Wednesday 6 October 2021

Energy crisis continues - where is the clamour?

If anything, I am amazed at how little the energy crisis is hitting home. Gas prices are 200% up and this means that we will shortly be paying well over 100% increases on our domestic bills. So much for keeping a lid on inflation, this alone will drive inflation to over 2% per annum without any other factors. 

It still seems to be just a business news page issue, the petrol shortage, although energy for transport is seen as something different. To be blamed on Brexit or the pandemic as per your choice. 

The energy crisis has none of these factors. The Government is 100% squarely to blame over the last 10 years. Cutting gas and oil stations too quickly, not replacing nuclear and then over-relying on Wind and Solar when they are not fit for core supply with the current lack of battery capacity. This is before we get to Nick's post of the lack of gas storage. The whole of Europe is suffering the same issues. 

How these costs work themselves out will be both interesting and horrifying. Costs and prices will go up as input costs are hugely increased - no both wages and energy. Countries, cough America, with domestic supply will have a huge advantage for the next few months. China is struggling, rationing power all over the place where it can. 

Why the media and opposition can't see what a hole the Government is in over this and one which for which there are simply no short term answers.

17 comments:

DJK said...

I agree that this is a huge story that is being not reported. I've been watching the natural gas spot price go mental in real time, on the BBC business pages (/market-data). 344p/therm now, whereas a few days ago it was under 250. Plenty of inflation heading our way in the next few months.

Anonymous said...

Is this not an example of societal level cognitive dissonance?

Because of the consistent stream of green propaganda over the last years/decades that has reduced the argument down to a simple binary of fossil fuels being bad/evil and wind/solar as being good, people are no longer able to connect their belief system with current events.

The current reality was always going to happen but because we've be told the green revolution will bring us a new utopia of being nice to the plant, yet still have a great existence, people are no longer able to face the reality that it's was all bullshit to start with.

DJK said...

20 minutes later, the spot price has cone to 404 p/therm.

Don Cox said...

Time to buy mittens and a woolly scarf.

Don

dearieme said...

Parade the Guilty Men. (Miliband, Davey, Cameron, Johnson?)

Offer them a last cigarette. Instruct the firing squad to shoot.

For the lesser weevils, the bent climate "scientists", the Pals of the Planet, and suchlike, don't bother with the formalities. Just hire a good machine-gunner.

Do I speak figuratively? I'm still pondering that.

Jan said...

I'm pleased I live in a flat with good "passive solar" heating ie on a sunny day like today the sun shines in the windows and I'm warm as toast without any heating.

I'm also glad I had the foresight to make some very modest investments in oil, gas and coal companies............but don't tell my children although they will be the ultimate beneficiaries.

E-K said...

The prices haven't hit yet, but they will.

The BBC is running the agenda. It is wall-to-wall Climate Change on news and magazine shows.

So. Expensive energy will be '...for our own good' according to Boris.

We need this. We need hard winters to destroy the Tories.

They have been our problem all along. And I say that as a conservative who would be labelled beyond the extreme right of the party. I hope more and more people realise what the Tories really are.

Jan - I'm glad I like the cold.

Anonymous said...

dearieme - don't forget Blair, who stopped all new nuclear build in 1998, which meant no young nuclear engineers, no new third-gen designs, and the nation with the world's first nuclear power stations (1956) reduced to dependency on the French and Chinese.

dearieme said...

@Anon, thank you for the reminder. For me Blair is in a special category because I really would like to see him arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged. No "figurative" about it.

Anonymous said...

To be fair to Blair, something I find very difficult, he seems to have seen this coming. I can't find the Guardian stuff from 1998, since they got Google involved their search engine is crap (it used to be good), but here is stuff from 2005-6.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/sep/19/nuclear.greenpolitics

"'The long and short of it is we certainly do not need extra nuclear power in anything like a 10, 15-year cycle' she said, in an interview for ITV's The Jonathan Dimbleby Programme, to be screened today. Her words will also be seen as a rebuke to Downing Street, seen as keener on nuclear power than Beckett's own department and the Department of Trade and Industry. A senior DTI official recently concluded that nuclear power would have to provide half of Britain's electricity needs by 2050 if the country was to meet its targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It provides only a fifth, but its reactors are ageing and will start to have to be closed down by 2008."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/apr/09/greenpolitics.nuclear

Following a series of hearings closely watched by Downing Street, the all-party Environmental Audit Committee will conclude that new nuclear stations will be of little or no short-term use in filling an anticipated electricity 'generation gap' in Britain. In a report to be published next weekend, it will raise a series of questions it says must be answered before the case can be made for longer-term benefits from a new nuclear programme. The report will reignite the debate on how best to deal with the interlocking challenges of declining North Sea oil production, growing energy imports from the Middle East and Russia, and an ambitious government target of cutting UK carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Later this year a White Paper is expected to argue that, even with wind power and other renewable energy sources, it will be essential to replace ageing nuclear-power plants, which provide about a quarter of Britain's electricity. Given the long lead-time required for the approval and construction of new nuclear plants, the report will suggest that, even if the government does decide to go down the nuclear route, a projected eight 'new generation' nuclear plants would not be fully operational until 2020.

Sobers said...

Very glad I have a log burning stove and a large supply of timber to throw into it. It heats the entire house to my satisfaction for zero cost beyond a bit of my own efforts. The gas boiler will go on for half an hour a day to heat water, and thats it.

jim said...

Cast our minds forward to say 2050 or 2100. Paddling around in the winter floods, hot as hell in the summer. Not very nice. But the higher ground will become sanctioned land - only for the political class and the very rich. The wet, muddy and dusty bit for us. As for food, very limited for we lower orders but pate fois gras and Arctic raised beef for the political class.

All because we were told 'oh, just another decade of coal & gas'. Which will inevitably turn into just another decade and just another decade. Because we are in a cleft stick, nasty choices have to be made and politics is only about nasty choices when there is a serious danger to the land owning classes. So nasty choices will not be made, nothing will be done, like the frog in a saucepan we plebs will be slowly boiled.

Covid MkIII will look one of the better choices or we might get nuclear fusion to work - or not. Cheer up, it could be worse.

Sobers said...

"Cast our minds forward to say 2050 or 2100. Paddling around in the winter floods, hot as hell in the summer. Not very nice. But the higher ground will become sanctioned land - only for the political class and the very rich. The wet, muddy and dusty bit for us. As for food, very limited for we lower orders but pate fois gras and Arctic raised beef for the political class."

What utter bollocks.

Anonymous said...

The only frog in the saucepan we're experience is the boiling away of freedom and liberty into a dry crusty pot of technocratic authoritarian control over every aspect of our lives (but at least we'll have a few extra weeks a year where it'll be warm enough to wear shorts).

hovis said...

"but at least we'll have a few extra weeks a year where it'll be warm enough to wear shorts"

Indeed but only if the anthropogenic global warming is correct and climate has nohing to do to do with sunspot activity.

Don Cox said...

The effects of CO2 and Methane concentrations in the atmosphere come on top of the effects of solar activity. If temperatures are rising because of solar activity, they will rise more if there is more CO2 (whether because of human actions or volcanic eruptions); if temperatures are falling, they will fall less.

Don Cox

E-K said...

Don

We are an Island of shale and coal and yet find ourselves at the mercy of Putin.

I'd like those Remainers (who all happen to be Greenists too) to tell us which is the truth:

- Are we a globally insignificant country since leaving the EU ?

or

- Can we lead by example on Greenism ?

Which is it ?

We can't be both.