Blooming Personalities C/D 30Th November
Quizzes & Puzzles2 mins ago
I’m afraid you’ve started me off.
Just to illustrate the folly of this nonsense, look at the current demand and provision (i.e. at this very moment):
- 27% is being imported.
- The same amount is being met by solar. This is available even at this time of the year for only about ten hours a day. In six months’ time we’ll be lucky to get four hours of significant supply.
- Over 6% is being supplied by what is quaintly termed “biomass”. This consists mainly of freshly felled timber harvested and processed in the USA and Canada and shipped by diesel powered ships and trains to be burnt at Drax in Yorkshire. The emissions involved in this process are enormous, but neither those emissions, nor the emissions from burning the wood itself are included in the UK’s “carbon footprint” calculation.
- 11% is provided by wind.
- 7% is provided by gas (and this will have to be seriously increased from about 6pm when the sun goes down).
- 17% is provided from nuclear power. The future of the UK’s nuclear plants is in some jeopardy, with significant supply beyond 2026 in serious doubt.
So basically, at this very moment, a quarter of our current demand is being met by foreign suppliers, some of whom burn significant quantities of coal. Over a third depends on either the sun shining or the wind blowing. Almost a fifth depends on a power source that is under threat of closure in the next two years. Over 5% is met by burning 7m tons of imported timber. The power station doing that has received more that £1bn in subsidies (paid for by consumers via their electricity bills) to convert half of its plant and is looking for a similar amount to do the same with the other half.
Mr Hitchens is right – these policies are lunacy. They are utter madness. They will achieve nothing other than impoverishing the population and crippling the country’s economy. The people of this country and elsewhere in Europe are falling victims to some sort of collective mania which seems to have been visited upon their leaders, who appear to be displaying the symptoms of some sort of mental illness.
I forgot to mention that whilst we’re faffing about with windmills and solar farms, China has either in planning or under construction, coal fired power stations which will increase its capacity by twenty times the UK’s total demand. So we could cease all our emissions tomorrow and China would take up that slack in a matter of weeks.
The average lifespan of a solar panel 25 - 30 years. Meaning that between 2030 and 2060, 9.6 million tons of toxic solar panel waste is expected. (good business opportunity)
A recent study has shown that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit than nuclear plants. Add that cost to your electrickery bill.
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