Green energy? Epic fail.

Bad weather and scones proved yet again why green energy is bad news for the UK.

An ambitious project to encourage an island community to dramatically cut its electricity use for one day was hindered by bad weather – and a school's decision to bake scones, organisers said today.
The idea of watermelons EDay 2009 in Scilly, the wild and remote collection of islands off the tip of south-west England, was to persuade everyone to turn off as many electrical appliances as possible to highlight how a community could work together to help fight climate change.
In the run-up to yesterday's project, organisers handed out 200 monitors to allow people to see how much electricity they were using. Pubs, families and the Five Islands school were all on board.
Analysis this morning of the islands' consumption revealed that the amount of electricity used had gone down by only 1.2% compared with the previous day.
At one point the school was actually up by 30% because it decided to fire up its ovens to bake scones, although by midnight, after some cajoling from green-minded pupils, it had reduced its consumption by 8%.

This is why people have been banging on about not using renewable energy sources, they simply will not be able to cope with peak demand when or if the wind doesn't blow or the seas are calm or even on cloudy days. You cannot have a green energy policy without a massive conventional energy supply to back it up. The Scilly example for all it wasn't using green energy proves that trying to get people to reduce energy usage is a non starter, you just need a cold day and people will pop the heating on, hell the local school decided to bake scones and energy usage went through the roof. So are the watermelons going to suggest we no longer eat cooked food unless the wind is blowing?

Just for once it would be nice to get some joined up thinking from the environmentalists, rather than idiotic energy saving schemes that can be defeated by a school baking day.