From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

Well, the report into the feasibility of 2030 net zero targets from the electricity system operator, NESO, requested by Ed Miliband, has landed on his desk:

Millions more households could be asked to regularly switch off light and appliances under Ed Miliband’s plan for a clean power grid by 2030, an official review has found.

The Energy Secretary has been told that the Government’s pledge to rely on wind and solar farms for most of Britain’s power needs is technically achievable but will entail a “Herculean effort” on every front.

Advice published by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) said a quadrupling of so-called flexibility is needed in order to ensure the grid can operate without the use of fossil fuels.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/11/05/millions-more-switch-off-ed-miliband-net-zero-targets

The Telegraph, however, seems to have largely missed the point! (Not for the first time!)

In reality, Fintan Slye’s report is a bit of a damp squib, little more than a rehash of the Future Energy Scenarios. The plan can be downloaded here.

Let’s first deal with the issue of “switching off the lights”.

According to NESO, most of this demand flexibility will revolve around smart charging of EVs and use of thermal storage. The idea of making us charge our EVs at night is hardly new; nor are electric storage heaters. But these only switch demand from one time of day to another, so are not really relevant in overall terms.

Meanwhile, “turning the lights off” is planned to save only 3 GW – again a bit of a side issue. Residential electricity demand, by the way, peaks at around 15 GW in winter, so they would be looking at 1-in-5 households switching off. Good luck with that!

The real importance of this energy rationing, however, is that a decarbonised power grid cannot simply turn up the gas plants to match demand as it goes up and down during the day. What happens when we refuse to cooperate is another matter!

None of that addresses the problem though of what we will do when we get a week like this with virtually no wind power.

So what does the report actually say?

It reiterates existing Labour plans to double onshore wind power by 2030, triple offshore to 50 GW and triple solar as well.

Battery storage will quadruple to 22 GW, but as the report admits this is a drop in the ocean in terms of GWh. Same story with pumped storage. Their role will remain the same as now – maintaining grid frequency and topping up supply at peak periods.

So what will they do when the wind does not blow?

They have an answer – fire up the gas plants!

Indeed it would appear they need more than we currently have, around 35 GW they reckon:

So all of the bluster about 100% clean energy was a lie, as we have been saying all along. It is simply impossible to run a grid largely on intermittent renewables. Miliband’s plans were fantasy all along.

Sure, eventually they might replace all of this gas capacity with new gas plants fitted with carbon capture, or hydrogen burning plant using gas as a feed stock. But we will still be dependent on fossil fuels either way.

And keeping all of our gas capacity going for many more years to come brings with it its own problems:

You have to keep the plants fully manned all year, and you have to keep them well maintained. This all costs money. When owners of CCGT plants find they are only operational for a few days a year, what incentive will they have to keep them open. They will need billions of subsidies via the Capacity Market Mechanism to persuade, and probably a long term guarantee as well.

Which brings us to their assessment of costs.

They claim that all of this renewable generation will reduce generating costs by £15/MWh. But this is an outright lie, because they have included Carbon Costs in the cost of CCGT:

This is plainly absurd, a choice of being burnt or scalded. They have included £60/MWh in the cost of gas generation for carbon costs, meaning that instead of being £15/MWh cheaper, their plan would increase the cost of generation by about £10/MWh. (Allowing for the fact that not all dispatchable power comes from gas). But carbon costs are not real costs, and we would not need to buy permits if the government changed the way the Scheme works.

Add that to the indirect extra costs they mention, and we are looking at an extra cost of £35/MWh over the grid as a whole. That equates to a total annual cost of around £14 billion, on top of the £12 billion or so which we are already paying for renewables.

These costs do not include standby payments to gas generators, as mentioned above. These alone will run into several billions a year.

To cope with the huge rise in renewable capacity and increased demand for electricity, they say we will need to spend £14 billion a year on upgrading the grid till 2030. On top of that will come an extra £34 billion for building renewable capacity:

And all of this expenditure will merely end up duplicating what we already have. Where on Earth is the sense in that?