Terry McCrann: How a ‘coal-free’ UK has returned to coal
Back in June, Britain was the poster child for the “coal-free” power generation. But, the brave new UK coal-free future lasted less than a week, writes Terry McCrann.
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Our duo of twittering twerps, former PMs Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, have been surprisingly silent about what’s been happening in UK electricity generation as that economy – unlike the formerly great state of Victoria – comes back to life.
Back in June, they separately sprung tweet-style to deliriously hail the ‘end of coal’ in the UK.
Rudd tweeted: “For anyone who thinks it cannot be done: the UK has not produced any electricity from coal for the last two months — the longest period since the Industrial Revolution. Let that sink in,” he concluded with all the deadening portentousness he could muster.
In his turn, Turnbull ecstatically re-tweeted a BBC headline: “Could the coronavirus crisis finally finish off coal?”
That BBC report had also noted the coal-free generation, with the kicker that the National Grid had told the BBC that “they weren’t expecting a coal generator to be turned back on anytime soon.”
Well, as I pointed out at that time, the brave new UK coal-free future lasted exactly less than a week. When the ‘wind didn’t blow’ on those balmy (and barmy) British summer days, back came a, cough, cough, coal generator.
At its peak back then it was pumping out a relatively modest 650MW – about one-third the size of a Liddell (still operating) or one-quarter the size of a Hazelwood (closed by the Andrews Labor Government in a test-run for what he would do this year to the entire state).
Well, this week, not only did the Brits go back to coal to keep the lights on – and, as they baked in a mid-20s ‘heatwave’, the aircons as well – they really shovelled some coal.
For a whole day or two they actually got more electricity from coal than from, oh dear, from wind.
At its peak this week, the UK was getting nearly 3000MW from coal, well more than three times the 800MW or so coming from all the wind turbines, both those that despoil the British landscape and those parked equally hideously offshore.
How’s that for a ‘coal-free future’ Malcolm and Kevin?
Then you need to add the inconvenient truth never mentioned by twerps like Malcolm and Kevin – and all the rest, who have claimed to “see the future in the UK and that it is a coal-free renewables future”.
This week the UK grid was also getting a similar amount of power as from coal from so-called ‘biomass’ – that is burning wood chips in what used to be a coal-fired power station.
And then there’s the biggest source of power generation, not just this week but every week – the carbon-dioxide emitting fossil fuel called gas.
At many typical point this week – when the wind didn’t blow – the UK was getting 74-75 per cent from these three base-load fossil-fuels: gas, wood and coal.
Another 14-15 per cent was coming from the nuclear power stations that the Brits, in their version of insanity ‘plan’ to close; and we in our down under version, prohibit from building in the first place.
That is to say, despite all the rubbish about how “the future is renewables” – and Britain is supposed to be one of the world’s poster-children of embracing such a future – ‘when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine”, it still has to get just under 90 per cent of its power from the three base-load sources I wrote about on Wednesday.
That’s counting burning wood as a – very – ‘poor man’s version of burning coal’: as you get less electricity and you pump more CO2.
Why would you be so insane as to re-engineer a coal-fired station to go back to a pre-19th century future, burning woodchips; and indeed burn woodchips mostly shipped across the Atlantic from the US?
Because under the rigged EU rules – if you’ll excuse the tautology; all the rules in the EU are rigged – the CO2 coming out of the chimneys is defined away. As the wood will be regrown.
Hey, why don’t we turn all our stations into wood-burners and cut down all our national forests as feed-stocks? They’ll ‘grow back; there’ll be no more bushfires; and we’ll be the greenest of green climate pure!
Now, yes, when the wind is blowing in the UK (and, it can blow, in the UK) it can get as much as 13,000MW of electricity from the turbines – indeed, at times that’s more than 50 per cent of demand.
But when it’s not, like this week, it could often be getting as little as 600MW from wind; satisfying just 2 per cent of demand.
You can build more and more turbines, destroy more and more landscapes, but if the wind don’t blow, you still get the same virtual zero. Zero multiplied by 5000 is the same number as zero multiplied by 100.
And no, one of the Big Lies about wind downunder is that if you spread the turbines over a vast territory, from SA across Victoria and NSW and up into Queensland, the wind will be blowing somewhere.
False. There have been plenty of times when the wind ain’t blowing anywhere much across Australia; and wind’s input into the national grid drops to all-but zero.
Ah, but, but batteries. Like wind – and solar – they just don’t work, as any functional basis for guaranteeing continued, sustained, power.
As I would have thought anyone who possessed both a smartphone and even a less-than smart brain, would understand only too well.
If we want power, if we want to live in the 21st century not the 19th, we need some mix of coal, gas and nuclear power stations.
Originally published as Terry McCrann: How a ‘coal-free’ UK has returned to coal