Owning our Power is the key to security

Owning our power is the key to our energy security. Owning the means to produce our energy means that we can never be held ransom by anyone person or country.

Video #5 is all about energy security. Should we be selling our energy production to foreign countries? OR, in a rapidly changing world should we be owning our electricity generation systems?

Irish Energy Supply

Owning our power and the means of production is security

Will buying back all UK energy production and energy grids help us remain independent of other countries? Can public ownership of our energy services give us the power to chose renewable energy?

Cameron selling out to French and Chinese nuclear is NOT owning our power

David Cameron recently initiated a proposal to build a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley in Somerset. The funding for building this new plant will come from the Chinese. British citizens will provide the tax money to underwrite this boondoggle. EDF is supposed to build and operate this new nuclear plant.

The Chinese and EDF had to be bribed with promises of twice the current rate of payment for nuclear electricity. We currently pay  £45 per Megawatt hour. the EDF and the Chinese investors will get £92.50 per Megawatt hour.

UK and Europe are opposed to nuclear power.

Fortunately there are many people in the UK and in Europe that disagree with this proposal. In the UK we have many groups and organizations working to end any thoughts about building new nuclear plants.

There were 1750 accidents, mishaps or leaks at UK nuclear plants between 2002-2009.

Here is just one good reason why. 1750! This is no random number. This is the number of accidents mishaps and leaks at UK nuclear power plants from 2002-2009.

The scale of safety problems inside Britain’s nuclear power stations has been revealed for the first time in a secret report obtained by the Observer that shows more than 1,750 leaks, breakdowns or other “events” over the past seven years.

British public will underwrite 16bil plant construction cost. Energy security or indentured servitude?

The European Union in Brussels is questioning the UK government promise to underwrite the £16bil. cost of the new plant at Hinkley.

This is not energy security. this is an energy crisis that will lead to greater insecurity of our means of generating electricity.

Write to your representative and tell them how you feel

Write to you MP now!. Tell them to stop being stupid and start building the renewable energy future we need today.

Watch the next video interview.

What if there is an accident at Hinkley C?

What if there was an accident at Hinkley C? What if the accident at hinkley C was like the ones at  Fukushima or Chernobyl? A nuclear accident at the coast of Somerset would end the lifestyles of millions of British citizens. Every major and minor city within the radiation zone would have to be evacuated. Like Fukushima where an exclusion zone of 80Km was recommended.

What if we have to evacuate Bristol and Cardiff?

Accident at hinkley C = No More Glastonbury!

We could never have a Glastonbury festival ever again! Every city West of Salisbury to the Atlantic coast would have to be evacuated. Every city South of Pontypool to the channel coast would have to be evacuated.

Fukushima blows up

We have discussed the financial disaster that new nuclear power would create.

We have discussed the lack of need for new nuclear power.

We have discussed the waste from nuclear power which we STILL have no place to store safely.

An Accident at Hinkley C would be a true disaster

Now we discuss the possibility of an accident at the proposed new nuclear power plant at Hinkley.

Here is the link to video #4 in my series of interviews.

Fukushima reactor blows up

Let the people decide which is better

We the people can make the right choice if we have all the facts. With the truth we can make an informed decision about what direction our energy policy should take.

We don’t know all the facts. The energy companies are keeping the truth from us. We must learn the truth. The truth will set us free and end nuclear power in the UK forever.

Watch the next video interview here.

Nuclear Waste? We can’t build Hinkley C

The last video spoke about the financial stupidity of building a new nuclear power plant. This new video looks at the nuclear waste issue.

This blog is a look at part of my interview with Theo Simon. Theo is one of the spokes persons for Stop Hinkley C. Nuclear waste is one of the biggest concerns surrounding a new plant at Hinkley.

Proposed Hinkley C: Power Plant and Waste Dump

In this video we discuss the most compelling reason for not building a new nuclear power plant: nuclear waste.

Nuclear waste is already the most expensive part of our current nuclear program. Estimates say that over £70 Billion will be required to safely store our waste underground.  This cost is going up all the time. The crazy part is that we have no place to store our waste.

The new plans for a nuclear plant at Hinkley will include waste storage on site! that means the good people of Somerset can look forward to having more nuclear waste stored in their county for hundreds of years.

The legacy of nuclear waste on British soil will be the undoing of our heritage and our green and pleasant land. Radioactive waste is not part of our idea of a nice place to live.

We can change the way things are going. We can make a difference if we all pull together as a team.

Time to Write your MP.

Time to write your Congressman, or Senator.

Time to write to your representatives within the National People’s Congress.

Watch the next video here.

The Financial Swindle

It turns out that the UK public is underwriting 10 billion pounds of the construction cost for Hinkley C. This will create a nuclear disaster of a different sort. A Nuclear Financial Disaster, NFD!

I have mentioned that we don’t need Hinkley C or any other new nuclear power plant.

Video interview #2: The Financial Swindle

Here is another interview video interview with Theo Simon.

The government will pay a bribe to Somerset County and West Somerset councils to help the Hinkley C project. The deal, totaling £128m, will last for 40 years, which is the planned lifetime of Hinkley Point C. This cost is in addition to the build price and the costs of waste disposal(a totally unknown amount).

Selling our future for too high a price is a financial swindle

The High price for Hinkley C power is a financial disaster. Today, electricity sells on the wholesale market for about £45 per megawatt-hour (MwH). But anything under £90 a MwH would see Hinkley lose money. On the other hand, go over £100 and by 2020, when Hinkley would still not be operating, wind energy would be cheaper.

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, said: “When City analysts tell you a contract is ‘economically insane’, it’s time to admit that you might have got it wrong. The analysis doesn’t even take into account the fact that they are only expected to meet a ‘share’ of the costs of dealing with the toxic waste created by their generators, with the public facing another bill for clean-up costs in future.”

So we the people will pay twice the going rate for electricity. We will have to forgo the construction of better cleaner and cheaper options like wind. And we will have a thousand years of radioactive nuclear waste to keep safe. We don’t even know the cost for that.

Time to Write your MP.

Time to write your Congressman, or Senator.

Time to write to your representatives within the National People’s Congress.

Check out the next video interview.

Say No to Hinkley C

Abundant energy surrounds us every day. We can use wind energy to make electricity. We can use the Sun’s light to make solar electricity. The tides and wave action of our rivers and bays can give us more energy.

To put it as simply as possible we do not need any new nuclear power plant in this country.  I have had an interview with Theo Simon from  StopHinkley.org

Stop Hinkley C Site

The interview was taped so that I could provide you with a clear understanding of why we will stop hinkley from being built.

See the Video interview – No to Hinkley C

Video 1: No To Hinkley C

Please watch this video and come back to see the other interviews that I am posting in future. I am doing interviews for my book “E is for Energy – The 9 Lies of the Energy Monopoly.”

If you have anyone in mind that would like to take part in an interview, please leave a comment below.

If this video has moved you into action, start by writing your MP

If you have written to your MP then check out the stophinkley.org site and see how you can help.

Watch the 2nd Video by clicking here.

THE END OF ENERGY AS WE KNOW IT CAN HAPPEN NOW!

The full Article from Forbes:
Distributed Generation Poses Existential Threat To Utilities

To the list of industries at risk of complete obsolescence – which at the moment includes daily newspapers, government postal services, and men-only barbershops, among others – you can add U.S. power utilities.  The creeping sense of impending peril that has enveloped the power sector was made explicit earlier this year in a widely distributed, and remarkably candid, report from the Edison Electric Institute entitled “Disruptive Challenges.”

Warning of “irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects” of utilities due to the spread of distributed power generation from renewable energy sources, the report foresees “a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent.”  The result: a “cycle of decline [that] has been previously witnessed in technology-disrupted sectors (such as telecommunications) and other deregulated industries (airlines).”

A Bloomberg BusinessWeek story last week put an even finer point on it: “In about the time it has taken cell phones to supplant land lines in most U.S. homes, the grid will become increasingly irrelevant as customers move toward decentralized homegrown green energy.”  NRG Energy CEO David Crane told the magazine that microgrids, small wind and solar, and net metering constitute “a mortal threat to the existing utility system.”

In the Kubler-Ross end-of-life model, U.S. utilities are still mostly in the denial stage.  Utility executives spend a lot of time these days decrying government subsidies, particularly for rooftop solar.  To be sure, several big utilities have at least hedged their bets by investing in alternative forms of power generation; Duke Energy, for example, entered the renewables business in 2007 and has built some 1700 megawatts of renewable capacity since then.

Sabotage in the Suburbs

Gloomy prediction aside, it’s worth remembering that this transition is sure to be prolonged, that the utilities, in their respective regions, often enjoy quasi-monopolies, and that they have ample resources, both financial and political, to draw on to protect their positions.  Power from wind and solar still accounts for less than 1% of the electricity generated in this country.  Southern Company has a market cap of $37 billion.  This is not a sector that is going to meekly fold its tents and retreat.

Think of Big Oil.  The “End of Oil” has been forecast now for decades, and oil consumption in many developed countries peaked in 2007 and has not yet reached those heights again.  It may never.  Nevertheless, the shale gas boom has given petroleum companies an unforeseen boost, and world petroleum use set a new record last year.  Many major oil producers are enjoying record profits.  The forces at work in the utility sector are very different (for one thing, technology advances, which are fueling the current oil and gas boom, are likely to work against utilities, not for them), but in times of upheaval and transformation, incumbents tend to do well, at least for a time.

What’s more, the recent glowing news in the renewable-energy business — which has seen prices for solar power approach grid parity as adoption by consumers, encouraged by no-money-down leasing arrangements, accelerates — is not guaranteed to last.  In fact, there are indications that solar markets in key states are slowing, as prices drop to levels unsustainable for providers.  “It is getting difficult to deliver a good product and still be profitable,” an executive with REC Solar told Greentech Media last week.

At the same time, the industry is fighting a delaying action on the policy front.  “The future of net metering in Arizona is under attack,” SustainableBusiness.com reported last week, “with the state’s largest electric utility Arizona Public Service (APS) proposing changes that undermine cost benefits for residential solar installations.”

Pushing back on net metering, investing in renewable capacity, and building new fossil-fuel plants are likely to buy the utilities some time.  And they may just figure out how to thrive in the new era of distributed generation.  But the threats they face are not going away – and they’re not just economic.  The FBI said last week it is investigating an act of industrial sabotage in Arkansas, in which an unknown monkeywrencher climbed a 100-foot transmission tower, cut a supporting cable, and brought down a 500-kilovolt power line.  That’s at least the second instance of destruction of utility transmission infrastructure this year.  When suburbanites putting solar panels on their roofs are joined by nighttime saboteurs, it might be time to rethink your business model.

I intend to stop Hinkley C from ever being built. We will never need another nuclear plant! I will need your help to change the minds of our government leaders. This book is how I will get the message out in to the world. The current government here in the UK has turned it’s back on renewable energy technology.

We could start building our renewable energy future now, today. We can do this with less money than would be spent on big power plants. The energy produced from a local, distributed generation model can quickly replace the aging dirty coal and dangerous radioactive nuclear plants.

The problem with our renewable future is that there is not enough profit for the Big energy producers. I will provide links in future to articles in prestigious magazines and financial news papers  which discuss the threat that micro-generation and distributed energy systems pose to the big energy companies. Placing this generation in the hands of the many, in the hands of the people will end forever the domination of our energy markets by the few.

Most important in this book and the path we must follow is the healing of our planet and our climate. We have waited too long ! we must now work in earnest on the renewable future we deserve. Our planet, our environment, and our very future depend on us acting now to remove all the blockades erected by the current big energy producers

In this book we will discuss the ways we can build this renewable future. This book will also discuss some of the reasons why it is not happening today. In the next chapter we will look at how solar alone will power the future world. In the following chapters we will examine how different ideas once put in practice, can save our climate, save our planet and save us. Chapters 7 through 9 will look at the energy industry as it exists today. There are different parts to the business of making energy today. We will look at the industry as a whole and how it keeps us as a nation and as a species from going green forever. Chapter ten is a primary reason I am writing this book……

We have the knowledge and the technology in place today to build a renewable energy system to power this country. Not 7% of the country but the all of the country! So let’s get the government on board the train to clean energy, the real clean energy, renewable energy!

David Cameron believes that nuclear energy is clean. This is one of the most ignorant things about our leader. He wants to have new nuclear plants build at Hinkley. He wants the French to build them but they won’t pay for it. The Chinese are willing to pay for the building cost of 16 billion pounds. This will mean the UK energy bill payer will be saddled with higher bill for 35 years into the future. How many warehouse and factory roofs could we put solar energy systems on for 16 Billion pounds? How many energy storage systems could we build with this amount of money. This government and the last have spent a stupidly small fraction of 16 Billion pounds on renewable energy. Spending that kid of money on a distributed system of renewable energy production would be cleaner, greener, and cheaper for us all.

Do you think Nuclear energy is clean?

Think again – The guardian