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Ahhhh, good old Yousless, what have we done to deserve such an imbecile?
I did wonder if this was going to be based on new support from the Ayatollahs or Hezbollah or ISIS-K or something.
I do wonder if the ScotGov actually thought this was a good idea to withdraw the commitments or just wanted to get ahead of the bad news.
Classic that Mairi MacAllan has blamed Westminster. Of course, who else's fault could it be...??
Incredible that the the independence fantasy was wholly based on "Scotland's Oil" just a short decade ago.
What I want to know is why no politicians are pointing out the nonsensically high price in AR6 for fixed wind (£73/MWh 2012 or £100.51/MWh Feb 2024) and floating wind (£176/MWh 2012 or £242.32/MWh Feb 2024) but all are "in our just transition and journey to net zero, reduced bills, cheap renewable energy blah blah blah blah....
I'm away to noise up my MP about it again. His EPL responses have been a bit wishywashy to date. I assume I'll get something the same here.
FYI,
using https://grid.iamkate.com/, past year wholesale price has been £78.57, which equates to around £57 in 2012 prices.
The AR6 prices are a 28% increase on 2023 average for fixed wind and a 208% increase on 2023 average for floating wind.
Remember though, renewables are 9 x cheaper.........
Meanwhile Drax, that green & renewable "biomass" (ha ha) and HIGHLY SUBSIDISED (not ha ha) power station, gets rumbled burning wood from old growth forests.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160
We all knew this anyway, despite all the green washing pish on the Drax website.
JUST GET THE RR SMR BUILT FFS!!!!
20 of them gives ~35% reliable UK base load, plus existing nuclear = 50% reliable baseload and then sell excess wind when we can. Sorted.
Interesting to see on this chart using the all time (at least from 2012 to now) function that;
Coal has declined from 40%+ of UK energy generation (15.6GW) to zero
Nuclear has decreased from 7.5GW to 3.5GW
2.3GW of biomass which is hilarious as it gets shipped across the Atlantic and is subsidised!
What would we do without gas (the reliable back-up/swing producer)? But yet we don't frac it from under our feet and trying to undermine production of same from the UKCS.
Madness.
Ron,
The simple fact is that up here, the SNP have gone from "It's Scotland's Oil" and relying on it to fund independence, to "Keep it in the ground" as a condition of the Bute House Agreement, that is the Greens supporting the SNP minority government.
The Greens seem more interested in other people's kids that actual environmental issues.
They are an utterly useless group, consisting of leader Patrick Harvey who associates with members of PIE, Lorna Sutherland who was previously a project manager in renewable energy (though these days she seems unable to manage a coherent thought), Maggie Chapman who in her "professional" life lectured in cultural geography, environmental ethics and social justice (I don't know either) and Ross Greer who is a speccy little twat who was likely bullied at school.
It's as if a student politics group is now part-running a country.
Embarassing and so very damaging to Scotland.
It is a demented policy position, isn't it?
Setting up rods for backs, petards to be hoist by and sharp objects for self-skewering.
Savings?
No way; costs are rapidly increasing in offshore wind.
100% clean energy?
No way; windless days and cloudy days.
Cut energy bills for good?
No way; the amount of redundancy required would mean hundreds of billions of investment, IF, the space and materials were available, which is not posible.
Create thousands of good local jobs?
No way; Fabrication is not UK based, transport and install contractors are European, SOV crew "may" be part UK based...
Deliver energy security?
No way; windless days and cloudy days?
Make the UK energy independent?
No way; see myriad reasons above.
LOL at the fantasy?
Yes.
Started replying to Ron's comment at 10:44 but managed to delete it.
I think a lot of the offshore wind targets are utter gubbins. Having moved from Oil and Gas to Wind in the last year, I'm amazed that the wind industry is still making such bold claims.
On the developer side, they never have really had a downturn. They have to date called the shots abd ridden rough over the supply chain, as seen by previous contractors and OEM's results.
Now the shoe is most definitely on the other foot. Strike prices agreed are not going to sustain the developments. It's just too low, or the windfarm is just too expensive, depending on your view.
The next-gen (20MW+) WTGs that are being touted for large developments are not happening. SGRE/GE etc have not made any money on the previous/current generation of turbines. See Siemens recent calamity.
The vessel contractors are increasing their rates due to demand. Larger newer vessels are being taken on term charters that developers will then utilise across their portfolios or possibly try and sub-let? Smaller developments will become very challenging.
The fabricators for foundations are experiencing materials shortages and price increases. As are the cable manufacturers.
You can "go east" but shipping (and the Houthis!) and material quality becomes a concern.
Net effect; the promised XGW by 20XX will not happen. A proportion will, but I'd say around half. It will also be more expensive and there will be intense lobbying from wind to amend strike prices.
Another observation from wind is that they spend not enough time engineering and designing, try and make things too bespoke and then try to rush everything. Costs increase and then projects get pulled.
Probably less organised than big oil projects!
I'd also say too many clever people and not enough experienced people.
Just my observations.
Jeffrey, don't be too sure about Labour losing the Scottish vote on this issue alone.
We have a very different battle being fought up here. Oil and Gas is pretty key to the economy, even more so (on a short to medium term) if Scotland was to become independent.
On the Indy trail there are a number of Indy fans who probably back oil and gas and Indy but hate the SNP. the SNP are now even more in to gesture politics than Miliband. Most of their time is spent deflecting their failure and pushing nonsense policies.
We also have probably the majority of the country who will vote along a "anyone but the SNP basis" and a lot of the central belt will always be anti-Tory given the mining belt history.
So you'll likely see Labour gains in the central belt, Tory gains in the farming/foshing/oil areas and libdem gains in the islands.
As long as Scotland remains in the Union and Labour realise their recent policy announcements need further u-turning, we are hopefully on a slow road to recovery.
At the risk of sounding like a tinfoil hat type, I did wonder if there had been a speculative offer(s) made to Amjad and he has firmly told them no and now there are murky shenanigans going on in the background involving trades of ENQ shares such that the pricing is kept down.
Is it theoretically possible to do this?
We all know market abuses happen, could it be happening here?
More likely we are still deemed as high risk, but it's fun to speculate
Someone needs to point out to Hunty and the Net Zero zealots regarding Siemens' Kaiser stating that renewables are only going get more expensive V gas which can be produced indigenously.
Must be something in it for the politicians. Probably see Hunt turn up on some renewables board(s) when the stories get ousted.
On the original Kraken FDP there was a requirement to have gas power N years after first oil. I'm not sure how EnQuest managed to not comply with this, but the tie-in to Norpipe never materialised.
There's no chance they'd manage to do that again with B&B So as Ron says I'd think electrification would be required from First oil.
Remember that the big old "Dibnah" spec steam boilers ran on burning crude or MGO.
No way either of them would pass the climate change checkpoint part of FDP approval these days.
Unless I am very much mistaken, it seems like we have a fair few new posters on the board today. AND they seem to be spreading festive cheer and positivity and buying!
This bodes very well for 2024 after today's great news - a nice bookend for the year!
Merry Christmas all
Great spot Modestus!
Regardless of your feelings on the rights and wrongs of Brexit and the EU, this would surely be a case where we can all agree that aligning with the EU would be an excellent outcome!
I wonder if Cameron can help arrange this?
Correct Ron
P&J is the alleged broadsheet of the North East, it's pretty amateur and you need to pay for the online service now. No loss!
Euan Mearns used to be the editor of theoildrum.com and I think he's a subsurface professor or some such!
His comment is very valid!
KO, perhaps you could hook up your friend with Ron's mates down Camden council building department about how to waste money on eco homes and still rely on fossil fuels?
I'd have though if you were building ground up you'd go for 300mm wall and base floor insulation, 500mm in the roof, air ducting & heat exchanger and triple/quad glazing etc and be a passiv haus standard?
I think the road to reduced home energy usage is thorough improving the housing stock, but it is a very very long road requiring either homeowners willing to do it all themselves with moderately deep pockets (me and the wife) home owners with very deep pockets and good contractors or the state somehow coming up with half a trillion?
Maybe the 60p party will be the celebration in line with the UK Housing stock being net zero?
Https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-67497023
Ouch! Goodbye Scottish produced fuels in 2025. Mental that we'll have to "import" fuel, especially when you consider the effects this would have if independence ever comes to pass.
Also hearing that Ineos are planning on winding up the FPS, a key transmission system for the CNS and offtake route for GKA. Fluids transported I think have halved in recent years so the FPS must be bordering uneconomic these days. That would be a massive "turd in the pool" for CNS production. Would either have to take on FPS from Ineos or go back to tanker offloading.
Given Ratcliffe's prior form at strong negotiating with Grangemouth, I wonder if this is the stand all UKCS bosses hoped someone else would take to call the gov's bluff?
it's a great point ron and i think it's now imprinted at an early age.
our older one was at school a few years ago. he is quite the entrepreneur and took to buying sweets in bulk and then selling £1 bags during breaks and lunchtime.
we helped him setup a spreadsheet to track everything and he was earning a very tidy profit.
he had custom from about 60% of the school, so was making upwards of £250 profit a week.
being a teenage boy he told a few people about this, which obviously was spread with lashings of hyperbole added.
three kids, just three, complained that "he was ripping off everyone and making a disgusting profit". he pointed out to the deputy head that he was actually charging less than the corner shop nearby and it was a service used by a huge proportion of the school.
needless to say the senior staff took the view of the three (annoying and opinionated little ****es) and he was closed down, despite protest from tens of kids that they would have to pay more.
great lesson for 12-18 year olds to learn - three complainers can **** it up for 300+ other kids.
the biggest irony? the three weren't even customers of his.
For me reduction of debt has to remain the priority.
As long as we're debt free, we're not beholden to anyone (Labour EPL potential aside).
Some of the current debt is pretty unfavourable, Stevo mentioned it recently, I want to say 11/12%?
Who knows what next year May hold. At least if we're debt free we can weather economic shocks with greater resilience.
Fortune may favour the brave, but there's no guarantee another flock of black swans aren't inbound.
you'd think so!
if you're in aberdeen and shire, buchan coast, cromarty firth, orkney and shetland, there is high support. also black trades and the like from glasgow and some parts of fife. but that's maybe 10% of the population.
but the rest of scotland is so isolated from it all, especially urban glasgow and edinburgh you'd struggle to find much support.
people don't care that it supports 200,000 jobs and supports a huge dollop of income tax, vat, corporation tax, ring fenced surcharge and epl.
scot gov has gone from "freedom on scotlands oil" to "no new oil and **** it down".
why?
the comical, repugnant, hideous support of the green fascists to prop up their failing regime, that's why. who are anything but green and are only really interested in other people's kids, shutting down free speech and what's going on abroad. they are an abhorrent mess and most of scotland is probably looking forward to them being ejected from government when (hopefully) labour romps to victory. this is the best option for scottish politics just now, short of shutting down hollyrood
have you ever seen a politician explain the "just transition"? no, because it is fiscally impossible, that's why.
i'd love to see the numbers on replacing scottish sector oil and gas income tax/vat/ct/rf/epl with the tax take from renewables. let's see the cold hard figures. these do not and cannot exist because 1 + 1 does not equal 2 in this context.
the main body of scottish politicians and voters don't know and don't care. they'll just blame the tories (in some cases justified) and shamble on through. meanwhile the country goes backwards and fails.
apart from that, everything is fine!
Don't look at it that way KO, you'd be missing out on;
1) the rollercoaster ride of emotions that is being a LTH
2) Ron's continued battle against Enfield council and others
3) the incredibly detailed analysis that Stevo, Tarmak and other provide
4) all the other informative and detailed posts that OneDB, AIMOilKing, mansardman, frac, oxygen, dumbly, Sekforde, Pelle, Auson, BTF, Apindok, MrsC (apologies for anyone I've missed) and others provide
5) being thankful you're not in the intellectually/mentally challenged mong group like Ammu, Neil Hannon, Lse2000 etc.
6) possibility of the 60p party....!!