Candour from the Beeb

Friday, September 05, 2008

Candour from the Beeb

A remarkable programme was aired yesterday on BBC Radio 4, remarkable in the sense that it allowed criticism of the great God wind energy – the totem of the greenie religion.

This was The Investigationwith Simon Cox, which can be heard here, with a back-up piece on the BBC website.

Cox actually takes on the "poster boy" for wind power, Denmark, visiting the offshore Horns Rev wind farm – 80 400ft towers with a rated capacity of 160 MW, stuck out five miles into the North Sea.

But, while Cox establishes that wind power produces 20 percent of Danish electricity, he also finds out that this is not actually consumed in Denmark. The figure is a statistical illusion. Only nine percent of the wind energy generated is actually used in Denmark.

At times of peak capacity, the power cannot be absorbed into the grid so it is exported. Much of the power goes a system of inter-connectors, mainly to Norway which has a high proportion of hydro-power and therefore is able to shut down its own capacity very rapidly in order to take the Danish feed.

This, Cox does not actually tell us. Nor does he reveal that the power is sold very cheaply to Norway – which is thus the main beneficiary of the Danish system – or that the Danes have the highest electricity bills in Europe.

But he does elicit from Peter Jorgensen, the vice president of Energinet, the Danish national grid company, that it would be "very difficult to run the system without the inter-connectors." "We are very dependent on our *neighbours", he concedes. 

Challenged as to whether Denmark could rely on an independent system, Jorgensen admits that "You could build a system that would balance on it own, but it would be very costly".

That, in fact, is what the UK is committing to. Cox finds that the National Grid has no plans for a system of inter-connectors and, therefore, we will never be able to balance our system with the aid of our neighbours. Thus, Britain will be reliant on back-up power stations for the many days when there is not enough wind

Cox even allows his listeners to hear how much this will cost us, retailing an estimate from E.On of £10bn per year to finance the back-up, adding £400 to the average annual household energy bill. 

That brings in Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, who warns that this back-up will probably have to be gas-fired power stations as these are the easiest to turn off and on. But this will mean a "dash for gas" leaving Britain badly exposed. It would be "about the worst possible thing that one could conceive of given what's going on in Russia and given our dependence on Russian gas supplies", Helm says. 

This is, of course, nothing new to EU Referendum readers but the fact that it was the BBC airing these views was very new. And what we have covered is by no means to whole of it. We’ll have a look at the rest in another post.

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A few thoughts ....

.... on the threat Sarah Palin represents to the whole cosy consensus not just in the United States but on this side of the Pond and, especially, in the EU over on BrugesGroupBlog. (Did you really think I would not be able to smuggle the EU into the discussion?)

Out of touch

About the only sour note in the "right wing" press on Sarah Palin's stunning speech comes – entirely predictably – from Charles Clover, the environment correspondent of The Daily Telegraph.

Morosely observing that she attacked Bonto (Barak Obama – Not The One) for "wasting his time turning back the waters and healing the planet", he ruminated that "no one could accuse her of that".

The online version of Clover's piece is headed "Pit-bull Palin, enemy of the greens, could be McCain's Achilles heel", and that says it all. In the eyes of Clover, and the rest of the GWGs (Global Warming Groupies), Palin is a BAD THING because, she not a believer.

Not only that, Palin is a despoiler of the planet, which – in Clover's eyes – means "trouble". "Who said America's isolation on environmental issues would be over with the election", he asks, betraying that ovine tendency of the warmists, their love of "consensus" and their absolute dread of isolation.

What Clover does not realise is that the tide is turning - and Palin is the living embodiment of that change. Look to the dire Spectator Coffee House clog yesterday, picked up independently with glee by Waendel and Purple Scorpion.

They both report that writer Sean Martin trotted out the usual leaden received wisdom on the melting of Arctic ice, intoning that, "The event serves as a prescient reminder to politicians that climate change is an ever burning issue…" - only to be comprehensively trashed by the commenters who piled in on the piece.

Significantly, in yesterday's Telegraph Mary Riddell captured something of that mood, noting:

Citizens want, and deserve, some clarity. Where Americans now have a stark choice between the liberal prospectus of Barack Obama and McCain's hawkish tomorrow, here there is no such distinct alternative. Partly, and thankfully, that's because we are less extreme. We don't burn abortion clinics or field candidates who, in Palin's case, make George W Bush look like Renaissance Man. But it's also because our politicians, huddled on the centre ground, have forgotten the preciousness of difference.

People are actually sick of the cloying "consensus" so beloved of the "colleagues" in Brussels – of the hair-shirt, torfu-spinning, sandal-wearing, planet-saving, eco-friendly preachers. They want some fire, someone who will offer an antidote to the doom and despondency, the sermonising and the dull diet of drivel that dominates the political centre ground.

Everywhere, the heresy is breaking out and the likes of Clover are being left behind.

Palin showed us what real leadership can do and she has electrified the US election campaign. There is a lesson here for Mr Cameron and other British politicians. Like Thatcher, Palin is not going for the centre ground – she is there to "kick ass" and the people love it.

Cameron may think he can win the election simply on the rebound from an increasingly unpopular and dysfunctional Gordon Brown and doubtless he can. But a victory borne on a tidal wave of apathy and loathing of the political classes is no victory at all. He may wear the crown but he will lose the hearts and minds of the people, gaining nothing but the trappings of office which will dribble through his fingers like dry sand into the pile of vacuity that British politics has become.

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This is serious journalism folks!

It is not repeated in the online edition (or perhaps has been subject to a quick stealth edit).

Nevertheless, The Daily Telegraph's transport correspondent, David Millward, writes in the print edition (front page), à propos the Boeing 777 crash at Heathrow:

The AAB said it believed the plane lost power after the flow of fuel dropped shortly before it was due to land. This was thought to be because the supply was impeded by the ice, preventing the reverse thrust needed to slow the plane for a normal landing.

Not only does it not say this in the report, anyone who thinks that reverse thrust is used in flight to slow an aircraft for landing is displaying technical illiteracy of an extraordinary high level. The man is not safe to be let out alone, much less employed as the transport correspondent for a major national newspaper.

Think about it … if that is the calibre of "journalist" the paper employs, can you trust anything it publishes?

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Missing the implications?

In May last, we ran a report on how global cooling had possibly caused the crash of a Boeing 777 at Heathrow in January of this year.

Now, the interim reportof the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch has been published, reported widely in the media, including The Guardian, which has produced as good a summary as any.

The official report rules out any idea of the fuel freezing in the tanks, due to the exceptional cold (as was originally postulated), and instead prefers an unprovable theory of ice forming in the fuel lines – a phenomenon which could occur at very much higher temperatures than those to which this aircraft was exposed.

By contrast, in the original report we cited, reference was made to the exceptionally low temperatures encountered, down to -76° Celsius – "the coldest ever experienced" – while the freezing point of the fuel used in the 777 was -57°C (The report records a minimum of -73°C static air temperature).

Strangely enough, in entirely different circumstances, I have had personal experience of the effect of ice while flying. Tooling around North Yorkshire in a Jet Provost one day – as one does – emerging from a high-speed aerobatic manoeuvre, I found that the trim wheel had jammed. Pushing hard to release it, it suddenly freed itself and spun most of the way forward, then locking in position, totally unmovable.

For those unused to the technicalities of flying, the trim wheel is used to balance the controls, allowing it to be flown in level flight with fingertip pressure. The trim nearly fully forward, it now took some considerable physical effort to keep the aircraft in level flight and prevent it plunging to earth.

However, after orbiting the field for some time at low altitude, the trim freed itself and I made an uneventful landing. To my potential embarrassment, though, a minute technical inspection showed up no faults and for a while my CO was deeply suspicious that I had invented the whole incident.

To my rescue came the engineering officer, who surmised that ice must have built up round the trim cable and pulley, jamming it in place, it having become free when the ice had melted at low altitude. That too was unprovable, but entirely plausible, and the incident went no further.

One would hesitate to cast aspersions at the current investigation report, which concludes that "the data indicates (sic) that the fuel did not reach a low enough temperature to cause the fuel to wax during the accident flight." This, however, is at such variance with the original findings we reported, that we could be forgiven for wondering whether "ice" in this case – conveniently melted after the accident, as inconveniently as had mine – gave the investigators the opportunity to play down the effects of extreme cold conditions, which may become the norm and have implications for the whole of commercial aviation.

While the investigators do acknowledge that their findings might have lessons for other aircraft types, it is unarguable that dealing with an ice problem is far easier (and cheaper) than having to address the implications of extremely low temperatures, sufficient to freeze aircraft fuel.

That said, the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch has unparalleled expertise and a world-wide reputation for technical excellence, but their personnel would not be the first to have difficulty coming to terms with the implications of global cooling.

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