The boss of British Gas owner Centrica has warned Britain “runs a real risk” by focusing too much on wind power instead of drawing on a mix of sources. The Telegraph has more.
Chris O’Shea pointed to figures showing the U.K.’s windfarms used only 15% of their power generating capacity on average last week.
Britain has around 30GW of installed wind generation capacity, but it typically generated only 4.41GW of electricity during the period.
Mr. O’Shea wrote on LinkedIn: “Whilst wind power is great, we run a real risk if we focus too much on new wind as we look to decarbonise the energy system of the future.
“A Net Zero future requires a range of technologies, and a good balance.”
The comments come a week after Labour launched its state-owned Great British Energy comapny – its flagship project aimed at achieving lower bills.
The new state-owned enterprise plans to controversially roll-out huge numbers of new wind turbines as part of efforts to decarbonise the grid.
Worth reading in full.
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Come on, Mr O’Shea. I love your directness, and your moustache, but please finish the job and say it: Net Zero and Decarbonising the Energy System are both dangerous pieces of nonsense dreamt up in the minds of people who don’t understand the difference between a wall socket and a power station and those who want us all (apart from they themselves) to be cold and hungry and stuck at home.
Worth reading in full? This is the only bit you didn’t quote verbatim:
I’d take issue with the Tellygraf’s wording though: I hope the UK’s windfarms didn’t use 15pc of their power generating capacity. I think the author meant they only generated 15% of their rated capacity.
Journos on the DT are quite capable of getting such simple issues wrong. They and almost all journos snd political shave insufficient understanding of anything.
They confuse stated capacity with actual output snd wealth with income.
“Wind Power is great” ????—— Relative to what? ——-And what constitutes “great”? —–When it comes to electricity generation wind certainly is NOT great. It is part time energy that cannot provide on base load, and for every unit of electricity it produces you need exactly the same amount being created as backup, which is causing us to pay for 2 sources of power when one would suffice——— So how have we got to this position where wind is seen as the answer to our electricity needs and our saviour from ? Because damage to the environment? Despite trillions spent on so called renewables which also includes solar hydro and biofuels they still only provide 3% of the worlds electricity. This is NOT “great”.
——-Only false accounting would lead anyone to claim wind is “great”. Only by huge subsidy to favoured technologies like wind while penalising unfavoured technologies like coal and gas with huge regulatory costs can wind be classed as great. Which ofcourse is therefore a lie. It is interference in the market for political purposes that attempts to deceive the public. The sector that receives by far the largest subsidy actually produces the least amount of electricity, and that electricity cannot provide on demand electricity as coal gas and Nuclear does. — -NOT GREAT. —–Germany, once the economic powerhouse of Europe has severely damaged its industrial base because of this absurd green dogma and it has the highest electricity prices as a result. —–You think UK Politicians would learn from that mistake. On the contrary they are determined to repeat it, which means it is not a mistake at all. It is deliberate. All part of the Sustainable Development and Social Equity goals that our UN lackey politicians are pursuing.
And people talk as though wind turbines themselves just pop out of nowhere. Citing Ian Plimer from one of his older books (wind turbines are much larger now), the construction of a simple, 65m wind turbine requires 100 tonnes of steel and 260 tonnes of concrete, both of which require huge amounts of energy to produce, not to mention the 7 tonne carbon fibre blades, the copper wiring, rare earth element magnets and light metal components. To become a wind turbine, these substances require mining, crushing, transport, melting, further transport, processing, assembly, transport to required location and erection. Estimates show that a wind turbine requires 15 to 20 years of operation solely to recover these energy outlays!
And once the turbine reaches the end of its days (after around 10 to 15 years?), it stands there above its huge block of concrete dug into the ground. Then what? Who will dig everything back out and bring the land back to its original, possibly arable, condition?
Not really. Wind power is not “great” – it makes no sense. And we’re not “running a real risk”, we are heading into the certainty of power cuts or ever greater reliance on foreign juice if we ditch gas. The only way they will be able to provide enough juice is to EXPAND gas and/or nuclear and/or “biomass” as we will need MORE juice with all these stupid “EVs” and what are we going to do when the wind is not blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Our temporary storage capacity is TINY and quite often windmills are producing very little and we’re buying 10-20% from France, Norway et al. O’Shea knows this, he just doesn’t want to say to so because he doesn’t want to lose his job.
I wish one of these people who knows better would finally stick their head above the parapets.
So far it has been mainly retired people and people who have already been made outcasts or are too big to fail.
““Whilst wind power is great, we run a real risk if we focus too much on new wind…”
Oxymoron. If it were great, there would be no risk.
We ran no risk focusing almost entirely on coal and gas with some nuclear. This was great. Abundant, low cost, reliable electricity.
Risk was introduced with the introduction of wind and elimination of coal.
Eliminate the risk and restore what worked… at low cost.
Things stopped being great in 2008 when we got Miliband’s “Climate Change Act”. Then we stuck the knife in and twisted it with the Net Zero Amendment in 2019. People need to understand that this is our own governments pursuing UN/WEF Sustainable Development agenda’s that comply with the idea that the “lifestyles of the wealthy western middle classes is too high” and must be reduced. To do that you remove the fossil fuels that brought that prosperity and fob us off with expensive unreliable wind and sun and convince us all this is “saving the planet” by plying us with junk science and speculative climate models in lieu of any empirical evidence for their phony climate crisis.
Wind is about 3.8 GW today, and solar at 24 or so at noon on the best day of the year so far is nothing useful. We also are getting about 10GW from France (basically nuclear). I agree with the Gas man, anything other than lots of sources will fail very badly, and Gas is still about 38%. There could be trouble this evening if there is a good TV program on (unlikely!).
There is nothing GREAT about Wind Power, it is one vast and useless vanity project, destined to fail miserably, and they look awful, kill masses of birds and bats, and destroy landscapes.
If they actually painted the things green, they could then declare them to be green, that’s the only way they ever could be.