One would hope that a journalist for times would have done better research. Or perhaps she was paid to forget about batteries and V2H and V2G
Net-zero energy may leave us with no power
Relying on renewables is recklessly optimistic and fails to learn lessons of the past 14 years: we must invest in oil and gas
If you’ve flown in or out of the UK recently, perhaps you have cast a glance down at the flat, silvery-blue of the ocean and spotted somewhere an impressive array of pinprick white turbines, their heavy blades gliding airily around. What you probably didn’t notice was the boxy offshore substation servicing the plant and, inside it, the enormous diesel generator that provides the turbines with essential back-up power. What, you might wonder, does a wind farm need 20,000 litres of diesel for? Well, if the wind stops blowing, the station still requires power to keep minimum, critical functions going, even when it isn’t generating any power.
The significance of these diesel generators is not their emissions, which are marginal. What they tell us is that Labour’s plan for the British energy system, and therefore for our economy and security, has a fatal flaw. In a renewables-based system, there is currently no credible, cost-effective plan for keeping the lights on when the wind drops and the sky clouds over. This is not a theoretical problem. Although wind and solar on average generate more than a third of our electricity, they are not reliable. On the coldest day of 2022, near the height of the gas crisis, beset by still, cloudy weather, they generated less than 2 per cent of the electricity needed that day.
Labour’s “solution” is to continue running down gas production and to speed up the building of renewables. New nuclear power won’t be ready on the scale needed for at least a decade. Yet the party has promised to shrink the role of fossil fuels in electricity production to negligible levels in the next six years, while also embarking on a breakneck phase-out of combustion engine cars and gas boilers, meaning both will need to be electric instead.
Ed Miliband, back in charge of energy policy, insists this is the cheaper way to go and has vowed to halt the development of any new oil and gas fields. But his plans are based on a highly dubious set of assumptions and allow very little margin for error. He is taking exactly the same reckless approach to Britain’s energy system as we have seen fail over the past 14 years.
The greatest failure of that period, which Miliband seems dead-set on repeating, is the failure to plan and invest in a sufficient supply of firm power — that is, energy that does not rely on the vagaries of the weather. Without firm power, the economy is essentially a basket case, susceptible to the extreme price spikes we saw in 2022, rationing and, in the worst case, power cuts.
The new government’s answer to this problem, insofar as it has one, is to admit quietly that we will be relying on gas for many years to come. Labour’s manifesto promised to “maintain a strategic reserve of gas power stations to guarantee security of supply”. The problem is you cannot “maintain” a critical back-up energy supply with a throwaway line in a manifesto. Britain’s failsafe option to keep the lights on actually requires planning and investment alongside more fashionable technologies.
The government ought to be doing everything in its power to slow the decline in North Sea oil and gas production (the lowest-emission gas available to us), signing long-term contracts with big gas producers in the US and Qatar to reduce future price volatility, and lobbying internationally for Europe and other friendly regions to keep up their gas production. In other words, on all counts, we should be doing the opposite of what we are doing.
The government would no doubt counter that such efforts are not required because its rollout of renewables will be so grand and impressive that Britain’s need for gas or other such fripperies will be marginal. This is a hair-raisingly optimistic assumption.
Take the wind industry, where most of our future hopes lie. In order to conclude that wind is definitively cheaper than any other option, for example, it’s necessary to engage in considerable jiggery-pokery. The analysis underpinning the Labour manifesto, by a consultancy called Ember Climate, was conducted in 2022 — just before spiralling industry costs caused a government renewable power auction to fail.
At that moment, the moment Labour chose to embed in its policy assumptions, the cost of offshore wind appeared to be below the market price for UK electricity. A year later, prices had shot up above the market price. When you add in the cost of unreliable weather, which effectively has to be borne by gas plants and grid upgrades, the costs rise further. Orsted, the Danish company building Britain’s biggest offshore wind farms, has this year been cutting jobs, scaling back projects and reducing its forecasts.
What’s more, renewable production will take up vast tracts of countryside. Last year, Miliband wanted to block approval of the North Sea’s most promising new oil and gas fields, Cambo and Rosebank. Had he done so, number crunching by Lambert Energy Advisory shows we would have needed to build 1,000 sq km worth of wind farms to produce enough electricity to replace them, an area the size of Dartmoor National Park. And if we were to scale up battery production enough to store this power for when needed, we would most likely be buying the batteries from China — not exactly a watchword for energy security.
So yes, I suppose it’s possible that wind might be cheaper than other options and straightforward to build, but it’s also entirely possible that it won’t be, and it’s certain that its full costs are not being reflected in the numbers we see bandied about by net-zero enthusiasts.
There is another risk to Miliband’s energy plans: rocketing demand. For more than a decade, the UK’s electricity use has been declining thanks to de-industrialisation and energy efficiency. But that is likely to reverse, not just because all our cars and heating are soon meant to become electric, but also because of the vast power demands made by data centres needed to develop artificial intelligence. The National Grid has forecast that power demand will more than double by 2050. The government’s current plans show no sign of taking this into account.
The likelier scenario, of course, is that demand won’t grow anything like that amount because British growth will instead be strangled by yet another energy crunch, snuffing out innovation and subjecting us to further bouts of inflation. Like the last energy crisis, the next one is entirely foreseeable. The government could take action now to avoid it by investing in gas production and long-term gas contracts, just in case its impossibly ambitious green agenda doesn’t pan out as hoped. But prudence and net-zero policy appear to be polar opposites at this point.
Only one of them is enshrined in law, and it isn’t prudence.
