Right around the British Isles, onshore and offshore, the wind stopped blowing and the sun stopped shining through cloudy and overcast skies. With the Climate Conference in full swing, coming up for midday on Tuesday, the entire British grid was getting just 1200 megawatts of power from wind and zero, zip, not-a-single-watt from embedded roof-top solar.
To keep the lights on at the conference - and the heating, as the temperature struggled up from near-zero – and across Glasgow, and indeed all of Britain, as Boofhead Boris was demanding we all abandon fossil fuels, some 21,000MW was coming in Britain from, cough, cough, that CO2-emitting fossil fuel known as gas. Yes, gas generation was supplying 61 per cent of all of Britain’s electricity. Another 6.5 per cent was coming from burning woodchips – and pumping out more CO2 than comes from coal.
And indeed, most deliciously of all, thank you Gaia, Britain even had to turn some coal-fired generation back on.
Indeed, midday Tuesday Britain was getting almost as much – nearly 1000MW or about half a Hazelwood or a Liddell – from coal as the 1200MW it was getting from wind. That’s the coal that our duo of Twittering Twerps, Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd, were gushingly chortling back in the middle of 2020 would never be turned on again in Britain.
And still it gets turned on, and will continue to be turned on, when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, at night, or can’t peep through the clouds during the day.
All up, as the Conference warmed up, so to speak, Britain was getting 70 per cent of its power from burning stuff - gas, coal and woodchips – and emitting CO2.
A further 16 per cent was coming from the nuclear power that Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese have joined in an exercise of stunning bipartisan stupidity and national vandalism in refusing to consider for Australia.
Yes, to nuclear submarines, some time after 2050 if we are lucky, but no to nuclear power. Sheer, unbridled idiocy.
So there was Britain and Boofhead Boris in full global warming ranting against fossil fuels mode, but getting at that very same moment 70 per cent of its power from those demon sources, another 16 per cent from nuclear, and around 7 per cent from its extension cords into Europe and its mostly nuclear and gas power stations.
After the tens of billions of pounds that have been poured into windmills and solar panels, when Britain needed it, just 6.3 per cent was coming from them.
Just 3.4 per cent was from wind and 2.9 per cent from hydro, and as I noted, right in the middle of the day, absolute zero anywhere in the UK from solar.
Are we completely collectively insane? Desperately trying to reinvent the energy wheel and demanding it be square?
Hundreds of billions of dollars around the world have been poured into renewables, and it’s bad enough that the ones that ‘work’- that generate some power, like wind and solar – are so pathetically useless.
But think of all the others that have failed utterly – the rusting ‘wave generators’ scattered around coasts, the thermal ‘hot rocks that were going to power Australia, carbon capture and storage which has captured only dollars.
Now it’s supposed to be – blue and green – hydrogen.
While China just keeps building more – 95 more at the moment – coal-fired stations.
While also making the wind mills and solar panels to sell to us idiots; the 21st century version of Lenin’s rope for hanging us.
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Deliciously, Gaia rolled out its own special welcome to the 20,000 or more carbon dioxide-belching, bloviating carpetbaggers, main chancers and assorted climate hysterics flocking by private jet and first and business class into Glasgow.