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:
. .
* 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!
The emperor has no fracking clothes, Paul. Excuse the language…
Precisely.
This entire agenda is ultimately one of depopulation.
Modern societies are dependent on reliable electricity.
End reliable electricity and you achieve depopulation…
As Stanley Johnson, Boris’ father, stated on GBNews a few months ago, he would be happy to see UK population decline to 15M, better still 10M.
The problem is who has sufficient in depth knowledge and the influence to challenge these figures and point out the consequences if they are wrong.
Who is going to accept responsibility for a significant grid outage due to poor policy?
Depth of knowledge will have no impact. The Green hoax is based on rhetoric. It is a tool of the control-freak left to gain total State control and usher in their socialist utopia. It is a religion for them. The best tools are rhetorical. Cracking jokes about their stupidity, ridicule, highlighting the huge amount of suffering created, and memes have far more beneficial effect on the voting public than scientific discussions.
The UK has reduced CO2 emissions by ~300,000 KT since the peak around 1970, most of that reduction in the past twenty years (Trading Economics).
China increased CO2 emissions more than that viz. ~ 500,000 KT in just one year 2020 – 2021 (Trading Economics latest).
India and Indonesia will be following China’s development model.
No doubt there are hordes of bureaucrats beavering away in front of screens and attending pointless meetings coming up with these impossible scenarios.
The futility of it all is getting quite bizarre even ‘surreal’.
I have been trying to get this message across to the politicians who are taking us down this rabbit hole for years .
The western countries are flying blindfolded into an energy crisis of their own making and I ask WHY.
China is now using more coal than the whole world used just 12 years ago with total world coal use exceeding 8 billion tonnes twice ,moving up from a steady 4.7 billion tonnes for 10 years before 2010 .
As I wrote here last week all heavy industry will shift to Asia using a massive tonnage of coal shipped from Australia producing iron and steel ,cement and thousands of other goods that need large ammounts of coal and electricity to manufacture .
The coal and iron ore are shipped from Australia and Iron sand concentrate is shipped from New Zealand .
Then the iron and steel is shipped back again pushing up costs and emissions from shipping .
Some one here argued that it did not matter because China would get richer but they did not realize that many other countries will become poorer .
I cannot see how shipping raw materials around the world and then shipping finished goods back makes any economic sense just to be able to tell the UN that your country has reduced emissions ,when in fact emissions and fuel use has increased substantially .
“I cannot see how shipping raw materials around the world and then shipping finished goods back makes any economic sense just to be able to tell the UN that your country has reduced emissions…”
Massachusetts brags that it’s the most energy efficient state in America- it doesn’t mention that it’s because almost all industry has left the state and we import almost everthing from China. Whenever I see this claim I point out this reality- which of course is ignored.
China gets a break for being a “developing country”- anyone who believes that should look at their cities- which look like something out of a science fiction movie.
No doubt there are hordes of bureaucrats beavering away in front of screens and attending pointless meetings coming up with these impossible scenarios.
The futility of it all is getting quite bizarre even ‘surreal’.
They provide nothing of value and likely can’t at their stage in life. They only survive by getting money from the government and leftwing foundations. If there is no Climate Emergency, they’ll get laid off and have to work as a check-out clerk at 30% the pay.
The end of an auld song
UK Grid to Sell Off Unused Coal Stocks to Help Lower Bills
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-12/uk-grid-expects-consumers-to-benefit-from-sale-of-unused-coal
Will cost us money in the long run
The stuff burned in power stations is little better than dust. I don’t see who’d buy it!
China or India for their power stations
There was still quite a big heap at Ratcliffe on Soar, nothing like the stockpile for the Miners Strike, about three weeks ago although some will have been used in the last couple of weeks.
It’s not worth shipping it unless the price is too low. They will probably give it away!
but they won’t pay much for it, that’s for sure- they’ll drive a hard bargain knowing how desperate the UK is to get rid of that evil carbon laden coal
Future energy scenario
Get candles
Made from petroleum wax
The alternative Green candle would be tallow, from beef fat, but they want to cancel cows too!
With rapid population reduction there will be plenty of fatty bodies that could be put to use.
Four candles
For us Brits, a link was not required – just those two words
whale oil lamps?
How do the alarmists explain the long ice ages and the relatively short interglacial periods? What is the role of CO2 in that context?
Revisionist geology is already rewriting the entire history of the Earth with exactly that aim.
Very glad this piece has been given the wider exposure from WUWT. Paul Homewood has done a superb job in recent years exposing the follies of the attempt to get to net zero by way of wind and solar. And the greatest folly of all, that of attempting to double demand from EVs and heat pumps at the same time.
The chart in this piece shows clearly that its not going to work. The important question for anyone living in the UK is what failure will look like.
One scenario is that the government of the day backs off. To do this would mean dropping the post 2030 ban on new ICE sales, and dropping the post 2025 ban on sales of oil boilers. It would also logically mean dropping the post 2035 ban on hybrid cars and vans. However the urgent thing to focus on is the 2025 and 2030 bans. How likely are they to be dropped?
I am afraid not at all likely. There will probably be a Labour government in 18 months, quite possibly helped to a majority by an infernal alliance of the SNP and Liberals. It will not be at all moved by the situation of the rural off-grid oil heating users, who it will see as Conservative voters to whom anything bad that can be done should be done. It will be held to the EV policy by its left and by its coalition partners. So we have to envisage the policies carrying on full force until the following election, which will probably be in 2028.
At that point it will be too late. No-one will be making or selling ICE cars any more. Those with them (like those with oil fired boilers) will be holding onto them, but there will probably be very high levies on using them, whether in the form of fuel taxes, things like the London ULEZ, differential parking charges. Very easy to make them too expensive to use.
Will a Labour or coalition government get a second term in the light of what will be, in 2028, an increasingly obvious pending disaster? Surprisingly enough, I think they may well. Because the way it looks now, there will be no party with any alternative policies. There will have been a couple more COP conferences, the BBC and Guardian will still be promoting the alleged climate crisis. The entire political class and all parties will still be committed both to the idea that there is a pending climate crisis, and to the even more absurd idea that taking Britain to net zero can have an effect on it.
And there will still probably be residual resentment of the Conservatives, who will not have reinvented themselves yet. Also, Starmer will be cautious in how radical he is in the first term, remembering Blair, whose first term focus was getting the second term. A second Labour term, including coalition partners, is entirely possible.
I guess there’s a very low probability that as the looming disaster gets more and more obvious a party like UKIP in the EU Referendum campaign, in this case perhaps Reform, starts to attract a wave of furious support. You can imagine that going into 2028 or so the Conservatives, terrified by this, make a U-turn on climate and energy. But I think both these are low probability.
So if you are living in the UK in a big city, the thing is to get prepared for power cuts and very high prices for electricity. Hold on to your gas boiler (these will still be allowed and installable as replacement items for the forseeable future).
If you live in the country and have space to install one, get a generator. Buy a new or slightly used ICE car in about 2026 (when they will still be available). But watch for falling availability. And if you are one of the unfortunate rural class enemies not on the gas grid and with oil fired heating, buy a new boiler next year, and buy in a spare heat exchanger, this being the part which is most likely to go and most hard to source for an old boiler.
And make friends, if you haven’t already done so, with your local heating engineer. And maybe your local garage. You are going to need both to get you through the next 15 years.
Michel don’t be too pessimistic. EV sales in 2022 were over 10m but 60% were sold in China, 15% in Europe and 8% in the US. So total of 83% in those three regions and only 17% in the rest of the world. Total sales in India, Thailand and Indonesia were only 80,000 and accounted for only 3% of sales in Thailand and 1.5% in both India and Indonesia. (IEA Global EV Outlook 2023)
Total sales of ICEVs in 2022 were 64m of which 28.9m were SUVs(IEA Commentary 27th Feb 2023)
On the heat pump side there is no way that the government target of 600,00 installations a year from 2028 will happen. NESTA, formerly the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, now an independent charity has recently said that to meet the target it would require more engineers to be trained every year than currently exist in the whole industry.
Plus a recent ad by Fischer, a supplier of heat pumps and other heating systems, noted that the government plans to give out 30,000 vouchers annually managed only 9888 by the end of 2022 and that total installations annually are less than 40,000 and stated baldly that “As it stands, the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028 looks a long way off”
Sooner or later the politicians will have to recognise that their plans are not credible or even feasible.
For an effective start, why do people not revert to non-smart electricity meters? Start-up companies should be able to make older models very cheaply. Used smart meters could be sold back to suppliers.
I have a dumb meter by choice because I predicted plans to shut down my power – “demand management” – through smart meters.
Does anyone live in a control freak state where you are legally required to have a smart meter? Did you resist the passing of that law?
Time for ordinary folk like me to DO THINGS instead of merely blogging about them in futile sheeple hope. Geoff S
“why do people not revert to non-smart electricity meters”
Because [in the UK] the question is where could you get one? I have a dumb meter and they are not going to impose ‘a new controller’ on me
Eventually they’ll get everyone, making it financially difficult by charging extra, which the government will support, by making it compulsory when the bill payer changes, making it compulsory when you change supplier.
Civilisations fall when the people don’t or can’t support the government
What is really interesting is I received emails from Scottish Power telling me my meter was old and needed replacing for safety reasons and separate emails & phone calls offering to fit a free “smart” meter.
When I told them I didn’t want a smart meter, the emails telling me to replace my meter for safety reasons stopped.
Perhaps I should report Scottish Power to the ombudsman
They want it to be a legal obligation
I think in the UK domestic meters are by default swapped out every 10 years. Whether when that point is reached it’ll be possible to insist on having a new dumb meter I don’t know. I’ve been resisting the increasingly frequent ‘invitations’ by my supplier to have a smart meter fitted (apparently I’m ‘missing out’ by not having one), they’ve even started messaging me to say they’ve made an appointment to have one fitted, which I then have to waste time cancelling. But when the existing dumb meter is timed out there may be no choice in the matter.
Both main political parties in the UK are banking on technology they just don’t have – Carbon capture? Adequate storage or any at all? This is exactly the same lies and gobbledygook as they have tried to peddle with renewables all along – “we’ll just limp along for a bit, then a miracle happens and we’re all saved, Yay!” Both Labour and the Tories have no plans whatsoever to sort out this mess – they have a handful of activist ideas they’ve adopted as unworkable strategy but no clue how to integrate them into a workable plan let alone how to integrate them with what we have now. They’ve identified point A and point Z but every point in between is missing.
“every point in between is missing”
The climate reality chasm
Well said 100% correct .They are in fairy land and it is all around the world ..You would think that they would get the simple things done like maintaining roads and training enough doctors and nurses .
Here in New Zealand our main highways are full of pot holes and we have a medical crisis because of lack of staff in our hospitals .
But our green tainted government spend all their time worrying about our emissions when China have doubled their coal use since 2010 and probably their emissions by the same amount.
National Grid should be asked who is responsible for this nonsense. It is certainly not the Engineers! I suspect that this complete rubbish comes from a PR consultant who has zero idea of the consequences of the foolish statements contained, and cannot see the total disaster for Britain which these numbers predict. Power rationing in any form is simply idiotic, and suggesting this move to heat pumps is technically impossible without rewiring the country at a cost of £3Trillion (their own estimate), with immense disruption to every road, and the countryside with pylons. Each property has a possible supply of 2kW or less with the present distribution cables etc. It works because we may use a lot at odd times, but everyone does not at the same time. This is called diversity, which with heat pumps which need continuous power, cannot work. So simple a small child could understand, but PR or the Government? Very, very small children, and vastly overpaid at that!
“National Grid should be asked who is responsible for this nonsense”
That would be tantamount to open heresy. This is the narrative…
“One of Britain’s oldest onshore windfarms will soon be “repowered” so it can generate five times as much green electricity as it did in 1995 – with almost half as many turbines.”
And now the waffle…
“The owner of the Hagshaw Hill windfarm, ScottishPower, began dismantling 26 turbines on its site in rural South Lanarkshire on Wednesday. The renewables developer will replace the ageing turbines with 14 larger versions that use updated technology to generate renewable energy more efficiently.
The tip of each new turbine will stand at a height of about 200 metres (over 650ft), compared with the older turbines that had a height of 55 metres, according to ScottishPower. The windfarm will also be equipped with a battery storage facility of about 20 megawatts to help make better use of the green electricity.
The “repowering” project means the 16MW windfarm, which was the first commercial windfarm to operate in Scotland when it began generating 28 years ago, will have a capacity of 79MW once complete.”
[Green jobs…]
“Although Hagshaw is our oldest site, there were a number of windfarms built in the late 1990s which are coming to the end of their operational lives. We have a dozen more to repower over the next three or four years.”
The local community had been “really supportive” of the project, which would employ up to 100 people when work reached its peak
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/13/scottish-windfarm-built-in-1995-to-be-repowered-with-new-turbines
I know the narritive very well. It is basically a load of lies for PR reasons. BTW the Guardian deserves an award for the least reliable source of information which is actually true. It is so green I suspect they will change from black ink to green soon, hopefully on identically green paper too!
“The Guardian”
Built on the proceeds of slavery.
“The windfarm will also be equipped with a battery storage facility of about 20 megawatts to help make better use of the green electricity.”
Meaningless we need to know how many kettles and for how long. Don’t these people know anything about technical stuff?
Up to 100 people for a few months demolition and construction work, that really is a Green Jobs Bonanza
The wind farm is going to be “repowered” because the subsidies have run out. Of course, the correct term is not repower but resubsidise. The word repower is typical wind lobby propaganda.
Excellent point
So this wind farm has been generating electricity for 27 years.
Has it produced a profit to its owners without the subsidies paid by the government ?
It would be interesting if any one could find out.
I would point out that New Zealands oldest hydro power station Arapuni was commissioned in 1928 and with some upgrades is still producing electricity after 95 years..
I can remember being taken to Karapiro in 1948 to see the newly formed lake behind the Karapiro Dam 75 years ago and still producing electricity .
Some one here at WUWT tried to argue that hydro dams silted up and would not generate power after a certain time .
Just take a moment to think ,the water held behind a hydro dam generates power by pouring down through gates near the top of the dam to the power house situated below the dam .
Any silt deposited behind the dams will not effect power generation as water below the control gates cannot flow out..
It is amazing that it is impossible to obtain permission to build any new hydro stations in New Zealand but no problem to cover our hills with wind turbines that look like they wont even last 30 years .
How does that happen? Wind will produce ZERO unless there is at least a stiff breeze. Then, when there is a very strong wind they need to shut down to protect the turbines from self destructing. Before that , in technically good power production wind regime, they are PAID NOT TO PRODUCE because they do not have the grid capacity to transport that much energy but the wind companies are not at fault, so they have to be compensated.
This whole thing is a bureaucratic cluster fk !!!
Stiff breezes still start at about 7mph or 3m/s or 11kph
In the UK climate solar is a joke. Even in summer most brits will spend all the money they saved in a year to go spend 15 days in a country which actually HAS sun shine.
UK Met Office refuse to give hourly resolution sunlight hours unless you pay stupid money for the data collected by taxpayer funded scientists. But anyone who has lived in the UK knows you get a decent summer about once every 20 years. With “global warming” let’s hope they get a summer every 10y.
Available data shows about 240h per month in summer months, or 8h per day. Daylight hours are about 16h at that latitude in summer, so 50% of days have sun… in summer. How much of that falls between 11am and 3pm when your ( assumingly optimally placed PV ) is producing useful power ? On a clear day a static panel will produce about 4h of power since it produces much less when off axis.
So 50% of 50% =25% is your BEST CASE scenario for perfectly situated PV in UK … in the summer.
“brits will spend all the money they saved in a year to go spend 15 days in a country which actually HAS sun shine.”
There’s a scare for that:
“Warnings issued to tourists over European heatwave Cerberus as temperatures soar and worker dies
The thermometer could reach 48C in parts of Italy and Spain, while Greece will also face extreme heat, as holidaymakers jet off to the Mediterranean”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/european-heatwave-2023-italy-death-b2373934.html
However did the British get an empire?
“However did the British get an empire?”
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun 🙂
The Emperor has no clothes and The Government has no money, no significant plan and continues to throw money at The Dancing Angels
Read this: could it be any worse? (OBR= Office for Budget Responsibility)
“””In a report, the OBR said the 2020s were turning out to be a “very risky era for the public finances”.
“In just three years, they have been hit by the Covid pandemic in early 2020, the energy and cost-of-living crisis from mid-2021, and the sudden interest rate rises in 2022, whose consequences continue to unfold.”
It said these shocks had delivered the
“And they have pushed government borrowing to its highest level since the mid-1940s, the stock of government debt to its highest level since the early 1960s, and the cost of servicing that debt to its highest since the late 1980s.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66187743
“… The net zero target is met in 2050 with measures that have a greater impact on consumers and is driven by higher levels of consumer engagement. They will have made extensive changes to improve their home’s energy efficiency…”
The error/misunderstanding/assumption/arrogance/conceit (as you will) here is that customers are as obsessed with this scam and give an sh1t.
From article”…most of their electricity demand will be smartly controlled to provide flexibility to the system.”
Here is the salient point in all this. Someone other than the consumer will control when and how much energy you can use/get.
The word “flexibility” shows up in both scenarios. That is the operative here. And not your flexibility.
The adiabatic flame temperature of hydrogen is around 250C/482F higher than methane. Existing turbines would likely exceed the yield point for some components and self-destruct. You could do it by providing a lot more excess air to cool the flame, but that requires robbing horsepower (watts) from the turbine to drive the compressor, so you would see an efficiency loss.
Heat pumps? Correct me if I’m wrong but wouldn’t the least energy waste be in 100% electrical resistance heat? Nothing going up the stack, no moving parts except for a possible blower fan. In fact, electrical resistance heat would be immensely popular if the cost of electricity wasn’t substantially more than natural gas or even heating oil for BTUs produced. In ordinary circumstances in the US very few homes are heated by electrical resistance heat, the most efficient option, because it’s simply much more expensive than fossil fuels. I know. I tear out baseboard electrical heat systems and replace them with gas boilers, the most economical and comfortable option. Heat pumps are even more expensive.
Aren’t you forgetting the 50% or so population reduction lessening demand?
This is all nonsense, this has to stop the very first step needs to be shutting down efforts like this.