By Paul Homewood
The Telegraph has already embarrassed itself by publishing a letter last week from an XR activist, Tom Hardy, containing serious factual errors about renewable energy and fossil fuels.
It has now compounded its mistake, by publishing another letter full of errors praising renewable energy, presumably in an effort to give the eco-loons free publicity.
Blaise Kelly may well be a member of the Energy Institute, but, as the letter makes obvious, he knows little about energy. Indeed he specialises in air quality, no doubt a worthy job but not one that needs knowledge of power generation.
Mr Kelly is, however, an ardent supporter of both renewable energy and XR, as his twitter feed makes clear.
The letter from Steve Proud, which he refers to, is below:
SIR – As a chartered engineer who worked in the electricity supply industry for 39 years, I despair to hear politicians like Rebecca Long-Bailey claiming that renewables will provide for most of our energy needs by 2030.
Renewable generation – solar, wind and tidal – is, by definition, non-synchronous and it is technically impossible to operate our electricity transmission system solely on non-synchronous generation. There is a real danger of system instability and consequential widespread blackouts once non-synchronous generation exceeds around 30 per cent of total generation at any one time.
The National Grid report on the recent major outage makes numerous references to the lack of inertia in the system. This resulted from insufficient large synchronous generators (nuclear, coal, gas) being connected.
Given the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the only option is to increase significantly nuclear build rapidly. Both Labour and Conservative governments have been unwilling to commit themselves to this, which has led us into the problems we now face.
It is unfortunate that politicians and environmental campaigners are ignorant of the technicalities of energy supply, or wish to ignore them. MPs may have the power to change the laws of the land, but not to change the laws of physics.
Steve Proud
Swansea
Kelly begins with an outright error. It was Hornsea wind farm which tripped first, not Little Barford. Moreover, the outage was compounded by the tripping of a large amount of unreliable embedded renewable generation.
Regardless of the exact cause, Kelly ignores Proud’s comment about system inertia, presumably because he does not understand it.
Kelly then proceeds to show his ignorance of how baseload generation works, accusing large generators of being inflexible. In reality it is the reliability of these that allows the grid to be supplied with the bulk of expected demand at any time of day or year. Small fluctuations in demand can easily be dealt with through small scale peakers and frequency management, just as they have successfully been for many years.
It is the inherent unreliability of renewables that makes them utterly inflexible, because you cannot switch them on and off when needed.
He then proceeds to whittle on about smart meters, which would not have made the slightest difference to the outage. And just how they can match our intermittent demand with the variable, but highly predictable, generation from renewables beats me! Unless he is suggesting that we have our power cut off whenever the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.
He then claims that wind and solar have only had a tiny proportion of the investment and government support that fission (and fusion) nuclear power have had.
At current prices, Hinkley, with a strike price of £101.99/MWh, will receive an annual subsidy of £1.4bn. By contrast, subsidies for renewables are costing £11.4bn this year alone.
Finally he caps off his nonsensical letter by claiming that nuclear power is a fossil fuel, and that we don’t need to import all of the rare earth metals needed for wind turbines and solar panels. (Even though we actually have none!)
While letters pages should reflect a wide range of views, it really is unacceptable that the Telegraph should see fit to publish two letters with so many factual errors, which should have been readily apparent to any competent Letters Editor.
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October 16, 2019 at 05:15AM
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