Power cuts could happen this winter

Speech Energy Package Plenary 13 Dec 2016

A recent study from the Westminster parliament indicates that current green policies will cost energy users as much as £300 billion in the UK by 2030.  This will do huge economic damage.

Yet both the National Grid and our energy regulator OfGem are warning that over-reliance on intermittent renewables, coupled with the closure of base-load capacity forced by the Large Combustion Plant Directive, threaten power outages this winter.

The National Grid has responded by doing deals with owners of diesel generators.  Mr. President you couldn’t make it up.  We’re going to save the planet and cut CO₂ emissions by using diesel generators for back-up!

They are also looking at what they call “demand management”.  I call it “supply failure”.  That is, getting factories to agree to close at peak demand times.

Mr. President back in Mediæval times, folk who could not afford candles went to bed at sunset.  They ground their corn in wind-mills, which stood idle on calm days.

By contrast we are accustomed to secure supplies of energy at the flick of a switch.  But now these Green policies threaten to send us back to the Dark Ages, where our own power supplies are vulnerable to the vagaries of wind and weather, with dire social and economic consequences.

In my party, we demand secure and affordable energy, for homes, for pensioners, and for industry.  We want an end to fuel poverty.  For these reasons, we oppose the Commission’s Energy Package, and we oppose its obsession with intermittent renewables.

Roger Helmer MEP

TAP – What no one is telling us is that coal could be burned and the carbon captured at the moment of combustion, not subsequently as is the plan of the current UK government, a hugely expensive and inefficient process.  The carbon that’s then captured can be bonded with hydrogen, which is cheap to produce but expensive to store.  The combined carbon and hydrogen can for almost nothing be used to produce methanol.  That would replace the petrol and diesel we are currently using to run cars.   In other words, for the same price as coal costs to generate electricity, we could be producing most of our road fuels to boot.  This technology is nothing new.  It’s simply banned from us using it as it would save so much money and threaten the profits of Shell and BP.  The control grid requires us to be kept in fuel poverty, to keep our economies down and the population too.