Just when you think that the world has had enough nonsense about climate change up comes an idea even more absurd. People and companies in the UK are now being urged to start using diesel generators, a horribly inefficient method of electricity generation, in order to beat climate change. Seriously, where do they get the people who come up with these ideas?
NHS hospitals are being asked to cut their power demand from the
National Grid as part of a government attempt to stave off power blackouts, which the energy watchdog Ofgem warns could arrive as early as 2015.According to one energy company, four hospitals have already signed up to a deal under which they will reduce demand at peak times by using diesel-fired generators.
The background problem is reasonably simple. As we add more and more renewables to the grid that grid itself becomes more unreliable. For the supply of electricity by most renewables is in itself unreliable. The wind doesn't always blow and the Sun doesn't always shine (well, actually, it does, but clouds can get in the way).
Further, we don't actually need there to be blackouts for this to cause problems: just minor variations in voltage being supplied can cause problems for more delicate equipment. Like much of that used in hospitals for example and also, unfortunately, much of that used in large industry. Indeed, we're seeing this problem in Germany currently (both in the news and from my own personal experience). Companies are installing their own, local, generating capacity as the fluctuations on the grid make it too expensive to rely upon it. Machinery is indeed being damaged by fluctuations in the power available.
And of course they're not installing renewables to do this: if renewables were reliable enough then there wouldn't be the basic problem in the first place. So they're installing diesel generators: which, in terms of their carbon emissions, are vastly more polluting than the coal fired power stations we're all being told we cannot use any more.
Which leads us to the awful possibility that by increasing the use of renewables we're actually increasing emissions, not reducing them. Which really isn't the point at all, is it?
What really gets me though is that this installation of inefficient plant, these diesel generators, is being proposed as a sensible solution to our climate change problems. When in fact, it's highly likely that these installations will make the problem worse.
