DIESEL GENERATORS TO PREVENT BLACKOUTS

               Thousands of filthy diesel generators are being secretly organized all over Britain to make available emergency back-up to prevent the National Grid collapsing when wind power fails.

                And under the hugely costly scheme, the National Grid is set to pay up to 12 times the normal wholesale market rate for the electricity they generate.

                One of the main beneficiaries of the stopgap plan is the Government itself, which stands to make hundreds of millions of pounds by leasing out the capacity of the generators in public-sector assets including NHS hospitals, prisons, military bases, police and fire headquarters, schools and council offices.

                But the losers will be consumers who can be expecting yet further hikes in their electricity bills in the name of ‘combating climate change’.

                 This scheme is a direct importance of the renewable energy policy adopted by the Coalition but first urbanized by Tony Blair in response to EU renewable directives to reduce Britain’s carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.

                As more and more wind turbines are built to replace fossil fuels, so the National Grid will become increasingly unbalanced because wind power is intermittent, unpredictable and unreliable.

Wind now constitutes about ten per cent of Britain’s energy mix. Under current Government targets, the plan is to increase this to 25 per cent by 2020.

              However, some experts, such as economist Professor Gordon Hughes in a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, warn that such a high proportion of renewable is untenable, because of the dramatic ebbs and flows of power being supplied in the grid.

             Last year, Professor Hughes predictable the cost of creating this wind capacity by 2020 to be £124 billion. To produce the same amount of energy from gas would cost just £13 billion.

            The National Grid’s eye-wateringly luxurious solution to counter the unsteadiness of wind power is known as the Short Term prepared Reserve, or STOR, to generate a keep back capacity of eight gig watts (GW) by 2020, the correspondent of about five nuclear plants.

           The diesel-generators will make available immediate computer-controlled back-up for that important period when the wind turbines are not operational, but at a hefty premium. 

           Currently the wholesale price for electricity is around £50 per megawatt hour (MWh) but diesel-generator owners will be paid £600 per MWh.

          At 12 times above the market rate, this represents a bigger cash bonanza even than that presently enjoyed by wind developers, who receive a subsidized price of between two and three times the market rate, depending on whether their turbines are on land or offshore.

          Although STOR was devised in April 2007 and customized in December 2010, it has not been widely advertised by the Coalition. Besides making energy significantly more exclusive, it would appear to make a mockery of David Cameron’s promise to lead the ‘greenest government ever’.

          Any benefits of the allegedly ‘clean’ energy fashioned by wind turbines are likely to be more than offset by the dirty and ineffective energy produced by their essential diesel back-up.

         ‘Yes it may stop the lights going out, but as a way of producing energy it’s a complete nonsense,’ said Dr Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

         ‘Burning diesel is nearly as dirty and CO2-intensive as burning coal. But worse than that, it is so gratuitously costly and incompetent.’