Dear Mr Kwarteng,
As one of your constituents I wrote to you in June 2019 requesting an analysis of how on earth we could become a carbon free society by 2050 or whenever in the face of the monumental impossibility of building enough wind turbines to accomplish the task. I have to say that I was not at all impressed by the quality of your reply in setting out a clear and achievable route map.
I should tell you that although I am now semiretired I spent a career in the oil Industry as a Geoscientist – Geology and Geophysics, finishing up as the international manager and, co-founder and co-owner of a small oil company that achieved the modest success of producing gas and oil from Turkey at a rate of 1000 Barrels per day of oil equivalent and employinhg a staff of 40. I am therefore well versed in energy provenance and economics.
As a natural scientist I remain to be convinced that the observed modest recent rise in global average temperature is either unprecedented, dangerous or even human caused, and despite my analytical research have yet to see any observational evidence that would persuade me otherwise.
This is not a fashionable view, You may beg to differ and we might have a civilised discussion on the matter. However that is not what I want to discuss today. I am no great protagonist of a fossil fuelled future and would welcome an alternative that could deliver the benefits of our bounteous fossil fuels.
What does seriously concern me is that our present decarbonisation attempts through the medium of unreliable renewables does not have any chance of replacing our present energy budget and must inevitably lead to the total economic ruin of our nation
I note that you are now Minister of State (Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth)
And in that capacity, I must bring to your attention the following.
I have worked out fairly completely the complete current energy budget of the UK on a spreadsheet and produced answers as to how we can get to carbon free by 2050. This spreadsheet can be found at the following drop box address.
I urge you to download this and disseminate it to your civil servants.
I have also made some appendix tables extracted from this spreadsheet that summarise some of my conclusions.
The following are facts distilled from that spreadsheet
- In the UK we consume annually 1295TWhr (Terawatt Hours) of effective energy (Total input energy of each type times efficiency factor). This is the total energy budget over all sectors of our society. Of this
158 TWhr (12%) come from renewables like Nuclear, Wind, Solar, Biomass and Hydro. The remainder 1137 TW hr (88%) comes from Fossil fuels
78 TWHr of the renewable total currently come from Wind and Solar (about 6% of our total energy requirement
- Assume that we replace all of our fossil fuel with wind power We need to build at least 32,000, 10 MW nameplate leviathan wind turbines, assumed to be offshore , to be commissioned to achieve “Net carbon free”, without even considering what happens when the wind does not blow.
- Assuming we wish to get there by 2050 we must commission 3 leviathans per day starting today. This takes no account of the fact that the lifetime of these units is 20 years and from 2040 to 2050 we would need to double up to 6 units per day.
There are plans afoot to establish 4.5 GW of offshore wind farm by 2025. This equates to a total of 500 units and an installation rate of only 0.27 per day. This is about 10% of the required deployment rate so we are off to a roaring start!
Moreover the annual energy supplied by these turbines in planning or construction equates to about 7% of our current oil fired energy
- We need 150TWhrs to supply all our cars with electricity This is about 12% of our total energy budget, it is also about 100% of all renewable energy currently being produced by Wind solar nuclear biomass and hydro.
- Assuming all of the vehicle charging was done in one of our 8000 odd current service stations we would need 115,000 chargers working 24/7 to do this. So each station needs 14 charging units working at a total power requirement per service station 6 MW or about 1.5 dedicated Turbines per charging station. Assuming 50% of charging was done at home we could halve this figure but would have to spend hundreds of billions beefing up the grid to supply
- When I tank up my car with diesel the energy flow is equivalent to the exclusive output of 4 wind turbines for 2.5 minutes. I suppose that this means that Diesel is a pretty inefficient way to power a car. Electric motors are grantedly more efficient but the difficulty is getting the electricity from the wind turbine into the battery.
- Electric bikes are great and it would require the output of only 2000 wind turbines to keep all of the motorists in the UK moving 24/7 on electric bikes. That equates to 200 wind turbines to enable us all to cycle 2 hours per day. This is doable.
It is glaringly obvious that it is completely impossible to keep 40 million cars on the road in the UK powered by renewable electricity leaving out for the moment the infeasibility of supplying enough Lithium, Cobalt and rare earth elements to accomplish the task. Therefore it is not going to happen.
I suppose one should address the question “when you go about your daily business is it really necessary to haul a ton of metal on wheels along with you?” Most of our daily business could probably be done if we swapped ownership of cars for ownership of bikes. However if this is the game plan from our political masters then we, the masses, should at least be told this. One feels also that the gilded elite would still like their Teslas, tax free of course because they’re green don’t y’know and the carless masses would still pay for the upkeep of the roads.
I look forward to a detailed reply to these issues and am confident that with your new army of dedicated civil servants this will be rapidly forthcoming.
I also expect one of these Civil Servants will point out any shortcomings or logical flaws in my spreadsheet – that is if you can divert at least one of them from the no doubt more absorbing task of counting Carrie’s flatulent unicorns, and would welcome such interaction.
I wou;ld also be thrilled to present my findins to a Conservative Party constituency meeting if you would like to convene one – Hopefully a real one and not a Zoom affair.
In the face of a Corbyn threat I did actually vote for you in December 2019. This is a vote that I deeply regret now because Boris and Carrie are well on the road to out – Corbyning Corbyn in every piece of woke governmental nonsense that Jeremy proposed.
I note now that your party have let your northern voters by stymieing the opening of coal mines in Northumberland and Cumberland opting instead to import the same amount of coal that these mines would have produced. Futile virtue signalling that actually increases global CO2 emissions, as the coal is now being imported- from our good friends in Russia . Mr Putin is reportedly thrilledbut he is such a nice man.
Likewise these voters will be thrown further into unemployment with the inevitable run down of our energy intensive industries under your decarbonising schemes. Their jobs of course will be done elsewhere in a more CO2 intensive manner so not doing much for the planet.
Our government have a plan to replace methane in domestic gas appliances. Good heavens man doesn’t your government have a whit of realisation that the only viable source of hydrogen is steam reforming methane – at 75% efficiency if you are lucky. You may be able to convince me that this is something other than moronic nonsense, but I doubt it.
Yours sincerely,
Alastair Gray
[Here is a second location for the spreadsheet~cr]
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Given the planners all bought the globalists overpopulation meme, there could be another angle to balance the energy budget not eveident in these figures.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/brexit-creates-major-problem-uk-energy-companies
[The UK is in a deficit by about 7% of its annual requirements. Undersea cables linking the UK’s grid to mostly nuclear power stations in France and the Netherlands make up this deficit.]
Today (8th January 2021) COAL is producing 7% of UK electricity demand (same as wind)….
I do hope the politicians aren’t watching – they might all have heart attacks…
Hmmm….
Boris’s hidden political problem lurking behind his Princess’s Net Zero projekt;
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/10-million-jobs-at-risk-from-net-zero-pledge-says-new-report/
And the repeal of the fixed-term act could make it easier for him to change this policy …
It looks like Britain is taking over from Germany the role of crash-test dummy. Thank God the two major political parties in the U.S. still have different climate issue positions, although the Swamp is all-in alarmist.
In response to my FOI the CCC has offered up its sixth carbon budget to emphasise its determination to be Zero Co2 completely ignorance the purpose of my FOI which was to identify all of the information it held to justify its determination for the UK to be Zero Co2 deliberately evasive. My response:
Dear Charles
You have not answered any of the questions I have asked. A sixth carbon budget is a bookwork account exercise to supposedly resolve a problem that does not exist. My FOI request referred specifically to CCC correctly identifying the data which CCC uses to determine whether or not there is a problem that needs to be resolved in the first instance. FOI legislation requires the full release of all data and information held by any and all organisations which fall under the remit of FOI legislation. You are required by law to answer the questions. If you do not answers the questions then the obvious determination is that the CCC is deliberately and illegally avoiding disclosure. Unless the CCC provides all of the data and information requested the next step is a legal action to get disclosure. If CCC cannot answer simple questions driven by data then the assumption has to be that the CCC doesn’t have a clue about science, data and the environment or protection of it. The CCC has to provide full disclosure of how and why Co2 needs to be mitigated because the Met Office data makes it abundantly clear the UK was cooling whilst Co2 was rising and the globe is hugely influenced by El Nino and La Nina events but not Co2. If the 100,000 billion tons of Co2 emissions within the period of 18 years and 9 months from 1998 failed to cause a catastrophe and 541 million years ago atmospheric Co2 was 8,000ppm whereas it is now 414ppm. Why didn’t 8,000ppm cause a catastrophe? And why does the CCC think 414ppm will cause a catastrophe when 8,000ppm did not? And as natural emissions are 28 times human emissions why does the CCC believe human emissions will cause a catastrophe that 28 times more over which we have no control will not. And there is ample evidence now that during a world wide lockdown emissions have continued to rise which means human emission are so insignificant their existence cannot overwhelm natural emissions, there is 38,000 billion tons in the oceans alone. And why doesn’t the CCC acknowledge the fact that during the LIA the planet struggled to feed 1.5 billion whereas now we produce enough food for 10 billion because of maybe 0.8C of warming since maybe 1850 but again if you look at the longest record which is the CET it has not warmed at all. Why subject 65 million people to a Hand Maids Tale existence when the CCC doesn’t even know whether its warmed or not? Answer the questions???
Yesterday and today G. B. National Grid status (templar.co.uk) Demand 44.07GW, wind 3.04GW. Number of 2.5MW turbines needed to meet demand 127,000 or 319GW’s. Demand 44.68GW’s Wind 3.27GW’s Number of 2.5MW turbines needed to meet demand 120.208 or 300GW’s of turbine capacity. Demand 44.23GW Wind 2.93GW turbines needed 132,000 or 330GW’s. Demand 46.82GW Wind 3.54Gw number of turbines needed 116,336 or 291GW’s . So much for an extra 40GW’s how about the 3300GW’s we need right now? G. B. National Grid status (templar.co.uk) Demand 40.50GW’s Wind 0.27GW’s. Therefore today – Sunday – the UK would need 1.32 million 2.5MW wind turbines to meet demand or 3300GW’s of supply just to generate 40.50GW’s of electricity. You can get 1GW of reliable supply for £1 billion with coal or methane like 50GW’s for £50 billion. Each turbine costs £3 million therefore that is £3.9 trillion just for the turbines. Every MW generated by a wind turbine consumes 200 times more raw finite materials than a MW generated by coal or methane. You need 50 acres of land mass for 1MW of wind electricity so you would need 165 million acres of land but the UK has only 66 million acres. G. B. National Grid status (templar.co.uk) Demand 43.64GW, CCGT 22.07GW’s Nuclear 6.30GW’s, Biomass 2.93GW’s, Wind 5.61GW’s, Coal 1.53GW’s, Solar 30GW’s. Therefore today to meet the demand of 43.64GW’s the UK would need 68,464 2.5MW wind turbines or 171GW’s covering 8.6 million acres. In 2017 the UK experienced 7 consecutive months of windless days. There is no battery that can store electricity for seven months but if it did exist the cost would be beyond £32 trillion. And it isn’t even winter yet? 27th November 2020 G. B. National Grid status (templar.co.uk) Demand 40.20GW’s CCGT 23.16GW’s (57.62%) Nuclear 5.73GW’s Biomass (Wood Pellets from USA) 3.01GW’s Wind o.44GW’s Coal 2.52GW’s Solar 1.2GW’s. UK would need 803,968 2.5MW wind turbines to meet demand or 2009.92GW’s of capacity. If solar 40GW’s of solar. At 1MW /50 acres Vattenfall would need 100 million acres of land – UK has 66 million acres – on or off shore to meet demand at a cost of £2.4 trillion. Whereas the UK could buy 50GW’s of coal or methane generation at £1 billion/GW. Lord Deben has not denied an all electric UK would have a peak winter load of 150GW’s 3.33 times our current peak load. Zero Co2 for the UK between £6 and £7 trillion to mitigate 0.000187% of global Co2 emissions. Every road street and path would need to be dug up at a cost of £466 billion but if like HS2 that cost could double and triple. We remain thankfully within an interglacial which is relatively benign in climate terms but the next ice age is overdue and by 2100 the mile high ice which existed where your farm is during the last glaciation might have returned. The natural cycle despite what you are obliged to believe within the climate catastrophist narrative has not been broken. Coal Outperforms Wind Power During UK Wind Week! | Watts Up With That? A month ago we would have needed 1.6 million 2.5MW wind turbines, then 176,000. The cost of rewiring the UK for an all electric UK is estimated at £466 billion.
Its bad enough that if all 65 million of us died today it would only mitigate 0.000187% of global Co2 emissions but what is worse is the predicted spend of at least £6 to £7 trillion needed to supposedly mitigate a tiny fraction of 0.000187% of global Co2 emissions or in the case of gas boilers shutting them all down would mitigate just 0.0000374% of global Co2 emissions. Truth be told if Zero Co2 is complete nonsense and a travesty of virtual signalling which will in every way do more harm than good to the environment.
The CCC is not above the law and the FOI legislation requires those organisations that fall within its remit to conform to FOI legislation. The CCC’s remit is compromised by all of the data, warming such as it is, is insignificant and your sixth carbon budget cannot modify or manipulate the climate or weather of the UK or the globe. Therefore I will now generate another FOI request which will demand the CCC to identify explicitly how its sixth carbon budget will influence the UK’ s climate and weather because presumably that is the purpose of the exercise which I am sure the CCC will be only too pleased to identify, examples of questions to be asked:
How does the CCC calculate that mitigating a miniscule 0.000187% or an even more miniscule 0.0000374% of Co2 emissions will have an influence on the UK’s weather or climate when China and India are building 1400 new coal fired stations?
There is a fine Norwegian word ” Drittsekk”. Ask Ole Humlum what it means or google it. It was applied by the Norwegian environment minister in 1980 to a certain Rt. Hon. John Selwyn Gummer. who may also go under the alias Lord Deben. One feels esp. after reading your post that he should have been ennobled as Lord Drittsekk of Green Nepotism
Excellent thought I cannot use it directly because Deben would then use it to refuse my FOI. CCC, BBC, Met Office, BEIS use every subterfuge known to humanity to avoid answering the questions in my FOI’s because they know their claims are nonsense, they know its a scam but if they know its a scam why do they persist in applying the scam, it makes no sense. Nuclear war and hypersonic weapons are a risk, another ice age is a risk but they know Co2 is not a risk because history makes it abundantly clear that it is not a risk and we cannot live without it. Are we being ruled by sheep, have the meek already inherited the earth, have genetics become so diluted that the intellectual base of the average human is unable to understand and comprehend reality and this has driven them back to rely upon their fears and beliefs. If so then we are in it right up to our necks already and the vision of Kamala Harass being in charge of the big red button really is scary.
Don’t try to confuse them with the facts!
Very good letter, Mr Gray. They should be pressed for a reply.
With regard to electric cars, the HoC Science and Technology Committee produced a report that states
In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonisation. The Government should not aim to achieve emissions reductions simply by replacing existing vehicles with lower-emission versions. Alongside the Government’s existing targets and policies, it must develop a strategy to stimulate a low emissions transport system, with the metrics and targets to match. This should aim to reduce the number of vehicles required, for example by: promoting and improving public transport; reducing its cost relative to private transport; encouraging vehicle usership in place of ownership; and encouraging and supporting increased levels of walking and cycling. The Government should commit to ensuring that the annual increase in fuel duty should never be lower than the average increase in rail or bus fares.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmsctech/1454/1454.pdfB
Page 70. See also page 65 for the rare earth metals problem.
But for the moment, the government is pretending we’ll all be getting electric cars.
Mr Grey,
Anne-Marie Trevelyan is now Energy Minister, you might want to resend.
I would take out the last 6 paragraphs though.
You can be sure it will be binned if you start out by insulting them (even if well deserved).
Good point.anyway g had my rant .Somehow I dont think Ms T will be any more responsive. I wonder though which of the swamp creatures really drives the agenda. Is it Sir Humphrey, media, the concerned XR children of the powerful,Chinese 5th column Davos clique or even David Iykes friends the lizards
The picture is incomplete. The estimates of the following article needs to be added to the original Excel spreadsheet.
“The Hidden Cost of Net Zero: Rewiring the UK”, in an article first published as Briefing 48 by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has with permission been re-published in the recent December Edition of the Royal Engineers Journal, the Corps’s foremost professional journal. The brief summary is here:
“The extra demand for electricity will overwhelm most domestic fuses, thus requiring homeowners to install new ones as well as circuit-breakers and new distribution boards. Most will also have to rewire between their main fuse and the distribution network. In urban areas, where most cabling is underground, this will also involve paying for a trench to be dug between the home and the feeder circuits in the street.
In addition, increased demand along a street will mean the distribution network will need to be upgraded too. This will involve installing larger cables and replacing distribution transformers with larger ones. Most urban streets will need to be dug up. In rural areas, where electricity is normally carried on overhead cable, it may just be possible to replace the wires, but it is more likely that cabling will have to buried instead.
The cost to the country of re-wiring alone will probably exceed £200 Billion, or over £ 7,000 per household. This figure excludes the cost of new equipment, such as EV chargers, heat pumps and electric showers.” (My bold.)
I support Phil’s Dad comment on removal of the last 6 paragraphs.
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