The billionaires can't profit on wind/solar.
As long as they can keep us on oil, they can charge what they want and tax us for the privilege of using only what they supply.

The billionaires (including Saudi Arabia and the other dictators in the Middle East) need large countries dependent on oil.

The billionaires (including Putin who has personally made an unimaginable amount of money off oil) pay to influence hundreds of millions of voters worldwide wide (notably in the U.S., lately) so that those voters will keep their heads up their asses.

Unfortunately, because of the way the UK grid is regulated, that doesn't mean people in Scotland pay less for electricity than those living in the south, so we put up with some of the negative impacts but don't see all the direct benefits.

There is some resistance to the locating of new windfarms, along with the power lines to support them, but nothing like the hysteria Trump's expressed about their defiling the views from his golf courses.

His insane hatred of wind power in the US may be traceable to his humiliating protracted defeat when he challenged the construction of a sea-based wind farm that would be barely visible with the naked eye from his course at Menie on the Aberdeenshire coast:

The UK's Labour government, like other recent UK governments before it, is pressuring Scotland to allow the building of new nuclear power stations as its ageing nuclear plants near decommissioning. The SNP-led government in Holyrood has long opposed this as ecologically perilous and unnecessary given that Scotland already more than meets its own needs. The innumerable problems, delays and vast cost escalations encountered in building the new nuclear power station Hinkley Point C in Somerset in England haven't helped the UK government's case.

Anyone interested in how the loads on the UK electricity grid work can view the proportions from various sources in use in real time at https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

The smaller dials in the second row on the right show the two-way interconnector contributions via a network of cables linking the UK, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and other locations on the Continent. The flows will vary dynamically depending on which source has a surplus at any time and the spot price of electricity from that source.

...precisely why so called "renewable energy" is a useless affectation.

If nothing else they demonstrate why the atmospheric collapse is accelerating since this expensive unsustainable junk is unreliable and capricious.

It's 2026. I've personally been hearing this "percent talk" for decades while observing, almost daily, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste rising faster and faster. We hit, for the first time ever, a daily concentration reading over 433 ppm on Monday at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory. It was under 370 ppm at the dawn of this century.

The enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy" has nothing to do with arresting the use of fossil fuels. In fact it depends on access to fossil fuels. It was, is, and will remain until the last forest burns all about attacking the last best hope of humanity, nuclear power.

Scotland regularly produces a surplus. The reason this was a headline was because it's unusual for the percentage to reach so high, but that will be a trend given the number of new developments under way. Through Scottish Power, I have access to a tariff that guarantees 100% renewable sourcing.

Wind power isn't the only electricity development Scotland's involved in. There have been pioneering installations of tidal flow generators, which can produce predictable and constant baseload energy, along with hydro power, which has a long history in Scotland. Vast numbers of houses now have their own solar power installations, and people can see their significant benefits directly through readouts and in their power bills.

You sound like an ideologue, so it's probably not worth debating with you, but the information's out there if you take off your blinkers.

I have a very long history on this website of writing about issues in energy and the environment by appeal to the primary scientific literature. I have been reading on the topic for decades.

I would suggest that an "ideologue" is a person who values belief over knowledge.

It's not "debatable" that the planet is burning nor is it debatable that we saw a concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide measured at over 433 ppm on Monday.

Over decades here I've experienced hundreds of defenders of this reactionary scam - making energy access dependent on the weather when the weather is becoming destabilized- calling chanting "debate." It's not only uninteresting, it's depressing.

The planet is burning. I seldom meet an antinuke who notices this reality.

Facts are not subject to debate.

Out of curiosity, is it not possible that, had some sizeable portion of renewable power NOT be deployed world-wide over the past few decades, the 433 ppm measurement would be even higher than that?

I'm confused how the fact that this number is continuing to rise despite these deployments somehow proves that the strategy is not effective? Could renewables not be deployed ENOUGH to stop the upward thrust, but still being HELPFUL in reducing the rate of rise?

At the least, wouldn't you have to KNOW what the number would otherwise be without such deployments, so you have something to compare it to?

Not saying you're wrong, I'm just not seeing how "the number keeps rising" alone proves the strategy is completely useless?

In the long run it will do nothing to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gasses humans eventually dump into our planet's atmosphere.

It's a payday loan, not any kind of solution to the underlying problem.

Like it or not, the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely (which we need to do) is nuclear power.

Check out this map of carbon intensities in Europe:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/12mo/monthly

The renewable energy experiment has been ongoing and the results are not encouraging.

Actually, also a lot of yours on his threads as well , and I don't necessarily disagree with the premises either of you espouse.

But I had a very specific, focused question, one based on a simple "critical thinking" process. If you can answer that specific question, I'd be much obliged. To reiterate, I'm not sure it's logically valid to see that the CO2 numbers continue to rise despite the deployment of some small % of renewables and conclude "therefore, the whole premise of renewables being a helpful part of the mix is wrong-minded".

You'd need to know what this PPM number would be OTHERWISE (i.e. without such deployments) in order to assess whether said deployments were valueless, or perhaps even counter-productive.

Or are my critical-thinking faculties slipping away like so many others in my advancing years?

Also, IMHO, the underlying problem is 8B people, a high % of whom would love to live like a billionaire does. Which I think is, in part, a function of constant messaging and propaganda that tries to convince everyone that their "worth" is tied to "what they own". Or more specifically, "what they can buy"

IMHO, the whole world should've adopted China's erstwhile "1 child policy" about 50 years ago, along with a full-scale commitment to nuclear power. And I think about 1/2 the worlds population dying off is already baked in the cake, barring some miracle like fusion

The economic and political empowerment of women, universal access to birth control, and realistic sex education are very effective.

Not coincidentally, these are all things "conservatives" of many religions and political ideologies oppose.

I don't believe a brutal decline of the human population by great suffering and death is "baked in the cake." The solution to the problem is obvious but somehow hard to implement. We just have to agree that every human deserves a comfortable and secure place to live, healthy food, clean water, and basic medical care.

Most of the horrors of the modern world are brought upon us by people who do not believe this.

For various reasons I don't think fusion (excluding that which occurs in the sun) will ever be a viable energy resource for humankind. That's okay, fission works well and we've been building fission power plants for more than seventy years now. If we can halt our population growth and quit regarding one another as "consumers" to the detriment of our physical and mental health, nuclear fission can power our civilization indefinitely, beyond the "seven generation sustainability" many environmentalists talk about. ( As someone interested in evolutionary biology I tend to think in longer time scales. The beginning of the Miocene epoch was yesterday morning. )

If a was formulating a conspiracy theory I might say that "renewable energy" and fusion are being promoted for the purpose of prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels.

I'll focus again on Hinkley Point C.

To save me a lot of summarizing and typing to a possibly impervious audience, you can read its history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station

Its development was granted a licence in 2012. Today, after many years, it still isn't built. It's slated to come online by 2030. Anyone who wants to place a bet on that happening needs to read that history.

As preparations ground on, in 2016 it was supposed to cost £18 billion and be activated by 2025. Currently, it's predicted by EDF, its prime investor, to come partially online in 2030, for a cost of £48 billion at current prices.

EDF is a French company, with the Chinese CGN an earlier partner that has backpedalled its involvement considerably since the scheme was first floated.

You might assume, since France has long put pretty much all its eggs in one basket, with about 57 operating reactors accounting for some 70% of its energy generation, that they know what they're doing. Well.

One thing about nuclear power plants as we know them is that they require access to large bodies of water for cooling and steam generation. Hence many of them are located on the coast, as is the case with Hinkley.

And what is predicted to happen to sea levels in the mid- to long-term future? If you want to bet that sufficient account has been taken of this, given the "unforeseen" problems that have beset this development over the years, be my guest. There's also the issue of storms, which are widely predicted to become more ferocious and frequent as the century wears on.

Given the number of nuclear plants in France and the country's size, EDF couldn't site all of them on the coast. Many were sited near rivers to provide the water supply needed.

Maybe the assumption was that these would always flow and provide sufficiently cool water for operations.

That assumption has begun to unravel in recent years:

I'm not about to try to teach a DUer about irony, but there it is.

This raises again what I posted about earlier - about the opportunity cost. Hinkley has been very expensive and has taken up a lot of time and engineering and political energy, but has yet to produce a glimmer of electricity. And its carbon footprint has been vast.

In that time, how many renewable research projects and actual installations could have been fielded for that outlay?

My own neighborhood has so much solar we export electricity on sunny days.

At night everyone's power is dirty. You can watch the ins and outs of California's electric grid here:

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

The shutdown of solar occurs nightly. We've got huge battery plants and everything. (Sometimes the batteries catch on fire... )

What say you of the chart I posted previously? I'll post it again here:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/12mo/monthly

Nuclear France is solidly green. It exports electricity to the United Kingdom. The price of electricity is low compared to non-nuclear power grids.

It's no coincidence that places with the most aggressive "renewable" energy programs have some of the most expensive electricity in the developed world. Much of that burden falls upon the people least able to afford it.

Renewable energy is just as much a "cash cow" as any other energy resource. People in my neighborhood who don't have solar systems are frequently harassed by people selling solar power systems. It's not cheap either. Sunshine and wind may be "free" but the cost of integrating this energy into a reliable electric grid is high.

I used to be a radical anti-nuclear activist. Now I'm not. I've written about it some here on DU.

And also why I've long been a fan and proponent of tidal stream generation, which is as reliable and predictable as moonrise and moonset, and could do with a lot more interest and investment. With the varied tide times we have around our intricate coast, it wouldn't be rocket science to develop an overlapping grid that could deliver that holy grail of energy nuclear-lovers adore - baseload.

A major challenge that's only partly being addressed so far is how to store excess power from times and locations of plenty. We have many decades-old major pumped storage hydro systems in Scotland that are a partial answer and can be brought online very quickly when needed. Another more recent and more hi-tech partial solution is conversion of surplus electricity to hydrogen through electrolysis. There are and will be others, including battery storage as you mentioned, and some will be more suited to certain situations than others and have their own pitfalls and advantages. I'd rather put money, time and resources into pursuing and deploying those than the boondoggle of waste and delay we've seen at Hinkley, with nothing to show for it so far and the climate clock still ticking.

The latest brainwave that was doing the rounds a couple of years ago, and one where the all too eager nuclear industry seemed to have our government's ear, was mini-nuclear installations that would be dotted around the country. Another red herring, and one that's not aged well given threats to and actual attacks on nuclear installations in recent conflicts, most notably Ukraine. And also one that again doesn't address that thorny and unavoidable issue of long-term access to adequate supplies of coolant water in a country where England's aquifers are already running dry.

I wasn't a big fan of wind power way back when it started being rolled out extensively in the UK, I felt there were alternative renewable sources - mainly sea-based around an archipelago nation - that we would have been better off developing, but it was low-hanging fruit, tried-and-tested technology, and could be deployed quickly and at scale. And so it's proven. It can't be the be-all and end-all, but it's certainly been better than the alternatives, as I've come to admit.

I notice you've tried to dodge my arguments about French nuclear power's major and unavoidable problems with coolant and consequent lack of capacity, which will be shared by nuclear installations all over the world and is a problem that isn't going to go away and is going to get worse. You really lost me when you offhand threw in a reference to the French power system as "green", even if that's just the convenient (subliminal?) colour used as a map key. Any system worth that title would at least have to have figured out what to do with its waste, rather than leaving it for some wunder-solution to be scrabbled together by future generations. I also note that your map doesn't separate Scotland out as a generating unit, which is unfortunate as we're dragged down into that rather jaundiced shade of green by the rest of the UK, otherwise I'd pitch us against France in the colour wheel stakes any day.

You've also not addressed my information about the ongoing clusterfuck that is the UK's most recent misadventure with nuclear power, a resource trumpeted by none other than our late queen as being capable of producing electricity "too cheap to meter" when she opened our first nuclear power station - the first of many nuclear industry promises that fell apart when faced with reality, and so it continues.

Then you tried to suggest that Big Oil was targeting nuclear with propaganda, when since the 1960s there have been extremely well documented campaigns by the petrochemical lobby to deny climate science and muddy the water where renewables are concerned and obstruct their development and deployment. Which is a major reason why we're where we are today.

Forgive me if I don't have the time, energy or patience to chase you down whatever further rabbitholes are coming. Do what you want in California, we'll do what we want in Scotland.

You could maybe start by electing a government that will, long-overdue, finally build or sponsor a properly joined-up integrated modern US power grid rather than the cobbled-together mess you live with and are trying hard to knit together, to make better use of your continental time zones and wide variety of resources. What you plug into it is up to you.

I don't get my information from Wikipedia. I get it from the primary scientific literature and official organizations, for instance the Danish Energy Agency.

One agency that drives the depressing data that I have been reporting in series here for years, is the data from the NOAA Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory. The latest in this multiyear series was last Sunday (they appear in the March-June time frame every year) : New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 431.73 ppm

These series always include a data section and a section on the cost and uselessness of so called "renewable energy" while commenting on the accelerating rate of the collapse of the planetary atmosphere despite the trillion dollars squandered on solar and wind energy along with grid connections for that garbage:

As for antinukes indifference to fossil fuels while they push the grotesquely failed "renewable energy" scam, lipstick on the fossil fuel pig:

One can also look at news websites to learn, for instance, that six days ago the Scottish government announced support for new dangerous natural gas facilities, but we can see, given the crap handed out about Hinkley C, that as usual, defenders of the obscene so called "renewable energy" scam couldn't care less about fossil fuels. Their sole goal, despite occasional crocodile tears about the collapse of the planetary atmosphere is to attack nuclear energy.

Scot News: UK Government set to approve major North Sea project amid Iran war



This begs the question I asked, citing a paper by a scientist who has left academia that is somewhat obscure, as is the scientist, Robert Idel, that is nonetheless racking up citations even as he went to work in the travel industry:

LFSCOE: The True Cost of Solar and Wind Energy in Texas and Germany in Answer to the Question...



Denmark has stopped updating the Master Register of Wind Turbines probably because it made it very clear how pathetic the lifetime of this land and material intensive fossil fuel dependent junk is.

I analyzed the data here:

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

...and here:

The Growth Rate of the Danish Wind Industry As Compared to the New Finnish EPR Nuclear Reactor.

Some excerpts from the former:



From the latter:



Energy consumption 3 years later has exceeded 650 Exajoules as of 2024.

As for antinukes whining about the cost and timelines of Western nuclear plants, I note that in former times, between 1965 and 1985, the United States built more than 100 nuclear reactors, 94 of which still operate, while providing the cheapest electricity possible. The reason the US can no longer do this is because antinukes - I compare them to arsonists complaining about forest fires - did everything possible to destroy US nuclear manufacturing infrastructure with appeals to fear and ignorance.

The Chinese don't give a rat's ass about the rhetoric of antinukes. In this century they brought 61 nuclear reactors on line and have 39 under construction, a rate of nuclear power plant building not seen on this planet since the US and France in the late 20th century.

Regrettably, it's not enough. It's too little too late.

Please spare me the battery and hydrogen bullshit, by the way. I'm a physical scientist and thus I am aware of the laws of thermodynamics, as well as the material issues that make so called "renewable energy" unsustainable, inasmuch the word "renewable" is as dishonest as anything dribbling out of the mouth or keyboard of the Orange Pedophile in the White House.

Have a nice evening.

If you cant keep it civil, I'm done wasting my time on you.

You seem to assume you're the only person around who has dwelt on these issues and researched them. In my case, I've also lived with them for many years in real life, not just reading papers, and my concern for climate change is very real and constant.

The real scam is nuclear power, for very many reasons I won't bother rehearsing here because as I first observed and you've yet again proven, there's little or no point debating you, but Hinkley Point is a prime example.

Primarily, it's a cuckoo in the nest. If all the resources and time that have been ploughed into that ridiculous development had gone into renewables research, deployment and investment, the UK might have its own indigenous companies producing turbines and other facilities, rather than relying on foreign investments which inevitably take the bulk of the profits away from these islands.

Wind and other renewables have a vital role to play as a mix of sources. Nobody credible is suggesting that any country place its sole reliance on wind, that's a ridiculous and historically Trumpesque straw person. The wind may not blow constantly, but if you lived in Scotland, you'd know it blows pretty damn regularly, and will increasingly do so as climate change takes a greater hold.

The prime time when wind falls down is during periods of winter blocking highs and cold weather accompanying prolonged periods of calm. That's where the mix comes in, along with interconnectors to locations which aren't subject to the same weather conditions.

Every nuclear power station must have a rapidly deployed backup in case it goes offline and unbalances the grid. That backup, in the UK at least, comes from dormant gas-powered stations that can be fired up more or less instantly. So nuclear also relies on other sources of power during its operational life.

Last edited Wed Apr 8, 2026, 06:31 PM - Edit history (1)

The fossil fuel lobby's prime target for opposition has long been renewable energy, from at least the Bush I years.

Nuclear power is just another highly centralized cash cow that won't deliver on its promises (see my earlier reply to you above).

overcomes human stubbornness and self-absorption. I think this is one of those instances.

I'm blown away

Notice Big Oil's very own Big Bonehead behind Bonesaw and the Boss.

Keep hope alive. Great news story.