10,000,000 Miles in a Nissan Leaf?

If North Mill Avoncliff had not been defrauded out of their water impoundment and abstraction license in 2010 - electricity generating turbines would have been operational at Avoncliff from December 2011.

That's nearly 5 years of generation - using the numbers made up for The Environment Agency's hydroelectric scheme comparison at Avoncliff  taking one of the lower estimates for power from Avoncliff  weir of 422 MWh per year I've put together a table of some of what's already been lost....

Comparisons like  - how many London buses is that?  - are a bit difficult since the supposedly electric buses are having battery problems....

but the best available numbers have been thrown in... :-)  (the answer is v.roughly 15 buses a year).

So in terms of road transport / houses / tons of CO2 - here are the numbers of what's been lost through EA fraud, lies, incompetence, egregious waste plus £3 million of public money over the last 6 years:

Road Vehicles over 5 years
	Battery	Recharges	Miles (Manf claimed)
Tesla Roadster	53 kWh	39811	9,713,962
Tesla Model S	90 kWh	23444	6,212,778
Nissan Leaf	24 kWh	87917	10,550,000
Boris Bus	75 kWh	28133	2,813,333
"Standard" Houses a year
	Annual kWh		Houses supplied
Small	1650 kWh		256
Medium	3300 kWh		128
DECC "Average"	4800 kWh		88
Mansion	5000 kWh		84
"Tons of CO2" over 5 years
DECC 2014 average	0.527	kg per kWh	1,112

I have to say these are only guideline numbers and much could be quibbled in the detail - but the magnitude of the loss of "Green Electricity" here is hardly a national catastrophe - it is though - decidedly non trivial.

EDIT 29th Feb - "Tons of CO2" using the "Grid Carbon Intensity" figure from the previous Windmill post  would be 962 tons of CO2   

The willful intransigence and waste continues apace - the deliberate and malicious awarding of a second abstraction license (after the first was quashed) - that could not be implemented at Avoncliff shows that The Environment Agency are abusing their powers to indulge in vindictive antics to damage those who seek to challenge their mistakes and wrongdoings.

In the meantime Feb 27th 2016

  Not much going on at Greenland Mills in Bradford on Avon



If you are bored and trying to sleep I can recommend National Bus Statistics 2014 


The EA's vehicle use is getting some scrutiny from one Katya Leyendecker (whatdotheyknow.com) who obviously missed Henry's piece on insidetheenvironmentagency.com about 2.5 cars for every 3 employees and flashy bigger vehicles on rental + juvenile "rental racing" antics at regional offices.

Wind Power ?

or NOT.

The failure of wind generation this week has been conveniently (for the subsidy bandits) sidelined by referendum mania.

I have regularly compared the UK's wind fleet with the 1/10th the capacity hydro generators  The UK's electrickery windmills seem to have been mostly stationary the last three days of this week - except the ones stealing power and being driven round by fossil and nuclear - to keep from permanently bending the blades (droop/set) or wrecking the gearboxes with see-sawing...

Wind is now down to 180MW. Only an idiot would specify them as an energy source for the grid. @JamesDelingpole pic.twitter.com/qojitWWZ9R

— Richard W. Jones ❤⛽ (@richardwjones) February 25, 2016

As of January 2016 there's 6,666 wind turbines with a supposed total installed capacity of ca. 13.5 gigawatts rated output (vs. actual) vs. roughly 1.6 gigawatts for hydro. I don't watch the outputs obsessively but Thursday night - the piffling amount of hydro is approaching three times the output of the entire wind fleet - this is simply appalling.

Windmills are simply not fit for purpose 

The very idea that fossil and nuclear output is financially punished to support this farcical situation is ridiculous and to add insult to injury -

we have to pay them extra when it's "too windy"! 

At the very least the wind generators should be required to pay for the extra "emergency" capacity required  when they fall short - at rates commensurate with what they would have taken had the wind not failed - plus a charge for the unreliability factor....  which pretty much what happens with other generators anyway.

The distorted and grossly unfair subsidies should be scrapped forthwith.

I could of course be accused of cherry picking - but - a large part of the usefulness of electricity and the reason we chose to buy it is that it's there on the switch. To charge double for something that's unreliable and doesn't measure up in almost every other way - well, that's <insert your own expletive>

EDIT 29th Feb:

You might think windmills are perfect harvesters of Mother Nature's bounty - but that's not the whole story by a long chalk.


How Much Power Does It Take to Run a Wind Turbine?

Energy Consumption in Wind Facilities

and last - but certainly not least The Ecotricity Windmill at Green Park Reading - the Daily Mail version here - the perpetual motion machine that remorselessly grinds around on perfectly still days...