Continuing instability in the Middle East makes it imperative that America protects its domestic energy suppliers.
via CFACT
July 6, 2025 at 05:38AM
Category: Daily News
By Paul Homewood
h/t Doug Brodie/Philip Bratby
It’s started already!
From The Telegraph:
British solar farms have been paid to switch off for the first time as sunny days prompt a surge of clean power that could overwhelm the grid.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso), which manages the UK’s power grids and is overseen by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has issued switch-off orders to solar facilities this year, new research reveals.
Operators are paid to switch off when these orders are issued, with the extra cost added to consumer and business energy bills.
The solar operators claiming compensation are understood to include some of the UK’s biggest energy suppliers, such as EDF Renewables and Octopus Energy.
Such “constraint payments” are already common with wind farms because so many have been built in areas such as northern Scotland or offshore, areas without grid capacity to carry the power they generate.
So far this year, constraint payments have cost consumers £650m, according to the Wasted Wind website. The cost is added to energy bills.
Overall “balancing payments” could hit £8bn a year by 2030 without massive grid upgrades, according to Neso estimates. Such upgrades would also be extremely costly, with consumers liable.
Read the full story here.
This is of course the tip of the iceberg. The real problems will start when we have three times as much wind and solar capacity.
As I noted here, there will be many occasions during the year when we will be throwing a third of the electricity we produce, when demand is low and wind and solar power are high.
The only way to have enough renewable capacity at times of stress during winter is to build large surpluses in.
What this latest news shows though is that there are already regional imbalances appearing, with too much solar power in local areas.
NESO’s own projections for 2030 show that these surpluses will add £15/MWh to electricity costs. Even that is optimistic, because it assumes we will be able to export some of it, which may not be the case. It also assumes grid expansions.
Even at £15/MWh, that works out at £5 billion a year.
Once again, the red herring of zonal pricing is mentioned in the Telegraph report:
Octopus has been campaigning for Britain’s energy market to be broken up into regions that set their own prices based on supply and demand. This reform, known as zonal pricing, would theoretically reduce or even eliminate constraint payments by encouraging developers to build infrastructure in areas where prices were highest, meaning there would be sufficient cabling.
The basic idea is that new generation will be attracted to areas with high demand, and consumers attracted to the areas where supply exceeds demand, with price differentials the driver.
But most new generation will be paid via CfDs, so will be unaffected by whatever the market price happens to be. Moreover, most will be offshore wind, and therefore not embedded regionally.
As for the idea that people and industry are suddenly going to relocate to the Scottish Highlands is ridiculous. Or that people are going to switch all their electrical appliances on when it is windy, just because prices come down,
Zonal pricing will no doubt be a good way for Octopus to charge higher prices. But the real solution is not to rearrange the deckchairs. It is to stop building wind and solar farms that cannot reliably meet demand when and where it is needed.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
July 6, 2025 at 04:34AM
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via Watts Up With That?
July 6, 2025 at 04:03AM
By Paul Homewood
Why do we have to pay the BBC licence fee for this nonsense?
A tiny, obscure animal often sold as aquarium food has been quietly protecting our planet from global warming by undertaking an epic migration, according to new research.
These "unsung heroes" called zooplankton gorge themselves and grow fat in spring before sinking hundreds of metres into the deep ocean in Antarctica where they burn the fat.
This locks away as much planet-warming carbon as the annual emissions of roughly 55 million petrol cars, stopping it from further warming our atmosphere, according to researchers.
This is much more than scientists expected. But just as researchers uncover this service to our planet, threats to the zooplankton are growing.
If anyone has heard of them, it’s probably as a type of fish food available to buy online.
But their life cycle is odd and fascinating. Take the copepod, a type of zooplankton that is a distant relative of crabs and lobsters.
Just 1-10mm in size, they spend most of their lives asleep between 500m to 2km deep in the ocean.
In pictures taken under a microscope, you can see long sausages of fat inside their bodies, and fat bubbles in their heads, explains Prof Daniel Mayor who photographed them in Antarctica.
Without them, our planet’s atmosphere would be significantly warmer.
Globally the oceans have absorbed 90% of the excess heat humans have created by burning fossil fuels. Of that figure, the Southern Ocean is responsible for about 40%, and a lot of that is down to zooplankton.
Scientists were already aware that the zooplankton contributed to carbon storage in a daily process when the animals carbon-rich waste sinks to the deep ocean.
But what happened when the animals migrate in the Southern Ocean had not been quantified.
The latest research focussed on copepods, as well as other types of zooplankton called krill, and salps.
The creatures eat phytoplankton on the ocean surface which grow by transforming carbon dioxide into living matter through photosynthesis. This turns into fat in the zooplankton.
"Their fat is like a battery pack. When they spend the winter deep in the ocean, they just sit and slowly burn off this fat or carbon," explains Prof Daniel Mayor at University of Exeter, who was not part of the study.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c628nnz3rp9o
“Protecting us from global warming”? These creatures have been around for millions of years and have always been just a part of the cycle of life on the planet.
They have not suddenly arrived to save us from anything.
But silly Georgina gives the game away when she writes:
The research team calculated that this process transports 65 million tonnes of carbon annually to at least 500m below the ocean surface.
65 million tonnes is a drop in the ocean – about half a day’s worth of man made emissions.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
July 6, 2025 at 03:25AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 