Category Archives: Utilities

Stop patronising us Chris Huhne

It makes me seething mad when Chris Huhne comes out with his trite sayings. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t actually know the guy and I’m sure he’s a nice man trying to do s difficult job but when he is reported in the press it really does nothing for his image.

His latest pronouncement, the one that has me so angry, is a great case in point. When faced with higher energy bills consumers (i.e. you and me) should switch tariffs. And that’s it. The end to all our worries and massive price hikes in the cost of energy from the big six energy companies is achieved by simply switching tariffs. No why didn’t I think of that earlier???  If only I’d known I could have saved myself hours of time on the phone arguing with my supplier and hundreds of pounds in overpaid bills.

All this time I’ve been working under a misapprehension. I’m busily going round berating the Energy companies for the state of my gas and electricity bill and all along it’s my own fault for not switching. I’ve been thinking that it is incomprehensible that we no longer have any control in this country over our energy bills as all the providers are in foreign ownership, and they have put massive ‘green’ hikes onto our bills to pay for the Renewable Energy Obligations and subsidise stupid windmills all over the country. Our ridiculous and unachievable Energy policy that is chasing impossible CO2 reduction targets for no plausible reason any more is set to not only cost us billions more than we can afford to pay but also to condemn the only power stations that are actually producing anything to close.  Couple this with the stupidity of Brussels directives and we’re now officially in a complete mess.

Chris Huhne, nice man though he may be, either is in complete denial over the parlous state of our energy policy in this country or he simply doesn’t understand. I’m not sure which is going to be worse when the sh*t finally hits the fan. But of course, that’s assuming we’ve got any electricity left in this country to power the fan….

Windfarms – now that makes me mad!

I’ve always had a thing against wind farms, even as a boy.  Don’t get me wrong I am still in awe of the architectural and engineering feat that is a windmill but when I went back to the West coast recently, to where I grew up, I was horrified to see the fabulous unspoilt landscape that I grew up with was now peppered with windmills all across the horizon.

You see I just don’t get it.  I’ve always thought that if these were such a good idea then there would have been more of them across the country years ago.  For example when we were at war in the 1940′s there was a shortage of energy supply.  So logically if these things were so good you would have expected there to be at least some of them built, right?  But no, there weren’t and the nearest we ever got to this was the type of ‘Windy Miller’ windmills that were dotted around the country.

Clearly there was never going to be enough wind to drive any kind of meaningful electricity, and as you can’t store electricity, you have to produce it then use it, getting any kind of regular supply would be virtually impossible.

So when I see stories like this in the paper it drives me mad.  What the heck are our politicians doing allowing windfarms to be paid for producing no electricity?  And £1.2 million of your and my pounds to do it with as well!

You see when you examine windfarms in some detail you quickly realise that they are a legalised scam.  The produce no power when the wind doesn’t blow (usually when we get a freeze in the winter, just the time we need the power….), they can’t produce power when the wind blows too hard as it causes a spike in the supply which means they have to be turned off, and in between times we have to rely on the wind blowing at all to get any power out of them.  The myth of ‘capacity’ against actual output continues to be peddled by those building them, where they quote ‘capacity’ but fail to tell you that the ‘real’ output will be around 25% of this.  They get massive subsidies and tax breaks from our Government so we can be seen to be meeting Brussel’s ‘green’ agenda.

This equation only works if there is a massive public subsidy to support them and this has been done in your and my name to try and meet EU ‘green’ targets.  Now that makes me mad!

Time to stop this madness.  Time to say no.  Surely this collective myopia we seem to have needs to be treated so we can wake up and actually see what is going on around us?