A story broken by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph and Richard North on EU Referendum on Saturday evening heralds one of the biggest consumer rip off scandals in UK history.
This concerns the existence of a vast network of standby diesel generators, which make up what is known as a Short Term Operating Reserve (STOR), that can be called upon by the National Grid in the event of a shortfall in electricity should electricity generating capacity go offline.
The theory is simple.? When there isn?t enough power being generated to meet demand, this network of diesel generators can be brought online within minutes to provide gigawatts of electricity to keep the lights on.? Booker and North detail the system and how it has been hidden in plain sight for years ? which explains the confident performance of energy minister, Michael Fallon in his interview with Andrew Neil last week when he said the lights would stay on, even as power stations close without replacement and wind turbines fail to deliver power reliably when it is needed.
STOR brings into sharp focus three major issues that are unlikely to be pored over by the media. First and most immediate of these for energy customers is the cost of running this system that will be passed on to them.? As Booker explains in his piece:
These new power sources are far from cheap; the current wholesale cost of electricity is around ?50 a megawatt hour (MWh). Thanks to the subsidies levied through our electricity bills, we are already paying nearly ?100 per MWh to the owners of onshore wind farms and ?150 for those offshore. But, as the National Grid reveals, the tender prices submitted by those signed up to the STOR scheme can be as high as ?400 per MWh, eight times the market rate. The average payment in 2011 was ?225 per MWh, plus a fee of ?22,000 for every megawatt of their capacity (for these fees in 2010-11 alone we stumped up ?75?million).
This is another subsidy gravy train run in the interests of corporations at the expense of hard pressed customers, and businesses whose costs are driven up accordingly and are passed on in the price of most goods and services.? The evidence of this is detailed by Richard in his piece when he explains:
Under normal circumstances using this back-up capacity is not an economically competitive form of generation; it is generally only called upon in emergencies when price rises can cover the costs of generation. But as we lose power stations from the system, there will be no option but to use it as replacement capacity and, in particular, as back-up when the wind is not blowing.
So lucrative is this option that it is being regarded as a major investment opportunity, ?anticipated to experience significant growth due to increased reliance on reserve sources of power to meet fluctuations in electricity.
Investors are told that the ?significant upward trend in the requirement for reserve services? is due to ?decreased power supply following from the decommissioning of ageing nuclear power plants? and ?increased volatility of power supply caused by increased reliance on renewables (due to the high proportion of wind power, renewables are not a consistent source of power) ?.
The second is yet another example of fear being as a tool to condition people into accepting a grotesquely expensive ?solution? that shouldn?t be required in the first place.
Make no mistake the emergence of the STOR story, and its revelation of the gigawatts of failover capacity that are available to the system, shows us that the current focus on the energy gap being played out in the media with suitable dramatic effect, is a contrived narrative designed to worry people about power cuts and blackouts so that when they are asked to stump up significantly more money to keep the lights on via diesel generators, they will grit their teeth and pay up ? the metaphor that sums this up being ?they?ve taken my arm and cut off my leg, but thank God it means I?ve been able to stay alive?.
The third of the two issues is how this theft has been engineered by the establishment by its utterly illogical and nonsensical policies on energy.? Whereas common sense would dictate this country?s government to have an energy strategy to meet the needs and demand of powered infrastructure, businesses and residential customers using the most reliable forms of power generation, the strategy has been designed around the unworkable goal of relying on unreliable and intermittent wind energy to meet our baseload energy supply, coupled with ?demand management? ? namely the forced reduction in energy demand through increased cost.
Businesses and households are being priced out of using tomorrow the same amount of energy they already find difficult to afford today; and this scenario is being compounded by purposely built-in scarcity through the policy of closing down generating capacity without reliable replacement, so the gap between total reliable energy supply and peak energy demand has narrowed to a dangerously small percentage.? Instead of replacing conventional power in need of decommission with nuclear power to provide our baseload energy, and topping that up with coal and gas which, already spinning below capacity but not wasting what is being generated, can quickly be called upon to meet additional demand when it peaks, we are getting subsidy chomping wind turbines that provide only a fraction of their potential and rely on intermittent weather conditions.
At the end of this trail of state driven larceny is a special interest collective of subsidy farmers, corporates and big money investors who reap a huge return in profits at our expense for our substandard and flawed-by-design energy infrastructure.? An infrastructure that is forced on us by a deranged sustainability agenda that is sponsored and nourished by those special interests who hoover up our money, and the anti-progress environmentalists who are determined to de-industrialise the world and enforce untold misery on billions of people.
As you can see, this is not just a story about carbon emitting diesel generators being used to keep our lights on.? It runs far deeper and is far more disturbing than that.? The question that needs answering is will the media step up and educate people about this, or will it look away to continue sucking up to those influential and ?powerful? people of ?prestige? who are calling the shots to enrich themselves by robbing us blind?
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