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June 7, 2024 at 12:04PM

By Paul Homewood

 

You will no doubt recall the exchange of letters with Claire Coutinho a few weeks ago, which I organised with the help of one of her constituents.

The letters concerned her Government’s decarbonisation policies, and how they were putting our electricity grid at risk.

This was the second letter we sent a month ago:

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Many thanks for your reply concerning Net Zero policy.

I appreciate the Government has many ambitious low carbon plans for 2050, which you list. However, none appear to offer a solution to the catastrophic problems facing us during the 2030s.

To lay it out in simple terms, according to the National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios, peak demand for electricity will be about 100 GW in 2035. We will probably have about 10 GW of dispatchable capacity (nuclear, biomass and hydro) – this assumes that all unabated gas power is shut down.

Even with 20 GW of interconnectors, which we most certainly cannot depend on, we will be woefully short of electricity when wind and solar power is at low levels.

You plan on 5 GW of new unabated gas, but clearly this will be nowhere enough. We will likely need ten times as much. Building new gas power plants incorporating carbon capture may be a solution, but I see no plans to do so in the time scale we are looking at, ie the mid 2030s. In any event, carbon capture adds significantly to the cost of electricity, and increases the amount of gas needed to produce each unit of electricity. Are you happy to see energy bills rising as a consequence?

The other plans you mention are currently far too small to make any difference, and will certainly not be ready in any scale by 2035.

Low carbon hydrogen, for instance, will need tens of billions spending on a whole new infrastructure – electrolysers, distribution networks, seasonal storage and hydrogen burning power stations. The new batch of projects outlined will only supply about 0.1% of the UK’s annual gas consumption, and are not grid-scale solutions.

On top of that, there simply won’t be enough wind/solar power in your plans to produce the hydrogen anyway. And if that is not enough, the contract price you have agreed for the next batch of hydrogen projects is ten times that of natural gas. Are you prepared to see household energy bills rocket to pay for these subsidies?

Similarly tidal and geothermal are extremely expensive, and the 106 MW currently procured is a tiny amount. While these technologies may bear fruit in thirty years’ time, we clearly cannot rely on them making any difference in the next decade.

You mention 35 GW of battery storage, but typically such batteries can only store enough for an hour’s use. Plainly these will be useless when we go days on end with little wind power.

So there you have it! We are staring at a gigantic black hole in our potential electricity supply come 2035.

I can only see one solution – begin construction now on a fleet of new CCGT plants, if necessary made CCS ready. (Bear in mind, CCS is still not a proven technology at scale). It will need to be at least 50 GW. In addition the current fleet needs to be contracted for at least 15 years, to provide standby capacity.

Evidently this is not part of your government’s plans. In which case, could you please explain how your plans will avoid the blackouts which appear inevitable?

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.We have now received this reply from DESNZ:

This is an extraordinary admission!

They are now accepting that everything we said was correct. It is simply impossible to totally decarbonise Britain’s grid by 2035.

Whatever technologies we may have in place in thirty years time, there is no way any will be available at scale by 2035, when supposedly the grid will be decarbonised.

Unless we place total reliance on interconnectors, we will most certainly need at least 50GW of dispatchable power, most of which will have to be gas. I would still argue that we will need even more if EVs and heat pumps are rolled out at scale.

But this is the first time I have seen any official admission of this.

And the question arises – is Claire Coutinho even aware of this issue, and if so why did not she mention it in her initial letter.

We currently have about 30GW of CCGT, but some of the older plants will likely have shut by 2035, particularly given they are no longer economic in the face of heavily subsidised renewables. Timera reckon that 7GW could be gone by 2030.

And nobody is going to build new plant, when they know the government of the day will shut it down a few years later.

It is clearer than ever that we now need an emergency programme to build at least 30GW of new CCGT, as well as guaranteeing at least 15 years of operation/capacity market payments to all existing plants.

BTW – if anybody is unlucky enough to be Ed Miliband’s constituent, would they like to write a similar letter to him after the election?

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June 7, 2024 at 11:28AM

NOAA July 2022 headline: Research: Global warming contributed to decline in tropical cyclones in the 20th century. Now the same global warming is supposed to be increasing their frequency? Does not compute. NOAA Research said: ‘The annual number of tropical cyclones forming globally has decreased by approximately 13% during the 20th century, and scientists say the main cause is a rise in global warming, according to a new study in Nature Climate Change by a group of international scientists including NOAA scientists.’
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EurekAlert news release: Climate: Increasing tropical cyclone frequency may have deadly consequences for seabird populations

The increase in tropical cyclone frequency and intensity due to climate change could lead to dramatic declines in seabird populations, suggests a paper published in Communications Earth & Environment.

The authors’ conclusion is based on the impacts of Cyclone Ilsa on Bedout Island, after the cyclone killed at least 80% of seabirds nesting on the island when it struck in April 2023.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including tropical cyclones.

Individual cyclones can have a dramatic impact on wildlife populations, including seabirds. Cyclones directly affect seabirds in several ways, including causing significant mortality events, disrupting their nesting and breeding patterns, and altering migration strategies.

The increasing frequency of cyclones is already known to have negative impacts on a range of organisms, but the impact on seabird populations is still unclear.

Jennifer Lavers and colleagues studied the impact of Cyclone Ilsa, a category 5 tropical cyclone, on the populations of several seabird species breeding on the 17-hectare Bedout Island, Western Australia, after the cyclone crossed the island on April 13 2023.

They used aerial and ground surveys, conducted between April 17 and July 21 2023, to estimate the percentage mortality of three species — the brown booby (Sula leucogaster), the lesser frigatebird (Fregata ariel), and an endemic subspecies of the masked booby (Sula dactylatra bedouti).

The authors estimate that 80–90% of these species’ populations — at least 20,000 individual birds — were killed during the storm, with the losses predominantly adult breeding birds.

The authors warn that this level of population loss for island seabirds may be unsustainable when coupled with the increase in cyclone frequency, as many seabirds are long-lived, have long generation times, and raise very few chicks per year.

Full article here.
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Image: Tropical storm [credit: BBC]

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June 7, 2024 at 10:31AM

By Paul Homewood

 

 

Labour’s plan to set up the Great British Energy company at a cost of £8.3bn is just part of its wider Green Plan, which is still included in its website:

https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Make-Britain-a-Clean-Energy-Superpower.pdf

According to Sky News, it comes with a cost of £23.7bn over five years, equivalent to £870 for every household in the country. But what will we get for the money?

In addition to Great British Energy, which cannot be funded by increases in windfall taxes, as claimed by Labour, we are promised these goodies:

Upgrading of ports is, of course, yet another cost associated with offshore wind. As for green hydrogen, carbon capture and gigafactories, the money will in all likelihood be wasted, and certainly won’t benefit the public.

Transitioning the steel industry will involve wasting billions so that efficient processes are replaced by hydrogen fuelled ones. But the cost of hydrogen is so great that whatever is left of our steel industry will be unable to compete with international rivals.

This list, together with GBE, costs £15.6bn, so the remaining £8.1bn will presumably be allocated to insulation schemes:

Free insulation has been on offer for so many years that it is hard to see there are many homes left who have not had some. But the plan appears to be to hand billions to local councils to spend on council houses.

But why should taxpayers fund this? Let the councils themselves pay for it, and recover the expense by putting up rents.

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In any event, the amount is tiny, and will make very little difference to the UK’s energy consumption. For example, £8 billion would pay for just 800,000 houses at £10000 a time, the sort of amount of money that might make a difference.

And even that would not save £500 a year, given that annual heating bills for the sort of small houses involved are probably little more than £1000. Labour’s promise also implies that everybody will benefit from this saving.

But the most ridiculous claim of all is that “hundreds of thousands of jobs” would be created. At £50000 a job, you’d be looking at a cost of tens of billions a year. And you can double that amount when the cost of materials, travel etc are added on. Quite clearly this money is not on the table.

By the way, the document, which although undated must have been written last year, states:

As we know, this claim from Carbon Brief was only true for a few days.

But then it goes on to claim that energy bills will fall by £1400, based on the high prices still prevalent last year:

It is fraudulent for Labour to continue linking this report prominently on the website, without any qualification that the costings are no longer correct.

Indeed, Labour’s renewable plans will inevitably force up energy bills even faster than under Tory policies. This is what labour promise:

Based on current market prices, the extra wind and solar power planned will be subsidised to the tune of about £13 billion a year. That’s £500 per household, on top of the cost of the Green Plan.

The insane obsession with floating wind power alone would cost £4 billion a year in subsidies, given its strike price of £244/MWh.

Meanwhile, Labour clearly have no plan for when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.

Thank you, Ed Miliband!

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June 7, 2024 at 08:40AM