By Paul Homewood
Mad Miliband want to spend billions more of our money to plug the intermittency of so-called cheap renewables!
Loch Ness faces monster hydro scheme after Energy Secretary offers developers support for projects
A string of giant dams are to be built across Britain’s mountain landscapes after Ed Miliband offered developers billions of pounds in potential support for the projects.
In a bid to strengthen the country’s energy storage capabilities, the Energy Secretary has approved a scheme that will provide a financial safety net for dam developers.
The proposal has been approved to encourage a spate of new dam projects across England and Scotland, which will be used to store backup hydropower for times when wind and solar farms cannot meet electricity demand.
The eventual cost of supporting such projects will be added to consumer bills, with Mr Miliband introducing the backstop to help developers make a profit.
The technology behind the dams relies on pumped storage hydropower (PSH), which uses two reservoirs at different elevations.
Water is pumped into the upper lake when there is surplus cheap power and then released during shortages to spin turbines and generate electricity.
Such systems are highly controversial because while they can provide green energy, they also require altering entire landscapes, often in treasured rural or wild areas.
Energy Minister Michael Shanks said: “We need to increase our ability to store energy for when the sun isn’t shining, or the wind isn’t blowing.
The UK already has four pumped hydropower schemes – two in Scotland and two in Wales. The largest is at Dinorwig in Wales, opened in 1984 in Snowdonia National Park.
The power station was built inside Elidir Fawr mountain using a reservoir built 2,000 feet above sea level and linked to a second lake 1,700 feet lower down.
Mr Miliband and Mr Shanks want to unleash many other schemes over the next two decades, meaning many new dams will be built across mountainous regions in Britain.
Under the so-called cap and floor funding scheme, developers will have a guaranteed minimum income in return for a limit on revenues.
A spokesman for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero said deploying 20 gigawatts of long-term energy storage – an eight-fold expansion – could save the electricity system £24bn by 2050.
This, they claimed, would “reduce household energy bills as additional cheaper renewable energy would be available to meet demand at peak times”.
Several hydro projects, targeting up to a dozen lochs, are already at the planning stage in Scotland.
A number of schemes are centred around Loch Ness, where critics say the projects will damage the local environment.
Brian Shaw, river director of the Ness District Salmon Fishery Board, said: “In places such as Loch Ness, this scale of pump storage hydro will overrun natural ecological processes, destroy the loch and surrounding ecosystems’ biodiversity, and devalue one of Scotland’s premier tourism destinations, all in the quest for not-so-cheap electricity.”
One of the largest is Earba, near Dalwhinnie, on the Ardverikie Estate, whose stately home was used for filming TV series including The Crown and Monarch of the Glen.
Davie Black, of Mountaineering Scotland, which represents climbers and hikers, said such projects were “incursions into the wild qualities of our hill country”.
Kate Gilmartin, chief executive of the British Hydropower Association, the industry trade body, said dams and lakes were among the least intrusive of renewable energy technologies.
She said: “The biggest winners are energy consumers. We are currently paying about £62m a day to curtail wind as we haven’t got sufficient capacity across the grid to move it from Scotland to England.
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We truly are ruled by cretins!
How the DESNZ can claim that spending billions of pounds could save the electricity system £24bn by 2050 defies logic. (The figure of course is not annual, which they craftily do not reveal, and simply means that the enormous costs of the renewable agenda won’t be quite as steep).
As for Kate Gilmartin’s claim that we are paying £62m a day to curtail wind, I suggest she buys a new abacus, as that works out at £22bn a year!
There is another fundamental issue here as well. As most of this pumped storage will be in the Scottish Highlands, how the hell will we get the power to the south where it is actually needed. We already don’t have enough transmission capacity from Scotland to England, which gets most of its wind power from the North Sea via cables across the East Coast. When the wind does not blow, we can’t just tap into a hydro power station in Inverness, as there is not the transmission network installed to carry it.
And how much difference will these new projects make?
Dinorwig, the largest at the moment, can store just 9.1 GWh. In winter this would only be enough to keep the grid going for maybe 10 minutes.
DESNZ want an eight-fold increase in storage, so that might give us enough to last for a couple of hours. This is a drop in the ocean, when we are without wind power for weeks at a time.
The hydro industry body will, of course, be delighted at the prospect of billions in subsidies.
We have been assured for years that renewable energy is cheap. That was always a lie, as subsidies are now costing bill payers over £10bn a year. But we were never told about all of the extra costs, which will be entailed.
The National Grid already wants £100bn over the next ten years to upgrade the grid to cope with renewables. Then we had Miliband’s potty plan to litter the country with flywheels. Now billions more are demanded for his latest hare brained scheme.
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October 11, 2024 at 05:24AM
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