Re: Policy driven
Europe does not possess sufficient fossil or nuclear fuel for its energy requirements.
Which is a specific set of policy decisions, made to please the green crowd who promised the country that wind and solar could produce 100% of our energy without cost or security implications, and who dismissed nuclear, and then derided people who raised concerns about being dependant on overseas suppliers as xenophobic dinosaurs who didn't understand that suppliers like Russia had nothing but good and peaceful intentions and would never do anything nasty, like for instance invading Ukraine and then blackmailing countries by cutting off their energy supplies if they didn't passively acquiesce.
Hence despite the overwhelming majority of the countries heating and cooking being done with gas (and a large share of our electricity generation!) our gas extraction was decommissioned before replacements were in place in favour of buying gas in from abroad. As little as 10 years ago had we been faced with the current situation then we would have been exporting gas and making a massive profit on it, instead of destroying our economy by paying a massive premium in buying gas in from abroad.
This is a massive failure of the "Green" political movement, who have literally frozen the poor, old and vulnerable to death this winter while destroying our economy, and their failure kicks everybody hard in the pocket every month.
If we build nuclear on the terms that Hinkley point C was being constructed on (with no cost to the taxpayer) then we'd still be paying electricity bills of about a tenth of the current prices and we'd have enough juice to replace existing heating with storage heaters and fanheaters without raiding research labs for new technology that doesn't work. We'd also be able to use electric cookers, and have enough juice for electric cars; which we haven't at the moment. Nor will we ever have following the idiotic and brain dead policies that left us in this state.
Current "biomass" plants are burning rainforests which are cut down, shipped to America, turned into wood pellets and then shipped across the Atlantic to be burned here. How anybody can consider that "green" is beyond me; my view is that it's idiotic.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
