Utopia, you are standing in it!

With power prices soaring out of control, it’s little wonder that thousands of British families can’t afford electricity. Every time Britain is hit with a bout of calm weather, wholesale power prices go through the roof.

In response to soaring wholesale power prices, the retail price cap that kept a lid on power bills over the last few years has been lifted (see above), such that power has now become a luxury item and forever out of reach for thousands of low-income households.

Add to that to the cost of the hundreds of £millions doled out in subsidies to wind power outfits to produce no power at all, and the tens of £billions they pocket, when they do, and Britain’s subsidised wind power-fixated energy policy looks positively obscene.

In the postwar period, British governments targeted policies that ensured that even the poorest households had access to reliable electricity, which came…

Just in case anyone has been living in a cave for the last 5 years, with their fingers in their ears and a blindfold on – race relations in New Zealand are somewhat strained right now.

Co-governance, having been initiated by National and taken to an unexpected extreme by Labour, is (to put it mildly) polarising poor old New Zealand right now. I don’t see the polarisation diminishing any time soon, nor do I see any type of sustainable consensus coming about.

Relevant to this is the following announcement: Rurawhe will not contest Te Tai Hauāuru, moves to Labour list:

Te Tai Hauāuru MP and Speaker of the House Adrian Rurawhe will not stand for the Māori electorate in October’s general election and will instead move to the Labour Party list.

Rurawhe contested and won Te Tai Hauāuru three times. He was elected as Speaker mid-term in August last…

It’s not just sunset that sends solar power output to the floor; dust, ice and snow do an equally good job, demonstrating that solar power is, and will always be, utterly useless as a meaningful power source for businesses and households that require power as and when they need it.

Solar is simply incapable of increasing output to meet rising demand and perfectly capable of collapsing in a heap when demand hits the roof (think breathless 42°C evenings when air conditioners are running flat out and the sun sets; or bitter freezing weather when panels are carpeted in snow and ice, and householders are scrambling to add light, power and heat to their homes).

And even when the going is good, solar panels produce power a tiny fraction of the time, especially in higher latitudes, as John Hinderaker explains below.

Solar Energy is Useless
Powerline
John Hinderaker
10 January 2023

Primitive economics, with its pattern of reciprocities, its enmeshment in the wider social structure, its hostility to accumulation, its rigidly regulated rules of distribution, its come-one, come-all dispersal of domestic resources, is largely what he says it is. Primitive attitudes toward nature, which emotionally fuse the secular and the divine, are just that.

To me that passage very much strikes a chord here in New Zealand.

It’s from a fascinating lecture that was delivered in the far-off days of 1997 by a New Zealand born Australian anthropoplogist, Roger Sandall, and it’s the subject of a post over at the Bassett, Brash & Hide blog site.

Mr Sandall was deeply worried about modern government attempts to protect and revive tribal life among the Australian aborigines. He argued that although it had been done with the best intentions it was actually a bad thing because it had prevented them from moving into…