By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

We came perilously close to rolling blackouts yesterday, something which I have not seen reported in the media –(correct me, I may be wrong!!).

The ever alert Kathryn Porter has the full story here.

This is her conclusion:

The reference to the Viking I/C, by the way, is that it managed to provide 700 MW on a dipole, which was intended to be offline for maintenance.

Below is the Elexon chart for generation and I/C supply during yesterday:

https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-by-fuel-type

Annoyingly, they don’t seem to have an option to show which fuel categories are which! But I have filtered out below everything except for Biomass, CCGT, Nuclear and Wind, in that order. (I/Cs at 5.30pm were supplying 6.3 GW, Pumped Storage 4.7 GW, OCGT 0.9 GW and Others 3.8 GW).

With Biomass and Nuclear running flat out, CCGT supplied 24.2 GW at that time. Wind ran at 2.6 GW. It needs to be pointed out that wind has often fallen to less than 1 GW in winter.

This particular near miss appears to have caught the NESO by surprise, because demand turned out to be 3 GW higher than anticipated three days before. And as Kathryn points out, alarm bells are already ringing for Friday evening, when winds are forecast to be even lighter than last night.

Why did we get into this awful mess?

It does not take a genius to work out why? We shut down more than 20 GW of reliable coal capacity, and thought we could replace it with medieval technology that only works when the wind blows!

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

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January 9, 2025 at 04:25AM

CFACT’s Peter Murphy discusses New York’s insatiable need for cash and the lengths the state will go to get it. WATCH NOW

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January 9, 2025 at 04:02AM

via Watts Up With That?

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January 9, 2025 at 04:01AM

A reality check for over-eager climate alarmists, as the sea ice extent returns to near the long-term average. Scientists remember “the high variability of Antarctic sea ice extent” when confronted with the latest data. A question arises: were the sea ice lows linked to the mystery global temperature ‘spike’ of 2023-24?
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Antarctic sea ice rebounded in December after a long period of record lows, US scientists said, giving pause to speculation that Earth’s frozen continent could be undergoing a permanent change, says Phys.org.

The rate of sea ice loss during the warmer spring months of November and December slowed to well below average, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said in a statement on Tuesday.

This followed a “prolonged period of record to near-record daily lows” in 2023 and 2024—the hottest years in the history books for global temperature rises driven by climate change. [Talkshop comment – logic fail].

By the end of 2024, Antarctic sea ice extent had recovered to 7.3 million square kilometers (2.8 million square miles)—very close to the 1981 to 2010 average, NSIDC said.

This erased the record and near-record low extents of October and November, it added.

“This provides a sharp illustration of the high variability of Antarctic sea ice extent,” NSIDC said.

Ocean temperature records—both at the surface and deep below—have tumbled since 2023, driven partly by an El Niño phenomenon that elevated heat around the globe.

Scientists have been concerned since mid-2016 that global warming could be setting in motion more lasting changes in how much sea ice forms around the world’s coldest continent.

NSIDC said this “regime-shift idea” took hold particularly after a persistent stretch of below-average sea ice and “dramatic” records or near-records in 2017, 2023 and 2024.

“The recent slowdown in extent loss during December gives some pause to this idea”, it said, though cautioned that a one-month rebound was not enough to contradict the theory outright.

Full article here.
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Image: Antarctic sea ice [credit: BBC]

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January 9, 2025 at 03:13AM