Post
by macliam » Tue Aug 09 2022 1:21pm
The failure to exploit tidal power is truly indicative of the lack of foresight by successive UK governments.... particularly when France has had the La Rance barrier generating 500GWh since 1966 and the known potential of the brackish Severn estuary. The problem is that the sale, not only of the energy retail companies, but also of energy generation and transmission, has left the UK energy sector entirely in the hands of private companies - so no government wants to invest. far better to pour billions into a rail scheme that fails to provide any benefit to the majority of the population.
The UK needs to be investing in the major capital-intensive issues in the energy sector. The most important is not the generation of green energy, but storage..... because green energy is transient. Battery storage is expensive, generally requires rare metals and has a defined life-expectancy, but alternatives require much greater investment. Equally, the production of "green" hydrogen and the creation of a transmission network is not something that a fragmented private energy sector will underwrite. The production of green hydrogen by green energy is the prize for self-sufficiency - stored energy available at any time, independent of imports and produced without pollution.
It wasn't a government that stopped gas storage (though they did nothing to stop it), it was Centrica, that big beast of a privatized monopoly, and it was only in 2017. Their rationale was that imports of LPG from Qatar had made such storage "uneconomic", i.e. they could make more profit elsewhere.... There were warnings at the time that the move would make the UK vulnerable, but hey-ho, too many unicorns for the government to hunt.
The comment on Brown's sale of part of the gold reserves really shows the power of the Tory press to embed their messages in the public psyche. The "loss" was notional, not real, and in line with many other countries, because the gold price had been stagnant for many years and there were "better uses" for the value tied up in the reserves. Gold prices then jumped and the legend was born.... Interestingly, the notional value "lost" pales into insignificance alongside the real money lost in "track and trace" and Richboy Sunak's failure to hedge UK debt against inflation......
Just because I'm paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get me