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What will electricity companies do if a million UK customers say they won’t pay their bill? We might find out in six weeks or so.
A group called Don’t Pay UK are gathering pledges from fed-up UK consumers, and so far 75,000 Brits have signed up. The Twitter account @dontpayuk started in June, and already has 91,000 followers. The group draws inspiration from the Poll Tax protests thirty years ago which likely ended Margaret Thatchers reign as PM.
As commenter MrGrimNasty says the latest estimates have the UK energy bill price cap at a [shocking] £4,700 by April next year, remember it was about £1200 hardly 2 years before then.
With 12 million people in the UK facing energy poverty, there may be plenty of takers in the civil disobedience movement. The nation is only 6km away from 1,000 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. OK, so it’s 6 kilometers of solid rock, but if it were war-time, how long would that take? (Especially when the hole is already drilled. The hardest rock apparently is the paperwork just to stop it being concreted back in.)
…
Don’t Pay UK
It’s simple: we are demanding a […]
By Jo Nova
The Year of Gloom continues for Wind Power
Wind energy is so cheap and profitable that last week, investors abandoned the annual UK auction to build industrial wind plants in the oceans around the UK. Exactly no one offered to spend money building turbines even though electricity prices are burning hot. Apparently prices for building the machinery to collect and transmit low density erratic energy are not “free” like the wind. Even after decades of advances, sacred green electrons still cost a lot more than war-afflicted-fossil-fuel electrons do.
The free market has spoken and it said “No”. At The Guardian though – it was, of course, all the Governments fault. That and the dreaded Hand Of Inflation. It’s so unfair:
‘Biggest clean energy disaster in years’: UK auction secures no offshore windfarms
Lack of interest was widely expected after government failed to heed warnings about soaring costs
Jillian Ambrose
None of the companies hoping to build big offshore windfarms in UK waters took part in the government’s annual auction, which awards contracts to generate renewable electricity for 15 years at a set price.
The companies had warned […]
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 […]
By Jo Nova
Green Europe is running out of electrons
Last Monday in Great Britain the entire steel industry shut down because the wind stopped and wholesale prices reached £2,586 a megawatt-hour. As winter cranks up, British factories are getting ready to shutdown, as the threat of small, medium and blockbuster blackouts loom. In the fifth largest economy in the world, thousands of people are using communal warm spaces because they can’t afford electricity any longer, and the largest North Sea gas producer has decided not to drill for more gas just when the country needs it. The government has slapped a new tax on it, thus achieving the exact opposite of what the government aimed for.
Meanwhile over in Germany one eighth of the entire national economy is now consumed with paying for the energy crisis of 2022. They tried to hold back the seas in 2100 but forgot to secure their own electricity a year in advance.
These are very expensive experiments They aren’t telling you this but UK is close to nationwide blackouts
by David Maddox , Daily Express
But the one nobody is discussing is the real possibility the lights could […]
By Jo Nova
Imagine an energy system so broken that the government forced The People to buy generators that only work (randomly) 30% of the time and told them they would still have to pay the generators even when their product was useless.
Britain wasting ‘millions a day’ in energy as wind farms told to turn off while bills soar
The UK has been squandering an estimated £1billion a year in energy as the National Grid’s infrastructure cannot handle the volumes of clean power currently being produced.
By ANTONY ASHKENAZ, Express
Imagine that the government told The People that this would make their electricity cheaper (and people believed them!).
In the UK people are forced to pay unreliable generators for electricity that comes when no one wants it. No doubt this was built into the contract from the start to stop investors from fleeing for the hills.
Imagine an investment so bad that the seller has to pre-arrange payments for all the times their product is useless or it wouldn’t be worth building in the first place. There’s a message in that. (Don’t build it.)
To put arsenic-icing on this cake, the wind farms that […]
by Jo Nova
Things are getting serious Mum.
Nearly half of Britons are already finding it hard to pay their energy bills. Over two million UK households are behind in their payments, and some have started unplugging fridges, hand washing their clothes and skipping meals, and it’s not even winter. The National Grid manager is so desperate they’re setting up a scheme to pay people to switch off their own electricity at peak hour, and the going rate for these precious Negawatts is £3,000 per megawatt hour.
There’s the hint of a war footing building. Thousands of shared refuges from the cold are being planned across the country, and the WarmSpaces website is setting up a directory.
Last week someone leaked that the BBC was secretly planning what to do if the UK gets a full two-day national blackout in the dead of winter. Apparently the BBC will advise people to use their car radios, or haha “battery powered receivers” (do the millennials know what they are?) to tune in the BBC. If they manage that, the BBC could then helpfully tell them, the minute after it was too late to do anything, that the blackouts may affects their […]
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 […]
by Jo Nova
Good News — Fracking will start in the UK after ten years of absurd delays over bizarre seismic excuses where the fracking industry was supposed to stop if tremors were larger than 0.5 on the Richter scale which meant it never started. A 0.5 level tremor is so small you’d need a Richter scale to even know it occurred. People usually can’t feel shakes of 2.0 or less, and it’s a logarithmic scale…
Once fracking starts it will be hard to put this genie back in the bottle. Will Australia, Canada and New Zealand be the last three nations on Earth still serious about Net Zero?
As Gaia Fawkes says: Truss Gets Cracking With Fracking
The news comes as The Guardian reports Liz is planning to follow through on her leadership election pledge and lift the ban on fracking as soon as possible, with first licences set to be issued as early as next week. This will no doubt come as welcome relief as energy bills continue to rise during winter. The decision comes despite the paper’s ominous quote from a forthcoming report that forecasting fracking-induced earthquakes “remains a significant challenge”. In August 2019 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Even the Australian ABC was telling Australians with a straight face that the extreme heat in the UK was so dangerously bad that healthy young people might die in the heat. For most Australians, it’s not summer if it doesn’t hit 40. And for people with a sauna, it’s not fun if it’s not 60 degrees. People enjoy an hour at 60C all the time without dying. We are mammals, we just need to drink. (And make sure we never forget the kids in the car).
Toby Young at the Daily Sceptic found the perfect study released last week reminding us of how deadly UK heatwaves are:
There are Eighty Times More Excess Deaths Associated With Cold Each Year than Heat
According to a recent study in the Lancet Planetary Health, between 2000 and 2019, there were an average of 65,000 excess deaths per year in England and Wales associated with cold, but fewer than 800 a year associated with heat. In other words, roughly 80 times more deaths per year are associated with cold than heat.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
The eighty fold difference shows how serious a UK winter is, and […]
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 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 […]
Mike Cannon-Brookes might be an Australian tech-billionaire who wants to buy out one of our biggest energy companies and get rid of coal, but not only does he apparently not understand electricity grids, he doesn’t even know what a free market is.
In a free market customers could choose not to buy green electrons:
If we had a real free market in energy, we could a tick-that-box on our plan that said “100% coal fired, cheapest available reliable electricity”. Instead, all Australians are forced to buy electricity from a hobbled patchwork grid which has been repurposed as a Global Air Conditioner.
It’s a national grid crafted through “Renewable Energy Targets”, and pure hopium. Hidden in our electricity bills, taxes, and frozen-pea packets at Coles, are multiple subsidies to help wind and solar power. Poor Australians have paid to help put discounted solar panels on their rich neighbors roofs, and are paying for back up, storage, stabilizers, unnecessary two-billion dollar interstate transmission lines, and demand management plans.
Every windless minute at night the poor pay more for electricity than they would have — if the Agents of Weather-changing Sorcery were not allowed to romp freely through the energy market. Once […]
Lesson 4-billion-and-one in How Big Government Screws Everything Up
Cuadrilla Shale Gas.
Remember Cuadrilla, the company that discovered 200 trillion cubic feet of gas in Lancashire, UK in 2011? It multiplied the entire national reserve of shale gas by 37 fold. At one point the market value was estimated to be something like £136 billion and could keep the UK “in gas” for 56 years.
It should have changed everything. But in 2022 the UK is in an energy crisis and instead of expanding those shale wells, the UK government is sealing them up. They’re the only two viable shale gas wells in Britain, and the government wants them to pour concrete down the holes.
It’s been a long slow grind to nothing. The anti-frackers frightened the people with stories of “known carcinogens called ‘silicon dioxide’” and seismic shocks that registered 1.5 on the Richter scale. So the people of the UK gave up an industry worth £6 billion a year, and a reliable energy supply because a government department was afraid of pure sand and a class of earthquake so small it’s “rarely felt” and so common the world has “several million” of them each year.
Andrew […]
Some poor sods will be paying extra to help Griffith Wind Farms cover the cost of shutting down for part of the COP26 Superhero Costume Party. If only that secret charge was listed on their electricity bill. Where is the transparency?
Twitter
Big Lie Number 1: that the Glasgow COP26 event is powered by 100% renewables.
It’s hard to believe, but some people think the wind powered electrons can be tracked and relied upon.
Sustainability Mag
There will be some accounting shell game where “100% of the annual supply” means they supply the whole years electricity in lumpy packets at times that no conference centre could run on. We know it’s wrong because lies don’t scale up. If the whole nation can’t be 100% renewable at the same time and in the same way, then the Conference centre isn’t 100% renewable either. It’s relying on coal and gas just like everyone else is.
The 100% renewable fakers are show-pony parasites on the system. They need the transmission lines, the back up, the inertia and the stable frequency but they Lord their 100% Renewable Badge knowing full well, that if everyone was “100% renewable” the system would […]
Some great Green plans are starting to come undone and it’s not even winter yet
But it is just in time for a reality check on COP26.
Europe’s energy crunch is continuing, as gas storage volumes have shrunk to 10-year lows. In the UK 12 energy companies have collapsed this year leaving 2.2 million customers stranded without an electricity provider. Things are so bad the Dutch government is thinking of reopening the Groningen gas field, Europe’s largest onshore gas field. This is a big backward step for the transition to magical energy. “Until recently, the plan was that Groningen would be closed completely by 2023, ending the large-scale gas production and export by the Netherlands with a bang.”
There are even thoughts of switching back to coal. Drax is suddenly talking about keeping some coal plants running a bit longer, something that would have been blasphemy a few months ago.
Across Europe and Asia — the energy crisis runs amok
No one can blame Brexit for food shortages in Brussels:
https://twitter.com/hermannkelly/status/1442901773958582274
But people can blame Green policies for energy pain
Kate Andrews: Britain’s weak energy security puts net zero in doubt The Daily Telegraph, 29 […]
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