environmental activists have attacked Moore and Gibbs, and called for their film to be censored.

EU Green Deal Should Be Canceled Because of Coronavirus, Czech PM Says

Not much chance of that in the absurdly climate-obsessed EU, but maybe a popular view in his home country given the massive costs and lack of worthwhile benefits of said ‘deal’.

Will COVID-19 be a reason to accelerate or slow Europe’s energy transition? The battle lines are already being drawn, says green Tech Media.

The Czech Republic’s prime minister, Andrej Babiš, has said the European Union should abandon its Green Deal and focus on fighting the spread of the coronavirus in an early sign of policy battles ahead.

Announced in December, Europe’s Green New Deal seeks to invest €1 trillion ($1.1 trillion) on the road to making the EU economy net-zero carbon by 2050.

Fertiliser could be used to power ocean-going ships

Bulk carrier

Here comes the latest ‘green’ pipedream that won’t work, as the report almost admits. Another thin excuse to bang the tedious climate change propaganda drum.

Ocean-going ships could be powered by ammonia within the decade as the shipping industry takes action to curb carbon emissions, says BBC News.

The chemical – the key ingredient of fertilisers – can be burned in ships’ engines in place of polluting diesel.

The industry hopes ammonia will help it tackle climate change, because it burns without CO2 emissions.

The creation of the ammonia itself creates substantial CO2, but a report says technology can solve this problem.

Biofuels are meant to clean up flying’s carbon crisis – they won’t

Image credit: United Airlines

More wreck-o than eco? Here we find that ‘biodiesel from food crops emits an average of 1.8 times as much CO2 as fossil fuels which increases to three times more in case of biodiesel from palm oil.’ Looks like another non-solution to the claimed problem.

The UK’s aviation industry is touting biofuels as a way to make plane transport greener. But some biofuels can end up doing more harm than good, says Wired.

In the next 30 years, the number of flights is expected to increase by 70 per cent.

Unless things change, by 2050 the aviation industry will have used up more than a quarter of all the carbon dioxide we can safely emit while keeping global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But the aviation industry says it has a way out.

The Western Link: A new failure highlights the overbuild of Scottish Wind and raises new questions

[image credit: beforeitsnews.com]

In short, Scottish wind power often produces too much for the electricity system to handle, yet more is planned. Meanwhile the super-expensive Western Link is failing miserably to draw off the excess power. Matt Ridley is trying to blow the whistle on this fiasco in the House of Lords, with some success.

Last weekend the Italian cable manufacturing company, Prysmian, released a statement announcing to the markets that the Western Link High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) interconnector between Hunterston and Deeside had failed again, on the 10th of January, says the Renewable Energy Foundation.

This grid link, which is a joint venture between Scottish Power Transmission (SPT) and National Grid (NG), employs cables manufactured by Prysmian.

This £1 billion project has a peak transit capacity of 2.25 GW and was designed solely to facilitate the export of Scottish wind power to the English and Welsh markets.

In doing so it was expected to reduce constraint payments to wind power, payments which amount to £630m since 2010, with a record £130 million in 2019 alone.

The project was expected to come online at the end of 2015 but in fact did not become fully operational until late 2018 and has been plagued with faults ever since.

Burning trees for heating won’t help with climate change: UK think tank

Most things the UK CCC suggests are likely to be a bad idea, but that’s another story. If this is all they can think of, they’re scraping the barrel. How long does the list of experts trashing tree burning policies have to get before the government takes any notice?

A suggestion by the UK Committee on Climate Change to burn more wood and plant replacement trees as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels has drawn criticism from think tank Chatham House (reports OilPrice.com), which says this is hardly the best approach to reducing emissions.

“Expanding forest cover is undoubtedly a good thing, if you’re leaving them standing,” energy expert Duncan Brack told the Daily Telegraph.

The UK blackout of 9 August 2019 is unlikely to be the last one

This GWPF report paints an uncomfortable picture of increasing instability in the UK electricity supply system, as ever more renewables are injected into it while older but more predictable thermal power plants are retired. The author says bluntly that until recently customers ‘could rely on the system. That is not the case today.’ Come the power cut, you’re on your own.

It has been widely claimed that Distributed (or embedded) Generation, such as solar and wind connected to the low voltage distribution network, reinforces electricity system stability.

The final reports into the widespread blackout of the 9th of August last year by the UK electricity regulator, Ofgem, and the British government’s Energy Emergency Executive Committee, E3C show that this is not the case.

Distributed Generation is now under the spotlight as a leading cause of the severity of the 9 August blackout, and as a hazard increasing future risks to security of supply.

California dreaming of an energy storage miracle

Solar power complex in California [USA.Gov – BLM – BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT]

This public statement looks long on ambition but short on realistic and/or affordable possibilities. They openly admit that existing ‘green’ tech won’t cut the mustard on its own, as everyone knew – or should have known – all along. In other words their legislated targets can’t be met, as things stand. The same problems will exist everywhere else that tries to enforce similar energy policies in pursuit of a ‘carbon-free’ mirage.

The California Energy Commission (CEC) has released a solicitation (GFO-19-305) to fund innovative, non-Li-ion energy storage research projects, including green electrolytic hydrogen systems, reports Green Car Congress.

The Commission notes that the state’s statutory requirements (SB-350, SB-100) for low-GHG electricity cannot be met with currently fielded technologies alone, because those technologies do not have the energy density, daily cycle capability, longevity, safety, and price to be viable for the diverse set of applications that will be needed in the State.