Net Nowhere

 The media is positively luxuriating in its bunker mentality. Tweeting from the trenches on the frozen streets of where they are now calling ‘Keev’ and pontificating like drunken football fans arguing about the refereeing, they have conveniently overlooked the war being waged not only on our doorsteps but right inside our houses. The conflict between heating and eating, a miserable pair of mutually exclusive options formerly only inflicted on ‘the poor’ is now pushing ahead on all fronts.

Fuel for driving has increased by over 50% in the last year. Fuel for heating and cooking is right behind it, with gas being the more obvious contender but electricity – already the most costly energy - ready to double, maybe triple in price. We put up with it, cutting back on ‘luxury’ treats such as medication and so forth, up to a point. But soon the cost of even getting to work may make work itself uneconomic for a very large number of people. And all the while the headlines lie to us about how very much cheaper so-called renewables are.

It all depends on who you read and where you go to listen to your news, but it is surely undeniable that the push for the impossibility of Net Zero is coming from those who do not have to face the economic realities. Smug accounts of ‘well, I have a solar array and a power wall and my bills have come down enormously’ and ‘with my eco set-up, I am virtually off-grid’ totally ignore the plain truth that most of us, even had we the roofs or the land to install such glittery, new-age tech, simply can’t afford it.

The true cost of Net Zero

You can probably install a quite decent 5 kW array and a basic battery storage system for under £20k these days. But who has £20k to spend, especially if your monthly fuel bill lands you in the red? And what are you really getting? Those doing the bragging quite often got in on the now defunct government feed-in tariff which actually paid you three times the retail price for every unit you generated (no wonder they stopped it so abruptly) and have reason to be smug. But if you are not so compensated, how do the numbers stack up?

According to Ofgem, the average household in the UK has 2.4 people living in it, and uses 2,900 kWh of electricity and 12,000 kWh of gas respectively. That’s around 15,000 kWh of energy a year, or around 40 kWh per day. Your 5 kW (peak) system is only at best around 20% of that, which is 1 kW (not enough to boil a standard kettle, used directly). Multiply that by 8 hours of good light in a day (not winter, obviously) and you could produce 8 kWh, or a fifth of your needs.

So, if your combined electricity and gas bill is around £200 a month, you could save around £40 a month if you invest £20k now, which investment will pay for itself in in a mere 500 months, or a bit over 40 years… which is twice as long as such a system is designed to last. Of course, other figures are available and this is a fag-packet estimate for an all-electric future. And there absolutely will be low energy users who could benefit hugely. But few of them are you or me.  

So the recent news that the government has admitted it has no idea what Net Zero will cost will come as no surprise to many. (Links here and here) We knew, all along, that we had no coherent energy policy, and the war in Ukraine has shown how fragile is the reliance on Russian gas (itself a policy to make the EU appear greener by offshoring their emissions). We are sheep, led by other fleecier sheep, themselves fleeced by the special interest lobbies and acting against our joint interests. For those who insist on believing in deep state collision, the most apt phrase which springs to mind involves a piss up in a brewery.

China Syndrome

There really is no way to avoid the conclusion that the cost of ‘saving the planet’ is going to be too high a price for many to pay. For every renewable source of energy there is an enormous up-front investment required, often obscured from those of us, the consumers, who foot the bill regardless. I don’t think I have ever seen a reliable total figure for the erection of a wind turbine, for instance, and solar PV rarely returns what it costs on a smaller scale.

And when it comes to it, that’s really all there is, wind and solar. Biomass is a biomassive accounting scam, said to be carbon-neutral but actually incentivising a massive increase in carbon footprint. By shipping the raw material across oceans, from where it has often been grown in the devastation created by deforestation it amounts to environmental vandalism. But what about tidal power, you may counter? I am unaware of any working tidal generators of sufficient scale to contribute but a drop in the plastic-filled oceans.

As for carbon trading, this merely creates a market in soothing first world sensitivities by moving the unsightly out of sight. Offsetting emissions by paying landowners to plant trees rather than grazing livestock is mere smoke and mirrors, especially when thawing permafrost is said to be releasing trapped carbon at an alarming rate. Carbon trading is much like sending our plastic waste to Malaysia where they tip it into the sea; it simply moves the problem out of sight.

And what is to be made of yesterday’s announcement that subsidies for electric cars are being cut, from £3000 to £2500?  The fact that subsidies were required in the first place reflects the high price that early adopters were having to pay. The subsidy previously applied to cars up to £50k and now only applies up to £35k. And that is a reduction from a year ago when £3.5k was available for all electric cars without a limit to their cost.

That is already twice what I have ever paid for a car, including the odd occasion I bought new. But cutting it is an easy argument to make because anybody who can afford up to £100k for a car of whatever stripe doesn’t need a 3.5% bung as an incentive for their virtue signalling – they were going to parade both their affluence and their paid-for Green credentials in your face regardless. Green, it turns out, is for the few, not the many.

So, what of the developing world which is supposed to magically come into the twenty-first century without the several hundreds of years of societal evolution necessary to inculcate a culture of modernity (see most islamic countries for reference). We have been conducting such an experiment in the west, importing alien cultures in the name of diversity, under the happy delusion that we will all rub along together under western rules. It just doesn’t’ work, does it?

China, it appears, has the answer. It is going to fuel the Green Revolution with fossil fuel. Lovely, cheap, energy dense coal and oil and gas will keep the wheels of their manufacturing industries turning, achieving economies of scale only dreamed of in the west. Meanwhile the west will saddle itself with ever higher costs and ever tightening parsimony, eventually being forced to buy in its supposedly green technology from the inscrutable Orient. Damn clever, your Chinese.

It's Electric!

I had an electric car once. The range was pathetic... the cord only stretched about 50 feet. An oldie but nevertheless still illustrative of a truism, that although electric cars may be the future, it will be a future quite different from the one advertised. There may yet be inductive charging while in motion, kerbside hook-ups every fifteen feet and the opportunity for some to charge up for free at work, but the electricity has to be reliably generated somewhere.

And about that reliability thing: until we get 24/7 sunshine, or constant, not-too-weak/not-too-strong wind we have to generate that electricity by, you guessed it, fossil fuel, because much of the world has turned against nuclear. So, the real power behind electric cars is not clean, fresh, free-to-harvest renewables, but good old coal and gas. Add in the cost of mining all that toxic cadmium and other expensive, exotic metals and it is almost certain you can show that cough for cough, electric cars are more environmentally harmful than diesel

But long before we get to the stage when environmentalists begin to campaign against electric cars we need to spend a whole bunch of cash just to make electron-propelled transport viable. Where do you live and where do you work? Do you have a nice driveway where you can recharge? Or, like far more of the population, do you need to park across the road, in the next street, or just in a different spot every evening because, muh, congestion?

Who is going to build all the power stations needed? It has been widely reported that China builds a new coal-fired power station about every three seconds, yet in the UK we get one new nuclear plant every fifty years. And how is all that electricity to be distributed; who is going to build the infrastructure? You guessed it, not us. The Germans and the French already seem to own our power market anyway, so hey, let’s throw more of our capital away in pursuit of what still seems, to me, to be an improbable dream.

Why the push for all-electric transport then? Well, obviously it is whatever form of climate change we are trying to reverse this week. And if energy usage is the bogeyman, why increase it? Turning fossil fuel into motive power, heat, light, etc is more effective if you cut out the middle man of costly (to build, maintain, manage and bill for) energy networks which merely increase complexity. This introduces efficiency losses at each stage of the process: extraction, transport, conversion , distribution, etc  and adds administrative costs as the bureaucracy of the systems involved each take their slice.

Drax power station in South Yorkshire converted to the ‘carbon neutral’ wonder fuel known as biomass some years ago. Not only is this more expensive, but it is ultimately more polluting, especially when you take into account the supply chains and deforestation involved in the base fuel. Drax is built pretty much on top of a massive source of coal, which it used to burn. If the Chinese and the Germans are allowed to get away with coal-fired, why do we have to pay for what they produce from afar when we have it right here?

Faced with rising costs, British consumers of electricity have been economising and their adoption of more efficient devices, low energy lighting and a bit of common sense is paying dividends. The electric car might be a shiny carrot of a pseudo-incentive, but we have always responded quicker to a beating and the big stick of electricity tariffs has been pushing our usage down for years. It was reported this morning (BBC World Service news) that we are now using less electricity in the UK than in the eighties and that our thrift has been more influential in this than the combined ‘contribution’ of both wind and solar power.

Plug into a nearby taxpayer's wallet and she's ready to go... 

So, the experts’ solution to our future energy needs is to increase our demand for electricity? And to do this they will add extra taxes into your electricity bills? Doesn’t this sound rather like the sort of things a drug baron might do - increase dependency, push up the price? Are those in control really a part of the solution at all, or rather the largest part of the problem? By all means buy an electric runabout today, but suggest your kids look into coal, oil and gas for future careers... just in case.

Hotting up...

Ah, another week in Westminster and all is well with the lunatic world of those running Asylum Britain. Both Tory and Labour ex-Foreign Secretaries take a turn in the stocks for their apparent arrogance in accepting cash for access; didn’t we do all this before? But maybe it was a case of taking bullets for the team? Rifkind possibly intended to draw attention away from George Osborne reining back his promise to increase minimum wage to £7 an hour, which looks pretty shoddy compared to £5k a day, doesn’t it? And maybe Jack, the man of Straw, was keen to deflect attention from the astonishing announcement regarding a former cabinet colleague. 

Yes, that old dinosaur John Prescott has been dug up, dusted down, re-animated and brought out of retirement as an exhibit in the Unnatural History Museum – an example of the extinct hominid Homeo hullibilis on-the-pithecus – in order to be, wait for it, Ed Miliband’s special advisor ‘responsible for global warming’ by one report. I expect the lithe and sporty Mr P has been responsible for a fair portion of it over the years but it seems a little unfair to single him out as being entirely to blame. Mind you he can throw a mean punch so maybe this is the plan to engage climate change sceptics? Believe or Big John will lamp you one.

Because it is far more about belief than it is about science, isn’t it? And Red Ed falls hook, line and sinker for the climate change message, swallows unsubstantiable ‘truths’ wholesale and Oliver Twist-like, begs for more. Why? Because listen to the siren call to the young and impressionable: “Oh woe, woe and thrice woe,” they cry, “we have only five days to save the planet. The nasty grown-ups burned all our futures!” Even if this creaky Hollywood premise were true we are either too late, or else we can do too little - but think of the votes! Personally, I genuinely don’t give a fuck because all that I am will die with me in a couple of decades from now, long before any changes will affect my lifestyle.

Except for one thing. Miliband’s absurd target will only make it more expensive, year on year. He says “The next Labour government will commit Britain to making our electricity supply carbon free by 2030.” Does he have the first inkling of a clue about how anything works? Of course not. A schoolboy Marxist he thinks all things come from the state and is prepared to repeal the natural laws if necessary to turn policy into personal hardship for millions. He has no clue about physics, meteorology, chemistry, biology, or anything else not covered in the Oxford PPE syllabus and in his ignorance will happily make you pay for every madcap gimmick the Green gurus will dream up and petition him to adopt.

In Labour’s wonderland, new technology must miraculously appear without the intervention of humans. Humans who create carbon dioxide (Prescott alone has a carbon footprint the size of Hull) and all the animals we eat, which create carbon dioxide and the minerals we mine, transport and process using fossil fuels which emit carbon dioxide. There is no such thing as zero-carbon energy unless we rely on direct sunlight alone and preferably don’t employ any of that energy to create even more humans.

Simple Gore-geous!

But beyond simple ignorance there is a massive hypocrisy in Labour’s pursuit of green credentials and it is the little matter of one of Labour's raisons d'être - equality. In the bright red future, only the very wealthy will be able to afford heat and light and transport and technology and just as now the very wealthy will be able to choose how much they want to pay in order that the rest of us may have a share. From sunny, tax-free climes they will occupy the choicest spots on the planet and watch as the rest of us shiver in the dark. Somebody said, as a joke “What if we run out of renewables?” Would anybody dare bet that couldn’t happen under Labour?

Say again?

I am no enemy of ‘green’ technologies. I say ‘green’ in quotes because it’s rare that we use any of the Earth’s resources in ways that are truly wise and don’t have an overall negative impact on somebody along the way. Often, Green proponents are dreamers, just as hell-bent as other causes on forcing their policies on those who don’t agree and rarely managing to make a real case. But, if there IS a case for using a low-impact energy source, I’m all for it.

This weekend a story about EU green energy policy caught my eye: Apparently, David Cameron backs the EU's grand design for energy. I’m not entirely sure what his backing of that ‘grand design’ really means, so I am inclined to try and find somebody who really knows. But I know that’s not going to be possible; nobody with interests in the green energy industry will tell you the objective truth. 

Some of you know that I teach electricians for a living. They don't, in the main, understand what electricity really is, how it does what it does and alarmingly, how to make it safe. Although they may do an excellent job of repeating what they have been shown, they REALLY don't understand generation, transmission or storage of electricity. So there’s no point in you asking an electrician. 

David Cameron won’t have asked any electricians either. Neither will he have consulted any engineers, because politics and cold hard facts just don’t mix. No, he will have been advised by ‘advisors’ (again, in quotes) and who will those advisors ALWAYS turn out to have been? That’s right, lobbyists for the technologies they promote… Directors of ‘green’ technology companies, or their willing dupes. 

Humans are on record as being profligate, poor decision-makers. We barely listen to the arguments and then return to our knee-jerk first choice. Or we work out we can’t afford that car/jewellery/suit/suite… and buy it anyway. It’s partly because our true nature is reactive, rather than contemplative, but even so that’s hardly an excuse in government. 

With my sparkies I tell them, tell them again, get them to repeat it several times, then tell them again. Then when I ask them what I just told them they often reply, “Sorry, what?” It’s the calculators in primary school argument all over again; there is no substitute for hard graft and if you don’t grasp the fundamentals you just aren’t ready for the rest. 

A politician is unlikely to be able to grasp the technical principles behind policies he is being lobbied to promote. But he can at least ask again. And then again and again until that chink of light appears. 

So, Mr Cameron, before you engage in yet more unnecessary spending of money we can’t afford in pursuit of ideals we generally don’t hold, achieved by means we don’t really understand and making profits for anybody but us, you might want to hang on to this handy crib-sheet of questions for the green lobbyists:

DOES it work? HOW does it work? Can you PROVE to me that it works? How much will it COST in total to set up? How long will it last? What will it save? If it doesn’t save anything, why should we consider it? How many jobs will be lost? How many of the jobs created will go to British workers? Can you prove all of that? If not, why are you here? Now, tell me again why you’re asking for public money? If it’s as good as you claim it is, surely you can get private funding? Next! 

Next... Ah yes, the European Union. Tell me Mrs Merkel, “DOES it work? HOW does it work? Can you PROVE to me that it works? How much will it COST?...”