we shut down the last coal fired power station, not a nuclear reactor. #
Her comment is a little self serving.
I read the article a few days ago, and am not going to look again at it, but as we all know, Miliband is intending to shut down not just one coal fired power station (i have no problem with that) but all of the gas fired stations which come on stream only when our wind farms cant keep up, or as last week, are totally still.
The big problem is that in winter we quite often get periods of many days when there is no wind and next to no sun. These winter high situations come several times each year and they often last for days and even a week or more. There is absolutely NO WAY any kind of affordable battery system can deal with a forty gigawatt demand level for a week, or even a day.
The other week, you were talking about the marvellous opportunity of purloining the stored energy in the nations (by then) twenty million electric cars. Rough calculation suggests to me that the entire capacity of these batteries might last a day and would then totally drain the entire car fleet. What about the next several days? What is more, can you imagine the massive demand that would come on when the wind started to blow again and the nation's car fleet started pulling down power for charging? We would have the mother of all brown outs and the national A/C grid frequency would be through the floor. This idea of phasing out ALL fossil fuel use is stupid, damaging and utterly impractical. This is why I detest Miliband - hes an utter tw @t and an idiot with his head in the clouds. I am a big fan of wind power, but it needs strong back up that can operate for as much as a week, or we will all be sitting around warming ourselves in the dark with a candle in a plant pot
And this is all before we even think about banning gas boilers and forcing useless heat pumps on the population. These will increase the power demand hugely and they don't work in cold weather. I know people who have them because most people in mid Northumberland have to heat with oil and some have tried to move onto heat pumps to get ahead of the compulsion. They are in all cases but one that I know of, VERY disappointed. The one who is content, spent about forty thousand having his entire house lined with insulation about five inches thick and has ten solar panels on his roof. The cost of all of this was massive. I was there the other day and it wasn't that warm, even in September.