On Easter Sunday, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband launched a blistering attack on Nigel Farage, accusing the Reform UK leader of spreading “nonsense and lies” about the UK’s Net Zero policies. Miliband blasted Farage and the Conservatives for linking Net Zero to the collapse of British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant, the last facility in Britain capable of producing virgin steel.
‘Mad Ed‘, as critics call him, branded Farage a reckless opportunist who would “keep Britain locked in dependence on global markets we don’t control”, “forfeit clean energy jobs” and “sell future generations down the river” by ignoring the “climate breakdown”. His pitch? “Cheap, home-grown” renewables to secure UK jobs and prosperity while also helping save the planet from “climate breakdown”.
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No way Moribund would understand any of this. He’s way too thick
People will wake up to it when they are all laid off because the economy is totally uncompetitive.
The only people still working will be civil servants, unfortunately the productive workers whose taxes finance their loafing will all be at home wondering how to avoid getting their houses and cars repossessed, and feeding their cats and dogs to their children.
We are on a cataclysmic journey, mad Ed is the driver, and before too long there’ll be no way back.
It’s worse than that. He’s not thick, he read Maths, Adv Maths, and Physics at A Level before reading PPE at Oxford. So his outpourings are a wilful rejection of facts which he is perfectly capable of understanding if he wishes
I think his problem lies in ego issues; his relationship with a brother who eclipsed him, his failure as Labour leader, and maybe a desire to please his Marxist father? He looks like the boy who would never be picked for any team. Whatever it is, his mental capacity is subsumed to a personal drive which results in him spouting contradictory BS almost all of the time, which makes him look increasingly stupid – and still he doesn’t seem to mind. This is to be encouraged. One day he will blow up and have to be sectioned/moved to the Department of Work and Pensions
At Least “He’s Twying” W-nker !
I prefer this picture of mad monk miliband, it keeps vermin out of my garden
No, that is Wallace of Wallace and Grommet fame.
That is out of order and decidedly unkind to the loveable Wallace.
He believes his future, and very lucrative career outside Westminster, relies upon him promoting the Net Zero scam.
Rather like Alok Sharma.
And Big Brother David, who got shuffled off by the Globalists to run a Charity Scam when he failed to win the Labour leadership.
Precisely.
Otherwise known as George Soros.
Good article thanks. Many people see through the Climate Con and money laundering scam. Netzero will fail and be rubbished. No one voted for it, few who have IQs above a certain level will tolerate it.
Wind turbines, solar panels and batteries for electric vehicles rely on imports from Chinese companies – overwhelmingly powered by coal-generated electricity – which dominate global supply chains and the refining of minerals and rare earths.
AS well as prices, what will really make people sit up and take notice is if we do not have enough energy, if the electric gets turned off, if the gas runs out, if the petrol station has no fuel. No amount of mendacious disinformation can cover up if all the lights go out.
Perhaps not. But the lights went out in 1920-1930s Germany, and all the people were hence immune to disinformation…. right?
Global warming
Climate change
Climate breakdown
Climate armageddon
What next?
A New Ice Age – Plebs stay at home
Global boiling?
Government Climate Lies Continue
To which can be added the even higher-order insanity of chucking away billions at sucking a trace gas out of atmosphere, oceans and even blocking the sun.
Clean power is dirty lies. Put before a techically-literate beak in a court of law for energy-treason, Dr Doshi’s long list of evidence would convict Kommissar Miliband and the Climate Claptrap Committee every time.
Time for Mr Farage to mount a campaign to Take Back Control of energy bills, which in turn inevitably points to calling out the climate con-trick and repealing the 2008 Climate Claptrap Act.
Pains me to say it, but grid-failure in a cold winter would promote a Campaign for Real Energy no end. The Kommissar Must Fall.
Retail cost of a kWh of electricity: ~34p (27p/unit for electricity + 7p/unit standing charge)
Average wholesale cost of gas over past year or so: ~3p/kWh
Conversion from gas to electricity ~50% efficient => 1kWh of electricity from 2kWh of gas
=> cost of gas used in generating electricity: ~6p/kWh
=> cost of gas makes up ~18% of the cost of electricity.
As the cost of gas at current levels (which are high compared to historic levels although recently falling) is a relatively small proportion of the price of electricity, changes in the cost of gas have a relatively weak effect.
Doubling the price of gas would increase the cost of electricity by 18% and halving it would decrease the cost of electricity by only 9%.
These aren’t difficult calculations. Unfortunately none of the interviewers of Miliband, Vince, Jackson etc seems able or willing to do them or to ask someone who’s able to do so.
Thanks for this info. I believe that the price of windmill etc electricity is linked to the whole cost of gas. I think I have understood that correctly – the whole thing is such a ridiculous load of nonsense it’s hard to follow. Of course, the linking of the cost of windmill electricity to the price of gas is wholly artificial. It would be interesting to see how a completely free market would set the cost of windmill electricity. Even if anyone were foolish enough to build windmills without guarantees and subsidies, I doubt they could often sell electricity they generated from them – they’d have to compete on price with other suppliers and the wind would need to be blowing at the time when other suppliers were not able to fully meet demand.
The link between the price of electricity from gas with that from wind/solar isn’t really “artificial” in the sense of being imposed by policy – it’s inevitable when w/s aren’t available (eg still winter evenings) and gas has to be used to “keep the lights on”.
More w/s power => less gas generated electricity needed
=> fewer gas power stations
Gas generators have to be available at all times, just in case => 100% overhead (capital, construction, maintenance, staffing, amortisation…)
If they’re only needed for (say) 10% of the time, they have to recoup all that overhead when no w/s power and so there’s high demand for gas generated electricity
=> very high electricity prices
More wind/solar => greater price spikes without any change in the price of gas.
Well the use of wind and solar is a policy decision. I guess I need to read a dummy’s guide to UK electricity pricing. I thought the state guaranteed payments to intermittent generators. I understand that gas generated electricity costs more than it should because of the insane/evil need to duplicate capacity, but I don’t understand what determines the price of wind generated electricity.
Lets be clear what you mean by price. I think you mean how much wind generators get paid? That is the CfD rate [paid on output], plus subsidies of various kinds, which are used by the owner to pay the Opex [minimal], amortise the Capex [huge], and give an almost guaranteed return to investors. When people like Mad Ed talk about offshore being cheaper, what they are actually saying is that the Opex [running costs] are very low [they are], but they ignore the Capex cost, and ignore the subsidies paid to be on standby, subsidies paid to switch off [e.g. if too windy, or not needed], money paid for a duplicate Grid network because there aren’t many factories or houses 50 miles off Great Yarmouth, etc. All these income streams come from consumer energy bills or, in some cases, from general taxation, channelled via the Big 6, who allow Ofgem to set the price. You can see where this is heading, right? OUR ELECTRICITY COSTS FOUR TIMES MORE THAN THE USA…It is simply state-sponsored theft
What I mean by price is the price we pay as consumers and the price the generators get paid, which hopefully bear some relation to one another.
As Lewis Carroll might have said “Certainly not!”. The price of electricity is determined by the price of gas, thru a mechanism which takes the highest marginal cost of producing electricity from gas. That almost always means using Spot market gas to generate in a stand-by gas fired station, and using the price at which that is sold to set the ‘market’ price for electricty. So we are always paying top dollar, and it shows. FOUR TIMES…
Where is that profit going [hint: Dale Vince of Ecotricity paid his ex-wife £42m in a recent divorce settlement…]. Why is Ofgem allowing these massive profits to arise? Energy pricing in the UK is a long and winding road – now that couldn’t be deliberate could it?
A BBC series presented by a serious heavyweight is needed, someone politically neutral who just spells out the startling facts. Chris Lintott [Sky at Night] is an Oxford physicist, although he probably values his astronomy slot too highly to get mixed up with criticising the Government?
Thanks. That’s what I thought but that seems to contradict what WD-40 wrote.
Not really.
My earlier post concerned price spikes during renewable shortages rather than the cost of renewables themselves.
A key point is that suppliers buy from generators via a market while renewable generators have effectively guaranteed payments.
CfDs effectively guarantee the price paid to renewable generators. That contract price is set at auction and not linked to gas prices. The cost of gas generation is only ~one third of the consumer cost of a kWh and the gas itself is about half that so the effect of gas prices on CfD prices is relatively small.
When there’s a shortage of renewables, suppliers have to buy more from gas generators who are only asked to supply power during limited periods but have to recoup 100% of their non-generational costs during these brief periods, and so raise unit prices accordingly. Then (since electricity is fungible) renewable generators raise their prices to the same level but have to pay back the difference between that price and the strike price under the CfD.
Ok, thanks, I think I follow that but it seems to me that the cost to the consumer is only very loosely related to the true cost of supply from a competitive market and is heavily influenced by government policy and state intervention.
BBC? Give it a rest H.
Blotting out the sun over uk theoretically affects every other country on the planet. What gives this government the right to so impose?
The UK is not a private jail.
“I thought the state guaranteed payments to intermittent generators.”
Effectively it does.
As I mentioned, spikes occur in prices when renewable supply is low. Gas power stations which are used for only a fraction of the time but incur ~100% overheads (excluding generation except when actually in use) all the time, have to recoup costs during such periods of low renewables so increase the price accordingly.
Essentially, gas generators’ expenses are spread out over the whole year but their income is concentrated in a few relatively brief periods. In order for the two totals to match, the unit price in those active periods has to be much higher than if supply was continuous.
An obvious way to reduce price spikes would be to offer the gas generators similar contracts to the renewable suppliers so they’re guaranteed a level of income. It would be consistent in that the intermittency of wind/solar affects not only the renewable suppliers but also the gas generators.
In a properly free market, and pricing in the many negative externalities, these ridiculous things would never ever get built..
Agreed tof.
Why can’t the prices of “renewables” be quoted sans subsidies?
If man made climate change is real, there is little we can do to stop it. However all that money could be put towards helping with the effects of climate change, such as flood defences, which are needed now anyway, and making things more resilient; if climate change is going to make weather more unpredictable in the future, isn’t that a justification for storing more gas, not less?
The added bonus is all this is it will benefit us even if (as many of us believe) climate change is a load of rubbish.
Public opinion will change very quickly when the first blackout occurs.
The laws of physics will hit like a sledgehammer
Everyone in Britain turn on every electrical item in their house at 7pm on pre planned date, that will test the clean green future!
And implementing this mass effect by the Internet can’t even be construde as a NCHI !
Mass disobedience! It will achieve more than voting
That is an excellent idea in principle.
Of course smart meters would ensure we’re not allowed to.
That’s what they’re for.
Precisely.
It would certainly put that to the test wouldn’t it? How much strain could this digital control put up with? Going by the regular failures of other things digital, not long!
Give it a try, for short time switch on all your heavy use electrics, cooker, dryer, immersion heaters, fan heaters, kettle, iron etc and see if it limits your use
If it did, or if it switched off, most people would still see this as a power cut,or ,more importantly, control! They may even start to wake up
I don’t believe the smart meters have ability to throttle supply variably (not sure how you’d achieve that with AC mains without burning out appliances etc), they do have a on/off contractor which is remotely operated, at least the off part… linked to lack of payment I expect
In Milliband’s world we might not be dependent on Russian, USA, or Quatari gas that we do not control, but we are dependent on Chinese made wind turbines, turbine blades made from oil, and even the steel for the turbines is not made in the UK.
Who is now dependent on foreign powers?
Good point.
Isn’t telling lies and spreading fear of that magnitude a hate crime or something?
bring back two tiers all night courts!
What took everyone so long? Amber Rudd foresaw this in 2015 when she put the brakes on renewables subsidies. But she only stayed in post for a year – another failing engendered by the Tories
It would be helpful if those writing about the Net Zero scam would highlight that the Mad Monarch of Windsor is (a) fully supportive of the nonsense and (b) is making a shed load of money out of it.
He is also breaking his Coronation Oath of interfering in what is clearly a political issue …. since different political parties have different policies regarding Net Zero and the Climate Change scam.
Surely, the Mad Mullah of Windsor.
UK to pledge £50 Million to block out the Sun ! Let’s check this out . Will it just just be the UK doing this ?? Just like Net Zero our efforts are like trying to catch a fart in a Culinder , we don’t get enough Sun anyway & the rest of the world is supplying our energy using the same techniques we did before we shut them all down ! Heads need to roll , these Chunts are taking the Piss with Bells on !!!
I believe the UK has been told by the globalists to make up the recent shortfall in geoengineering that was caused by DOGEstopping funding from USAID. Hence the £50M to keep the skies hazy while a few £M will go to tame academics in UK Universities to produce quantified reports and papers.
I fail to understand why the fall in oil prices will destroy Russia but simultaneously push our energy costs up (the prices of oil and gas are closely linked, we are told).
It’s the same mechanism as the one that caused no-lockdown Sweden to experience “a drop in Covid cases” at the same time that the UK did – the UK drop being attributed by the scammers to our wonderful mockdown.
I thought it would be interesting to ask Grok to compare the cost for the UK of:
a) 100% gas generated electricity and
b) 90% wind/solar with 100% gas backup used for 10% of supply.
For a fair comparison, starting from scratch – no pre-existing equipment or infrastructure
Assume current electricity demand.
Assume lifetime of 50 years for gas power stations and 25 years for wind/solar installation after which they’re replaced.
Calculate cost over 50 years.
With the usual caveats (I haven’t cross-checked – this is pure Grok), cost estimates (2025 costs): a) £554B b) £790B
If the carbon tax is omitted (which, for a fair comparison, it should be as it’s a government imposed cost), costs reduce to: a) £352B b) £770B.
These costs are over 50 years and it may be that the extra cost of £6B per year is thought to be worth spending for the CO2 reduction.
But these figures only cover current electricity use, leaving a much greater amount of CO2 from heating and transport. To produce all the UK’s energy as electricity from wind/solar with 10% gas backup would, according to Grok, cost ~£3T; again over 50 years so the cost would be £60B pa.
(It wouldn’t make much sense to convert all the UK’s energy to gas generated electricity as it’s less efficient and would produce much the same CO2 as the current system but for the record Grok thinks it would cost ~£1.6T)
Assuming Grok is roughly correct, a “Net Zero” energy supply would cost ~£60B pa.
As the UK uses ~1.3 TWh of energy pa, this would add ~46p to the price of a kWh of electricity (current cost ~34p).
Also bear in mind that this is only the cost of the NZ power supply and doesn’t include conversion to heat pumps, electric cars etc.
.
Human error – can’t blame Grok for this.
UK energy use ~1,300 TWh pa => NZ power supply adds only ~5p to the cost of a kWh, compared to the current cost of ~34p/kWh.
There may be other Grok-errors in the calculation but that was all mine; all those powers of ten had my head spinning).
Can Grok explain why we pay so much more for our electricity than they do in the US?
This is via Claude rather than Grok. Seems to express himself better…
Infrastructure and Network Costs (~25-30%)
Environmental and Climate Policies (~20-25%)
Natural Gas Pricing (~15-18%)
Taxation Differences (~15%)
Market Structure and Supplier Margins (~10-15%)
Scale and Geography (~5-10%)
Nuclear Policy Differences (~5%)
I wouldn’t put a great deal of reliance on the numbers and I’d guess “environmental and climate policies” are also involved in some of the other items.
Thanks
I imagine you are right about policies affecting the other elements. We’ve stopped extracting and looking for our own raw materials, the US has not. Also baffled as to how US network and infrastructure costs could naturally be so much higher than ours given how much less densely populated the US is.
I’d guess that it’s precisely because the UK is so much more densely populated. Many more people to object to having anything new built or anything old taken down or newts disturbed; planning law and regulation. Building anything substantial in the UK takes much longer and costs more than almost anywhere else.
Yes those are fair points though on the other hand the US needs to cover a LOT more ground, use more materials and productive labour per person than we do. Arguably too much regulation is a political choice too. I can’t think of any good reason why our energy should be substantially more costly than the US.
Nit-picky I know, but surely Claude is an ‘it’
Or will Plod soon be knocking on my
door for misgendering an algorithm?
Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage should face each other in open debate on Net Zero.
Might be entertaining, although Farage is no scientist……..He’s a great rabble rouser, and he has vision, but maybe not the top grasp on facts, and some parts of Net Zero are complex [electricity pricing, for example]. The majority of people don’t, so far, show a strong appetite for hearing the facts. The facts are all ‘out there’ , have been for many years, but ‘bullshit baffles brains’ to date. Sadly, no blackouts last winter, and no way to bring Ofgem to account short of a change in government
Yes baby imagine having that creature making decisions that not only affect your life negatively but will also impoverish the future of your progeny for decades to come. Truly the stuff of nightmares and yet we will sit back and let him work his funky magick. They are drunk with power very difficult to stop them now.
We had the equally loathsome Hancock making huge decisions that negatively affected our lives.
And after a little time in the wilderness the little turd came out of it okay. I hope Bridgen wins his lawsuit.
China now consumes nearly 40% more coal than the rest of the world combined, largely for power generation.
I wonder what percentage of Chinese coal is used for other than power generation? For what?
Wind literacy is critically important in the context of the wind and solar debacle. When there is something approaching universal appreciation of the implications of wind droughts, then the credibility of the green transition will collapse and the net zero program by wind and solar will be seen as one of the worst public policy blunders ever. Dunkelflautes wind droughts with a solar drought at the same time. In Australia we get that combination on windless nights and these are the worst case scenarios for wind and solar power.
I may have missed it but I have yet to see anyone clearly explaining the wind drought problem and the discussion of wind variability typically revolves around average capacity factors which are irrelevant.
Consider the ABC of intermittent energy generation.
A. Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.
B. The continuity of RE is broken on nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no feasible or affordable large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.
Therefore, the green transition is impossible with current storage technology.
The rate of progress towards the tipping point will accelerate as demand is swelled by AI and electrification at large.
Miliband is poisoned with contempt for the UK public. He is not working for us. He takes his instructions from the phony planet savers at the UN/WEF who think our standard of living is too high (unsustainable) and must be reduced. The way you reduce standard of living is to remove affordable energy under the guise of a climate crisis for which no empirical evidence exists.
These bstards should be arrested and put on trial for treason against the wealth, security and happiness of the British people. Millibrain must be destroyed politically. I’d also like to see him, and those like him, significantly impoverished.
The More in Common poll is also highly suspect. I imagine most Britons, when asked if they want their cost of living to rise hugely to counter some nebulous bullshit, they’d say no. Ask the right questions.
We are governed and propagandised to by a whole system of communist shits.
Kathryn Porter’s graph reproduced in the article shows the household electricity price and wholesale gas price decoupling in 2008 and completely so in 2023. As such it does clearly debunk the ‘gas prices set by evil dictators make our electricity the most expensive in the world’ line.
What I’d love to see is an analysis of what makes up the price: global gas price + carbon tax + renewables subsidies + green infrastructure costs + … etc. Eyeballing the graph it looks like the wholesale gas price was around 20% of the household electricity price and edging down for most of the 2009-2018 period but by 2023 it was only 12% or so, leaving Mr Miliband a lot (88%) to explain.
Completely agree ; but, is it strictly true to state that virgin steel can only be produced from blast furnaces as at Scunthorpe ? I have seen it said that arc furnaces can also produce virgin steel. Nonetheless the cost of power will be vital to both.
I am not so concerned with the climate con, the covid con, the Ukraine con, the trans mania, the brexit bunkum, 9/11 fallacies, and on and on and on. These are but just a few of the vast plethora of symptoms resulting from the core conundrum: the indoctrinated cult belief in the legitimacy and the utility of ‘the state’. That is ghe root and until we do get out of the ground and burn its root we will never be free.