"Now provide a causal link between the anthropogenic component (if any) of present atmospheric CO2 content and any specific incidence of flooding".
Not for the first time you have cherry-picked a partial sentence to provide an answer to a question not asked and ignored the one that was.
I was not cherry-picking, but in order to show there is a link between A) anthropogenic component of present atmospheric CO2 content and Z) any specific incidence of flooding we need to start somewhere and that might as well be A).
More obfuscation, equivocation, procrastination, vacillation and, of course, good old general flimflam.
'We' don't need to do anything. You, however, need to provide an answer to the query I raised rather than giving excuses for not doing so.
Formulating a response to a phrase within a sentence while ignoring that which was explicitly requested is the very essence of cherry-picking. You did not deem it necessary to qualify your response at the time and now, for the third time, you have failed to provide an answer to my original comment.
We all acutely aware of the rising proportion of atmospheric CO2, but after 30 years of intense study and billions spent, there is still no clear evidence to suggest CO2 is the demon the IPCC claims it to be, and certainly no evidence of the water vapour amplification effect, as speculated upon in the Charney Report. There is, however, a growing catalogue of evidence suggesting CO2 is merely a convenient scapegoat.
If you believe differently, do something radical for a change and provide an argument as to why.
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I note that you have also failed to respond to my follow up comment:
"Neither have you provided any justification for the spending of trillions on atmospheric 'control', in the hope, it will stop the flooding, rather than the few billions in practical flood defences that will".
I did not want to be mean and point out how insanely stupid it was as an assertion.
Continuing your propensity for ignoring inconvenient comment and data, your claim my statement above is mere assertion comes as little surprise. Of course, without any supporting evidence or argument, your claim too can as easily be classified as such. The difference, however, is that I have previously provided such an argument, whereas you deny its existence and preferring instead to exercise your wild imagination in a risible attempt at deflection.
Note: Estimates to retrofit Britain's housing stock alone are around the £2 trillion mark, and AOC's Green New Deal in the US has been costed at anything between $51 - $93 trillion. It appears the only thing 'insanely stupid' around here is your comment.
1). As previously mentioned, injecting CO2 into concrete to improve the product cannot be considered a mass storage solution, as it only offsets the CO2 produced in its production.
With such an abundance of dispatchable hydro on tap, the Îles‑de‑la‑Madeleine 'microgrid' project is a perfectly reasonable undertaking and likely sensible regardless of climate issues. It is, however, no justification for the mass adoption of wind power as it only plays a minimal role in HQ's energy supply mix. Good for green virtue signalling, but little else.
2). Another worst-case scenario is an extinction-level meteor strike à la Deep Impact or a pandemic à la 12 Monkeys. Metres high sea-level rise from presumed CO2 induced warming is, however, pure alarmist hyperbole, not even worthy of a low budget Hollywood film.
3). Pragmatic planning outweighs wing and a prayer hope. Only the institutionally gullible would believe otherwise, which is perhaps the reason for your wild speculation and unsupported claims.
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Climate has changed naturally for millennia and though now the subject of intense study, its 'DNA' remains nothing like fully understood. Without said understanding, one cannot merely assert that past change is irrelevant.
I did not say past change is irrelevant (after all the past changes brought us to where we have been for the last few decades) I said 1520 is irrelevant. The Vikings that were living in Greenland left when cooling negatively affected their crops a long time ago. They are not there in Greenland trying to farm the land anymore and have not been there trying to farm that land for centuries. The people living in Greenland today (like the people living in northern Canada) depend on ice roads to truck in (cheaply) food and supplies and truck out (cheaply) whatever they produce. Global warming is killing these ice roads, and for the most part, the alternatives are helicopter/small plane which is extremely expensive.
Again. Pragmatic planning outweighs wing and a prayer hope.
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I have never claimed sea level rise cannot cause flooding.
Does that mean you agree that it does happen?
I have, however, previously mentioned that in some instances, land subsidence is more of a factor then rising water level
Absolutely, so can natural disasters (like a tsunami), man-made planning (like flooding a cranberry field at harvest time), man-made disasters (like a dam breaking)…., also if it is "more of a factor" and not the only factor. Are any of those relevant to the discussion? Absolutely not.
Also if it is "more of a factor" then rising water level is also a factor in what happened, you can't just dismiss it just because you want to pretend it is not true.
More paranoid alarmist twaddle.
Seaborne flooding events are entirely the result of natural disasters creating large tidal swells (e.g. The Bristol Channel floods of 1607) or storm surges during periods of unusually high tides (e.g. The North Sea Floods of 1953). The modest sea level rise we've seen for the past 150 years (circa 45 cms) would have had little additional effect, and once again the practical solutions of maintaining and improving sea defences* trumps the wishful thinking of atmospheric CO2 control - the latter, of course, presupposing the, by no means certain, belief that CO2 is the cause of the rise in the first place.
*Note: The Dutch are doing precisely this with the ongoing renovation works being carried out on the Afsluitdijk: the primary sea wall protecting their polder regions.
As for sea-level rise itself. Climate change lore tells us The Maldives should no longer exist, but not only has their seaborne doom failed to materialise, the islands are actually thriving; most notably from the billions of infrastructure investment (airports and hotels) being provided by the Saudis. And land subsidence is far from irrelevant, as areas where it's occurring (e.g. Jakarta, The Mekong Delta) have been principally promoted as areas threatened by climate change, which is a complete misrepresentation of fact.
Stories of apocalyptic sea-level rise are unsupported alarmist exaggerations, specifically designed to lure the institutionally gullible into unnecessary pre-emptive action. It seems to me you've been hooked.
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Once again, one's reply highlights one's total ignorance of the seriousness of the intermittency issue and the need for backup. One can forward plan fuel supplies, and in no small extent water, but one cannot plan for the wind to blow at a particular time or the extent to which it does blow when it condescends to do so.
Agree, but the utilities can't plan when people will turn on and off their electric stuff either. You say you go to https://gridwatch.co.uk/ all the time. Is the daily map that shows usage every 10 minutes a flat horizontal line? How about the monthly/yearly where it is by hour? How about if you click and compare CCgT/hydro to wind which ones "fluctuate" more?
Basic principles of electricity supply.
Suppliers know that for a given time of the year demand will never fall below a certain threshold, ergo some plants can be run at full power 24/7. This is known as baseload generation and something ideally suited to nuclear. Above that we have dispatchable generation, which can be quickly adjusted to meet demand, and above that there are 'short term peakers', which are only called upon in the event of unexpected transient demands.
Years of monitoring has provided suppliers with enough data and understanding to approximately gauge expected demand. If, however, we now add in a source of generation which is itself randomly variable, load balancing becomes an increasingly complex issue (more plant having to be placed on standby for example), which adds cost.
I would have thought the increased complexity of two random variables interacting a simple concept for a mathematician to understand. It seems I was mistaken.
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My point. You may have a degree of understanding about your own grid, but in trying to apply that specific knowledge to beasts of a different colour (systems you clearly have no understanding of), you are going hopelessly astray.
Floundering in your efforts to justify your partisan view of wind power, you are making trite and nonsensical assumptions, adding 2+2, getting 25, and then wondering why I'm scornful and dismissive. Aptly, your next comment is a perfect example of this.
Not at all, the laws of Physics Chemistry or economics are not different in Canada and the UK. The difference is I am willing to do the math, while you prefer listening to drunk guys that might or might not have written something on a napkin.
And yet the napkin remains a better judge of the costs than your arithmetic. The wine was quite enjoyable too… hic!
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i). I find it amusing that someone who has predicted his whole argument on the basis of CO2 induced flooding, is now using the threat of drought as a (principle) concern of its primary electrical energy supplier.
While drought remains a theoretical possibility, it appears HQ has introduced a significant degree of resilience by the sheer spread of its generating facilities. This spread no doubt also aids in water level control, flow control and output balancing. If running out of water posed anything of a threat I have no doubt HQ would have long ago diversified into other means of baseload/dispatchable generation. The risibly small amount of wind generation they presently utilise does not qualify in this regard.
Not at all, man can destroy water (electrolysis splits it into hydrogen and oxygen gas) or make water (think of fuel cells that combine hydrogen and Oxygen gas to make water) but for the most part (naturally) water just moves and changes forms (solid, liquid, gas) more water in one location necessarily means less water somewhere else.
First of all, any electricity produced by a consumable can be build more or less anywhere, any electricity built by harnessing natural forces can only be build where those forces lie. I am sure HQ would have rather built dams closer to Montreal to feed electricity to Montreal instead of James bay where it needed to spend a lot on infrastructure (there was nothing but wilderness down there) and everyday transmission (electricity does not like to travel).
There has always been more than just hydro in HQ, But I agree with you there would need to be major changes to reality before it drops to 0 (and boy would we be screwed if things did not change beforehand), but when I look at [Link: gridwatch.co.uk] I don't see any point in the last two years where it was 0 (either because of too much or too little wind) over the last two years, can you tell me when it happened last?
First, you start with a meaningless discussion about the nature and composition of water. This is followed by a pointless debate about the geographical locations of HQ's operations. Which is then followed by a meaningless attempt at comparing the theoretical possibility of zero dispatchable hydro output with the genuine possibility of zero non-dispatchable wind output. In short, you've done nothing other than produce three paragraphs chock-full of philosophical smoke and mirrors in a risible attempt at trying to justify the glaringly obvious contradiction you presented. But then, when it comes to climate, what's new? Inconsistencies from the institutionally gullible are commonplace:
It's too warm - it must be climate change.
It's too cold - it must be climate change.
It's too dry – it must be climate change.
It's too wet – it must be climate change.
There's too much flooding – it must be climate change.
There's too much drought – it must be climate change.
The fuel suppliers have gone on strike – it must be climate change.
The Brits have voted for Brexit – it must be climate change.
I've taken two weeks to respond – it must... No, wait! That was Christmas and I had better things to do.
Climate change. A solution to (almost) any problem, providing one doesn’t trouble oneself to think too much.
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ii). Your belief in the concept of wind power output ramping again demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of its operating principles.
Depending on prevailing conditions, the principle of wind generation is that one takes all one can get when one can get it. The only caveats to this are the wind blowing too slowly (no output), too fast (turbine stopped for safety reasons), or if the overall production is exceeding demand. As output can vary on a minute to minute basis, there is no such thing as ramping up and down: load balancing is undertaken by other dispatchable sources and short term peakers.
Not at all, you are just, again, oblivious to the obvious. A wind farm has several wind turbines/mills, all of them can be used to generate electricity or some of them can be stooped for maintenance, to prevent damage or because the electricity is not needed. If you have 10 turbines and 6 of them are working and you need more electricity you can startup #7 and #8 and #9 to match what is needed and if demand decreases you can take #1 and #2 offline. Now obviously if all 10 are producing electricity then you can't ramp up and if they are all off you can't ramp down but that is the truth about any form of electricity generating.
That is not the principle of wind but the best practice based on UK source mix. I know you don't want to admit it, but since wind is one of your cheaper sources of electricity it makes sense to max it out when possible and then there is no way to ramp up and no use to ramp down (and the utility pay more for electricity from the generators). The Source mix is different here, oil and NG exists and are used for the main grid but so little that they are almost never used (too expensive). Wind is used year-round because it can be ramped up and down more easily then Hydro can.
Well, congratulations on stating the bleedin' obvious and finally appreciating that there are differences between UK and Quebec operations. Other than that, what you've written is yet another two hundred words or so of complete bunk.
Once again then, since your memory retention appears to be similar to that of a goldfish, UK renewable energy is prioritised: solar first, followed by wind (then other sources depending upon availability). In such circumstances, it makes no financial sense to regulate supply by turning turbines on or off to meet demand. One caveat to this, as I mentioned, is their being turned off in the event of overcapacity, though in such a circumstance, the affected operators are then compensated via the constraints payment mechanism; i.e. they are paid to produce nothing. However, over and above the financial considerations, there is also no practical sense in attempting to regulate a stable supply with a volatile source as the latter's output (sometimes even on a minute to minute basis), cannot be guaranteed.
I appreciate, given your past difficulties in assimilating the complexity of such system interactions, you may struggle with such a concept, but I'm sure that given enough time even your incisive mathematical mind will eventually get there. What I do find surprising though, from such a luminary economics expert, is your inability to recognise wind's true cost.
Even though time and again, your ridiculous assertions have been demonstrably proven incorrect, you persist in believing wind power is cheap. My failure to comply with your nonsense though should hardly come as a surprise when the Government have even admitted to adding a surcharge and thus increasing cost. Indeed, such is your bewildering intransigence I sometimes wonder if I'm dealing with a robot; that would at least explain why the following sentence rambles on into incoherence:
"I know you don't want to admit it, but since wind is one of your cheaper sources of electricity, it makes sense to max it out when possible and then there is no way to ramp up and no use to ramp down (and the utility pay more for electricity from the generators)."
Even more amusing are your comments about HQ's risibly small percentage of wind power. The thought of them turning on and off a few unstable MW here and there, to 'regulate' a grid generating GW, would have any engineer rolling on the floor laughing. There may be sound financial and political reasons for HQ's decision to embrace wind, but generating power is almost certainly the least of them.
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You finally condescend to look at the OBR report.
Rather than accept my word, you feel it necessary to question the origin of the Environmental Levies.
I did not question where the money came from, I remarked that it was not stipulated in the report (and Ofgem) later showed it most likely came from electricity pricing and that is more than good for me
The problem was not where it came from (if it is income tax, VAT or your electric rate it is still coming out of your pocket) but where you said it went according to the OBR report some of that 9B went to "warm home discount" that subsidizes poor people, "CRC energy efficiency scheme" that goes to corporations that reduce their carbon footprint...
More weasel words, but it's amusing to see you fumbling around in the hole you've dug for yourself.
Of course the issue is where the money comes from, as it affects everyone; including the less well off. The £140 one-off Warm Home Discount you trumpet only offsets the Green Levies increase, not cancel it.
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Having provided an illustration of unit cost, via the Ofgem website, you now assert it presents a contradiction.
No, the # are the #, I said they contradict what you believe.
And, pray tell, what do you think I believe? I’ll give you a clue – there is no contradiction.
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Capital costs for wind farms are difficult to come by. Some while ago I found a website claiming the BBE cost circa £800 million, but have since been unable to find it again. This website, using data from a Crown Estate study, estimates the cost of a comparable array at £2575 per kW; equating to £659.2 million. Whichever figure one employs though (even allowing for a generous life expectancy of 20 years and not accounting for age-related reduced efficiency) I believe it self-evident that the wholesale price would render the project totally impracticable. In contrast, one could argue the agreed strike price is too generous, but that's a wholly different argument.
No, your first mistake is that capital cost does not go on the cost side of the ledger but on the asset part of the ledger. i.e. the company owns a wind farm worth £800 million that it can use to make £. Now if it were to sell it immediately for 750M, it will have a capital loss of 50M and if it sells it for 850M, it will have capital gains of 50M. The second part is that you don’t know how to calculate depreciation.
Now let’s say a company buys a van that costs ~40k if it were to sell it a year later it would not get anywhere near 40k. For that reason on the asset section of the ledger the value has gone down, to account for that loss in value on the expenses side there is a depreciation cost. Now for a van, I would use Declining Balance Method (i.e. the van loses more value the first year then the 5th year) but let’s assume we use linear. What you would do is say the car costs 40k, its life expectancy is 10 years and the company will be able to get 5k for scrap so (40k-5k)/10 =3.5k per year and that would be the depreciation on the cost side.
Now if a company bought a new building, that would be a large capital cost, but as an asset there normally won’t be any depreciation, if it were to sell, it could even get more than what it paid to buy it.
For a wind farm, from your article only ~40% of the cost should be considered depreciable, and then the residual would be very far from 0.
Thirdly I think your 20 is a bit low, but low-balling naturally comes with the term of depreciation (i.e. if you keep it longer the depreciation cost is 0 going forward and profitability goes up) but just for the fun of it I would like to point out that Tvindkraft wind turbine has been operating since March 26th, 1978 (aka as over 40 years)
More smoke and mirrors. Oh, I'm sure that financing a multimillion-pound business venture is a complicated affair, but if there were a need to understand asset accounting and depreciation I'd ask the wife. There isn't.
Nothing you've mentioned above counters the fundamental principle of investing to make money. If the product being sold does not provide enough to recover the initial investment, let alone provide enough to make a profit, then the proposition is simply not viable, and all you've mentioned above becomes moot.
An annual income of circa £39 million on a project investment of £800 million (with a liberal life-expectancy of 20 years) is the very definition of not viable, whereas an annual income of circa £147 million makes it so. Thus…
"To make wind projects viable, the Government have agreed to strike prices significantly above that of wholesale cost and introduced a surcharge on energy bills to recoup the difference. Not only has this increased bills directly but also indirectly through increased retail prices as suppliers raise them to recover the additional cost. Further costs are also incurred through increasing grid complexity and the need to pay generators to remain on standby to cover for the intermittency of the renewables. In short, renewables increase cost, not decrease them."
As for Tvindkraft, I say congratulations, but preservation societies abound for all sorts of vintage machinery, including Dutch windmill pumps. What you cannot do, though, is compare a mollycoddled 900kW land-based turbine to a commercial 8/10/12MW offshore monster and the rigours they have to endure.
As the GWPF report:
"One of the principal disadvantages of rapid and inorganic technological deployment, such as that required by the European Union's renewable energy targets, is that problems are very widespread by the time they are discovered. The prudent approach is to stay behind the learning curve, so that the consequences of type failure affect only a small number of installations. Dashing ahead of the learning curve is asking for big trouble."
Orsted is in the process of renovating all 324 blades on the 108-turbine, 389 MW, Duddon Sands wind farm in the UK part of the Irish Sea, due to a leading edge erosion problem. This issue is reported to affect some 500 turbines across Europe and has been costed at up to £1 Million per machine.
After suffering a series of well-publicised cable failures, the eighty 5MW turbine EU funded Bard Offshore 1 (owned by Ocean Breeze Energy GmbH & Co. KG.) has for the past two years been undergoing a program of nacelle and rotor replacement, though Ocean Breeze has declined to confirm how many machines are affected.
Such problems would suggest a healthy order book for offshore servicing/maintenance companies, but as the GWPF again reports:
"This has not been enough to prevent Offshore Marine Management Ltd (OMM), a UK-based offshore wind contractor, entering into voluntary liquidation after several years of losses. Interestingly, OMM, a relatively small company though prominent in the UK, cited the increasingly 'competitive nature' of the sector as a factor underlying its failure, and it seems likely that it was unable to survive the efforts of developers determined to reduce both capital and operational and maintenance costs to the bone (and judging from the failures reported, perhaps into the bone itself). With margins pared thin, costly local suppliers may quite simply be forced out of the market, and regardless of their other merits. Related evidence of this phenomenon, which is clearly global, can be found in the fact that the Danish mega-developer Orsted is now grumbling that the Taiwanese government's insistence of a high level of local content for its projected 900MW Changua 1 & 2a offshore wind farms will double the capital cost from approximately £1.6m/MW to about £3m/MW."
German onshore is fairing little better. The last German contract auction was significantly undersubscribed; turbine manufacturer Senivon is in serious financial difficulties and the German tower and foundation maker, Ambau GmbH, has already filed for bankruptcy. Adding to the industry's problems are the tightening of Germany's planning regulations - Enercon has recently been compelled by court order to suspend construction of its 30MW Wulfershausen wind farm because it had, apparently, breached the local authorities' requirement that no dwelling should be within a distance ten times tip height. The stricter planning regulation, declining public acceptance and falling subsidies have also been cited as reasons why 15GW of existing capacity, now over 15 years old, may not be repowered.
The GWPF again:
"Meanwhile, in Norway and in its home territory Sweden, Statkraft, Europe's largest generator of renewable energy, has suspended further onshore wind construction because it would be 'very challenging' to develop profitable projects in these areas. They are concentrating on other less resistant markets, such as the United Kingdom, where it has acquired a 250 MW portfolio of projects from Element Power.
"But as it happens, things in the UK may prove to be no more promising. It has just dawned on the wind industry that government is actually acting on Amber Rudd's landmark energy reset speech when Secretary of State for the Department of Energy & Climate Change in November 2015. In that speech, Rudd remarked that 'we also want intermittent generators to be responsible for the pressures they add to the system'. [My Bold] That of course, was only right, but perhaps the industry hoped the intention would never materialise. If that was their expectation, they were gravely mistaken. Aurora Energy Research has now released analysis of the regulator, Ofgem's proposal to reform network charges, the 'Targeted Charging Review', and believes that the proposed changes 'could set back subsidy-free renewables by up to five years'. When 'unspun' this actually means is that if the regulator removes the hidden subsidy of avoided system costs, imposed by renewables but socialised over all generators, then more of the true cost of renewables will be revealed to the market, making it much less likely that even the most greenwash-thirsty corporate, NGO, or governmental body will sign an extravagant long-term Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with a wind or solar farm. In other words, far from hindering the emergence of subsidy-free renewables, Ofgem's reforms threaten to give the lie to the subsidy-free claim and show that it was never anything more than an empty PR gambit."
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To make wind projects viable, the Government have agreed to strike prices significantly above that of wholesale cost and introduced a surcharge on energy bills to recoup the difference.
Look at
Can you tell me the heading of the second to last column?
What does that do to your previous comment?
Oh, for goodness sake!
From my last post:
"ii). As mentioned above, the electricity wholesale price is variable, so there is nothing unusual in seeing differing figures being quoted. The graphic you've used, however, has nothing to do with wholesale price: it is a list of the wind power projects which 'won' the last round of CfD auctions.
Note. These projects are the subject of your link to an article in the Independent newspaper in post 117 and my reply in post 118. Further commentary and links to a more detailed analysis of the problems facing the wind industry can be found in post 138."
For the intellectually challenged, and those incapable of following a link, the short version goes thus:
The ending of unsustainable lavish wind power subsidies has brought turmoil to the wind industry. Competition has become cutthroat with a number of high profile businesses going bust (see above) and others shedding thousands of jobs:
"Enercon, the Mercedes Benz of turbine makers, has just announced 3,000 redundancies in its home town of Magdeburg, and admitted to a $220m loss in 2018, with worse to come in 2019 (“Thousands to lose jobs as German wind crisis hits Enercon” 11.11.2019).
"Indeed, in a measure quite incredible for a flagship German firm, Enercon has explained that it can no longer afford to make wind turbine blades in Germany, and will perforce attempt to preserve its viability by manufacturing overseas, presumably in locations where lower energy costs mean that labour is much cheaper." (Source – GWPF)
Another aspect of this change in fortune has been the eyebrow-raising signing of low price contracts:
"Offshore wind projects, for example, are claiming dramatic (and implausible) capital cost reductions, backing up such claims by signing contracts to supply electricity at surprisingly low prices, even at so-called Zero-Subsidy levels. In the UK the latest instance of this is the Round 3 Allocation of Contracts for Difference, which announced strike prices of £40/MWh for about 4.5 GW of capacity at five gigantic projects. This appears to be below the likely wholesale price, let alone below the fundamental price needed to deliver a return on investment for the wind farms themselves." (Source – GWPF)
Hailed by supporters as the dawn of a new age, these prices are completely unrealistic and are seen within sections of the industry as simply a means to secure market position and inhibit competition: actual construction will likely be conditional on more generous terms being offered in the future. Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University likens this to a game of high stakes poker with the patsy being the UK Government and the hard-pressed British consumer.
In support of his argument, he cites the contrast between two wind farms off the coast of Scotland: Moray East and Beatrice.
"Moray East, currently under construction in northern Scotland, and Beatrice, which came on stream just a few months ago, use very similar turbines and are situated just next door to each other. There is nothing about Beatrice to suggest that costs or performance are out of the ordinary, yet it has a strike price nearly three times that of Moray East.
"They are probably gambling that if they threaten to go bust, the government will be forced to raise carbon taxes sharply. This will push market prices up, and the operators will simply walk away from their agreed contracts and trade at the new prices". (Source – GWPF)
The future for British consumers looks bleak. Wind and solar renewables are not cheap, add cost and unless rethought will lead to increasing levels of fuel poverty and hardship. Trying to deny the plainly obvious, something no amount of accounting wizardry can alter, only continues to make you look pig-headed and stupid.
As previously mentioned, further details and analysis can be found by following the links in post 138.
