| utility bill just arrived 11:20 - Feb 9 with 12509 views | enfieldargh |
£480 per month up from £180 per month
That's almost the cost of my 60+ season ticket in one month |  |
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| utility bill just arrived on 20:30 - Feb 11 with 1139 views | Sonofpugwash |
| utility bill just arrived on 09:48 - Feb 11 by Esox_Lucius |
When you see stationary turbines whilst others on the same site are working it is because they have been stopped with a "parking brake" due to low demand. A wind turbine only requires 5mph wind speeds to operate due to fan blade design. |
The parking brake mostly works when the wind is too high,same as the domestic product.
Don't get me wrong I'm very pro - wind,it's just that it's the most expensive option first for seemingly political reasons rather than practicality and giving the punters a fair deal.
What puts me off with the small turbine product(and solar doesn't suffer from this) is the constant maintenance costs - bearings,yearly balancing of the turbine blades....vertical axis ones are a better bet because you don't have to "follow the wind " with them and the control gubbins are situated at the base of the tower rather than up top.You also have to get planning permission
As to getting energy "out of thin air" well even Tesla couldn't achieve that....or did he?That's the holy grail of electrical engineering,broadcast power.They've toyed with the idea of induction coils under roads for electric cars but nothing major so far.
Whatever happens we ain't going to get cheap juice any time soon,would be too much like Communism innit. [Post edited 11 Feb 2022 20:32]
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| utility bill just arrived on 23:06 - Feb 11 with 1050 views | GloryHunter |
The purpose of smart meters has always been to be able to shift to time-of-use tariffs, where the energy companies can charge more at times of high usage. The govt has pretended that smart meters are "more convenient" for customers, but anyone who has had one fitted knows that they are not more convenient at all.
Now the cat seems to be peeking out of the bag, and even the Daily Mail (sorry) is covering the time-of-use tariff story:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10500391/Poorer-families-face-threat-pe |  | | |
| utility bill just arrived on 19:22 - Feb 12 with 883 views | stevec |
Worth a read whatever your politics.
BY ANDREW NEIL
HOUSEHOLDS across the country are gripped in a cost-of-living vice, with the price of essentials, from food to travel, soaring. But none more so than energy costs, with the average family fuel bill rising by an incredible 54 per cent to just shy of £2,000 a year. For folks on modest and low incomes, there will be real financial hardship.
‘It’s a global energy crunch,’ say our politicians. ‘There’s not much we can do about it.’
In fact, we are reaping the bitter consequences of 25 years of increasingly costly, stupid and self-defeating energy policies promoted in unison by these very same politicians – Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat alike – who now bleat there’s nothing they can do about it.
Take gas. As the world economy has sprung back from the depths of the pandemic, there is, indeed, a global shortage of gas. Prices have spiked and the extra cost is now showing up painfully in our domestic fuel bills.
The solution has been under our feet for more than a decade. Britain sits on some of the world’s richest reserves of shale gas. The Bowland Field in Lancashire harbours 37.6 trillion cubic metres of the stuff. Even if we were to extract only 10 per cent of it – through a process called fracking – we’d have enough gas to be self-sufficient for 50 years.
There are plenty other places in our land brimming with shale – all of which could be mined to supply our own needs, with the surplus exported to a gas-hungry world.
In reality, we haven’t extracted a single cubic metre. Our politicians – left, right and centre – simply didn’t have the gumption to go for it.
They were cowed into submission by the propaganda of the green lobby, which hugely exaggerated the environmental dangers and spread scare stories when exploratory drilling produced the mildest of earth tremors in the Blackpool area.
They barely registered on the Richter scale and Northern coal-mining areas have experienced worse for more than a century. But they were enough to kill off Britain’s nascent shale industry.
Even that’s not enough for the Green Blob.
Far from exploiting our shale reserves, the Oil and Gas Authority, a state quango which increasingly dances to the green net-zero carbon emissions tune, has ordered Cuadrilla, the drilling company, to seal forever its two shale gas wells by pouring concrete down them.
Not now to frack – and not ever. It is a policy which beggars belief. The Government should be ashamed of itself – as should all those Opposition politicians who support it. Far from developing shale gas when we most need it, the unthinking and often uninformed Westminster consensus is to make sure none of it ever sees the light of day.
As a result, massive investment in the North will not take place and 75,000 well-paid, skilled jobs in places where they are most needed – such as Lancashire – will now never be created. Remember that next time you hear a Cabinet minister wittering on about levelling up the North with the South.
Of course, we’re still going to need gas. Even as billions have been poured into renewables, gas is still the biggest generator of electricity – accounting for on average 40 per cent, and more than 50 per cent when the wind isn’t blowing. But instead of extracting it from our own lands, we’ll have to import it.
Already 50 per cent of the gas we need comes from abroad – mainly Norway and Qatar, with some from Russia. By the end of the decade, we’ll be importing 70 per cent and by 2050 – when we’re meant to hit that magical net-zero for carbon emissions – 85 per cent of the gas we need will be imported.
Britain currently runs a balance of payments deficit equivalent to 4 per cent of our GDP and energy already accounts for a big chunk of it. In the decades ahead, imported gas is set to blow an even bigger hole in our trade deficit. A growing deficit makes it harder to run a high-growth economy without making that deficit unsustainable.
The consequences of our absurd energy policies are mind-boggling. Instead of providing well-paid employment for our own people in the North, we’ve decided to line the already-brimming pockets of dictators in Qatar and the Kremlin with billions more dollars.
Instead of cultivating our own shale industry, which would generate billions of pounds in tax, we’re spending billions to import gas.
The hypocrisy is nauseating. Our politicians dine out with virtue-signalling glee on how they’ve stopped fracking in the UK. But they don’t mention that we had to import shale gas from America this winter to make up for shortfalls in supply from elsewhere. America – where gas prices are 25 per cent of ours and shale has turned the country into a net energy exporter.
A prospect which beckoned for us – but on which we preferred to turn our backs, all because our political elite bowed to the power of the green lobby.
That thud you hear as your energy bills pop through the letterbox and hit the floor is the price you’re paying for their political cowardice.
Our energy failures are not confined to gas. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 with a landslide majority, giving him the power to do what he wanted, it was quickly apparent we needed to start planning for four new nuclear power stations to replace our ageing nuclear generators.
But nothing happened. As the Government dithered, the then Chancellor Gordon Brown decided it was a good idea to sell our nuclear generation capabilities – in the shape of Westinghouse Electric Company – to Japan’s Toshiba in 2006. Thus did Britain, which once led the world in the peaceful application of atomic power, end up with no nuclear power technology of its own.
Twenty-five years after Blair was told we needed four new nuclear generators, we’re building only one (at Hinkley Point). Actually, the French are building it since we don’t have the know-how to do it ourselves.
France has shown nuclear is an alternative to gas. It has 56 reactors which generate more than 70 per cent of its electricity. Only 10 per cent comes from gas, which has insulated French households from the current surge in gas prices.
No surprise, then, that President Macron this week announced six new nuclear power stations as part of a €50 billion modernisation programme.
Here in dear old Blighty we failed to invest in new nuclear or shale. So our nuclear stations are fast reaching the end of their lifecycle and we grow ever more dependent on gas imports. Stupidity piled upon stupidity.
UK energy policy used to be driven by the need for security of supply and for affordability. Today we have neither. Both have been sacrificed to the great god of decarbonisation, which has taken precedence over everything else.
Instead of trying to learn from the litany of energy errors, we just compound mistake with mistake. Smart meters, in theory, should help us to use electricity more efficiently, using power for some tasks when it’s off peak and cheaper.
But our energy tsars intend to use them to manage shortages of supply, surging prices when demand is strong and even siphoning off electricity from vehicles plugged into chargers. Good luck with that.
The irony of our predicament is that, even if you’re a net-zero zealot, it’s impossible to see it being reached by 2050 unless nuclear power is there to provide carbon-free, base-load power, and relatively clean gas is used as a transition fuel until there is a step-change in battery technology which allows electricity to be stored in huge quantities (to use when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining).
But the Green Blob is irrationally averse to any use of fossil fuels even in a transition to net zero and implacably hostile to nuclear.
Most of our politicians, to their lasting shame, are in hock to them – hook, line and offshore windmill. The rest of us will be paying for their spinelessness big time for the foreseeable future. |  | | |
| utility bill just arrived on 19:54 - Feb 12 with 866 views | CliveWilsonSaid |
| utility bill just arrived on 19:22 - Feb 12 by stevec |
Worth a read whatever your politics.
BY ANDREW NEIL
HOUSEHOLDS across the country are gripped in a cost-of-living vice, with the price of essentials, from food to travel, soaring. But none more so than energy costs, with the average family fuel bill rising by an incredible 54 per cent to just shy of £2,000 a year. For folks on modest and low incomes, there will be real financial hardship.
‘It’s a global energy crunch,’ say our politicians. ‘There’s not much we can do about it.’
In fact, we are reaping the bitter consequences of 25 years of increasingly costly, stupid and self-defeating energy policies promoted in unison by these very same politicians – Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat alike – who now bleat there’s nothing they can do about it.
Take gas. As the world economy has sprung back from the depths of the pandemic, there is, indeed, a global shortage of gas. Prices have spiked and the extra cost is now showing up painfully in our domestic fuel bills.
The solution has been under our feet for more than a decade. Britain sits on some of the world’s richest reserves of shale gas. The Bowland Field in Lancashire harbours 37.6 trillion cubic metres of the stuff. Even if we were to extract only 10 per cent of it – through a process called fracking – we’d have enough gas to be self-sufficient for 50 years.
There are plenty other places in our land brimming with shale – all of which could be mined to supply our own needs, with the surplus exported to a gas-hungry world.
In reality, we haven’t extracted a single cubic metre. Our politicians – left, right and centre – simply didn’t have the gumption to go for it.
They were cowed into submission by the propaganda of the green lobby, which hugely exaggerated the environmental dangers and spread scare stories when exploratory drilling produced the mildest of earth tremors in the Blackpool area.
They barely registered on the Richter scale and Northern coal-mining areas have experienced worse for more than a century. But they were enough to kill off Britain’s nascent shale industry.
Even that’s not enough for the Green Blob.
Far from exploiting our shale reserves, the Oil and Gas Authority, a state quango which increasingly dances to the green net-zero carbon emissions tune, has ordered Cuadrilla, the drilling company, to seal forever its two shale gas wells by pouring concrete down them.
Not now to frack – and not ever. It is a policy which beggars belief. The Government should be ashamed of itself – as should all those Opposition politicians who support it. Far from developing shale gas when we most need it, the unthinking and often uninformed Westminster consensus is to make sure none of it ever sees the light of day.
As a result, massive investment in the North will not take place and 75,000 well-paid, skilled jobs in places where they are most needed – such as Lancashire – will now never be created. Remember that next time you hear a Cabinet minister wittering on about levelling up the North with the South.
Of course, we’re still going to need gas. Even as billions have been poured into renewables, gas is still the biggest generator of electricity – accounting for on average 40 per cent, and more than 50 per cent when the wind isn’t blowing. But instead of extracting it from our own lands, we’ll have to import it.
Already 50 per cent of the gas we need comes from abroad – mainly Norway and Qatar, with some from Russia. By the end of the decade, we’ll be importing 70 per cent and by 2050 – when we’re meant to hit that magical net-zero for carbon emissions – 85 per cent of the gas we need will be imported.
Britain currently runs a balance of payments deficit equivalent to 4 per cent of our GDP and energy already accounts for a big chunk of it. In the decades ahead, imported gas is set to blow an even bigger hole in our trade deficit. A growing deficit makes it harder to run a high-growth economy without making that deficit unsustainable.
The consequences of our absurd energy policies are mind-boggling. Instead of providing well-paid employment for our own people in the North, we’ve decided to line the already-brimming pockets of dictators in Qatar and the Kremlin with billions more dollars.
Instead of cultivating our own shale industry, which would generate billions of pounds in tax, we’re spending billions to import gas.
The hypocrisy is nauseating. Our politicians dine out with virtue-signalling glee on how they’ve stopped fracking in the UK. But they don’t mention that we had to import shale gas from America this winter to make up for shortfalls in supply from elsewhere. America – where gas prices are 25 per cent of ours and shale has turned the country into a net energy exporter.
A prospect which beckoned for us – but on which we preferred to turn our backs, all because our political elite bowed to the power of the green lobby.
That thud you hear as your energy bills pop through the letterbox and hit the floor is the price you’re paying for their political cowardice.
Our energy failures are not confined to gas. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 with a landslide majority, giving him the power to do what he wanted, it was quickly apparent we needed to start planning for four new nuclear power stations to replace our ageing nuclear generators.
But nothing happened. As the Government dithered, the then Chancellor Gordon Brown decided it was a good idea to sell our nuclear generation capabilities – in the shape of Westinghouse Electric Company – to Japan’s Toshiba in 2006. Thus did Britain, which once led the world in the peaceful application of atomic power, end up with no nuclear power technology of its own.
Twenty-five years after Blair was told we needed four new nuclear generators, we’re building only one (at Hinkley Point). Actually, the French are building it since we don’t have the know-how to do it ourselves.
France has shown nuclear is an alternative to gas. It has 56 reactors which generate more than 70 per cent of its electricity. Only 10 per cent comes from gas, which has insulated French households from the current surge in gas prices.
No surprise, then, that President Macron this week announced six new nuclear power stations as part of a €50 billion modernisation programme.
Here in dear old Blighty we failed to invest in new nuclear or shale. So our nuclear stations are fast reaching the end of their lifecycle and we grow ever more dependent on gas imports. Stupidity piled upon stupidity.
UK energy policy used to be driven by the need for security of supply and for affordability. Today we have neither. Both have been sacrificed to the great god of decarbonisation, which has taken precedence over everything else.
Instead of trying to learn from the litany of energy errors, we just compound mistake with mistake. Smart meters, in theory, should help us to use electricity more efficiently, using power for some tasks when it’s off peak and cheaper.
But our energy tsars intend to use them to manage shortages of supply, surging prices when demand is strong and even siphoning off electricity from vehicles plugged into chargers. Good luck with that.
The irony of our predicament is that, even if you’re a net-zero zealot, it’s impossible to see it being reached by 2050 unless nuclear power is there to provide carbon-free, base-load power, and relatively clean gas is used as a transition fuel until there is a step-change in battery technology which allows electricity to be stored in huge quantities (to use when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining).
But the Green Blob is irrationally averse to any use of fossil fuels even in a transition to net zero and implacably hostile to nuclear.
Most of our politicians, to their lasting shame, are in hock to them – hook, line and offshore windmill. The rest of us will be paying for their spinelessness big time for the foreseeable future. |
Why has it taken him this long to say anything?
I can't say I disagree with a lot of it but as household energy is something that I know about I'm amazed that more hasn't been said before.
There doesn't seem to be any accountability in this sector and it's deeply worrying. |  |
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| utility bill just arrived on 21:13 - Feb 12 with 791 views | Esox_Lucius |
Fück fracking! Forget fossil fuels, use the renewable sources available in this country, sea, wind & solar. |  |
| The grass is always greener. |
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