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Originally Posted by jamesqf
So explain how this is fundamentally different from having peaker plants in the system, which may run only at infrequent times of high load, and so command a high price for their output? Why are customers paying for those plants when they're just sitting idle most of the time?
Or indeed, why hospitals, data centers, and suchlike should pay lots of money for backup generation in case of power failure. Back when I used to work for the local power company, their office building, which contained the system control room, had backup power from batteries and a diesel generator. You could, with equal justice, ask why the customers were paying for the cost of that seldom-used installation.
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The CCA commits the UK to an 80% cut in CO2 "emissions" - we've had that argument over earlier pages, lets stick with power for the moment.
To do this a lot of power has to come from "renewables". To build those, private investors had to be "incentivised" with a guarantee that they would see a return, otherwise they would invest elsewhere and none of this stuff would be built and the 80% target would not be met.
Those subsidies include provision for when the wind doesn't blow - after all how can those poor investors be expected to handle the risk of no wind ? (hang on, isn't risk part of the idea of investment, oh never mind...)
So even if windmills don't make any energy they still get paid - from energy bills. And when they need backup, which is idling and uses energy to do so - those will also be subsidised from energy bills.
If we do see some blackouts or maybe some brownouts and people begin to realise that we have just closed our coal plants due to the CCA and this is only going to get worse then the public may no longer be willing to accept this situation.
Background to the CCA
here.
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One of the most bizarre features of the Climate Change Act – put through by Ed Miliband when he was our first climate change secretary and passed almost unanimously by MPs – is that it was largely drafted by a young green lobbyist, Bryony Worthington, seconded to the Civil Service from Friends of the Earth, where she had been in charge of their global warming campaign.
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