Did Steve Holliday, Chief Executive of the National Grid, let the cat out of the bag or deliberately set it amongst the pigeons when he said, on Radio 4 last week, that our National Grid is going to have start being “smarter” about who gets electricity and who doesn’t? Delingpole reckons he’s an imbecile, and maybe he is. I didn’t hear the actual Radio 4 interview, so do not now know if he was blurting out an embarrassed admission or proud proclamation of inanity, or on the other hand offering a more careful and considered warning, thus to alert politicians to the consequences of their excessive policy greenness of recent years. Whatever the old school newspapers (that story, by the way, says that Delingpole is right) make of this story, it is already going walkabout in the new media.
Slowly, the counter-attack against global greenery is taking shape. First it was Climategate, which is now, finally, finding its way inside the heads of the kind of people who rule the world. The scientific excuses for greenery are collapsing, not just in the heads of skeptics, but in the heads of the kind of idiot politicians who originally accepted these excuses without bothering to scrutinise them. Now the consequences of greenery are becoming clearer. Blackouts. Nothing says “failed politicians” like power cuts.
For Britain, a big moment will arrive when it is finally, truly accepted, by enough British people to make this acceptance stick, that these blackouts are being imposed upon us by, and by means of, the European Union, and that our Prime Minister is not our Prime Minister, any more than the District Commissioner of your province in India was your District Commissioner. Today, the news is, yet again, that David Cameron is going native. I’ll believe this when it starts having consequences, in the form of Britain doing things that the EU forbids, and when they threaten to chuck us out, and when Cameron says: go on then, I dare you. I wouldn’t put this past him. He seems to be the kind of leader who follows his followers.
But, more generally, I am not angry about this tendency for the world more and more to be ruled as a single entity by the kind of people who now rule it. Telephones and atom bombs have seen to that. The former technology has long meant that they can talk to each other rationally, and the latter one has for more than half a century meant that they must. These people are now, more and more, all on the same side. I just wish they were ruling the world rather better than they actually actually are now ruling it.
In the matter of greenery, the world’s rulers have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate a huge folly, and personally I am very grateful to the probably imbecilic Steve Holliday for having made this fact that little bit clearer.
I think a more mundane mechanism is at work. The planning system empowers the government to decide if, and where, powerstations are built. If they approve one. they get NIMBYrage now. If they approve a huge tranche of fossil powerstations, the greens get mad. If they approve a huge tranche of nuclear powerstations, the, err, greens get mad. And that happens today.
But if they handwave the growing gap in capacity by subsidising wind and solar, the crunch isn’t going to come for another 10 years. A parliament lasts 5 years. So who cares?
This certainly isn’t a global problem. France (nuclear) and Germany (coal) have taken very different approaches.
“smarter” as in the “smart grid” idea so beloved by the Obama Administration and General Electric (the normal alliance of the far left and corrupt, rent seeking, business people).
It is interesting – “Nudge” (Cas Susteen’s totalitarianism by the installment plan regulation idea).
High speed GOVERNMENT train projects (carving up private property in the Chiltens at the expense of the taxpayers).
And now the “smart grid”.
Whether it is a “Conservative” government in Britain or the radicals in the United States – some of the same (terrible) policies get pushed.
It is almost as if there is an international elite (who go to high status universities and meet at conferences) who get sold on many (although not all) of the same policies.
Smart grid is absolutely vital not so much to use electricity better as to connect up very variable sources such as wind and solar. Basically the National Grid was designed to distribute electricity from systems that delivered electricity in a predicable, controllable way. It works fine for fossils and nuclear. It doesn’t for wind for obvious reasons.
That’s just another of the things the windy millers didn’t tell you… large scale adoption of wind power means replacing the grid at enormous cost.
If you are building new power stations, you should be building gas. Much less polluting than coal. One of the interesting stories of the last five years is dramatic improvement in extraction technology of gas from all kinds of infeasible places. Part of this is a response to a realisation in the industry that Vladimir Putin was (shall we say) an unreliable person to do business with.
And you should be thinking about nuclear, too. Reactor design is way better than even a few years ago there, too
The other technological change is that smaller scale generation becomes more feasible due to better technology, so if you cannot rely on the grid, you do it yourself. Interesting to see if the greens try to stop this.
This sort of stuff is happening a lot in developing countries already, of course.
The NIMBY rage they get when they start planting bird mincers across the landscape doesn’t seem to deter them.
” Reactor design is way better than even a few years ago there, too”
A recent article in an Ecuadorian newspaper made the following claims, arguing that nuclear power was not an option for the country:
1) The building of reactors is inordinately costly because, among other reasons, there is no standardisation. “Every reactor in the world is built to a different design”.
2) At the heart of every reactor is a piece of kit that is manufactured by only one company in the world, a Japanese outfit, that makes one a year.
Plus, of course, the usual stuff about nuclear waste being hard to get rid of.
Is there any truth in the above two numbered assertions?
Holliday is merely saying ‘now that you’re bending over, you’d better brace yourself’. I’ll believe Britain’s politicians have ‘failed’ when the people start paying attention and, like you say, prove that there are actual consequences. Has Cameron really demonstrated a serious willingness to do more than talk? I remain unconvinced.
I’m inclined to agree with mdc. The wheels are slowly grinding to a halt, which is what the greens really want anyway. Let’s see how many of the rest really understand where Britain’s going.
“1) The building of reactors is inordinately costly because, among other reasons, there is no standardisation. “Every reactor in the world is built to a different design”.
2) At the heart of every reactor is a piece of kit that is manufactured by only one company in the world, a Japanese outfit, that makes one a year.”
1. No. Nuclear reactors are built to common designs. Just wiki ‘CANDU’, ‘European Pressurised Reactor’ or ‘AP1000’. I don’t imagine any complete site would have identical placement, but that’s no different to any fossil station.
2. Any idea what it is? Otherwise it’s difficult to say – but I’m not sure why production wouldn’t simply grow with demand. Nothing in nuclear plants is inherently bottlenecked by production capacity.
Regardless of why, costs for nuclear plants are well known (at least, in present, possibly excessive, regulator environment). They are 10-20% more expensive than fossil fuel stations if you don’t believe in global warming. If you do believe in AGW, they’re cheaper when you count the carbon externality.
Anything Caneron says is garbage. He is the EU’s creature and will peddle any lie to try and fool people that he is a euro-sceptic. He is a leftist eco-freak and EU stooge.
Please tell me the British are going to start lynching greeny politicians soon. Life should not be an ongoing Monty Python sketch.
I get the feeling that there is actually plenty to go around, electricity, food, services, but that shortages are the means of control.
I read the US sits on a great wealth of oil that the controllers pretend they cannot use for environmental reasons but the non-use of which has more to do with control and extortion.
The reasonably responsible west is being shut down while the non-productive world is being encouraged to go wild with resources and production.
If state greed and patronage is consuming about half the production/wealth in the west (far more elsewhere) then that is where the shutdowns should logically occur?
It is the state and other controlling apparatus gone mad that is the problem.
Brian, I was reminded of your recent post about how the British trade unions alienated the public. It looks to me as though the green movement is doing something very similar, and will provoke just as big a backlash.
I also think that when it happens it will happen very suddenly. Politicians tend to be very risk averse because taking a strong stand on any issue might end up offending more voters than it pleases. There is the always the risk of misjudging the state of public opinion, or of accidentally giving your opponents a killer soundbite. So with a controversial and uncertain issue like global warming most politicians will stick to whatever they perceive as being the conventional wisdom, because that’s the safest option.
But if public opinion continues to turn against that position it will cease to be the safest option. Firstly one or two of the shrewder operators will start to shift their positions. Then when they are seen to benefit the rest of the political herd will suddenly stampede. Almost overnight the greens will find themselves out in the cold, wondering what the hell just happened.
There’s actually two different meanings for ‘smart grid’.
One is the rational approach taken by the filthy polluting profiteers of the energy companies, which seeks to maximize the number of satisfied customers while recognizing that the power supply and grid are limited and inflexible.
This is the version that’s practiced in many parts of the US, where there has been ‘interruptible’ service for decades. For things that you don’t care about continuity of supply, or exactly when you use the energy during the day, there are multiple overlapping systems of advantagous rates and interruptible technology. By rational economic motivators, customers are persuaded to provide some of the flexibility that the supply and the grid lack. And all completely voluntary.
And then there’s the other version, where the happy green acolytes of Gaia propose to make all the rest of us model our behaviours to the sort of energy supply system that they feel we should have. If the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, then you’ll have to do without. And they get to decide who ‘deserves’ to have what limited energy they have available to parcel out. No prizes for guessing how that will turn out.
The first seeks to maximize the supply to consumers. The second seeks to change the consumers to match the supply. I’ll take door # 1, Alex. Large parts of the developed world will become only semi-habitable if the supply of electricity becomes dependent on the sun and the wind.
llater,
llamas
At the heart of every reactor is a piece of kit that is manufactured by only one company in the world, a Japanese outfit, that makes one a year.
I keep seeing that on the web. It’s not true. There are four such forges: One in Japan, two in China, and one in Russia. There is one being built in the UK and one under construction in India.
And they’re not 100% necessary to build a nuclear plant. You can forge a reactor vessel in pieces and weld them together. It’s jus that plant operators would rather have the single-piece vessel because welds need to be inspected periodically for the life of the plant.
See here.
It strikes me that NIMBY rage works in two ways. Currently the Greens make the running by protesting against, BUT FAILING to stop, conventional power generation.
I say let them get into DRAX or SELBY or any of the others and let them shut them down. Then tell people why they have no electricity. After that we’ll see what mass protests can do. The mob won’t be supporting the Greens.
This is not a claim of any sort of moral superiority, just noting a difference. Americans tend to react more strongly and more quickly when the government mucks about with them, than Europeans in general and Brits in particular. To be honest, many of us are operating on the assumption that the English of Runnymede are long gone.
When the story broke about the deliberate policy of rolling blackouts and power rationed only to the politically connected; I figured that the odds were that the average Brit would do whatever the modern equivalent of tugging his forelock is, and accept being reduced by his “betters” into Second World status, if not Third.
Now, I am not so sure. Now I grant that this is the Daily Mail. Sober and staid is not their style, sensationalism is. Still, if the number of those attempting a citizens arrest on a Judge is anywhere near accurate; y’all may have the beginning of a movement that is willing to actively confront the trappings of the State directly.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1364091/Council-tax-protesters-storm-courtroom-arrest-judge.html
Granting, once again, that the commenters are Daily Mail readers and the sample is unscientific. But only a relatively small minority of the commenters seemed to object when I looked this morning. The majority cheered them on and more than a few offered to join the next effort. Some of those who objected referred to the protesters as “Hooligans”, a presumed reference to your soccer hooligans. I don’t think that definition holds.
Hooligans do not operate under what appears to be a some form of discipline, plan, and control. They do not place themselves in a position to be arrested deliberately [those who laid down to block the police] as part of a pre-arranged tactic. And it does not seem that they were under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The ability to mobilize “hundreds” for such an enterprise is impressive, and I suspect that this was not an all out effort.
I will be watching with great interest. I will repeat one admonition I have made before to Brit Samizdatistas. The State is going to react rather strongly against these protests, and any protests against blackouts, especially of there are mass casualties as a result of a power shortfall. If y’all are not part of any protests, if it reaches that point I hope you have a plan be ready to leave. If you don’t have such a plan, it might be an idea to develop one. Because anyone who is not tugging their forelock is going to be an Enemy of the State.
Subotai Bahadur
Thanks to both contributors who answered my question. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that the journalist I quoted was following a web hoax. See yous at the Wanky Balls rock festival.
A Smart Grid is something we will get anyway… the grid as it exists is running over capacity from what I have heard. Not to mention which I am quite happy with the idea of energy being a commodity market where any producer, no matter how small, can take their extra to market.
I have no problem with people putting solar panels on their roof and selling the excess. Some day I hope to be able to sell the excess from my basement fusion power generator too 😉
Very interesting and encouraging, Subotai – thanks for the link.
Green is the new black.
(1)
That reads as if Steve Holliday is a type of economic czar, as under a Fascistic or national socialistic regime. Or even full blown communism. So who owns the “National Grid”? Seems to me that its components ought to be privately owned and to have no czar. Vital or not, power distribution is a service, and the service ought to be provided by businesspeople as is food and other vital goods.
(2) It seems that the doors of power might be slammed shut in the faces of the environmentalists. But it hardly follows that they will give up their environmentalism. The resulting tension and eagerness to find a solution should make them more receptive to arguments that government causes environmental destruction through crony capitalism and socialism. The solution should then be obvious to them. Since militarism, a type of communistic protection racket, is often loathed by environmentalists, the solution will be all the more appealing.
I spell “liberal” with the letters a, n, a, r, c, h, i, s, & t.
Good times are ahead.
“large scale adoption of wind power means replacing the grid at enormous cost. ”
AND achieving no benefit for the cost, as the wind is capricious, and in total, produces little energy.
Let me expand a bit on what llamas said, above:
“Smart grid” in the US centers about “load shedding”; the concept that if demand exceeds supply, some unessential electrical loads can be turned off, thereby preventing brown- or black- outs.
I design gear that is sold to Electric Utilities which is placed on customers equipment (usually as a result of some sort of incentive- cheaper rates, one-time bonus programs, etc) that will allow a central location to simply disconnect that load from the grid for a specified period of time. If the overload continues past that time, someone else’s equipment will be disconnected as the first is reconnected. The usual kind of device this is applied to are air conditioners, water heaters and pool pumps. Under this sort of plan, nobody will die of heat exhaustion, the second person in the shower may get a cold one, and the pool will remain dirty for an additional few hours, but… the utility will not have to invest millions in new generation capability that will sit idle for a large part of it’s life.
“At the heart of every reactor is a piece of kit that is manufactured by only one company in the world, a Japanese outfit, that makes one a year.”
Would not surprise me if Westinghouse was a maker, you know that company sold off to the Japanese by one James “I feel bad” Gordon Brown.
Dale the “smartgrid” is not the fluffy economic thing you think it is. It could be – but it is not.
The smartgrid is two things.
A corrupt way for companies like General Electric to make money (the government forces it on people and General Electric profits).
And a way for the government to control people’s lives.
“But I can produce energy and sell it to the grid, and I can …..”
Sorry but you thinking in technological terms – and this is a political matter (what it could be, will not be what it is).
To understand matters first assume that the people in charge are totally evil (I assure you that this is a valid assumption) and then reason from there.
The on going horror in Japan will be used against nuclear power – although the nuclear element is actually a small part of the horror.
The fanatical nature of the Greens can be seen in Australia – where they are trying to close down the coal industry (one of the basic industries of Australia) as well as the uranium mining industy (also one of……).
The Prime Minister of Australia swore (before the election) that there would be no carbon tax – and is now introducing one.
This lady is not a Green – but she does need their support, and she is a Red anyway.
The “mainstream” media (including, of course, my dear friends at the Economist magazine) presented her as a moderate, but she is anything but.
The lady worked at a Marxist organization only a few years ago – and, sorry, the explination that “it was just office work” does not convince me.
The Prime Minister’s reaction to the recent floods in Queensland?
A new tax on the rich (any excuse).
And, of course, the Red/Greens are now using the floods as a reason for the carbon tax also.
Supposedly the coal industry caused the floods – just as it is the reason when there is no rain.
In case anyone is laughing at this point…………
Children in many nations (including Britain, the United States and Australia) are being taught these things.
Only yesterday I watched as a lot of children from local schools were indoctrinated (via play and other activities) in the park where I work – it was an “Eco Day” you see.