EDF Boss Urges Miliband To Stop Building Wind Farms
On June 11th, the boss of energy firm EDF Simone Rossi urged Ed Miliband to stop building wind farms around the UK
The Telegraph ran this story:
Britain should stop building wind farms because the country has too much electricity, the UK boss of EDF Energy has said.
Simone Rossi, the energy giant’s chief executive, said Ed Miliband’s expansion of wind and solar power was creating far more electricity generation capacity than needed.
Mr Rossi told The Telegraph: “We should stop building wind farms and focus instead on raising demand for electricity … As a country we don’t need more electricity generation capacity. We need to use the generation capacity we have already got.
“As a country, we’ve always got it wrong. We’ve always thought electricity demand was going to increase, but it decreased … So now we have this large [generating] infrastructure, twice as much as we need, which means we also need to build twice the [transmission] grid.”
He added: “These are all fixed costs – so the key question is how are we going to absorb those fixed costs? My conclusion is that the time has come to shift the debate from building more [infrastructure] and just stop it for the foreseeable future. That’s enough. The issue now is how we use it.”
Mr Rossi’s call for a pause on wind farms comes as Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, drives a substantial expansion of renewable energy. Earlier this year, he signed off on plans to build the biggest onshore wind farm in the UK in a decade.
Many turbines are built in remote locations that require new cabling to be installed to carry their power. The build out of the grid has failed to keep pace, meaning electricity generation at times threatens to overwhelm it.
As a result, taxpayers are increasingly having to pay to switch off turbines at times when the grid cannot handle their power.
See the Telegraph article here.
See more here notalotofpeopleknowthat
Bold emphasis added
Header image: Renewables News
Phil
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I think we need to apply some critical thinking to this comment from the boss of EDF.
“EDF Energy is a British integrated energy company, wholly owned by the French state-owned EDF (Électricité de France), with operations spanning electricity generation and the sale of natural gas and electricity to homes and businesses throughout the United Kingdom. It employs 11,717 people, and handles 5.22 million business and residential customer accounts.” -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDF_Energy
Also The UK imports around 13% of its electricity the majority from France. It seems to me that the French would not be happy to see additional capacity built in the UK but they would be very happy to see any additional capacity needed to be supplied from French sources Électricité de France (EDF) perhaps.
As a matter of national security it might be an idea to nationalise EDF and return profits to the British taxpayer from whence they came. We need redundant capacity in any case until we get our electricity storage strategy defined and built out. Assuming of course we dont have a fit of common sense and build scalable nuclear and gas fired power stations. Didn’t someone say EDF were dragging their feet over building new Nuclear power stations?
I wonder why. Maybe the EDF CEO could tell us that too 🙂
Or am I barking up the wrong windmill?
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Phil
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Correction:
The UK imported at least 16% of its electricity according to this industry report…
https://www.niauk.org/uk-more-reliant-on-electricity-imports-than-ever-before/
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very old white guy
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One wind and or solar farm was one too many. A complete waste of resources and not effective or efficient enough to justify the cost and waste of natural resources to build them.
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