From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/future-energy/future-energy-scenarios/documents  

This year’s National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios has been released, and as before fails to address the real problems facing the pursuit of Net Zero.

As usual, there are four scenarios. The most optimistic is called Leading The Way, which has as much chance of being achieved as England winning the next World Cup. The most realistic is Falling Short, which only cuts emissions by about half come 2050.

But I’ll concentrate on the other two:

As before, I will focus on 2035, as nobody can predict what will happen in 30 years time.

Consumer Transformation looks a highly unlikely outcome. It assumes, for instance, that there will be 12 million heat pumps installed by 2035; there is simply no prospect of this unless the gas boiler ban takes effect a decade earlier. It is also unlikely that consumers will drastically alter their habits in terms of demand side response, or be willing to spend thousands on insulation.

System Transformation is slightly more realistic, but not much! This assumes 3 million heat pumps by 2035, but with an annual rollout of about 160,000 as soon as 2025, again extremely implausible. Because of this slow take up of heat pumps, the scenario assumes most heating will use hydrogen boilers, which in turn raises a separate question – where will this hydrogen come from? The FES answer is mainly from steam reforming natural gas, in theory using CCUS.

And in turn, this raises two more issues:

1) Steam reforming uses much more natural gas than you would use if you burnt it in the first place. It is therefore extremely expensive and inefficient.

2) Even with CCUS, there are still some emissions, as the process cannot capture all of the carbon dioxide, only about two-thirds.

Under ST, we will still be consuming 581 TWh of natural gas in 2035, compared to 986 TWh currently. This clearly makes a nonsense of the Labour Party’s plan to stop all new North Sea exploration.

But now we come to the crucial question of what our power system will look like in 2035. Below are the capacity assumptions in FES:

2035
		GW
	Current		CT	ST
Interconnectors	7.40		19.15	15.90
Fossil fuel and CCS	35.36		24.11	27.39
Solar	0.04		4.93	2.61
Offshore Wind	12.75		78.27	69.84
Onshore Wind	7.94		20.83	20.83
Other generation	11.06		16.62	15.88
Storage	3.34		21.15	14.35
Dispatchable			40.73	43.26
Peak Demand			98.00	73.00

. .

* Others includes nuclear, bio, BECCS, hydro and hydrogen

In both scenarios, dispatchable capacity (excl I/Cs) is woefully short of what is needed. Even with interconnectors, a large shortfall remains, despite the retention of most of our existing CCGT fleet.

Storage, according to the FES, will only be about two hours worth on average, so only enough to manage short term peaks in demand. Solar, as we know will produce next to nothing in winter; ( the figures quoted for capacity are, by the way, grid scale installations, and exclude embedded local solar farms).

At a push, you could possibly count on getting a minimum of 5% out of the wind capacity, even on windless days, about 5 GW. But this still leaves us well short in both scenarios.

Sure, we might be able to reduce peak demand by maybe 10 GW, by smoothing out daily demand. But on the other hand. You would need to build in a reserve of at least 20 GW, to cover for plant outages etc.

The only way to ensure security of supply with these increased electrification scenarios would be to treble our existing CCGT fleet, if necessary modified to burn hydrogen. In the longer term, a tranche pf new nuclear might help to plug the gap, but that would likely take many more years to come about.

Every year I raise this problem. And every year a new FES comes out, which totally ignores the disaster staring us in the face. There seems to be a naive belief that all of that wind and solar capacity will somehow always provide the power we need. Is it just me? Am I missing something?

It really is a case of the Emperor having no clothes!