First it was Germany discovering the expensive failure that is wind power, now Britain:

Wind power has collapsed to less than 1pc of Britain’s electricity supply as some of the stillest weather in years hits the UK and Europe.
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Near-zero wind speeds and low temperatures have left the UK dependent on France, Norway, Belgium and Denmark to keep the lights on through much of today, with the countries collectively supplying more than 10pc of the UK’s electricity through undersea cables.

The country only just avoided catastrophic blackouts earlier this month, coming “within a whisker” of widespread outages, according to the National Grid operator (basically equivalent to Transpower here in NZ). On multiple occasions, Britain’s grid operators scrambled to stabilize the system as freezing temperatures coincided with a prolonged drop in wind power generation. Wind turbines, which typically supply nearly half of Britain’s electricity, failed to deliver as winds died down during critical periods. This left the country teetering on the edge of disaster, relying on last-minute imports and emergency measures to keep the lights on.

And now here they are again, which is no surprise but entirely predictable.

The cherry on top is that Britain now has the highest electricity prices in the world.

I’ve added the tag of “useful idiots” to this post in that we might learn something from their renewable energy idiocy.

But looking around the NZ political scene I suspect we’re just going to be idiots ourselves.