Wind_Energy's_Absurd

We looked for an image depicting as many disbenefits of wind as possible. We couldn't find one, so we made our own. Feel free to RT.

@KathrynPorter26 What we have just posted on our fb page.

Apparently people have been using my work as evidence in objecting to wind and solar planning applications Some guy called William Mykura contacted me via my website complaining about its "lack of transparency". Apparently he is evaluating these submissions and is trying to determine whether I am a reliable source He did not introduce himself and only explained the purpose of his, frankly hostile questions, after I asked him. He tells me I am entitled to operate a personal blog but it "cannot be not acceptable as scientific submissions"!! I think he's something to do with the Scottish Borders area - if you are from that region and have used my work in planning submissions, them please be aware this guy is going to advise whoever is paying him (which he didn't disclose despite complaining that I don't disclose my business structure and funding on my website) that my work cannot be relied on And to whomever has hired this guy, perhaps you can employ people who behave more professionally rather than demanding information that I am in no way obliged to provide, without having the basic manners to explain the nature of his enquiry

@7Kiwi Part of what we said yesterday: 'It's never wise to use lawyers to try to retrieve your reputation if you, and they, use specious argument, resulting in what can only be described as 'being hoist by your own petard'.

Only time for a short Sunday thread this morning. I've been having a bit of trouble with Dale Vince's lawyers who think it's unfair to point out all the subsidies his companies receive (1/2)

Our take on Miliband's speech to the Labour conference.

I was recently a guest on The Truth Contract podcast, here... thetruthcontract.substack.com/p/kathryn-port…

I had fun on the @electricianspod podcast the other day... m.youtube.com/watch?v=5z3D7e…

I was delighted to appear on the @triggerpod. We covered a lot of ground...

Such an excellent interview.

Hosted by local community councils for ALL. Lets fill this venue like the the first time. @RossjournoClark @NetZeroWatch @GillianMSP @ScotGovFM @_KateForbes @mgshanks @Ed_Miliband @STVNews @BBCScotlandNews @Jamie4North @Ruraidh_Stewart @AJABurnett @HighlandCouncil @fincarson

@WimDool @VattenfallNL And a lot more besides; but this was, comparatively, an old image.

@VattenfallNL weleens van bisfenol gehoord?

@Fenbeagle Not to Starmer, he hasn't been 🤣

@Real_BWEA Trump has been a breath of fresh air.

Starmer mouse, explaining to Trump how we have free speech in Britain.

@aNorthernGarden @mwt2008 @mattwridley @DailyMail No, we don't think we have. Thanks for the info. His 'debunking' of Matt Ridley's piece did give us a laugh last night.

@Real_BWEA @mwt2008 @mattwridley @DailyMail Perhaps you haven t come across @mwt2008 before? He's absorbed all the 'green' propaganda, thinks he knows it all and demonstrate he understands nothing. He has been an unsuccessful Green Party candidate. Enough said.

Warning! The @DailyMail is carrying an article by me that contains numerous errors, introduced by editors while I was without access to a phone signal or internet, hiking in the Rockies. Below is the correct text that I submitted to them: The climate boondoggle is one of the most regressive wealth transfers in history: never in the field of human commerce, or at least not since the sheriff of Nottingham, has so much tax been paid by people so poor to people so rich. Perhaps Ed Miliband is hoping that by giving lots of money to rich people, he can then impose a wealth tax on them in a sort of economic perpetual-motion machine. There appears to be no end to his generosity to the rich. He has recently announced an increase in subsidies for electric cars, electric heating and electricity bills, and this week he quietly let slip that he will raise the amount he pays for new wind farms and index-link the payment for an extra five years. What’s that? You don’t have a wind farm? Bad luck. Landowners who do can trouser £150,000 per wind turbine per year in rent for twenty to thirty years. One is arguing in court that £10m a year for his wind farm is not enough. The companies that run the “farms” make even more money. (As a landowner myself I am acutely aware that my ecological and economic distaste for these eyesores has cost me dear.) Under the delayed AR7 auction for new wind projects, Mr Miliband is promising to pay up to an astonishing three times as much as the Climate Change Committee forecast he would: £113 per megawatt-hour for offshore wind instead of £38. The average electricity price is around £70. Meanwhile Richard Tice MP has sent shock waves through the wind and solar industry by warning them that if Reform gets into power he will cease their subsidies. Don’t be fooled by the Miliband largesse: it’s not his money he is handing out; it is yours. The cost of paying all these huge subsidies is added to your electricity bills – which is why they are now the highest in the western world for both industrial and domestic power. Mr Miliband argues that sluicing vast sums from the poor to the rich (not that he likes to put it that way) is necessary to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to show “leadership” to the world in fighting the “climate crisis”. All right, let’s do the sums: Britain produces 0.8% of the world’s emissions. Electricity supplies roughly 20% of our energy and wind supplied about 25% of our electricity last year. Let’s be generous and assume that windmills cut emissions by maybe 60% over their lifetimes compared with gas turbines, though once you take into account the back-up from gas when the wind does not blow, the building and maintenance of power lines to connect distant wind farms to cities, the coal that was consumed in making the turbines and the energy cost of maintaining them, it’s probably way less than that. (As for solar, a reputable study concluded that north of the Alps, solar panels probably supply little more energy over their lifetimes – if any - than went into their manufacture and operation. They only generated 5% of our electricity last year, mostly when we least needed it, on summer afternoons. They are contributing next to nothing to emissions reduction.) templar.co.uk/downloads/Sola… It follows that Britain’s wind farms are achieving a reduction of 0.008x0.20x0.25x0.6 = 0.0002, or two hundredths of one percent of global emissions. That is what £25 billion a year, paid by you in direct and indirect subsidies according to the Renewable Energy Foundation, is buying you. At that rate getting the world to net zero will cost £100 trillion a year – or the entire world’s economic output. ref.org.uk/ref-blog/390-u… The climate economist Bjorn Lomborg has calculated that if all of Europe went net-zero today and stayed net-zero for the rest of the century that would reduce the rise in temperature by 2100 by 0.14°C – based on standard assumptions about climate sensitivity. So Britain (with 12% of Europe’s emissions) spending £25 billion a year to cut emissions by 20% of 25% of 60%, or 3%, would reduce the temperature in 2100 by – wait for it! – 0.0005°C, less than a thousandth of a degree. Can this really be good value for money? Esther McVey MP asked Ed Miliband in the Commons last week by how much his policies would reduce global temperatures. He refused to answer but what he did say was revealing: “the costs of inaction are much greater than the costs of action.” He is no longer claiming that we are saving money by cutting emissions, just that his policy will cost less than climate change in the long run. Is this true? Let’s take Mr Miliband at his word and assume that his widely famed global leadership skills ensure that the whole world achieves global net zero in short order. What horrors will he have prevented? rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jo… The state of the climate report, which he presented to Parliament last week, says only that “recent decades have been warmer, wetter and sunnier than the 20th Century” with earlier springs and more “lawn-cutting days”. Mostly good news unless you hate lawn-mowing. There has been more warming in winter than summer, so less frost, less snow and fewer “heating days”: good news given that death rates spike in cold weather much more than in hot weather. It says we now have 10% more rain, most of it in winter but the report can only “suggest a slight increase” in heavy rainfall while finding a “downward trend” in both average wind speed and maximum gust speed. On balance, good news. The only bad news is that sea level is rising, still very slowly – about a foot per century – but perhaps with a slight acceleration. Where’s the horror, Ed? Project these changes to the end of the century, and take into account that crops and oak trees all grow faster these days because of carbon dioxide, and it is hard to call it a crisis. The average of 69 estimates from 39 studies by climate economists, summarised by Richard Tol of Sussex University, says that when we hit 1.5 degrees of warming, global GDP will be 0.74% lower as a result; 1.9% lower if we hit three degrees of warming. That’s not 1.9% lower than today: it’s 1.9% lower than a much richer level reached in future. sciencedirect.com/science/articl… The business-as-usual model used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects the average person in the world to be earning 4.5 times as much in 2100 as today – and if we do not prevent climate change that will be cut to 4.3 times as much. The model in which we forget about climate change and just let the fossil-fuel economy rip has the average person an astonishing 9.8 times richer in 2100 even with the effects of rapid climate change, instead of 10.4 times without it. #fig0001" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">sciencedirect.com/science/articl… So Mr Miliband is asking you to reduce your standard of living today to save a bunch of very, very wealthy future people from being slightly less – but still very, very – wealthy. Your prosperity is sacrificed to their posterity. This is therefore yet another way in which he is transferring money from the poor to the rich. Was he sheriff of Nottingham in a previous life?

@staylorish And imagine, in the event of independence, as was stated in 2012 would be the case, that subsidy costs, current and legacy, were to be paid purely by Scottish consumers.

Stationary wind turbines which (when they do spin) produce electricity at a cost of £163/MWh (double the current wholesale price). A perfect encapsulation of the utter vacuity of SNP rhetoric on energy. Imagine if these costs could not be defrayed across all GB bill payers…

@aNorthernGarden @mwt2008 @mattwridley @DailyMail The bit which did it for us was he said that Matt Ridley had quoted 2030 offshore predicted figure of £38/MWh but that was in 2012 prices. No, it wasn't. The CCC explicitly stated it in 2023 prices in its 7th Carbon Budget.

@mwt2008 @mattwridley @DailyMail Oh dear. I got to your first point and saw, as expected, you were talking bollocks. You say "clean power cuts bills" Yet Miliband is intending to pay far more for wind power than he does for gas. Reality: wind power increases bills. I didn't bother reading further.

@NetZeroWatch @EdwardJDavey Reckless, and a flip-flopper, too: 2012/13: ' “I love shale gas, fracking is not the evil thing that some people make it out to be.” (Ed Davey)

Incredible hypocrisy from @EdwardJDavey. He pushed for policies that made Britain more dependent on imported gas and intermittent power. He now has the gall to lecture others on energy security. Reckless doesn’t even begin to cover it. 🤡

Absolute cobblers. The base costs of existing renewables are more expensive than gas (even with a carbon tax). Then add on the £32/MWh to cover grid balancing and backup and even new renewables are much more expensive. Net Zero is increasing our bills. Link to detail in reply.

Such an important document from CB4PC.

@Ed_Miliband is as bad. He keeps saying renewables are cheap when they are clearly more expensive than gas fired generation The most recent offshore wind subsidy was 13% higher than the gas based wholesale power price Renewables backup costs are going up Renewables curtailment costs going up Renewables connection costs going up Renewables balancing costs going up

A stunningly good, factual and concise mythbusting report which we have had the pleasure of highlighting today.

@KathrynPorter26 How we've introduced the report this morning. '..factual, concise, easy to understand (belying the extraordinary amount of work and knowledge which has gone into it). Thank you, Kathryn.

This evening my latest report: "The true affordability of net zero", was launched at an event hosted by The Lord Offord of Garvel, Shadow Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero in the House of Lords. The event was attended by MPs, Peers and members of the energy community as well as the press. It’s the first time a report of mine has received quite so much attention, and it was great to see so many people there (thank you to everyone who came!) The costs of net zero are a hot topic. While @Ed_Miliband repeats over and over that renewables are cheap and gas is the reason for our high power prices, this report demonstrates that these claims are simply untrue. While gas prices undeniably set the wholesale price of electricity, this is only c 40% of what we pay in our bills. Gas prices are falling while the costs of renewables are rising. The most recent subsidy round, AR6 saw offshore wind price around £10 /MWh higher than the average day ahead wholesale electricity price in 2024. An even that wasn't enough with @Orsted cancelling its Hornsea 4 project saying it was uneconomic. It's time for a more honest debate about the true costs of net zero. I hope this report can inform some of that discussion. #netzero #renewables #energycosts watt-logic.com/2025/05/19/new…