Energy

Officially, Britain’s worse power outage in a decade is being recorded as an unusual event that nobody could have reasonable anticipated.  Dig a little deeper into the National Grid report on the 9 August 2019 blackout, however, and we discover an electricity system that has been allowed to become increasingly …

Thinking about car ownership in the years before the financial crash, I reasoned that there were two groups of people who fared best.  The first were those rich enough to buy brand new cars.  Although they lost on the rapid decline in the re-sale cost of the car, the price …

Serious questions remain about the failures that resulted in a widespread blackout across Britain on 9 August.  According to Jillian Ambrose at the Guardian, the event was triggered by lightning from one of many storms that crossed the UK that day: “National Grid has blamed a lightning strike for Britain’s …

Despite claims to the contrary, the first task of the agencies involved in the UK power outage yesterday will have been to cover their backs and, if necessary, lay blame somewhere else.  So it is that a story emerged that it was a freak accident coincidentally affecting two separate generators.  …

Green campaigners will no doubt be cheering the announcement of the closure of the Aberthaw B coal-fired power station yesterday.  As Jillian Ambrose at the Guardian reports: “Doug Parr, the chief scientist and policy director at Greenpeace UK, said the shutdown of Aberthaw should encourage more government support for renewables …

During a conversation with a friend yesterday I was asked why I was so hostile toward “renewables” – or as I prefer to call them, non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies.  My answer was that I am not opposed to these technologies, but rather to the role afforded to them by the …

The same mainstream media that told us last month that we had a “climate emergency” that required urgent action seems determined to lull us back to sleep with a large dose of Bright Green hopium today.  That, at least is the only conclusion one can reasonably arrive at when Jeremy …

The unspoken flaw in the so-called “fourth industrial revolution” and the various forms of green new deal that are meant to bring it about, is that renewable energy is supposed to simultaneously replace existing energy sources and provide the additional power for an entirely electrified economy.  The problem, for now, …

One of the advantages of being a rocky island in the northeast Atlantic, right underneath the Gulf Stream is that you get to deploy record amounts of offshore wind turbines to delay the day when your economy grinds to a halt.  This is the reality of modern Britain – a …

Protesters today intend bringing central London to a standstill by blockading several major arterial roads into the capital.  For once, this has nothing to do with Brexit.  Instead, it concerns the increasingly urgent call for government to “do something” about climate change.  Exactly what that “something” is that must be …