Crazed Brits Show Us Just How Big A Grift Wind Energy Really Is and How It's Destroying the Grid

The Cambridge Dictionary defines grifting as “ways of getting money dishonestly that involve tricking someone.” I use it here all the time in the context of the corporatism that has replaced capitalism in so many respects, particularly in the case of the ‘green energy transition” that is little more than a collosal rip-off of ratepayers and taxpayers.

The great Joel Klotkin writes about this form of grifting here and offers the following explanations:

Its agenda consists of several goals. On the corporate front we have the emergence of “stakeholder” capitalism, which embraces the state’s priorities implicitly and those of the progressives generally, as a way to please regulators, the woke among their employers, and, to some extent, their own consciences. In this they resemble companies in authoritarian states—like Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and today’s China—where private capital accumulation is permitted but dissent from the agreed norms of the media-government-academy, once the privilege of individuals and corporations, is now largely verboten.

Yet complicity in the West differs from fascist or corporate socialist standards in one important way. In wealthy societies, a large part of the corporate elite does not see widespread economic growth or rising living standards as a goal but as an impediment to meeting the demands of the “stakeholders,” who are largely defined by the clerisy, their orbit of nonprofits, cowed media, and their academic mentors…

We see this grifting in no better example than what our crazy Brit cousins are doing in paying industrial wind energy producers not to produce. Check out the story and you’ll find this:

Ed Miliband’s flagship wind farm has already been paid close to £2.5 million to keep its turbines switched off, The Telegraph can reveal.

Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, praised the Viking wind farm in the Shetlands, which officially opened on Thursday, saying “hundreds of thousands of homes” across the country would benefit from “cheap, home-grown energy.”

Viking Wind Farm, Source: https://www.vikingenergy.co.uk/construction

He said the development, the UK’s largest onshore wind farm, “shows why we need more developments like this to make Britain a clean energy superpower.”

SSE, which operates Viking, promised that it would be Britain’s “most productive” onshore wind farm. But figures from the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) show 62 per cent of its output has had to be discarded in its first month.

The wind farm has so far been paid £2.48 million by the National Grid to reduce its energy output, according to the REF analysis. 

The payouts, which will ultimately be added to consumer bills, have been made almost every day this month and have varied between £227,192 and £8,408 per day.

Known as constraint payments, they are paid out by the National Grid to incentivise wind farms to reduce output when more energy is generated than can be used locally or exported to consumers elsewhere in the UK, usually as a result of higher wind speeds.

The value of constraint payments to wind farms has increased rapidly in recent years as more of Britain’s power has come from renewable sources. Last year, wind farms were paid over £310 million to stop producing energy, up from £174,000 in 2010, according to REF data.

The charity’s analysis found that £1.8 billion had been spent since constraint payments began in 2010, which had ultimately been passed on to consumers’ electricity bills.

Dr John Constable, the director of the REF, said: “The paradoxical outcome is that wind farm developers actually make more money when they are paid to reduce output rather than when they are selling normally on the market. The British consumer is being ripped off, and developers are laughing all the way to the bank.

“All you hear from Ed Miliband is that more renewable energy will make energy cheap – but unless he deals with the constraint payment programme, that is simply an illusion.”

Dr Constable said it would “certainly not save people money on their electricity bill” if wind farms continued to be paid huge sums of money to keep turbines off.

Thus is precisely the problem Meredith Angwin documents in her wonderful “Shorting the Grid” book I reviewed here. It’s madness; the sort of rationalization one always uses to perpetuate anything that’s failing but is hard to give up. It’s the “doubling down” phenomenon, of course, and illustrates the complete total insanity of most green energy schemes. The only beneficiaries are the grifters and the politicians they reward with campaign donations. The losers are us but we’re all learning, aren’t we? And, that means we are, at the very least, at the beginning of the end.

#Britain #Climate #UK #WindEnergy #Milliband #ElectricBills #Subsidies