to be sceptical about man made climate change

[Brioche201]

.. to a layperson like myself the evidence does not seem robust (record antarctic ice caps) .Even if it were true 'the climate' is such a complicated thing affected by thousands of factors.Is it likely that changing just one or 2 of the factors that are within out control would make a difference (or even that the difference would be in the right direction)
Do you still believe in man made climate change or think it is mainly rooted in politics?

"Cote - the thermal power station backing up your wind turbines is miles away."

What I am trying to tell you is that there is no idle coal plant anywhere in that country waiting to kick in when wind drops. That is not how electric grids work on mainland Europe. Power plants + renewable energy generators work. If there is excess electricity, it goes to neighbouring countries through the cross-border electricity exchange system. Your assertion that our wind farm causes some coal-powered power plant to work to back it up is complete nonsense.

"You need the power regardless of whether the wind is blowing. It isn't just an accident that you can use electric night and day regardless of whether wind is blowing."

Really now. That is entirely new information

"they should make all wind turbine operators install a diesel generator of the same capacity next to every turbine with the associated fuel storage and switching costs that kicks in immediately the wind stops blowing."

Oh yeah. That sounds like a great idea to lower pollution and costs associated with energy generation

And Cote, we thank you for the nice French electricity that enables us not to 'rely on' Undercrackers' imaginary phalanx of diesel generators. Interconnectors are great. I'm looking forward to the Norwegian one very much. Nice clean Norwegian hydro.

Cote,

Do you feel like telling us what you get paid per kWh relative to what fossil fuel generators get paid? Twice? Thrice? Or you prefer to duck that one?

Jassy - You might be interested to hear that over 75% of France's electricity is generated in its nuclear power plants. Something to think about.

larry - I would be happy to tell you if I knew but we are just a small investor and I just don't know. It's highly unlikely to come out of your pocket in any case, FYI.

CoteDAzur

The key word there is scientific. Some of the above are pseudoscience and the rest are mistakes/misunderstandings on the path to proper understanding of the human body/mind, before scientific measurements & experiments were possible and methodology was developed

It's a timeless (and dangerous) conceit that the only generation to "get it right" is (mysteriously) the one we live in.

Human understanding is always correct. Until it isn't.

To try and understand this, you could do worse than find a way to watch the unsurpassed "The Day The Universe Changed". Where you will see that every generation before us would have said exactly what you have said. "We are right, and everything else that came before is wrong."

FWIW, climate changes anyway. If we start from that viewpoint it seems eminently sensible to look towards mitigating the effects that would have on mankind.

However, by making people believe it's man made, I suspect we are engineering a future where people who become disadvantaged by climate change will be portrayed as somehow "deserving it" because they "didn't try hard enough". Which sounds suspiciously close to "the plague happened because we didn't pray hard enough".

Climate change is the new religion. Just skim read news and see the language people use.

imaginary phalanx of diesel generators ??
You are obviously unaware of the Capacity market 1.9gw of new build.
None of that is CCGT and the biggest single unit is 20MW.

and that means diesel generators

Cote even with the European model there is still the requirement for backup power sources to support renewables, particularly for extreme weather events, and as more renewable sources come on stream there will need to be a massively improved transmission network as well.

"even with the European model there is still the requirement for backup power sources to support renewables"

There are backup power sources everywhere but they are not built/reserved specifically to support renewable power sources. The very idea is ludicrous.

Cote even with the European model there is still the requirement for backup power sources to support renewables, particularly for extreme weather events, and as more renewable sources come on stream there will need to be a massively improved transmission network as well

As Cote has pointed out, France has fuckloads of nuclear. It's not fossil fuels or nothing for base load.

And that's before you consider the future potential for storage, or consider the fact that not all renewables are intermittent.

And of course, the more geographically diverse your wind and solar supplies are, you'll get better net reliability.

Ego,

Capacitors store electrical energy, pumped hydro stores gravitational potential energy. We store energy now but, clearly, we lose efficiency by doing so.

Solar would work well if transferred from space, fusion could be huge. As I said, it may be more efficient to spend less now and wait for cheap alternatives to become available.

We need better transmission networks, preferably smart grids that enable true demand side response.

And yes to large scale storage projects

Cote - I am well aware of the interconnected electric grids of mainland Europe.

In an interconnected grid (whether a single country like the UK or multi country grid like Europe) then total system demand must always equal total generation supply. Therefore when the wind turbines near you stop generating then another power station somewhere on the grid many miles away and perhaps in another country has to start in order to meet demand.

That power station is almost always a thermal power station as they are the marginal plants and the only ones with flexibility to run.

In fact you clearly don't understand how electric works. The turbines near you do not feed electric to your town. They feed it into the grid and the electric then flows throughout the grid. You only get some electric from your local wind turbines and the rest is from other power stations due to the properties of electrical flow on grids governed by Kirchoff's Law.

As I said, it may be more efficient to spend less now and wait for cheap alternatives to become available

What's your model for cheap alternatives 'becoming available'? What's their path to market and from there to competitiveness?

Cote I didn't say that conventional backup power sources are specifically held in reserve. However, conventional power stations will need to be retained and new ones built as old ones are decommissioned to keep that reserve capacity and to be able to ramp up supply during extreme weather conditions.

So the Industrial revolution and all that followed has had no impact on the climate and we can just ignore it?

Oh mans climate-bashing activities go back way beyond then. However, it would rather spoil the narrative that climate change, if man made, started with the nasty machines in the C18th,

Neolithic man had a neat line in clearing forests for crops - by burning them. Thousands of square miles in a few centuries.

The Roman occupation of Britain saw a massive deforestation for building and fuel.

And famously (for history buffs) England had to start burning coal in the C16th as all the wood was being cut down for ships.

But, if it makes you feel better, carry on arguing over the cause - and ignore the fact I agreed we should be doing something. The thing is, if you remove the "man made" from the mix, you end up with quite a different list of things you could do. None of which has the potential to gouge the taxpayer quite as much.

I will lay money that one of the outcomes from Paris will be a shed load of advertising campaigns.

Incidentally, any archaeologist would tell you - for free - that climate change has always affected human habitation over the years. There are several sites in Britain where it's apparent the change in climate forced settlements to be abandoned (signs of piers and jetties in the middle of dried flood plains). But acknowledging that climate change has always been a risk for mankind rather weakens the apocalypse some would have us believe in.