So, the chief political correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, Benedict Brogan, has woken up to the idea that, "Labour has pushed us to the brink of a blackout". It might have been better, though, if he had been writing this sort of thing a few years ago, as were we were, on numerous occasions, when there was still some prospect of doing something to stave off the electricity crisis that faces us.

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So the Cameron luvvies who can afford expensive electricity generating toys will win, while everyone else will lose.

The original two barriers to entry expanding these toff toys into a cottage industry - one that could reach millions of consumers via the national grid - will be overcome under a Cameron government.

The first barrier, price competitiveness with the huge (German and French owned) industrial electricity generators, has been wholly coincidentally overcome with the global warming scare, which now justifies a subsidised selling rate for "green" energy producers.

The second barrier, the lack of infrastructure through which a toff can plug his toy into the grid, Cameron is promising to overcome with an election manifesto pledge.

Professor Helm is quoted as saying the division is between the "middle classes that sell the electricity because they can afford the installation" and the "poorer customers [who] will pick up the bill". That is too simplistic - the crucial distinction is not between who can afford the toys and who can't but between those who can afford to produce an electricity surplus and who cannot.

The division must be between the large land owners and rural communities (including farmers), and the households in towns and cities. You're not going to be able to produce more than subsistence (not even that) even in the most upscale of London suburbs. The inequality we are talking about is of medieval proportions.

It is worse than you indicate. The feed-in tariff system allows claims for ALL the electricity produced, not just any surplus. This amounts to a massive subsidy, paid-for out of our electricity bills, for anyone who has one of these expensive toys.

Right. I was thinking they'd use their electricity and send what was left over to the grid. But I should have known such logic would not apply. They send all their electricity to the grid at a subsidised rate and then buy what they need back.

Still I think land owners in rural areas can better maximise their gains compared to those in urban areas. The rural economy aspect, and its implications, cannot go unnoticed.

In Italy,
ENEL (Italy's government electric provider) pay's the sum of 0.15 cents a Kwh to a hydro provider, solar panels can get up to 0.55 cents a Kwh, sounds good when a house pays 0.03-7 cents a Kwh
But, first you have to get permission to use the water,
(x cubic meters ) for which the local authority charges a tax, then you have to get land use permission, for which the local authority charges a tax, then you have to get a building permit for which the local authority charges a tax, then you have to connect to medium or high voltage, if you are lucky maybe 2-300 meters, if more, renegotiate with your bank manager, the building of dams,( 1.000 cubic meters or 1,000,000,000 the formula is the same) turbines, (you need 2. 1 for low and 1 for high output, and both parallel when you have the water ) there will always be someone who has fished this spot for the last 25 years,( another tax, ) thats the good news, the bad news is that ENEL offers a 15 year contract, with two 5 year renewals (25)
before signing read, and then have your lawyer read, he will find that the good ENEL have sneakily hidden 9-10 escape clauses in the contract, wait ! the local authority has been talking to ENEL and between them they can shut you down anytime, I have a friend that has a flour mill that was built in 900, the water is now producing electricity, on paper he should clear euros 165,000 a year, and for an investment of 1.5 million a very good deal, last year, clear, he made 78,000 the rest went in taxes.

I've recently been poking about on the web to try to find out what the Generation mix has been like in this Mild Winter (as predicted by the Met Office on 27 November).

The figures aren't easy to find but anyone who wants to have a look can go to:- http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Go to the ‘Generation by fuel type’ (graph) at the left. In the bottom left hand corner of the graph will be a link called ‘Current/Historic’ click this and then the top right corner where it says ‘Historic Data CSV’ – this will let you view / save it in Excel, either as a csv file or an Excel worksheet.

This will give you a spreadsheet of the last 3 months' figures, based on half hour averages. You can work out what the column headings are (more or less) by comparison with the Generation by fuel type’ (table) tab. (To make it easier do a screen capture and print it.) There is all sorts of other information on how the electricity markets actually work if you poke around.

I've made up some graphs showing the energy mix (based on 4 hour averages to make it more manageable) for November (from 17th) / December / January / February (up to this morning). No doubt you can do the same. If I knew how to upload attachments you could have mine with pleasure.

Calculating and plotting the figures as percentages of total means that the 'nuclear' plot goes up and down (because the total and thus the percentage of total goes up and down) whereas the actual amount of energy generated by nuclear is pretty constant - because they are on base load. You could, if you want, just plot output in MW but the output from wind is so small you can hardly see it.

Note that "other" includes a rag bag of things like hydro, pumped storage, oil and the interconnector from France. In essence this tends to be used to help out when things are tight or to attempt to counteract the destabilising effect of wind generation which is highly variable.

You will note that over the last 3 months the amount of wind generation has been derisory for the great majority of the time (little wind). This is the gross output of the UK's existing 2,700 turbines. Based on the half hour figures over the 3 months, the very best performance (over half an hour) was 3.982% of total, the average was a stonking 0.906% and the minimum was an impressive 0.017% of total. Remember this the next time the BBC comes out with some tale about the latest wind farm that will "supply all of Glasgow's electricity needs".

You will be pleased to note that the average subsidy of these bird shredders is £400,000 pa each and that Gordon Brown has announced the expenditure of £100 Billion to erect 3,000 more offshore turbines (and more onshore ones beside) before 2020.

You will also be delighted to note that David Cameron & Nick Clegg thing that this is a jolly good idea and that we should do much more and more quickly. Output from "Do-It-Yourself" generators will be much MORE derisory, of course. Even if they don't blow up in high winds, as they are prone to do.

You will also be impressed to know that the Green Party has stated that all the coal fired stations should be shut down as soon as possible - even before the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive requires this to be done by 2015.

It must be said that the three party leaders - and the Greens, vie with each other to be greener than the others. None of them could be trusted to run a bus stop. Never mind the country's energy policy.

Wrap up & keep warm!

When I first came across the Tory energy policy (Power to the People) some while back I wrote a response and sent it to my local representative and the shadow cabinet by email and snail mail. My response is available here:
http://www.trevoole.co.uk/Questioning_C ... mem6_1.htm
and as a pdf here:
http://www.trevoole.co.uk/Questioning_C ... People.pdf

The title alone pretty much says it all ... "Power to the People" ... I thinking back to the TV comedy Citizen Smith.

It is not an energy strategy to prevent energy shortages, it is purely a policy to take responsibility from the utilities and place it on the population whilst propping up and probably growing utility profits for little or no investment. A brilliant scam riding high on the back of AGW, needless to say.

It is intestesting to contrast the Tory policy (http://www.conservatives.com/~/media/Fi ... hx?dl=true) with the UKIP version (http://www.ukip.org/media/pdf/energy%20final.pdf).

There is no contest for the thinking person.

I have been thinking of getting some form of solid fuel heating put into my house, because I don't think we can rely on centralised supply of gas or electricity anymore. We have candles in the house and I can turn the burner rings on my cooker on, but not the oven as this uses electricity despite being a gas oven. I have made sure my Dad's 100 year old house still has its open fire so that can be used. This might be being very pessimistic, but the bastards who are supposed to be looking after us are masterbating themselves behind a curtain.

The Green Tosser's obsession with micro generation, is the same as Zac's, he is always banging on about it.

It looks like he has handed over Tory policy, to that fool.....As you say he will be worse than McSnot, if he lets that idiot Zac loose on our Energy requirements.

This home power generation strategy reminds me of Mao Tse Tung's disastrous Backyard Steel Furnace strategy during the Great Leap Forward. At the time the West thought that idea was laughable, but also tragic in its consequences. Now we are being controlled by the Gramsci Marxists the joke - and the tragedy - is on us. Meanwhile the Chinese have adopted our previously successful economic growth strategies and are thriving. How the world turns!

I wonder if this is Cameron's way of saving on future pensions, after all how many pensioners will be able to afford to do what he's proposing. No I think this strategy is to kill them off with hypothermia and save all that pension money. And he has the cheek to criticise McSnot about the treatment of the elderly.

I think it must be time to seriously think of getting out of this cesspit of a country, either that or someone to organise a mass revolt, descending on the HoC when all the arsewipes are cosily ensconed inside. Storm the house.

Little rich boy Zac probably thinks everyone can afford one - the poor lad might not realise that we don't all have butlers who can be sent down to the shop to buy the kit.

Some time a couple of years from now, whomsoever is the next prime minister is going to get a call from the boss of one of the generators, who will say "I've come to the end of my Large Combustion Plant allowances, so I 'm going to close down my great big coal plant next month. This will take x GW of capacity out of the grid, and you will see regular power cuts starting from two months hence."

It strikes me that the prime minister, whomsoever he may be, will suddenly have a damn good motivation to duck out of ( resile from ? ) the relevant Directive. Because it will be his ONLY way to avoid being the guy who was in power when the lights went out.

Which could be interesting.

This fatuous out-gassing is reminiscent of Mao T'se-tung's Great Leap of the late 1950s, when backyard steelmills were expected to radically increase China's industrial capacity. The result was a famine that killed fifty million peasants, followed by the Great Helmsman's impossibly destructive Cultural Revolution and democidal one-child per family tyranny. As China's millennia-long heritage and traditions dissipated, even her populace degraded to a foreign slough of southern and East Asian migrants imported to fill a 10 - 20% "marriage gap" due to aborting female offspring. The parallels to latter-day British and Continental European circumstances are truly striking, a bizarre socio-cultural death-wish fostered by Luddite-sociopath elites.

History has no precedent for such willfully induced mass suicide. Now on the threshold of a long-term "dead sun" Dalton if not Maunder Minimum, most probably the overdue end of Earth's current Holocene Interglacial Epoch, to sabotage, subvert, global energy economies in favor of a pustulent "global warming" scam will induce population mega-deaths worldwide. Of course, this is what nihilistic death-eaters prefer.

Surely the reverse sell of electricity will cause massive fraud. Selling your neighbours grid electricity back to the grid.