Consciousness of Sheep
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Some years ago, psychologists at Harvard devised a selective attention test, which came to be known as the gorilla experiment. Students were asked to focus on a basketball being passed between people and count how many times the ball was passed. In the middle of the experiment, a man in a gorilla suit walks between the people passing the ball but – the point of the experiment – less than half of those counting the passes noticed the gorilla.
It would appear that politicians and environmental activists fall firmly within the sixty percent or so who would not notice a troop of gorillas even if they stood in front of them. That, at least, is what we might conclude given the ardent support for the deployment of wind turbines while simultaneously undermining the industries that make wind turbines possible. Take, for example, concrete – one of the highest carbon emitting industries in the modern economy. The foundation of a 5MW wind turbine includes some 900 cubic yards of concrete. It also includes around 230 tons of that other high-carbon industrial product… steel. Although given that most of the mass of a wind turbine is steel, that is only a fraction of the total 850 or so tons – making wind turbines, especially the offshore ones, the most steel intensive forms of electricity generation… something which is increasing along with capacity. As Kris De Decker at Low Tech Magazine explains:
“The most popular offshore wind turbine nowadays has a capacity of 7 MW, while the largest ones have a capacity of 14 MW… a 14 MW offshore wind turbine would require 1,300 tons of steel per MW or 18,200 tonnes in total. Such a wind turbine thus consumes 24 times more steel than a coal or gas power plant of the same power capacity.”
And yet somehow our politicians seem to have completely missed this, just as they remain oblivious to the massive volume of diesel fuel consumed in the transportation of those turbines from China, along with the petrochemicals required for the blades. How otherwise, did we end up with an industrial policy which is diametrically opposed to our energy policy?
The current energy policy requires that we completely decarbonise our electricity generation by 2035. And if the Labour Party are elected later this year, the target date will be brought forward to 2030. Since the UK is a bit too close to the Arctic and too cloudy because of the Gulf Stream – making solar a minor add-on – in practice this means deploying huge numbers of windfarms (not least because our apparent inability to complete large civil engineering projects all but rules out any serious deployment of nuclear). But even the green energy fanboys at the BBC have begun to notice a rather serious flaw in the plan:
“The UK’s electricity network needs almost a further £60bn of upgrades to hit government decarbonisation targets by 2035, according to a new plan. Some 4,000 miles of undersea cables and 1,000 miles of power lines including pylons are needed…
“New connections and more grid capacity will also be needed as people and companies switch to using electricity for their cars or heating their homes. Renewable forms of generating energy, including through solar and wind farms, will also change the way the grid is shaped.
“The undersea cables will have to come ashore at various points, predominantly on the east coast of Scotland and England – and from there, on to places near urban centres via overhead pylons or at four times the cost, under the ground. Hot spots for the new pylons include West Wales and a route through East Anglia.”
With tedious inevitability, the Pravda article then goes on to highlight NIMBY critics concerned about the way pylons will spoil the view, rather than talk to any of the many serious critics who might point out that, having just closed the remaining UK steelworks, there is no means by which all of this proposed new infrastructure can be constructed. Not least because two years ago the UK imposed sanctions on its main provider of imported virgin steel.
The somewhat throwaway response from the political class is that the old, coal-powered steelworks will be replaced by shiny green arc furnaces which will recycle existing steel. This though, is almost as deranged as the belief that a country which can neither make nor import steel can also be a world leader in constructing windfarms. To understand this, consider that the key properties of steel which make it so ubiquitous in a modern economy are its strength and durability… properties which are the opposite of those required by a recycling industry. Put simply, there is not enough scrap steel to go around. As Halina Yermolenko at GMK Centre reported last year:
“In August 2023, the shortage of steel scrap supplies may increase by 2.1 million tons amid a potential reduction in supplies… According to the consulting company Yongan Futures, in July 2023, the supply of scrap in China was 12.25 million tons, and the demand was 13.6 million tons. According to the forecast, although the demand for this raw material will not change in August, the supply has fallen to 11.5 million t, which will increase the deficit…”
Nor is this problem going to be resolved anytime soon. As Kris De Decker explains:
“There’s not enough scrap available: the continuous growth of the global steel output makes a circular flow of resources impossible. It takes decades before most steel becomes available for recycling. For example, there is 543 Mt of steel stocked in ships. The scrap available for recycling in 2021 corresponds to the production level of 1965 when global steel production was less than one-quarter of what it is today (450 Mt). Consequently, the other three quarters need to be produced in blast furnaces using coal and freshly mined iron ore…
“Steel available for recycling forms a mix of steel grades. That mix is suitable for making plain carbon steel but not highly alloyed steels, which require scrap with similar qualities. However, that scrap is not available. For example, stainless steel, the most produced special steel grade, has a recycling rate of only 15%. Almost 60 Mt of stainless steel was produced in 2021, compared to only 4 Mt in 1980. The traditional use of stainless steel was in cutlery, surgical tools, and medical and food processing equipment. However, it is now also used in the construction of tunnels and outdoor furniture, wastewater treatment, seawater desalination, nuclear engineering, and the production of biofuels.”
Nor should we forget that wind turbines, pylons and other electricity infrastructure are hardly the only things within the economy that have need of steel. Railways are the most overt steel users, and in a “green economy” one would assume we would have more of them. Less obviously, every concrete building, bridge and flood defence system contains tons of the stuff. Most of the roads which will supposedly be supporting the additional weight of electric cars and trucks at some future date also contain steel reinforcement in the layers beneath the asphalt which is all too visibly falling apart these days. But without the ability to make or import steel, whatever meagre access to scrap steel the UK may have will provide but a fraction of that required even to maintain our existing infrastructure. Constructing anything new will soon be beyond us.
Such is the inevitable outcome of having an inbred and incurious political class which has convinced itself that it should not interfere in a “free market” which, in reality, was replaced by a corporate kleptocracy decades ago. And while that political class may try to convince us that the enemy is Putin or the Chinese Communist Party, the real enemy is to be found within… in the selective attention of those who still retain some power of decision, but who cannot see the need to act.
As you made it to the end…
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