The UK is engulfed in fog, our ungritted drive is a death trap and even the spiders’ webs are freezing in the garden. It’s what the weather buffs on the BBC refer to as a ‘cold snap’, the definition of which is ‘a brief period of very cold weather’; who could have predicted that in winter?
So, you would have thought, just the time to crank up the power and let a bit more oomph into the National Grid in anticipation of people doing their best to stave off hypothermia. Many must be trying to survive at least until Christmas to enjoy themselves for the first time in three years without some health-obsessed panjandrum lecturing them about masks, lateral flow tests and social distancing.
The only problem being that we don’t have enough power. France, from whom we get some has none to spare due to a decline in nuclear power production. French power workers have been striking and since Putin has put his foot on the gas pipeline, France—very dependent on Russian gas—has precious little of that.
Thank God we have been preparing for this for years. After all, the countryside is marred by huge, noisy, bird and bat slicing wind turbines and vast tracts of farmland are given over to solar panels. Surely the trade-off for all this ugliness is a plentiful supply of cheap energy. The problem is, it has not been a reasonable trade-off; it has been a zero-sum game whereby greater dependence on wind and solar power has increased our vulnerability to energy slumps, cold snaps and the vagaries of geopolitical power politics.
Basically, wind power is a con. Currently, only 26% of our power is wind generated and that is in a good year; it fell to 21% in 2021. If we wanted to produce even 50% of our power from the wind, we would have to build more of those ghastly turbines. Currently standing (tall) at 11,500, there would be so many of them that nearly everyone not living in a city centre would be able to see a wind turbine from their bedroom window. The first law of thermodynamics states that ‘energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be converted from one form into another.’ You don’t need a degree in thermodynamics to work out that when the wind don’t blow we gets no power from wind turbines. And what about all those fields covered in solar panels instead of cows, and all the ridiculous house-price lowering virtue signals with which people festoon their roofs for the sake of a lukewarm shower? Promise not to laugh, but these contribute a grand total of 1.2% to the national grid. We’re not doing very well, are we?
Which brings me to the next aspect of the wind power con. Believe it or not, we are running out of wind. That is one aspect of the climate emergency we don’t hear much about. There will always be wind as it is a result of air moving between the cold arctic and the warm tropics, but we are running out of the right type of wind – the type that drives wind turbines fast enough and for long enough to light up our lives. Mind you, when those wind turbines get going, as one did in an industrial park in my home town of Hull this year, they can certainly produce some heat. Sadly, I don’t think that bursting into flames and causing a mass evacuation of homes (and possibly a few bowels) is quite what was intended. That one, which is ironically visible to inner city dwellers, now stands as an inert monument to our worship of St Greta of Thunderberg and her climate crisis fanatics. I could go on about the water polluting mining for the rare earth metals needed to manufacture wind turbines and the fact that, despite being made from recyclable materials, wind turbines are rarely recycled, they are just buried but you might accuse me of making it up.
The result of the ‘net zero carbon’ energy policies that we are pursuing in the UK hit us this week. We have a cold snap with freezing fog; the sun is nowhere to be seen, and the countryside is still and silent. Even the BBC had to admit in the Today programme on Radio 4 that there was insufficient wind to power our turbines. Energy prices recently rose by 27% and a further 24% rise is predicted. Chez Watson, our household bill has doubled from this time last year. The government has just given me an inflationary £500 (which is nice, but which I am lucky enough not to need), and cut all household bills by £400 each, presumably by making another massive inflation driving payment to the energy companies.
Listening to government ministers speak or reading the official policies regarding our net zero carbon energy policies is to be exposed to boiler plate mantras about the climate emergency, global warming and rising sea levels. At some point someone will have to tell the emperor he is naked (before he dies of hypothermia) and admit that our net zero carbon energy policy is not working. These policies are not conservative, they are left-wing, eco-freaky nonsense. They are ruining our countryside, ruining our economy and bankrupting us into the bargain.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
