Though many Western countries eschewed lockdowns during the Omicron wave, a few did reintroduce major restrictions. One of these was the Netherlands.
Beginning on December 18th, ‘non-essential’ shops, bars, restaurants, gyms, museums and other public venues were shuttered. No more than two guests were allowed in people’s homes, rising to four over the Christmas period. Sports matches had to be played without spectators. And all the country’s schools were closed.
Upon announcing the measures, Prime Minister Mark Rutte said, “I stand here tonight in a sombre mood … the Netherlands will go back into lockdown from tomorrow.”
Measures were finally eased on January 26th – approximately five weeks later. What does the Netherlands have to show for these five weeks of restrictions? Absolutely nothing, as the chart below indicates:
The red shaded area shows the period for which restrictions were in place. As you can see, they had precisely zero effect on the case trajectory, which began climbing during lockdown, and then continued climbing once lockdown ended. In fact, infections didn’t peak until February 12th – another two and a half weeks later.
The Netherlands is one of the world’s most advanced countries, boasting the eighth highest score on the Human Development Index. If it can’t get a lockdown to work – after double-vaccinating 70% of the population – what chance is there for the rest of us?
It’s worth comparing what happened in the Netherlands to the course of events here in Britain – where, commendably, Boris refused to lock down (see below).
The overall shape of the curve is exactly the same as in the Netherlands. In fact, reported infections per million people peaked at a much lower level here than they did over there – 2,600 compared to 7,300.
This demonstrates, once again, that seeing infections decline shortly after a lockdown does not prove lockdown is what caused the decline. Infections have repeatedly declined in the absence of major restrictions, and sometimes without any discernible change in aggregate behaviour.
Unfortunately for the pro-lockdown scientists, the virus simply doesn’t behave in the manner their models suggest. This was evident as early as April of 2020, when Sweden’s first wave began to retreat. Yet almost two years later, they still haven’t learned their lesson.
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It’s also important to keep in mind that this is what Miliband refers to as private investment: So-called private companies building windfarms et al in order to qualify for a revenue guaranteed by the state. These so-called investments carry exactly zero financial risk for the so-called investors. They just need to build windmills to reap guaranteed profits, regardless if there’s any market demand for the so-called product. That’s little more than large-scale robbery of the taxpaying population.
It’s central planning, is what it is.
The government has decided in advance what you will pay for electricity.
The only question is whether you pay it all directly to the electricity company or some of it to the electricity company and some in taxes. Depends on the day.
Blatant money-laundering.
Dale Vince is awarded government contracts and Dale Vince rewards the Labour Party with millions in donations. It couldn’t be more blatant.
It actually isn’t, at least not insofar my understanding for the process goes. These contracts are auctioned off to eligible suppliers. The government decides on a number of auction parameters, the most important being the total budget available for CfDs and the maximum strike price it’s willing to pay. Eligible suppliers than make a sealed bid stating the lowest strike price they’re willing to work with and the capacity they can provide. Bids are then accepted on a cheapest-first basis until either the desired capacity or the budget limit have been reached (simplification).
This means it’s basically the suppliers of energy from so-called renewables who decide how much money they want to earn during the 15-year period the contract runs for and the government accepts this on behalf of the people supposed to pay for it or doesn’t. To make these procedure even more corrupted (from a market perspective), it’s really the government making a bid, namely, the maximum strike price, which suppliers may or may not accept and if they don’t, the government will have to make a higher bid, or, simplified, the maximum strike price the government will offer is really decide by a cartel of renewables operators beforehand.
A famous statement about software design (C.A.R Hoare) is There are two ways to construct a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The CfD procedure is an example of the latter kind of design. It’s meant to be so complicated that people have difficulties understanding how exactly they’re being ripped off.
Take away the subsidies and the whole sector collapses.
This does not imply there is no utility for some forms of “Renewables”
Just not at scale, and not as primary energy sources.
Solar PV’s on a house rooftop can provide a reasonable amount of electricity, especially in combination with battery storage – but not at large scale.
I’m not so sure about that. The crucial question is Is such an installation net-positive?, does it generate more usable energy during its projected lifetime than was necessary to build it and I don’t think so. If this was otherwise, subsidies wouldn’t be needed as the operation would be commercially viable on its own (instead of just being politically desired).
Basically no one would ever build a turbine if there was no subsidy. They build them to farm the subsidy. ——-NO SUBSIDY=NO WIND FARM
I would have seriously considered putting solar panels on my new house but the roof aspect prevented a worthwhile run. The protected mature trees shade the house 6 months of the year – at least enough to render the panels pretty ineffective – & while battery storage is a thing – the payback was silly years. I live in East Yorkshire. The sums just didn’t add up. Geography/location.
The idea behind this is obviously that the subsidies can’t be taken away once the sector is sufficiently entrenched because it’s collapse would lead to a collapse of the UK electricity system.
“revenue guaranteed by the state”——In other words the people via their energy bills.
The rip-off behind this is more thorough: What’s really happening here (with all the epicycles used for obfuscation removed) is that the state buys electricity from these people at fixed prices set such that it’s normally a lot higher than this electricity could fetch in the energy market using our money. The state then sells this electricity back to us at market prices or disposes of it using more taxpayer money in case it presently cannot be used for anything¹. In the unlikely case that market prices for electricity are even higher than the price the state paid for it, it reaps a profit here, ie, forces people to pay yet more for the electricity they already paid for and takes the difference to finance some other ‘worthy task.’
¹ Strongly blowing winds don’t necessarily correlate with high demand for electricity and electricity beyond demand cannot just be fed into the grid. It needs to destroyed instead (so to say) which costs money. Principally, it doesn’t make any sense to build wind parks for as long as a storage technology capable of storing electricity during period of high generation and low demand to use it later during periods of low generation doesn’t exist. Which it doesn’t. But since windmill technology exists and can be monetized, they get built nevertheless.
It’s also the reason why tw*ts like Dale Vince are as rich as they are. His reported wealth is, iirc, £120m (though he had to give £40m to the ex Mrs. Vince). Virtually all of this money he received in subsidies, I.e. from us, gratefully funding Labour in return. Scam? You bet!
Yep – literally a subsidy ‘farmer’
I have just posted similar before reading your post. Sorry.
No worries. A point that hits is a point worth repeating.
I reckon if you conducted a survey a lot of people would think that windmill generated electricity is free and the reason we have high energy bills is because of Putin.
Article somewhat spoiled by the obligatory:
Prices rose again in 2022 to £177/MWh as the energy crisis continued with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine before falling back somewhat to £89/MWh in 2023. Prices have fallen further in 2024 to £67/MWh even though prices have been somewhat elevated in the latter part of the year.
If this were in fact the only reason for the price hike, why would it fall back unless there was a cessation of hostilities, which did not happen.
Agree 100%
Worse still, this logical hopscotch takes away responsibility from government for its actions and puts the blame elsewhere, by implying there were no other options or choices on the table.
This happens often.
For example in covid, all the disastrous economic consequences were always put down to “the virus” or the “pandemic”, never to the heavy handed, insane policies that actually caused the problems. “The virus” didn’t close businesses, the government did. “The virus” didn’t force children to stay at home and subject them to online schooling, the government did.
It’s not: the virus came and many businesses went belly up.
It’s: the virus came, faced with a range of options the government chose to mandate that everyone stay at home and businesses close, many businesses went belly up.
But people just adopt this thinking, repeat these erroneous conclusions and with a simple rhetorical sleight of hand the government is once again off the hook for it’s catastrophic actions.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Gas prices rose significantly in 2021. They spiked further as Putin invaded Ukraine and sanctions were imposed. This caused a market dislocation, reducing gas supply to Europe. That dislocation has been mitigated by more LNG imports. It took a while to build the facilities to accept those imports.
So how do all these costs compare with reliable electricity production via coal, gas or nuclear power?
Is it possible to say that the production of one, two or some number of gas powered plants, for example, would be cheaper than all the renewables listed here, including or excluding building costs?
Bearing in mind that the erection of wind farms implies a large-scale change to the surrounding countryside, destroying habitats and wildlife, requiring transmission lines and servicing roads, all despoiling scenic areas while affecting locals with infra-sound and low frequency noise and property devaluation, can one say that they are a complete waste of money or do they actually serve a purpose?
Not forgetting land lost from food production.
There are indeed many arguments against wind farms. The construction of a simple, 65m wind turbine – I do not have information for today’s sizes which are much larger – requires 100 tonnes of steel and 260 tonnes of concrete for the base on land; I have no idea of the requirements to stabilize marine turbines. Huge amounts of energy are required to produce the steel and concrete, not to mention the 7 tonne carbon fibre blades, the copper wiring, rare earth element magnets and light metal components. These substances all require mining, crushing, transport, melting, processing, assembly, further transport and erection. Estimates show that a wind turbine requires 15 to 20 years of operation solely to recover these energy outlays!
Furthermore, a January 2020 FOI request revealed that 13.9 million trees had been felled in Scotland alone to make way for wind farms – is that being environmentally friendly? The wind is robbed of its energy, and local wind speeds, temperature and rainfall change. Winds bring moist air inland, dilute and clear air pollution, and change air temperature. The detrimental effect of wind turbines on bird and bat life is well known; less well known is their effect on insect migration.
You last point is one I often think about but is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Given we all know energy cannot be created or destroyed as such, only converted from one type to another, removing gigawatts of electrical energy from the wind MUST have an effect on the surrounding landscape, it can’t not…
There ought to be a similar issue for heat pumps: As far as I know, these work by making source environment colder in order to make a target environment warmer. Are millions of devices making outside temperatures colder in winter for heating purposes really a good idea? And one that’s likely to work, for that matter?
And even if it does – a housing estate with 150 heat pumps, all removing heat from the locale, will surely lower the local temperature baseline… a new ice age!! (A local ice-age, for local people!)
Try growing happy plants near one.
I meant that if is really quite difficult to find plants that thrive in cold air blasts (not impossible) but difficult & at times dispiriting.
The reference price is largely set by gas. SO you could day average gas-fired electricity cost about £67/MWh in 2024. And that includes a carbon tax. Higher now at around £95/MWh with elevated gas prices.
£67 = 6.7p [per kWh]
We are all paying well over 20p/kWh
Someone is trousering an increasingly large amount of money at our expense, with the connivance of the ridiculous structures put in place by Ofgem
As energy generation has got more fractured and complex, it has got A LOT more expensive to consuners. And given that gas is still used to generate about two thirds of our electricty, as well as being used to heat most homes, we have spent all this extra money without getting any greener!
That, by all reckoning, is a scam
My simple question is, if all wind and solar farms were closed down, would they be missed energy-wise? On dark, windless days or nights, the answer is obviously not.
If a wind turbine requires 15 to 20 years of operation solely to recover the energy cost of its manufacture and the life of a wind turbine is around 15 to 20 years, just what is the point of building the things? (My data are around 10 years old but still …)
Now let us assume the sun is shining and the wind is blowing (but not too strong, of course), how many gas or nuclear power stations would be needed to replace all this green stuff? One, two, a half? That is what I would really like to know.
This level of complexity makes it almost impossible for the bloke on the Clapham Omnibus understand any of this. And I’m afraid I’m one of them…(althought I’m not a bloke ;-)) No wonder we are having the wool well and truly pulled over our eyes. I just have that mysterious feeling that I’m being conned by Milliband et al.
The simple version is that so-called renewables generate very expensive electricity and can only exist as economically viable operations because the government covers their losses from money raised via taxation.
We pay taxes the government uses to buy expensive electricity at high prices which is then fed into the grid and sold to us, despite we already paid for it.
Not just paid for by money raised from taxation – it’s mainly paid for through charges levied via our electricity bills
Your Tax Billions Fund Climate Scam
And remember the fundamental truth, there is no climate crisis. CO2 has never been proven to have any significant affect on earth’s climate. Climate change is a highly contested theory. Follow the money.
You would almost think that our Victorian ancestors were onto something when they abandoned 4th century technology and embraced coal power.
I think we have probably reached our Pollack Factor and so every extra windmill connected to the grid will increase the level of constraint payments. And as the percentage of unreliable energy supplying the grid increases, the inertial generation level decreases and the risk of collapse increases.
Apart for the crazy stupidity of the government’s arrangements for wind farms, the claims that biomass plants are ecological or less carbon emitting are false. By cutting down trees and converting them to biomass pellets means we lose the benefit of the CO2 they consume and the claimed replanting, if it ever happens, takes years for trees to grow to the size of those cut down. And the output of CO2 and pollutants is not really offset at all, so where is the benefit of it and why are our taxes being used to subsidize it.