Earlier today I posted on Britain’s woes with “renewable”, sporadic power; the article I excerpted was in turn based on an article appearing in the Daily Telegraph: Britain’s wind power falls to virtually zero as Miliband prepares to cut reliance on gas. Just when western countries are facing (at least) a ten-fold increase in energy demand because of planned huge artificial intelligence factories and mandates that will require houses to be heated, and all internal combustion engines, from lawn mowers, to cars, to trucks, to locomotives to run on electricity, the supply of energy is being cut off. Western countries are going to crash.
But that’s a feature, not a bug, for the groups pushing this agenda, who have been working for decades to deindustrialize the west and return it to a mythical state of nature, where all is peace and harmony, and the population (reduced by famine and disease from 7 billion to one billion) will be “free to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner”, just as they please. That Marx’s Eden has never materialized is of no matter — this time, with the Greens running things, it will be different. And if not, well, they expect to be atop the rulig class anyway, so so what?
The picture of a coal factory being blown up, by the way, is part of their plan to not just end reliance on coal, but to ensure that there will be no going back. When the winter winds wail and the lights fail, well, that’s life, innit?
The Washington Post, of all publications, has an interesting article on this subject (reachable behind the paper’s paywall by disabling Java on your browser.) Here are excerpts:
October 4, 2024 at 7:05 a.m. EDT
The last operating coal power plant in Britain closed this week, ending more than 140 years of coal-fired electricity and proving that major economies can wean themselves off the dirtiest fossil fuel.
“Proving” nothing, in fact — wait for the next cloudy, windless day, or for nightfall.
“It’s a massive movement,” said Dave Jones, an electricity analyst at Ember, a London-based think tank. “The fact that the first country in the world to have a coal power plant, to lean so heavily into coal starting the industrial revolution, is now out of coal is extremely symbolic.”
…. In the 20th century, as trains, ships, stoves and other machines switched to oil and gas, coal retained its central role in running the turbines that power plants use to generate electricity. In recent decades, efforts to turn off coal-fired power plants have accelerated given their outsize contribution to global warming.
Although Britain still uses coal for steel manufacturing, which accounts for 2 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, experts say the country’s transition from coal-fueled electricity offers lessons to other countries seeking to phase it out.
But who needs steel? The Chinese will make it for us.
Joel Jaeger, a climate and energy research at the World Resources Institute, said Britain’s transition from coal is “truly historic” and “proves that other countries can also achieve rapid speeds of coal reduction.”
Few economically developed countries have completely phased out coal. Most that have, such as Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway, have little need for coal because they generate plenty of power with an older generation of carbon-free technologies: hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants and geothermal reservoirs.
Britain is one of the first countries, and the largest, to phase out coal by relying heavily on wind and solar. Portugal also did so, but it is smaller and less heavily industrialized. Germany has tried, but it still produces about a quarter of its power with coal and does not plan to complete its phaseout until 2038
… Germany’s clean-energy transition has been slower because it has few hydroelectric dams, and it shut down all of its nuclear plants, which together generated 30 percent of the country’s electricity in 2000. Britain gets about 15 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, while Portugal makes about a quarter of its power with hydroelectricity.
And all of this is for naught, as those who are doing this to us very well know:
”Developing countries such as China and India have no prospect of abandoning coal anytime soon.”
China is installing renewable power faster than any other country in the world, but coal generation is also necessary to fuel the country’s rapid development.
[NPR, March 2, 2023: China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds.’
“China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years, according to a new report released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.”
(And we now return you to our regularly scheduled article)
Last year’s United Nations climate change negotiations in Dubai stalled over resistance from China and India to committing to phasing out fossil fuels. The conference finally adopted a plan to phase “down” fossil fuels.
Even after coal is gone from the electricity mix, countries will be confronted with the next phase of the clean-energy transition: completely decarbonizing the power sector.
“The environmental community has been pretty focused on coal because it is the most polluting fossil fuel and because it is low-hanging fruit,” Jaeger said. “I think it’s going to be harder than the coal transition.”
Renewables are fueled by blowing wind and shining sun, which are not always available. Beyond some share of power generation — 80 percent or so, Jaeger said — renewables must be backed up by dependable supplies that don’t emit greenhouse gases, which rules out natural gas.
“Grid-scale batteries have become cheaper but can still provide only about eight hours of backup power.”
The U.S. and British governments have shown revived interest in nuclear power, but both countries have struggled in recent decades to build plants quickly and cheaply.
“Meanwhile, as electric vehicles and heat pumps become more common and power-hungry technologies such as artificial intelligence grow, Britain, the United States and others will be trying to make this daunting energy transition just as electricity demand is rising.”
Here are some fun charts:
