First published JoNova; Imagine needing government permission to turn up your winter heating when you catch Covid, or pleading with bureaucrats to allow you to heat more rooms in your house. But don’t call it energy rationing.

Turn on your heat pump when wind is blowing, Government pleads

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By Nick Gutteridge,
POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
4 September 2023 • 9:04pm

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The Government insisted it was “in no way asking people to ration electricity” and that consumers will benefit in the form of cheaper bills.

In official guidance, ministers have said the switch to smart appliances like heating systems, fridges and car chargers is key to delivering net zero.

“They enable consumers to shift their electricity usage to times when it is less costly for the energy system,” the document states.

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The Energy Bill includes powers for ministers to “mandate that electric heating appliances and EV chargepoints must have smart functionality, prohibiting the sale of non-smart devices in Great Britain”.

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Craig Mackinlay, the MP for South Thanet and head of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, has tabled an amendment to scrap the entire section on smart appliances from the legislation.

He said the Government was “admitting a shortage of electricity with its plans to limit supply to households and businesses through smart appliances, peak pricing penalties and reliance on irregular renewables”.

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Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/09/04/brits-urged-turn-on-heat-pumps-wind-is-blowing-net-zero/

Can there be any remaining doubt that claims renewables are cheaper and better than the alternatives are total nonsense?

Even if reducing CO2 emissions is important to you, there are better zero emissions alternatives to useless renewables.

Places with access to nuclear energy don’t have to ration energy. If anything, such places serve as a nexus of industry, business which take advantage of cheap energy surpluses.

Take the Welsh island of Anglesea. They used to have a nuclear power plant, Wylfa nuclear power station, which supported local industry. As far as I know nobody supplied by that plant was asked to ration energy. Instead, the nuclear plant supported Anglesea Aluminium, which employed 540 people. The Aluminium smelter was mothballed in 2016, shortly after the last reactor was shut down in 2015. I’m not sure how many people the power plant employed, but that’s a lot of jobs for a small rural community to lose.

There is some talk of replacing the nuclear reactor, but so far it’s all talk.

I once visited Anglesea, spent a week in a vacation unit. When I visited the nuclear power plant was still operating, you could see the bustle of industry. Good memories, everyone I met was nice – one of the friendliest places in Britain.

There is no doubt all of Britain could radically reduce emissions and keep energy bills under control, by transitioning to nuclear power. Suggestions nuclear is too expensive or impractical are absurd. France managed a transition to over 70% nuclear energy in the 1970s. OK it might have taken a little longer than a decade, but not much.

I believe British engineering would be up for the job, but if there is a shortage of key skills, I’m sure France would do a deal, lend Britain some of their top nuclear engineers, so Britain could copy France’s 1970s energy transition.

Meanwhile the people of Anglesea, of everywhere in Britain, make the best of it, with an increasingly detached government telling them on top of all the eye watering heating bills, ULEZ charges and hardship they’ve endured, Net Zero now means the government wants you to surrender control of your home appliances to politicians, powers which politicians assure us will never, of course, be used.

Don’t call it energy rationing.

Destroying pristine forests and wrecking critical wildlife habitats is all in a day’s work for the wind industry.

Whether it’s wiping out millions of trees across the Scottish Highlands, turning Germany’s Black Forest into sawdust and smoking ruins or ripping the Amazon basin apart to extract the millions of tonnes of balsa wood it needs to build hundreds of thousands of 50-80m turbine blades each year, the wind industry’s ‘couldn’t care less attitude’ is prone to rankle those with real affection for the natural order and the glorious world we live in.

One such character is Dominic Legoe. Dominic has over 30 years’ experience in engineering design, business development and project management, including designing ports and harbours and associated infrastructure.

Dominic has joined the growing chorus of outrage about the Queensland and Federal governments providing the ‘green’ light for the wind industry’s planned and obviously deliberate destruction of Queensland’s pristine dryland tropical forests.

In the following piece – which is an edited extract from a longer paper available in full here (PDF) – Dominic lays bare what’s in store for Queensland, its wild and rugged wilderness, and its peaceful rural communities, if the wind industry is not stopped dead in its tracks.

Queensland’s Renewable Energy Transition Madness
Dominic Legoe
5 September 2023

Now is the time to act to stop the Queensland government approving an environmental disaster!

The Department of Energy and Public Works (EPW) has released two papers:

which spell out a plan for the widespread destruction of huge regions of ancient rainforest for the purpose of installing swathes of wind turbines from Brisbane to Cairns. And it is all up to Tanya Plibersek now to make the final decision to proceed or amend or reject this proposal. We need to tell her no!

Extent of the Proposed Destruction
Currently there are only seven operating wind farms (utility scale) in the state, yet the plan calls for forty-eight wind farms more wind farms to be constructed. The nameplate capacity of the Proposed & ‘in Construction’ wind farms is over 33,000 MW whilst the current existing wind farm capacity is about 1,000 MW. For every turbine there needs to be an allowance of 200 hectares for each 4.5 MW (source SuperGrid Infrastructure Blueprint’- September 2022). Based on that rate, the land required for 33 GW of wind farms is 1.47 million hectares which is about the same as a quarter of Tasmania.

From Wilderness to Industrial Zones
These proposed wind farms will be built in pristine wilderness areas so they will be as close as possible to the main existing 275 kV transmission line that runs all the way up to Cairns. These steep and previously inaccessible areas of the coastal ranges that have escaped 200 years of agriculture will be cleared to make way for the turbines and their access roads.  For example, the Chalumbin region, which is a site of importance for Jirrbal cultural history, is now threatened with a major wind farm proposal

Most of the proposed wind farms (North of Gladstone) are located adjacent National Parks, conservation reserves and some in areas previously earmarked to be National Parks. For example, these areas have been identified as the site for the proposed Upper Burdekin wind farm complex and the Chalumbin wind farm.

You can get an idea of the degree of damage caused when you look at the Mount Emerald wind farm which became operational in 2018. The turbines are sited on top or near the top of the range. The turbines for Mt Emerald are small in height compared to the more recent projects and proposals.

Fast-Tracked Environmental Destruction