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Image by Tracy Lundgren from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The UK government is absolutely not asking you to ration electricity, to give up control of your own appliances, to pay more for less, and go to jail if you get it wrong.
This just looks a lot like that:
Turn on your heat pump when wind is blowing, Government pleads
Nick Gutteridge, The Telegraph
Ministers are pressing ahead with new legislation that could see families made to adopt “smart” appliances to ease pressure on the grid. Tory MPs are opposing the proposals, contained in the contentious Energy Bill which will come back before the Commons on Tuesday.
Are they your appliances or the state’s? If you don’t control the power switch you know the answer.
When they call something “smart” we know it’s stupid — and the mind-boggling complexity of central agencies switching on and off ovens and heaters across the country to “fit” with the weather is a dystopia we don’t need to have. Do you need 90 minutes to roast a chook, or 120? It depends on the wind strength in Scotland. If the kids can’t get to bed early, or […]
The UK set to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030, but awkwardly, the average cost of charging an electric car has jumped by 58 per cent since last May, so sales are falling, not rising. The UK can’t afford to make them either, with BMW sending their UK electric mini factory to China. President Xi will be happy. The West thought the Glasgow commitments was a climate plan, but really it was trade deal.
h/t Notalotofpeopleknowthat
Electric car makers put the brakes on UK production because many drivers think the vehicles are too expensive
Calum Muirhead, Daily Mail
It is now expected that the UK will produce 280,000 fully electric cars and vans in 2025, down from previous estimates of 360,000.
The forecast means only a quarter of car output will be electric within the next two years, lower than prior forecasts of more than a third.
The command-economy of gas meets the command-economy of cars and pretty soon we’ll be riding horses:
In its latest report, the Advanced Propulsion Centre, which provides taxpayer funding to makers of zero-emissions vehicles, said the ‘uncertain economy’ was expected […]
By Jo Nova
Just to recap: Energy prices are so wildly high in Europe — thanks to a quest to alter the planetary climate — that 70% of fertilizer plants have already shut down, half the aluminum and zinc smelters have closed, and glass-makers and tilers who survived both world wars may go out of business. German homes are reduced to being wood fired (if they can find the firewood). Meanwhile someone very naughty set off explosions on the Nordstream gas pipes from Russia, and since a third of all UK gas comes from an underwater pipe to Norway now suddenly people are very nervous about that. Before most of this unfolded, UK consumer confidence was at minus 44 — the lowest ebb ever recorded since 1974 when people started recording these things. Now it’s even lower (minus 49). As many as one in four people in the UK were saying they won’t heat their homes in winter. It’s the most dramatic fall in European energy since the late Middle Ages. Luckily, at least the UK and Germany both have some old coal plants they haven’t blown up.
To make things more exciting, last week, after the underwater bombs went […]
Written by Jo Nova
Spare a thought for glassmakers and tilers in Europe who can’t run on solar and wind powered furnaces.
There are companies that started business in the 1800s and survived two world wars but may not last the coming winter. It’s all changing so fast, they lament. With energy costs rising three to sixfold, the highest energy industries are folding. The first casualties were fertilizer, aluminium and zinc, and now in the second wave, the glass makers and tilers are coming undone, and with them, whole towns that support them will unravel too:
‘Crippling’ Energy Bills Force Europe’s Factories to Go Dark
Liz Alderman, The New York Times
Half of Europe’s aluminum and zinc production has been taken offline, according to Eurometaux, Europe’s metals trade association.
Eschenbach Porcelain survived Germany’s transition from communism to capitalism after 1989. But when its energy contracts run out at the end of this year, the company will face annual energy bills of €5.5 million, or roughly six times what it is paying now, said Rolf Frowein, its director.
Eschenbach Porcelain started 130 years ago. The giant glassmaker Arc started in 1825.
The numbers […]
The Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline from Russia to a desperate Europe was supposed to re-open yesterday, instead, Russia announced that it will remain closed due to an oil leak, indefinitely. The announcement was made after markets closed. Germany has about 3 months of gas in storage.
Gas prices are expected to rise Monday.
Ukraine war: Russia to keep key gas pipeline to EU closed
By Robert Plummer & Oliver Slow BBC News
Faisal Islam, the BBC’s economics editor, described the indefinite closure of Nord Stream 1 as a very serious development, noting that Russia had kept supplies into Europe flowing even at the height of the Cold War.
The stand-off with Russia has forced countries to fill their own gas supplies, with Germany’s stores increasing from less than half in June to 84% full today.
Apparently this is the oil spill that shut down a billion dollar pipeline:
Just bad luck then?
Twitter commenters have some doubts:
@PolemicTMM –– Masterful trolling of the EU by Mr P.
@PrivatinvestN — Is this a Friday night joke or have they actually published this?
@JavierBlas — They did. […]
Hoping to change the weather has consequences, and so does printing lots of money:
In the UK they’re being told they might have to avoid using appliances at home from 2pm-8pm this winter and cook dinner after that (your circadian rhythm be damned). Who wants to tuck the kids in without a hot meal? Energy prices are so high pubs are already closing early. Nearly one in four households in the UK say they are planning to not turn heating on this winter because they can’t afford it (and that was before the latest shocking price rise). In a taste of things to come, people are starting to be admitted to hospital because their energy was cut off. The NHS is asking hospital staff to turn of equipment and lights and warns that care may even have to be rationed because of soaring energy bills. People with electric cars may be asked not to charge them til after everyone has cooked dinner. It’s complicated saving the world.
In Europe, the gas storage is nearly 80% full which would cover Europe’s energy use in a normal winter for about three months. But half of Europe’s aluminum and zinc smelters […]
The UK “Price Cap” and forecast keep outdoing even the worse case scenarios, but finally the crisis is so calamitous that the UK Conservative Party are even talking of allowing fracking.
As the Wall Street Journal puts it: Household energy bills were expected to rise 40% this autumn, but on Friday the government regulator announced they’ll leap 80% in a single bound. (Who would have guessed that socialist price fixing would fail to cap the price?)
The current energy costs have just risen again, now “capped” at £3,549 per household, a horrible $4,200 USD or $6,000 Australian. But the future cap is headed for the mesosphere boundary layer at a shocking £7,000 by April. It’s so blisteringly bad that it’s being described as “worse than the GFC” in terms of its impact. It’s so bad, two out of every three Pubs say they are likely to close this winter, with the “monster hikes” to energy prices. That’s despite the Christmas season rush, and hopes that it will be finally free of Covid restrictions. The whole social care system is using the word “collapse” given that the price of a care bed will rise by seven fold thus wiping out their […]
Blistering high prices flow through the interconnectors too.
The energy price cap in the UK is now predicted to reach the £6,552 in April. Pretty soon only the Royal family will be able to afford electricity. If this continues, inflation in the UK may hit 18% by January.
As Javier Blas says: Day-ahead electricity prices in Europe are eye-watering, with lots of countries setting record highs for today. Notable to see the Nordics close to €400 per MWh, and Germany at €600. Before 2020, anything above €75-100 was considered expensive
It doesn’t matter who has the wind turbines, and who has the coal or nuclear power, everyone connected to junk generators gets expensive electricity. Denmark has more “free” wind power than nearly anywhere in the world but they are still paying €600+.
@JavierBlas
Meanwhile the German Energy Minister has decided he really should close the last three nuclear plants. Apparently it would only save 4% of their total gas bills, he says, not the 15% they need — like turning down a jerry can of fuel because it won’t fill the whole tank. I guess he’s not the one having cold showers.
Imagine how different […]
Power and gas prices in Germany more than doubled in just two months, with year-ahead electricity at a blazing 570 Euro per megawatt-hour. Two years ago, it was 40 euros. It’s summer but electric heaters sales are already up 1000 percent and online searches for Firewood are running hot. In the UK — householders are facing bills in the order of £5000 a year — (like $10,000, after tax) people are described as being in “pre-panic mode” already. Some are starting to turn off freezers, giving up toast and showering every second day. Shops and Pubs are closing, consumer confidence is at an all time record low, the most depressed in the last 48 years consumer confidence has been measured for.
European Power Smashes Records as Energy Crisis Intensifies
by Todd Gillespie, Bloomberg
This week’s prices are “unbelievable,” analysts at Energi Danmark wrote in a note. “The rally on the gas and coal market and the very high spot prices we see this week have given the already elevated market further momentum.”
German year-ahead power, a benchmark for Europe, is on a nine-day rising streak. The contract rose 6.1% to a record […]
Normally in a prewar situation a country might be increasing industrial production
h/t Rafe Champion
Russia has cut gas supply again, arguing over the German paperwork, after Canada dithered on sending the last turbine back, and Poland reneged on some dividends. Everyone is playing poker with energy, even if some of them didn’t count their cards before they started — and gas is predictably, hitting new record prices. But even before the ante was upped in the latest round, 15% of German industry were already cutting production. Many others are planning to or were considering moving. People are starting to wonder if this might be a permanent loss for the famous German industrial power.
In other news, rather frantic landlords in Germany want to be able to legally restrict temperatures of their tenants units. Someone has got to pay that gas bill, and just asking tenants to take shorter showers doesn’t seem to be working.
Now they tell us:
“Gas is now not only part of Russia’s foreign policy, but possibly also part of the Russian war strategy,” said [Klaus Müller, the president of Germany’s Federal Network Agency, Bundesnetzagentur]
If only someone saw that coming, like say, in […]
All hail the clean green energy reset — where people are being warned to get ready to live in colder, darker houses, and big energy users will be offered money to stop work. Make plans to turn that factory off! Buy candles!
The UK sits on a giant gas storage site they could have tapped 10 years ago. Instead costs are up so much Ofgem has warned this could push around 12 million people into fuel poverty which is one in six people in Great Britain. The energy price cap is projected to hit around £3,200 (maximum annual tariff).
Apparently even newspapers are getting thinner. High energy costs make everything expensive.
Back to the dark ages? Now millions of Britons could be told to switch off the lights and turn down the thermostat to avoid blackouts this winter under emergency plans
Daily Mail, 24 July 2022
Households might have to turn down their thermostats and switch off lights to avoid blockouts under emergency plans.
To avoid rolling blackouts in the UK, the National Grid could also pay some large energy users to use less power to ease the pressure on the grid.
Britain’s next […]
This sounds ominous.
Deutsche Bank says Germans should use less gas any which way they can. Their new report suggests they use more hard coal and lignite for power stations, wood for home heating, and use oil in industry. That’s sparked a debate on the merits of using wood. (Nobody say the word “nuclear”.)
Germany drawing up plans to heat homes with WOOD this winter as gas crisis erupts
The Express
WOOD could be used to heat German homes this winter as the country grapples with a gas crisis.
Opinion is divided over the merits of using wood as a fuel with some saying doing so increases CO2 emissions and would unleash a logging boom, trashing biodiversity. Others argue wood is a renewable source of energy and expanding its use could prompt landowners to plant more trees, resulting in more carbon storage.
The Deutsche Bank analysis adds both savings and substitution have already led to a drop in German gas consumption by more than 14 percent year on year in the first five months of this year, largely driven by a mild winter.
Desperate: The European Commission suggests countries pay companies to […]
Germany is getting more medieval by the minute
In the latest news the Cities and Municipalities Association is urging local officials to plan for public halls to be used as emergency “warm up spaces” when winter comes. With families needing to find an extra €3,800 to pay the energy bills many people won’t be able to afford electricity or gas.
Welcome to the renewables future where lights are dimmer, there’s no hot water at schools and public swimming pools are closed, but town halls are open so people can survive the night.
Renewables supply nearly half of German power demand in first half 2022.
Germany’s Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and the Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (BDEW) said on Monday that renewables had covered around 49% of gross domestic electricity consumption over the period.
The claim of “half” is still inflated. If we remove hydroelectricity and biomass, in the last six months all forms of wind and solar power have produced 35% of the electricity (on a random come-and-go basis).
Meanwhile in related news Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world at 35c/KWh (USD).
Germany Plans ‘Warm […]
It’s summer and yet some parts of Germany are already dimming lights and reducing the temperature, restricting shower times or even closing swimming pools. Meanwhile in the UK, energy prices are up four fold compared to a couple of years ago. Both nations are bringing back coal power, which is unthinkable enough on its own (in a 2021 climate-religion kind of way) yet even that isn’t enough. Winter is coming…
Germany dims the lights to cope with Russia gas supply crunch Financial Times, 8 July 2022
Germany is rationing hot water, dimming its street lights and shutting down swimming pools as the impact of its energy crunch begins to spread from industry to offices, leisure centres and homes.
A huge increase in gas prices triggered by Russia’s move last month to sharply reduce supplies to Germany has plunged Europe’s biggest economy into its worst energy crisis since the oil price shock of 1973.
Gas importers and utilities are fighting for survival while consumer bills are going through the roof, with some warning of rising friction.
“The situation is more than dramatic,” said Axel Gedaschko, head of the federation of German […]
Last month UK Ministers were warned that six million households could enjoy blackouts for dinner this winter. To try to stave off disaster, the UK Business Secretary has already written to the owners of the last three remaining coal fired power plants to ask them to stay running through winter. This is despite them being set to close in September.
Given the dire shortage of cheap energy, another plan is to pay British households up to £6 for each kilowatt-hour they don’t use at peak time. While a normal kilowatt-hour would cost 28p, the blistering premium price shows how desperate the National Grid planners must be. The last thing they want is everyone to come home, turn on the oven and washing machine and plug in their scooters and EV’s at 6pm.
So now possibly in a grand experiment, as well as trying to control the weather with windmills, millions of families may try to reschedule body clocks somehow, eating later, doing laundry later, watching the melatonin-destroying blue-screens-of-insomnia after 10pm and running the drier while they sleep. Maybe it won’t be so bad, or maybe people will be more sleep deprived and less productive, fatter, or crash their cars on […]
Tell the children: Energy is Power
And show them this graph. For twenty years the West has been giving up power.
OWID Click to enlarge
A warning from John Constable and Debra Lieberman, Special to Financial Post
The energy of nations and the creation of wealth
Countries where energy consumption is plummeting don’t feel much pain … yet. And there is a good reason for that. One country is increasing its energy use, propping up Western consumption with exports and giving us a false sense of well-being. That country is, of course, China.
Since the West began its energy starvation diet, Chinese energy consumption has increased by over 50 per cent and its electricity consumption has increased by 200 per cent, overtaking the U.S. by a large margin. China, unlike the EU, U.K. and U.S., is still 90 per cent reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear. What’s more, only some of the immense wealth these fuels are generating is being exported. What is China doing with the rest? Time will tell.
But right now, as a matter of urgency, we must reverse the decline in Western energy quality and consumption […]
Last week small electricity retailers were bleeding so badly they doubled their prices and asked their customers to leave.
This week it’s a big gas retailer, as Australia belatedly faces the same pain that hit and wiped out UK energy retailers:
Gas retailer Weston Energy’s collapse stirs call for Labor intervention
Perry Williams, The Australian
Weston Energy, which provides gas to more than 400 companies and government agencies, ceased trading with immediate effect on Monday, creating uncertainty for major manufacturers with 7 per cent of the east coast’s commercial and industrial market forced to find a new supplier.
The company said it could no longer finance cash flow requirements of its trading portfolio “on a timely basis” with prices rising over 180 per cent since April, and almost three times higher than at the start of the year.
These are blistering rises in costs:
With spot gas prices up to four times higher than normal levels and wholesale electricity prices in NSW on track to finish the June quarter twice as high as the previous record, Mr Willox called on the Albanese government to respond.
It’s a cult.
[…]
Wow. What does it take to get a democratic government to stop picking winners in socialist electrical generation? It takes a war, a 50% price rise, and the possibility that 4 in 10 households might be reduced to third world conditions within months.
Share the word — no country on Earth has lots of intermittent renewables AND cheap electricity.
…Bosses warn 40% of households face fuel poverty after October’s price cap hike…
Daily Mail
Energy bosses have called for more Government support for households facing a ‘truly horrific’ winter, with as many as four in 10 people potentially falling into fuel poverty before the end of the year.
Energy bills for the 22 million British households not on fixed-term deals rose 54 per cent to just under £2,000 a year on average in April, the last time the Ofgem price cap was reviewed.
The clean Green transition was supposed to reduce costs, create jobs, and set people free, instead the experiment failed everywhere it was done. “Free” energy turned out to be a high maintenance, unenvironmental expensive fantasy loaded with hidden costs:
Analysts have warned of a further jump […]
Warwick McKibbin reckons Vladimir Putin might be the best thing that’s ever happened to the energy transition.
Speaking at The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Tuesday, the economist, academic and former Reserve Bank board member argued that surging commodity prices caused by the war in Ukraine could force the urgent shift to clean energy to accelerate.
Really?
In the parallel universe Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.
Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.
He notes that the EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal.
This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points […]
It’s the Great Reset in Global Energy complacency
There is pandemonium on the markets and suddenly many nations want to be energy sufficient. It’s perhaps not The Great Reset than the collective-types were expecting?
The gas flows from Russia to the EU are sporadically tightening, and the Yamal-Europe line has been cut off. Gas in Europe is now trading at €340/MWh which is fully 22 times the long term average. Newcastle coal normally trades around $60 per ton, but now is over $400 USD.
A few days ago the former head of MI6 in the UK called for an immediate lifting of the frakking ban which was set to see concrete poured down the only two shale gas wells in England by March 15th. Thirty-five Tory MPs and four peers sent a letter to Boris demanding the same thing. Now even Boris Johnson is suggesting the Green targets could be relaxed, not just for Britain, but for all the West. He went so far as to suggest The West could give itself a “climate change pass” while we figure out how to get energy that isn’t Russian gas.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch
So much for the end of Fossil […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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