The lights are going out

Those of us who have done a bit of checking into the background of the power situation know there is a crisis coming. Our ageing power generating plants are coming to the end of their useful limits and succesive governments have failed to upgrade them, failed to build new ones and have fallen for the Green religion con trick of global warming climate change coupled with useless renewable energy from unreliable sources (cold day often enough = no wind)

Telegraph.

Forget global warming – the more pressing problem is that the lights are about to go out. Look at the projections, and you will see why Ed Miliband, the Cabinet minister responsible for energy (there have been eight since 1997), should be up at night worrying. Over the next seven years, all the assumptions about where our power comes from will be overturned.
Five years ago, Britain became a net importer of fossil fuels. The depletion of North Sea oil and gas means that we are depending increasingly on foreign supplies. In 2000, we imported just one per cent of our natural gas supplies; now it's nearly half, and the National Grid expects it will reach 70 per cent by 2018. On Tuesday, Oil & Gas UK, which represents the industry, issued a warning that without more investment in the North Sea, its contribution towards our energy needs will continue to dwindle.
At the same time, generating capacity is set to drop off sharply, as ageing coal, gas and nuclear power stations are taken out of service. As so often, Europe is playing its part, in the shape of the EU Large Combustion Plant directive, which says that they should be cleaned up at vast cost or closed. The Government admits that by 2020 the lost capacity will be vast – 22.5 gigawatts, or almost a third of our total requirements. The graphs show that if no action is taken, our energy supply will go downhill faster than Amy Williams at Vancouver.

What needs to be done (but wont, thank you EU) is that the environmental levy on all fuel bills be either scrapped or put into building power generating plants that actually work when the wind isn't blowing. We also need them quick so that means coal or gas and as we're sitting on masses of coal I'd opt for that as we'd at least be in control of our supply. We can even use existing technology to make them as clean burning as possible, but we need them soon. The EU wont let us however as it doesn't fit in with their policy of environmentalism at the cost of all else, which is just another reason as far as I'm concerned to leave.
Politicians are very aware of public opinion (even when they choose to ignore it) but they wont like what's coming when the lights start going out and people start freezing to death mid winter about 2017/18 I doubt many will survive the experience (including those who got us into the mess assuming they haven't jumped ship abroad)
I don't know about you, but I'm sick of short termism in politics, with those in charge seemingly unable to see further than the next election. This coming crisis should have been sorted out 10 years ago during the good times, but it was ignored by the fools in charge. We need the next government to go for a crash course in power station building, and the cost on top of the recession will be heartbreaking as the countries just about bust, yet anything is better than the result of letting the power die.