from the EIGEN VALUES Substack
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Carl Sagan
Summary
The Royal Society (RS) has recently released its Large-Scale Electricity Storage report that says we can provide the electricity we need using wind and solar power supported by large-scale hydrogen storage. The report makes some extraordinary claims that are interrogated by this report that also seeks to find the extraordinary evidence required to validate their claims. One positive aspect of the RS report is the painstaking analysis of the variations in wind and solar power we might expect over yearly and decadal timescales that drive the need for a very large energy store. The RS report also effectively rules out batteries as a viable alternative as a large-scale energy store.
However, the positive parts of the report stop there. They begin by assuming that electricity demand will be 570TWh in 2050 that represents roughly halving the energy demand across residential, transport and industrial and commercial categories. The evidence from Our World in Data shows that rich economies require high energy consumption to thrive. There are no rich countries with low energy consumption and those countries that have reduced energy consumption have grown more slowly, or even shrunk. The first extraordinary claim of low energy consumption fails because the evidence shows that if we allow that to happen, we will be much poorer.
The report then goes on to assume that the profile of electricity demand will be the same as today. However, as we move from gas to electricity to heat our homes and offices, the winter surge in electricity demand will be further exaggerated. Moreover, demand will change from year to year such as during the cold winter in 2010 that also coincided with a calm period when we would have generated much less renewable electricity. These variations in demand profile will lead to more generation capacity and an even bigger energy store than RS assumes, pushing up costs.
On the supply-side, the report assumes unrealistic load factors for both onshore and offshore wind. They assume that the installed capacity in 2050 will have load factors far higher than has been achieved so far. Even allowing for some technological improvements, the capacity they need to meet their low generation target will need to increase by at least 20%. This would mean a sizeable increase in the capital costs of generation to deliver their plan, pushing up the costs of wind power very significantly. In fact, the costs they assume for renewable electricity generation are three or four times lower than we pay today through Contracts for Difference (CfDs) and Feed-in-Tariffs (FiTs) and are very much lower than achieved in the latest auction round. Using more realistic assumptions about generation costs would double their weighted average generation cost to around £90/MWh.
The RS report calls for 112GW of offshore wind capacity. As discussed above, this is too low to meet their generation target which is also too low. However, low generation capacity estimate is undeliverable. Extrapolating current offshore development trends shows nearly two thirds of their offshore wind capacity target would remain unbuilt by 2050.
The report then goes on to assume efficiencies and costs for hydrogen electrolysers, storage and generation that do not stand up to scrutiny. The efficiencies are based on high-end projections of what might be achieved by 2050. These would be an enormous stretch to achieve and even if they were, the average of the installed fleet in 2050 is bound to have a lower efficiency. These lower realised efficiencies will push up the costs dramatically. They also assume no leakage of hydrogen stored underground at high pressure for a up to a decade. Assuming some leakage would push up costs further. The individual costings are all based on estimates produced before the latest inflationary surge that has pushed up the costs of everything which means the costs in today’s terms are far too optimistic. Again, even if their costs are achievable by 2050, much of the infrastructure will have to be built using today’s cost base which will push up the average dramatically.
The base-case for their financial assessment assumes a risible 5% cost of capital, lower than the current base rate. Even their sensitivity analysis that uses a 10% cost of capital is probably way too low. Investors are going to require rates of return of 15% or more to invest in immature technologies that will only ever have low load factors. It is likely that using more realistic efficiency estimates and costs of capital will at least double their base case estimates for their proposed hydrogen system.
After all that effort, the system they propose will have a very low energy return on energy invested (EROEI), meaning we will spend more than a quarter of our gross energy to produce the energy we need to live. Throughout human history, we have increased EROEI which has allowed us to thrive. This proposal takes us back to Iron Age times.
Even if their proposed energy system would produce enough to ensure a thriving society and the costs were realistic the report overlooks the human factors that would be required to deliver it. We would need thousands more skilled engineers that would not be available from abroad, because those countries would need them to complete their own projects.
Overall, the report starts with an unrealistically low estimate of future electricity demand which itself is an undesirable outcome. It then goes on to add its own unrealistic claims about the cost and efficiency of hydrogen electrolysers, storage and generation using a risible base case 5% cost of capital. In essence, the report expects us to believe we can deliver lots more renewable energy and a complete hydrogen ecosystem in 2050 for about the same as the cost per MWh of renewables in this year’s renewable auction. It’s a fantasy.
Even if it were deliverable, we would end up with an energy system near the bottom of the energy cliff producing about half the energy we need to run a modern society. It is simply not credible. The extraordinary evidence to support their extraordinary claims simply does not exist. Quite the contrary, there is a plenty of evidence that their claims are a fairy tale. Because the RS report also effectively rules out batteries as the energy storage medium to support intermittent renewables, the entire renewables project should be scrapped.
Introduction
The Royal Society recently released its Large Scale Electricity Storage report authored by Professor Chris Llewellyn-Smith saying we can meet our demand for electricity with wind and solar, supported by large-scale hydrogen storage. They claim that the cost of this approach “compares very favourably” with the cost of low-carbon alternatives. To get to their conclusions, they make some heroic assumptions and make some extraordinary claims about energy demand, generation capacity, the costs of renewables and the cost of storage required to meet net zero targets. This article examines their claims and seeks to find the extraordinary evidence required to validate their assertions.
What is good about the Royal Society Large-Scale Electricity Storage Report
Before diving into the significant weaknesses in the RS report, we should spend a little time focusing on the main positive aspect of the report. The thing that stands out most is the painstaking analysis that has been conducted to understand the very significant changes in the weather that occur on yearly and decadal timescales. They analysed wind and solar records over 37 years to estimate the level of variation we might expect from wind power. They found that we can sometimes have several consecutive years where the wind speed is lower than average. This means that if we are to have a grid powered solely by wind, solar and storage, then we need to build up massive stores of energy in the windy years to be used in the calmer years. They conclude that to consistently deliver their 570TWh of electricity each year, we would need 123TWh of hydrogen storage. Some of that hydrogen may have to be stored for a decade or more before it is used. This has important implications for the economics of storage and effectively rules out batteries as the storage medium. Who would want to spend millions on building a battery or hydrogen storage cavern, even more to fill it and maintain it, yet not see any revenue from it for years after it was completed?
Royal Society Electricity Demand Estimate
Now on to the significant weaknesses. The first thing to look at is the expected demand for electricity in 2050. The report settles on 570TWh as their estimate of demand. This is higher than the 518TWh they claim to be in the 2022 FES report, but lower than the 672TWh in the higher demand scenario of the Government’s 2020 modelling of 2050 electricity demand.
There are several problems with this as a starting point for 2050 electricity demand. First, the 2022 FES report has total electricity demand of 598-810TWh for Residential, Industrial & Commercial and Transport across their Net Zero scenarios for 2050. All these scenarios are higher, some much higher, than the 518TWh assumed in the RS report. These scenarios are much lower than other estimates for a largely nuclear-powered grid in 2050. This report arrived at 1,081TWh based on less optimistic assumptions of the efficiency gains to come from electric vehicles and heat pumps as well as allowing for economic growth and an increase in the population. For reasons discussed below, this estimate may be too low. 1,081TWh is well below the implied 1,338TWh 2050 electricity consumption target suggested by Professor Sir David MacKay set out in Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air (SEWTHA) in 2008. Table 1 below compares scenarios from different sources.
Second, this matters because there is a strong positive correlation between per capita energy consumption and per capita GDP. There are no rich countries with low energy use (see Figure 1).
Halving our per capita energy use would put us on a par with countries like Mexico, Brazil, Algeria and Paraguay, all very much poorer countries. To justify halving per capita energy consumption, we need some extraordinary evidence to demonstrate it is a sustainable proposition. Indeed, as Figure 2 (again from Our World in Data) shows there is a strong correlation between reductions in per capita energy consumption and slow growth (or even shrinking economies) on a per capita basis).
To further illustrate the extreme assumptions used to arrive at the overall demand figure, the RS report assumes that we will use only 96TWh of electricity for heat and 119TWh for transport (see p17 of the report). By contrast, according to DUKES Table 4.1.1, domestic consumers and service companies used 410TWh of gas in 2021, the vast majority for heat. Industry used a further 190TWh, probably mostly in industrial processes. Even if we ignore the industrial gas, they appear to be assuming a >4-fold improvement in efficiency from the switch to heat pumps. We might expect heat pumps to perform that well in mild weather, but when it is cold and you need your central heating on, the performance gain will only be around 2.5. It looks like they are planning for us to be cold in winter.
According to DUKES Table 3.2 we used 10,941kt of petrol and 21,228kt of diesel for road transport in 2022. This works out at about 392TWh of energy. The Royal Society is assuming we need only 119TWh of electricity for road transport in 2050, a reduction by a factor of 3.3 assuming no growth in mileage. There is likely to be an improvement in energy efficiency by switching to EVs because electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines. However, comparing the official figures for the VW ID3 to diesel and petrol VW Golfs, shows ratio improvements of 2.4 to 3 respectively and that does not include losses in transmission and charging the battery which might be of the order 5-10%. The RS assumptions look more than a little ambitious to say the least.
It looks like the starting assumption of electricity demand is off by a factor of two. This is important, because that means they will need around twice the generating capacity and roughly twice the storage capacity they have estimated. Now let us look at some of the other assumptions.
Unrealistic Profile of Demand
The Royal Society Large Scale Electricity Storage report recognises that demand for electricity varies with the seasons. They use a model from engineering consultancy AFRY to profile the shape of demand on an hour-by-hour basis. The example they show in Figure 3 below (their Figure 1) uses demand from 1992 scaled up to the 570TWh they expect to deliver each year.
As you can see, they expect demand in July to be around 60GW each day and demand in January to be around 33% higher at around 80GW per day. However, by simply using the current electricity demand profile as their template for the future, they have ignored even larger seasonal variations in demand for gas. Of course, we use far more gas in the winter because that is when we have the central heating on. This is illustrated well in one of their references, the H21 North of England report (p15) as seen in Figure 4.
This shows gas demand varying by a factor of five or six from around 480GWh per day (20GW) in summer to 2,400-3,000GWh per day (100-125GW) in winter. Electricity demand varies from around 600GWh per day (25GW) in summer to 960GWh per day (40GW) in winter. Transport demand is relatively stable around 1,440GWh per day (60GW). Total demand is varying from ~105GW in summer to ~210GW in winter or roughly doubling, far more than the 33% increase they assume. The H21 exaggerates the problem somewhat because some of the energy is double counted because some of the gas is also used for electricity generation. However, even after stripping out gas used for that and assuming efficiency improvements from heat pumps and EVs, there will be larger seasonal variations than they have allowed for. This means they will need more wind and hydrogen generation capacity and possibly more electrolyser capacity than they estimate to meet peak demand.
To further illustrate this point, current peak electricity demand in winter is around 45GW. Consider that 24m homes with an average 12kW heat pump operating at a COP of 2.5 on a cold mid-winter night would generate a peak demand of 115GW. That is a total of 160GW without even considering EV charging or the electrification of industrial heat. The AFRY model they use assumes a peak demand of 98.4GW and they plan for 100GW of hydrogen generators to cover it. That is clearly not enough.
Inter-Annual Demand Variation
An additional wrinkle in the RS analysis is that they appear to be assuming that demand is consistent from year to year. Whereas, when domestic and commercial heating are electrified, demand will be much higher in cold years and lower in mild years. This is illustrated in Figure 4 above when the “Beast from the East” pushed up gas demand to around 150GW. Moreover, according to the Met Office Winter 2010 was a very cold year and both 2009 and 2011 were below average. In the RS model, weather conditions meant generation would have been low in the years 2009-2011 consuming most of the store, assuming flat demand (see Figure 5).
It is likely that there was above average heat demand from 2009-11, with exceptional demand in 2010. If variable demand is considered, it is highly likely that the store would have been depleted, implying they need to model for a larger store. They will likely also need more renewable and hydrogen generation capacity to meet the exceptional peak demand. Both these factors will of course increase costs.
Over-Optimistic Electricity Generation Assumptions
To meet their estimate of 570TWh of demand, the RS report says we would need 200GW of installed generation capacity split 80% wind (160GW) and 20% solar (40GW). The wind component would be 70% offshore (112GW) and 30% onshore (48GW). They expect this generation mix to produce on average 741TWh each year. This is more than demand, but because the supply profile of wind and solar do not match demand, storage is required and extra energy must be produced to account for the roundtrip losses in making hydrogen, storing it and then burning it to produce electricity. They assume 89.4GW of electrolyser power to make hydrogen and 100GW of generation capacity to burn it will be necessary. Note that 100GW of hydrogen generation is more than double the current thermal installed generation capacity. They also assume 123TWh of hydrogen storage capacity will be needed as well as possibly compressed air storage which is discussed further below.
Now let us go through the assumptions they have made about the load factors and efficiencies of the different components. They have used load factors for wind and taken from the 2020 BEIS Generation Costs report. Plugging in 57% for offshore wind, 34% for onshore wind and 11% for solar gives the 741TWh average generation they are seeking. However, the estimates of load factors for wind do not bear any resemblance to what has been achieved in practice. According to Energy Trends T6.1, Over the past five years offshore wind has delivered 41.0% and onshore wind 26.4% average load factors. The load factors achieved for solar are slightly below 11% but are close enough to ignore.
Various experts have predicted big increases in load factors for new developments, but these do not seem to have materialised in practice. Moreover, to achieve such high average load factors, the new installations will have to achieve load factors close to the Government’s even more ridiculous higher estimates for 2050 covered here.
Allowing for some technological improvement by assuming the 2050 installed base has average 45% and 30% load factors for offshore and onshore wind respectively, the installed generation capacity would have to increase by more than 20% to ~243GW to meet their 741TWh average target. Even this assumption might be ambitious because there is strong evidence from another GWPF report that load factors decline with age, so the lifetime average may well be lower than this assumption. The load factors above mean 136GW of offshore wind, 58GW of onshore and 49GW of solar would be needed to meet their production target. This would represent a sizeable increase in the capital costs required to deliver their plan. The extra capacity required to deliver the same output will also push up the cost of wind power very significantly (see below).
The other curious thing is that they fail to explain how their planned 40GW of installed solar capacity manages to produce peak output of nearly 80GW on many days in July (see Figure 1). There is clearly some other hidden flaw in their modelling.
Generation Cost Fantasy
The Royal Society Large-Scale Electricity Storage report uses a weighted average of ~£45/MWh (their Figure 24) in 2021 money as their base cost of wind and solar supply (including transmission costs). This compares to the actual results of ~£70/MWh for onshore wind and £63/MWh for solar (both in 2023 money) awarded in AR5. Currently, we pay ~£177/MWh for offshore wind CfDs and £110/MWh for onshore. The average FiT price which is mostly solar was £196/MWh in 2022 with current solar CfDs £106/MWh in 2023 money. Of course, no offshore wind was awarded in AR5, so we have to estimate the costs for projects with near term delivery. The Government’s 2023 estimates of the future Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) were taken apart here. In summary, the Government had ignored the increasing costs of turbines and rising interest rates as well as making unrealistic assumptions about load factors. That analysis arrived at a more realistic estimated cost of ~£130/MWh for offshore wind. Even if that estimate was wrong, it is clear that offshore wind costs are well above the ~£55/MWh in 2023 money suggested by the Government in the AR5 auction.
Plainly, the weighted average base generation cost of wind and solar is far higher than estimated in this report. By using the costs of onshore wind and solar in AR5 and estimating £100/MWh for offshore wind (in-line with Aldersey-Williams et al 2019), the weighted average generation cost doubles from their estimate to ~£90/MWh.
Deliverability of Generation Capacity in the Royal Society Large-Scale Electricity Storage Report
Figure 6 below compares the evolution of actual installed capacity of offshore wind, onshore wind and solar to the 2050 targets set in the RS report.
The targets in the RS report call for 112GW of offshore wind capacity shown by the green square which is more than eight times the current 14GW capacity shown by the solid green line. The dotted green line extrapolates the linear trend of installed capacity since 2009. If this trend continues, we might get to ~40GW by 2050, about 72GW short of the target. Even if the sites for these wind farms could be found, it is very unlikely that the rate of installation could be increased to meet this target, especially when one considers that most of the existing fleet will need to be replaced by 2050 too.
With a bit of luck, we might achieve their targets for onshore wind and solar. However, this requires finding sites for these developments and persuading communities to blight their local landscapes and change the use of good agricultural land from food production to electricity production.
However, this generation capacity is only sufficient to meet the relatively meagre annual demand of 570TWh using their optimistic load factors. Using more realistic load factors as discussed above would put offshore wind further beyond reach and make the onshore wind and solar targets much less achievable. To provide the more realistic amount of energy discussed above, the generation capacity will have to at least double to meet 1,081TWh of demand with realistic load factors. There is no chance at all of any of the technologies meeting those targets.
Hydrogen System Costs
Over long timescales, there are large variations in the expected output of wind and solar. This is true on daily, seasonal and multi-annual timescales. To meet demand on a minute-by-minute basis, there needs to be a large storage capacity that can be used to generate dispatchable power. The Royal Society Large Scale Storage report acknowledges there will be a need for very short-term storage in the form of batteries, possibly slightly longer-term storage in the form of Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (ACAES) with the vast majority of storage provided by hydrogen in underground caverns. These will be filled in years with above average supply and used up in the leaner years. They have calculated that we will need 123TWh of hydrogen storage capacity to manage these inter-year variations in supply. The calculations supporting this requirement appear to be robust, except for again, they are based upon the low overall electricity demand of 570TWh making no allowance for inter-annual variations in demand. Approximately twice the amount of storage will be required to meet the larger estimate of demand discussed above.
Capex for Hydrogen Components
The capex requirements for electrolysers, storage and generators appear to have been understated. The RS capex estimates for electrolysers of $450/kW in 2050 are at the low end of IEA predictions for 2050 of $200-900/kW. They are also far lower than the current costs of $1,100-1,800/kWh that the IEA estimates. The IEA predictions for 2050 are based on a study from 2018 which is well before the recent inflationary wave and increase in interest rates. It is therefore likely that the estimated capex requirement for the electrolysers is far too low. Even if those cost estimates are met, the average cost of the fleet in 2050 is bound to be much higher.
Similarly, the H21 report used as the source for storage capex is from 2018 so again does not factor in the inflationary surge since 2020.
The RS report assumed £315/kWe (~$400/kWe) capex for four-stroke hydrogen-fired electricity generation is much lower than that achieved in two of the non-hydrogen projects it cites. The 76MW Goodman Energy Centre project in Kansas cost $62m which gives a cost of $816/kWe in 2008 dollars, more than twice the estimate in the RS report. After the recent inflationary surge and even allowing for some technological improvement, these costs are likely higher in 2023 money. Moreover, the 2014 600MW IPP3 project in Jordan cost $800m or $1,333/kW, more than three times the RS estimate.
It is obvious that the capex estimates in the report are far too optimistic.
Hydrogen System Efficiency
There are also significant concerns about the efficiency assumptions for the electrolysers and 4-stroke engines they plan to use to make the hydrogen and generate electricity. They assume 74% efficiency for the electrolysers. The RS report itself says the efficiency of Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) electrolysers is currently 40-67% (IRENA) or 55-60% (IEA). IRENA predicts electrolysers to hit >74% efficiency by 2050 and IEA expects 67-74% efficiency by that date. It is foolhardy to expect the full 89GW of electrolyser capacity to achieve the top-end efficiency estimates in 2050. First, these are just projections, not actual measured results and second, the fleet will have to be built over a prolonged period of time so even if the units installed in 2050 achieve the projections, the average efficiency is bound to be lower. Moreover, powering electrolysers using intermittent energy degrades their performance which will lead to lower efficiencies and probably shorter useful lives. Assuming more realistic efficiencies and shorter operating lives will increase the size of fleet required and of course significantly increase the capex and unit cost of hydrogen produced.
The RS report also assumes the generators producing electricity from the stored hydrogen is 55%. This derived from a projection published by McKinsey that shows the maximum expected efficiency of such four-stroke engines might be 55% at close to full load. However, this 2023 study suggests that a 12l V12 high-compression hydrogen engine for use in locomotives might achieve a peak efficiency of 46%. The Kansas project discussed above indicates an efficiency of 44.2%. It is unlikely that the generators will be operating at optimum load conditions at all times because they will have to vary their output according to changes in demand. Again, it seems overly optimistic to assume 55% efficiency based on just one projection when others show significantly lower results. More realistic efficiency assumptions will lead to higher costs because more hydrogen will be needed to produce the required amount of electrical energy.
Finally, they plan to store the hydrogen in underground salt caverns at 300bar and assume such caverns are gas tight. This is already carried out on a small scale for short-term storage of hydrogen at chemical plants. However, hydrogen is a tiny molecule that can diffuse through most things. Even if such a cavern is gas-tight for methane or air, it is difficult to believe that such caverns will be able to seal hydrogen at such high pressures for up to a decade without some leakage. This study from Gaffney Cline suggests leakage rates in the range 2-18%. However, the period over which that leakage is measured is not clear. They do suggest that the risk of leakage from salt caverns is lower than from other rocks such as depleted gas fields.
If there is any leakage at all, and there is bound to be, that will reduce overall system efficiency and lead to increased costs as well as potential safety concerns.
Cost of Capital
Throughout the report, they assume a default cost of capital of 5%. With the Bank of England base rate currently sitting at 5.25%, this is a risible assumption. They also discuss the impact of a 10% cost of capital. This increase in interest rates leads to the costs of making, storing and burning hydrogen going up by ~50% and pushes up the cost of ACAES significantly.
The technologies to be used in the proposed electrolysers, storage facilities and generators is immature and the planned load factors are very low. Therefore, even a 10% cost of capital is probably not enough to compensate for the level of risk being taken. An estimate of 11% current cost of capital for offshore wind was derived from the premium over long bond rates in the Government’s different Generation Cost reports. Offshore wind is a relatively mature technology whereas these hydrogen technologies are not. It would not be surprising to see investors demanding returns of 15% or more before supporting such projects. Of course, this would push the costs up even more dramatically, probably more than doubling their estimates at 5% cost of capital.
Of course, increased interest rates also push up the costs of wind and solar generation, but they have already been accounted for in the discussion above.
System EROEI
One thing missing from the Royal Society Large Scale Electricity Storage report is any discussion about Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI). The importance of EROEI is discussed here. Weissbach calculated the EROEI of various generation technologies in his seminal paper from 2014. Wind without backup had an EROEI of ~16 and solar at German latitudes 3.9. He then adjusted these figures to take account of the buffering or storage required to enable these technologies to deliver power on demand. The buffered EROEI of wind and solar was calculated at 3.9 and 1.6 respectively. The buffering technology he used was hydro power. There is no data specifically about the EROEI of wind and solar buffered by hydrogen. There is reason to believe it maybe even lower than Weissbach calculated because the embedded energy in 89GW of electrolyser capacity, 123TWh of storage caverns and 100GW of hydrogen-fuelled generation capacity will be very large and these systems will not generate any more net energy from the primary wind and solar sources.
Using Weissbach’s calculated buffered EROEI figures for wind and solar, the weighted average EROEI for the whole system is around 3.8. This and estimates of the EROEI of the grid in 1998, 2008 and 2021 as well as the Leading the Way scenario in the latest National Grid FES report and the nuclear dominated plan for 2050 are plotted on Figure 7 below.
As can be seen, the Royal Society plan takes us a very long way down the energy cliff, where we are spending more than a quarter of our gross energy to produce the net energy we need to live. This is well below the economic threshold of seven assumed by Weissbach. This alone should consign the Royal Society plan to the dustbin of history.
Overall Costs Understated
Section 8 of the report pulls it all together and arrives at estimated overall system costs of electricity in 2050 using wind, solar and largely hydrogen storage supplemented by 15GWh of battery storage to maintain grid stability as shown in Figure 8 (their Figure 24).
This results in an estimate of the full system costs of electricity at ~£52-62/MWh with a 5% cost of capital and the weighted average cost of base wind and solar generation in 2021 prices of £30.20/MWh. At the top end of estimates, full system costs are in the range ~£78-92/MWh with a 10% cost of capital and base generation costs of £45/MWh. The 10% cost of capital does not seem to have been applied to the weighted average cost of the base renewable power.
This report essentially says the full system cost of electricity including all the base renewable generation, hydrogen electrolysis, transport, storage, backup generation, transmission and batteries will be less than the costs achieved in AR5 in most scenarios and in most cases, cheaper than gas-fired generation today. It is a fantasy.
The models they use are very complex and it is too difficult to propagate more realistic assumptions on extra capacity, increased capex, lower load factors, higher leakage rates, lower efficiencies and higher interest rates throughout. Realistic costs of the base renewable generation would double the starting baseline of £45/MWh and more realistic assumptions about the true cost of hydrogen production, storage and generation would likely at least double too. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say the actual costs would be at least double the numbers they estimate for a 10% cost of capital and £45/MWh renewable generation. This would put the total system costs over £180/MWh.
Even that would be undeliverable because there is very little chance of expanding offshore wind generation at the rate required.
Human Factors
Aside from the technical and financial flaws in the Royal Society report another set of considerable difficulties need to be overcome, namely the human resources required to deliver the engineering reality. Each billion pounds of project costs will require approximately 1,000 person years of professional engineering time. Most of these engineers will have to be home produced because we cannot take them from their home countries where they will be needed to reach their own net zero targets. The materials requirements for the global net zero project will require more than a tenfold increase in the mining of key materials (including the rare earth metals) requiring even more professional engineers. The sequencing of the projects is critical, as this extra electricity needs to be available at least as fast as the deployment of electric vehicles and heat pumps. Finally, all this needs buy-in from the public, and for a start, the planning delays will thwart even the start of the projects.
Conclusions
The starting point for the Royal Society Large-Scale Electricity report is Government and NGO plans for an energy scarce world in 2050. The evidence from Our World in Data shows this will likely lead to lower GDP per capita and thus lower living standards which is clearly an undesirable outcome. This base assumption is then buttressed by flaky Government estimates of the future cost of renewable energy. These estimates are based on unrealistic assumptions of turbine costs, load factors and the costs of capital.
The report then adds its own unrealistic assumptions about the cost and efficiency of electrolysers, storage and generation technologies and its base case uses a risible 5% cost of capital. Even their 10% cost of capital sensitivity analysis is probably too low. In essence the report expects us to believe we can deliver lots more renewable energy and a complete hydrogen ecosystem in 2050 for about the same as the cost per MWh of renewables in this year’s AR5.
Even if it were deliverable, we would end up with an energy system near the bottom of the energy cliff producing about half the energy we need to run a modern society. It is simply not credible.
The RS report shows the dangers of “official” figures propagating from one institution to another in a daisy chain. The thing is daisy chains are pretty but very fragile. Hopefully, this article has exposed that fragility and demonstrated the extraordinary evidence required to support their extraordinary claims is simply not there. Quite the contrary, there is a plenty of evidence that their claims are a fairy tale. The Royal Society report shows that their vision of 2050 does not quite violate the first law of thermodynamics, but it goes on to break all the basic tenets of sound engineering. Because the RS report also effectively rules out batteries as the energy storage medium to support intermittent renewables, the entire renewables project should be scrapped.
Brilliant article. Very long, but it needed to be because it had a lot of ground to cover.
The RS should be embarrassed at the inadequacy of its report. Here is a report I have prepared for the RS as a full replacement:
Our non-transport energy needs for 2050 and beyond are likely to be three or more times higher than today’s, and they can all be met using nuclear energy. There is sufficient uranium to last for centuries, which is plenty of time for new technologies to be developed. Transport can continue to transition to electric power. This will reduce demand for fossil fuels, and this in turn will mean that fossil fuels will also last for centuries while new technologies are developed.
Despite its motto the RS is a fully paid up member of the MMCGW cult. Nothing it says on the subject can be relied on.
In cahoots with the BBC
MMCGW = Michael Mann Catastrophic Global Warming
Correct, it’s just another part of the globalist cabal
Add a couple of graphs and it’s perfect. (All experts have graphs.)
Not all, some have models
The report is very useful, because it exposes the wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen folly in some detail
Here is one aspect.
At present, owners of offshore wind projects want a return on invested capital of at least 10%.
Bank loans for risky projects are at least 6.5%, home mortgages for people with good credit are at 7.5%
Those rates will be with us for quite some time, because the world’s savings rate is too low, and printing more money and additional deficit spending is completely unacceptable
That means a major diversion of scarce investable funds to the highest SUBSIDIZED bidders of INEFFICIENT electricity production, if the folly of wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen is continued.
THIS FOLLY IS A GUARANTEED RECIPE FOR GOING BACKWARDS.
Luckily, the rest of the world is paying lip service to climate nonsense
Payments to owners and banks will be at least 20 c/kWh, fixed as the years go by
O&M will be at least 8 c/kWh in 2023, more as the years go by
All other costs will be at least 4 c/kWh, in 2023, more as the years go by
Toal cost 32 c/kWh in 2023, more as the years go by
This 32c/kWh number does not account for the decrease of capacity factor, and the extra increase in O&M, and the extra decrease of production, as the years go by
Government financial gimmicks pay owners 16 c/kWh
Utilities pay owners 16 c/kWh
The 16 c/kWh is what most owners tell US federal and state governments they need to get paid to be viable; some want 19 c/kWh
The 2023 UK auction received ZERO bid from offshore wind developers, which means the UK subsidies need to be INCREASED to at least as high as US subsidies to get any bids.
At present, Whitehall bureaucrats have their heads buried in the sand, with stiff upper lip, hoping it all will somehow blow over. A hopeless bunch of nuts, that believed its own propaganda
The 32 c/kWh also does not account for:
1) the exponentially increasing cost of counteracting/balancing/curtailments, which were about 2 c/kWh in 2020, with 28% wind/solar fed to the grid, much higher with 50% wind/solar, plus
2) the cost of grid expansion/augmentation to connect all those wind and solar systems; never call the farms!!
Here is proof, the New York State bureaucrats are just as dense as the Whitehall bureaucrats
Owners want a return on their investment of at least 10%/y, when bank loans and long-term CDs are 6.5%/y.
The 3.5% is about a minimum for all the years of hassles of designing, building, erecting, and paperwork of a project
Below contract prices, paid by Utilities to owners, are after 50% US subsidies, which are provided, per various laws, by the US Treasury to the owners. See Items 4 and 6
Oersted, Denmark, Sunrise wind, NYS estimate $110.37/MWh, needs $139.99/MWh, a 27% increase
Equinor, Norway, Empire 1 wind, NYS estimate $118.38/MWh, needs $159.64/MWh, a 35% increase
Equinor, Norway, Empire 2 wind, NYS estimate $107.50/MWh, needs $177.84/MWh, a 66% increase
Equinor, Norway, Beacon Wind, NYS estimate $118.00/MWh, needs $190.82/MWh, a 62% increase
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/liars-lies-exposed-as-wind-electricity-price-increases-by-66-wake
US/UK 66,000 MW OF OFFSHORE WIND BY 2030; AN EXPENSIVE FANTASY
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/biden-30-000-mw-of-offshore-wind-systems-by-2030-a-total-fantasy
This URL has an image of exponentially increasing counteracting/balancing/curtailments cost and grid expansion/augmentation cost.
Together they are called “wind/solar integration costs”
IRENA, a European Renewables Proponent, Ignores the Actual Cost Data for Offshore Wind Systems in the UK
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/irena-a-european-renewables-proponent-ignores-the-actual-cost
“A hopeless bunch of nuts, that believed its own propaganda” that perfectly describes the problem of the green movement – it was never driven by “the science ” but by the propaganda.
The problem is that this was never intended to be an engineering report. Rather it’s job is to provide enough political cover so that the scam can last a few more years. The politicians haven’t completely drained the victim dry yet.
There’s enough uranium for a millennia or two. Not that we need it, we have enough coal and gas for several centuries.
Excellent on a first reading. Need to work through it carefully. This looks to be exactly what should have been done before the UK political establishment ever committed the UK to Net Zero.
As to the substance of the piece: yes, it is completely absurd to suppose you can run the UK at 45GW peak demand on 160GW faceplate of wind. Based on current performance, as available to anyone from either of the gridwatch sites, there will be two or three episodes when wind produces less than 15% of faceplate for a week or ten days. And some tens of days when it produces less than 1.5%.
http://www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk (gives free downloads of data)
This year’s minimum: 0.071 GW
Last year’s minimum: 0.141 GW
This is from, as the piece says, 28GW of wind faceplate split about evenly between on-shore and off-shore.
It is even more absurd to suppose you can move transport to EVs and heating to heat pumps from 160GW. As the author says, figure how much energy is being used for this now. This, adjusted for efficiency gains, is what you are going to have to provide from wind. And provide it when its needed, not on average. Electrifying has to double or triple demand. Think about EVs in winter for a moment. They are less efficient, and they need power for heating and defrosting. You are going to end up with 100GW+ in demand, and trying to meet it from 160GW facelplate of wind, which will only deliver on average about 25% of faceplate, or 40GW. Its impossible.
In January or February there will be the usual blocking high, and wind generation will be close to nothing on some days and below 15% of faceplate for a week or ten days. The result of trying for Net Zero will be a nationwide blackout, and recovery from it will take a week or more. This will not happen just once a year in the winter. Its going to happen repeatedly, as wind generation falls close to zero time and time again.
Ther only way in which the electric society can be produced is quietly to install lots of gas generation. Wikipedia says there are currently 32 active gas fired combined cycle power plants operating in the United Kingdom, which have a total generating capacity of 28.0 GW. Raise it to 100-150GW and you might have a chance.
This is abandoning Net Zero. But if you look at the numbers, Net Zero is impossible anyway. You cannot run a modern industrial society on electricity that goes out repeatedly. And the data shows there is no way to get to reliable, usable supply from wind.
I’m not sure that 28.0GW isn’t a very large underestimate of all “renewables”. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation the installed base was 48,575MW in 2022. This is roughly the same as 14GW onshore wind, and 14GW off shore and 15GW Solar which various web searches give as the UK totals. Add in Biomass, Hydro and various sorts of bio-gas systems and you get the REF total as they do.
The REF site also says that this lot produced 77,995GWh of electricity in 2022. I make the theoretical maximum for 48.575GW over a year as 425,517Gwh giving 18% of maximum.
@Nick Stokes I know that this would improve if instead of paying renewables not to generate the surplus was put into some theoretical form of storage but in a non-FF country it’s a big job to get enough production and storage. Don’t say tidal because REF data says that’s 10% output v theoretical
There is also the small but cumulatively very large issue that all rose coloured projections of renewables ignores, and that is the fact that the efficiency of both wind turbines and solar panels drops by at least 1% per annum. Over a twenty five year projected life span this cannot be ignored in calculating requirements of installed capacity (or return on investment, as will be discovered the hard way by current investors).
Solar is irrelevant to the problem because there is none in the UK between November and February. If you want to do Net Zero, there have to be several winter months when all you have is wind. So the question remains, what do you do when wind produces less than 15% of faceplate for a week or ten days? Or when it produces only a couple of percent of faceplate for some individual days?
The answer is, if you are faking it, you turn on the gas. If you are a die-hard fanatic, you have nationwide blackouts and a week or so to recover and get the power turned back on. And pray that another day of no wind happens while you are doing it.
…sorry, pray a day of no wind does NOT happen while you are doing it…
Which it could, of course. These things happen when they want to. And if you are recovering your grid from a cold start, predicting them is not going to help. What you need is for them not to happen.
I’d rather the climerati get their way and plunge the west into rolling power outages, rationing, excess cold weather mortality rates, increased poverty & hunger etc etc – it really is the only way this idiocy is going to end
I fear that may be true, but even worse the political class will get away with it, always blaming the climate boogie-man. All parties have drunk the Kool-Aid and so we could be plunged into poverty and dispare, but that is fine for the politicos because they are always looking for issues to champion – basically they make work for themselves.
Think about this: most governments make noises about attacking poverty, but none actually inact policies to increase wealth – they just increase handouts and of course the taxes that pay for that, thereby actually increasing poverty!
“die-hard fanatic” again perfectly stated – these Net-Zero ‘plans’ are not careful, reasoned, and researched plans done by engineering professionals taking physics and economics into consideration. They are political manifestos done by fanatical scientists (who rarely have a good grasp of economics, or reality for that matter) – natural and political scientists – and have no basis in reality, but only on their self-induced nightmares.
Michel said the 28GW was wind only, not any of the other so-called renewalables. Your comment makes it sound a bit like you are correcting him, but commenting is not essay writing and maybe you just wanted to bring up the fact that there are other forms of green power. But thank you for calculating a real-world, all renewables in, capacity factor.
Good post especially your comments on wind generation (or not).
And to be fair to the Royal Society Report their model used 37 years of weather data which found
“variations in wind supply on a multi decadal timescale , as well as sporadic periods of days and weeks of very low generational potential”.
“For this reason some tens of TWhs of very long duration storage will be needed”
“For comparison the TWhs needed are 1000 times more than is currently provided by pumped hydro, and far more than could be provided cost effectively by batteries”
(UK total installed hydropower capacity is over4700MW, including 2800MW of pumped storage https://www.hydropower.org)
That’s less than 5GW (why do people insist on making the numbers look bigger and more impressive with megawatts when really were dealing with gigawatts) which is about 3 decent sized reactors – shows how little there really is.
Nut zero is an ideological quest, it is not based on good science & engineering, its peddlers are not sane
Not sane, or not truthful. Actually both – I think most know that they are at least stretching the truth, justified in their own minds because of the need to protect Gaia, but they have lost all sense with the current mad-rush to Net-Zero that will ultimately backfire on them and cause the whole scheme to collapse.
If they had pushed instead for continued additional generation and battery/storage development like in the past, they could have gotten away with a century of continued subsidy mining and rich and easily approved research grants.
But in Nut-Zero land, even the scientists are starting to come out against their own pointing out the stupidity.
I keep quoting this. This is Butterworth, the CEO of National Gas in the UK. No-one has disputed his numbers since he was quoted a month or so ago in the Telegraph.
“We’ve got to think of a joined up system,” he said. “When the wind doesn’t blow, gas is absolutely vital.
“If we hadn’t had gas in 2022, there were 260 days when we would have had rolling blackouts, and for 26 of those days we would have had a full blackout.
“There is public pressure for electrification at speed without thinking through the big picture. If we are not careful, we will over electrify. But when it comes to the winter, we need a lot of gas ready to roll.”
Net Zero is not only useless, its not compatible with a society anything like the one we are living in today. No grid can operate with this level of blackouts, and if it could, no industrial society could function with them. Think trains, including the Underground, hospitals, food refrigeration, cooking, lighting, phone and internet, businesses….
Its a liberal arts grad fantasy and wilful blindness about the practicalities.
Michel,
even Mr. Butterworth underestimates how vital gas is to our national electrical grid. It provides a lot of inertia and reactive power that wind cannot, and will be needed even more as our nuclear capacity diminishe sin terh coming years.
Gas is the backbone of the grid.
And another benefit of a gas grid is that we don’t put all our eggs in one basket – there’s a lot of common sense and security to having multiple sources of energy going on at the same time even if one or more isn’t the least expensive at one point in time. If the grid was built out naturally without being micromanaged by government then it might be like Ontario’s grid decades past when coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric all were major pillars. If any one of those were compromized by some issue like a temporary economic or maintenance issue, at least the other pillars are still there to pick up the slack.
Any analysis as to how the scheme complied with the second law of thermodynamics? Pure and simple application of the first law of thermodynamics will allow for a perpetual motion machine. It is the second law that caps the energy conversion efficiency and surprisingly the efficiency caps in some energy conversion processes could be very low.
Excellent report.
From Summary:
Conclusion:
The evidence from Our World in Data shows this will likely lead to lower GDP per capita and thus lower living standards which is clearly an undesirable outcome.
What I suspect is that the Royal Society’s ‘Large-Scale Electricity Storage report’ deliberately is assuming a lowering of energy in line with the phrase, ”you will own nothing, have nothing and be happy”.
Though this article provides an excellent critique of that RS report in terms of expectations, thus unfortunately true expectation is to reduce energy for the populous and deliver lower standards. That is you go poor.
Push EVs -> no power = no movement
Push heat pumps -> no power = go cold
Push renewables = less available power
Push hydrogen backup = not going to happen in nay commercial scale.
Add any extras I missed
I may be wrong..
What the Royal Society did was to use the work done to support the fictitious studies supporting the carbon budget reports from the CCC and the Future Energy Scenarios from National Grid. The only change they really made was to look at the long term weather variability of renewables. That way they have avoided having to tackle the other unicorns, and gained credibility for their report among the greens running policy.
That is no bad thing, because the need for storage even under very rosy assumptions is now established and cannot be ignored. Knocking away some of the other pillars of assumptions made then has an enlarged effect, multiplied by the storage inefficiency. Realistic costs for wind input multiply up. Realistic performance of turbines and electrolysers result in the need for more kit and more storage. Realistic demand profiles also result in more kit and more storage.
Chipping away at the underlying assumptions will eventually mean that the whole edifice will be seen to be infeasible and unaffordable and deeply damaging.
It is also good that we now have an ‘authoritative report’ which says outright that batteries cannot provide large scale storage but only short term grid balancing services.
RS
Really Stupid
They’re not stupid – they are purposely complicit in the self serving deceit
Nullius in verba has become
Scimus enim quid sit optimum vobis
We know what is best for you….
So digging a big hole to store enough compressed hydrogen to power our grid for months. That sort of idea really worked so well in Oxfordshire when a lightning strike detonated a measly bio-methane tank or two.
Please let us know where you intend to put this new store so we can extinguish all lights and quietly prepare to move somewhere far away.
Heck with lightning, such a tank, even underground would make an excellent target for terrorists.
A couple pounds of tnt on any of the pipes leading to the tanks, or even an RPG launched from the perimeter, and suddenly all of the hydrogen gets released into the atmosphere. As soon as it finds a spark, instant fuel/air explosion, everything within a mile or two flattened.
Excellent demolition job. If total energy demand is the same as today we will require 5 times as much electricity. Total energy consumption in 2021 was 170.1 million tons of oil equivalent (‘Mtoe’) which equates to 1,978 TWh of electricity. Many small modular nuclear reactors will be able to ramp up and down to meet demand. This will be a cheaper solution than hydrogen.
My guess is that whichever UK government finally has the gumption to lay out a proper nuclear option will go for a small number of big, showy, vote-winning reactor complexes then quietly top up with SMR’s as needed. It’ll allow for face-saving when they dismantle the wind turbine arrays.
“The other curious thing is that they fail to explain how their planned 40GW of installed solar capacity manages to produce peak output of nearly 80GW on many days in July (see Figure 1).” A voltage doubler /s
Or that the 40GW will only be 5GW intermittently at best through those dark winter months
You are far too optimistic about solar power. In Scotland, solar power produces power at just 1% of capacity in winter. In England, it rises to 2%. For all practical purposes, solar power in Britain is a waste of resources.
It’s an expensive way for providing some power on listless summer days.
Its an extra subsidy to farmers 🙂
Believe me, I’m not optimistic about any renewable power outputs – I fully understand the technology, it’s constraints, it’s problems, it’s inadequacies, it’s potential to regress western society
A huge mistake that is being made here, is that people consider hydrogen as a gas that can be handled like methane. Hydrogen is such a small molecule that it can even diffuse through steel, making the latter brittle along the way, leading to leaks and high risks of explosions. A tanker from the US to the Netherlands would lose around a third of it’s cargo through simple diffusion losses, during a trip of a few weeks. Here, they’re talking about an average storage time of ten years! Forget it! The best storage for hydrogen is to store it as synthetic hydrocarbons. If their synthesis consumed CO2, they would automatically be carbon neutral. For that the chemistry needs to be improved.
I would like to add, that this solution would be compatible with existing (and better) technologies for cars, heating systems, airplanes and so on, instead of promoting energy systems that simply won’t work due to intermittent production.
The blob love hydrogen but hate carbon dioxide – their understanding of chemistry is as dull as their competence in energy
There is the Sabatier reaction
4H2 + CO2 -> CH4 + 2H2O
But that is another energy loss.
CO2 is vastly important to life on earth, we should not dilute or eradicate it
‘For that the chemistry needs to be improved.’
The chemistry is fine. The thermodynamics is problematic.
switching domestic gas supplies to an hydrogen mix is a stupid, potentially catastrophic policy – it’s euthanasia by incompetence, perhaps that’s the goal?!
David Turver produces yet another brilliant summary of a blob related report
i suggest this is read out at the next Govt cabinet meeting and the Labour Party Conference
They may ignore its message, data and facts, but in doing so, their utter contempt for the living standards, health and welfare of the UK masses, will be openly visible to all
When I ask true believers what happens when the wind doesn’t blow I am always given the answer is to build more windmills because the wind is always blowing somewhere. There is no cure for stupid and the RS seems to be full of it. Are there no scientists and engineers in the RS any more?
This summer should have been a wake-up call to those that don’t realise we’re a small island and the weather doesn’t differ all that much across it.
build more windmills
But not in their neighborhood, right?
While it may be true, that the wind is always blowing somewhere, it’s also true that:
1) That somewhere may be thousands of miles away. You lose energy transmitting electricity long distances.
2) That somewhere may be somewhere where it is not possible to build windmills. Mid-atlantic or on mountain ranges.
3) Even if it was possible to catch 100% of the wind on the planet, the total amount of wind available still goes up and down. NOTE: Even if it was possible to catch 100% of the wind, doing so would have incalculable consequences for the environment.
Actually it is worse than you suppose
Let P be the power in Gigawatts required to satisfy all our societal needs 24 /7
Let I be the power in Gigawatts of installed wind capacity necessary to achieve this
Let Cap be the Capacity factor – the percentage of the nameplate power that is delivered on average
Let Eff be the efficiency factor of the energy storage say HYdrogen with efficiency about 50% (70 for electrolysis and 70% in fuel cell or turbine Power generator)
Imagine in any 100 hour period let Cap be the number of hours the wind turbine is producing
Energy supplied in Gigawatt hours =I *Cap where cap = number of hours say 40 for a 40% capacity factor
This energy must be enough to satisfy our 40 hour need ie P*40 plus in addition to supply that power for the 60 days that the wind is not blowing taking into account the efficiency factor of the storage medium ie P*60/eff
then I *40 =P*40+P* 60/Eff
I used 40 an d 60 hours for illustrative purposes
The general equation uses Cap and 100-Cap
an
And the equation is
I*Cap=Cap*P+P* (100-Cap)/Eff
or I = P* (Cap+(100-Cap)/Eff)/Cap
If you do these sums then if you suppose we need 200 GW reliable power supplied by wind with capacity factor 40% and hydrogen storage efficiency 50% then you need to install 800 GW of wind turbines or about 30 * what we already have. .
Under these parameters I have not calculated or estimated the actual hydrogen storage capacity required. Of course I could do that by using the actual wind statistics day by day and constructing a model but that seems awful tedious . I just want an estimate.
If anyone disputes my figures please reply and point out any error
“…then you need to install 800 GW of wind turbines or about 30 * what we already have.” Except when the wind stops blowing then the overbuild factor is (30 * 0)
Only the RS and the MMGWCs think this is a real number instead of infinity. Worse, they still want us to invest in INFINITY, without realizing their solutions are not fit for the purpose.
They do amaze.
Pumping the H2 into the tanks and then letting it back out again, you will probably lose another 30%.
When you compress a gas, it heats up, that heat will quickly be lost to the environment, resulting in a dramatic drop in pressure in your tanks. Also there is the energy required by the pumps and losses from friction as the hydrogen moves through various pipes.
You are also assuming no losses of H2 itself during this process. If stored for less than a week, leakage losses will probably be in the 3-5% range. The longer the gas is stored, the more will leak.
What’s the chance that any member of the RS will read this article? Will it be sent to any members? The RS should be asked to respond. I won’t hold my breath.
Modern leftists already know what the right answer is. Therefore there is no need to read critiques of their work. They already know the critiques are invalid.
About a week ago, Mosher responded to a paper that was published here with the declaration that even though he hadn’t read the paper, he already know that it contained a list of errors and distortions.
A week ago some climatistas related to my wife stopped by the house then they accosted me with climate dogma. I suggested they read Koonin’s “Unsettled”. I threw it on the table where they were sitting. They pushed it aside as if it was filthy. I then left the house rather than lose my temper and went for a drive until they left.
Talking with ‘climatistas’ in my home is like playing the card game ‘Hearts’ – I don’t lead with a heart until they’ve been ‘bled’ – but after that, it’s time to unload.
An impressive critique of a fool hardy project. But there are other factors:
Where would they site all the new onshore turbines? If they install 2MW turbines, they’re going to need around 10,000 sq miles. That would be an area stretching from Lancaster, across to Bridlington, down to King’s Lynn, and across the Shrewsbury.
Obviously, they would be spread out across the UK, but then another problem arises. The optimum sites are already used. And spread out over a very large area, there could be some sites with good wind, and many others in the doldrums. So I don’t think a load capacity of 25% would be achievable, for most of the time.
A 2MW turbine requires an area of about 0.1 sq miles, so they’d have to build about 100,000 turbines between now and 2050, at a rate of 4000/yr. As the above report, identifies, there is no chance of installing that many.
A turbine has a lifespan of about 20 years, so in 20 years time, they would encounter the problem of replacing the first batch of turbines, whilst at the same time installing a new batch. It quickly becomes obvious, that at some point, there will always be a batch of wind farms needing replacement, a bit like the Forth Bridge.
Then we have to consider the supply of the raw materials, copper, aluminium, nickel, cobalt, neodymium, dysprosium etc. Of course, demand will be high, as other countries would likewise be competing for the same materials. Supply and demand, I wonder what effect that would have on costs (who remembers, the OPEC countries, cutting supplies, back in the 70s?)
The above excellent cost analysis proves it’s an impossible goal, (I wonder if the RS factored in upgrading the national grid?). I firmly believe, that logistically it’s impossible, too.
But there is a simpler solution, a few nuclear power stations, requiring less land, reliable output, and less demanding on limited resources.
SSE have already said they see little future investment in onshore wind in the UK. Most of England simply isn’t windy enough. The bits that are consist of major tourist areas like the Lake District and Peak District.
Interesting, where I live (Calderdale), there is talk of installing the UK’s largest windfarm (300MW, 5MW turbines), at a place called Walshaw, just a stone’s throw, from a historical farmhouse ruin, used by Emily Bronte for Wuthering Heights.
The social and cultural impacts of this new windfarm could become the basis for a 21st Century gothic novel describing the environmental destruction of a once beatiful rural landscape — to be entitled Withering Blights.
They have also recently said output during the 6 months to the end of September was almost 20% lower due to adverse weather conditions. This follows a 32% drop in output during the summer and autumn of 2021. So considerable falls in output for half of the last 2 years.
Story Tip
Credit to the RS, for first publishing this research. Whilst, they use the term “hens and eggs”. I think “cat amongst the pigeons”, might be more appropriate.
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/10/08/settled-science-shock-earth-temperatures-rise-ahead-of-co2-emissions-say-scientists/
Regarding Capacity factors, usually assumed at around 30% onshore and 40 % offshore. We have a total fleet size of 28GW do I would expect then a fairly average day to produce at 35%*28 GW ie about 10 GW. I expect to see also a few days at close to zero but I also expect to see a few days of 25+ Gw. Looking back at last year on GRidwatch UK I cannot see many days producing at more than 12 GW
Is it reasonable to suppose that although the individual turbines have something like the quoted capacity factor, the overall fleet capacity factor seems more like about 20-25%
Can anyone tell me how to extract a gridwatch or other text file with daily contributions of each power source , rather than the graphical data they produce.
Gridwatch ( as in https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ ) has a download page linked from the menu at the top. Easy to do, it produces .csv files. The data you get will be at 5 minute resolution, so create a column for the date (and hour if you want to summarise that) and use pivot tables in a spreadsheet to average the data accordingly.
I actually produced this chart
from data from bmreports which is a much more painful exercise because they limit the amount you can download at once, although the new beta site is better:
https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/actual-aggregated-generation-per-type
You still have to look elsewhere for a full account of interconnectors and pumped storage pumping.
ag : As IDAU says, you can obtain the data you seek from Gridwatch.
I have done this myself, downloading the demand, wind and solar data from gridwatch, which records this data every 5 minutes, into an Excel file to model UK Labour’s proposal to decarbonise the electricity by 2030 by quadrupling offshore wind, doubling onshore wind and trebling solar based upon the Gridwatch data for 2022.
I calculate that for this 2030 proposal where the average power demand is 36 GW and maximum 56GW we will require :
Hydrogen storage : 19 TWhrs = 600K tonnes (taking a generating efficiency of 40%)
Battery : 10 TWhrs
I have also made some costings, but these were before the offshore wind industry requested a two and a half times price increase to supply for AR5!
If you or anyone else is interested in seeing the method & calculations please email me at jbxcagwnz@gmail.com
As pointed out, the good point is that the report exists at all.
Acknowledging the need for storage is an open admission that the original plan for solar and wind just won’t work. An awful lot of people still think it will. They need to be disabused of this belief.
Yes it finally nails the lie that batteries can provide sufficient storage to keep the grid afloat, showing at best they will only provide short term grid balancing services.
The World Hydrogen Congress and world hydrogen week start today.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/events/world-hydrogen-congress/?utm_source=offshorewind&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_2023-10-09
Much ado about less than nothing.
David Turver’s comparison with Mexico, Brazil, Algeria and Paraguay doesn’t account for the fact that they are somewhat warmer countries than the UK, yet with relatively limited aircon demand. If we adjust for that, the residual living standard for the UK would be even lower.
Excuse me but the downsides of hydrogen are understated? Weren’t there any RS members who said. “It’s Mad, you idiots, it’s MAD”?
Anyone who disagrees with the consensus has been run out of their ranks years ago.
So they begin by assuming that the electric car is not going to be adopted?
Yep. They probably have already realised that we’re likely to have run out of the raw materials before then. We’ll be walking.
Excellent bit of work. Keep chipping away at the fantasy and perhaps some people in charge will begin to think.
Energy consumption is approximately proportional to income. The constant of propotionality changes slowly as better technologies and better means of using energy diffuses through society but in the short term to use less energy is to become more poor.
Let’s not volunteer.
One problem I have with this article when it critiques the factor of 4 efficiency gain by using heat pumps, saying only 2.5 can be expected because of the heat pumps’ poor performance in cold ❄️ weather. Wouldn’t the factor be even worse, or is it somekind of smeared out average? I know this article talks about the UK and not Canada, but from my experience, there’s 2 months out of the winter that heat pumps will be useless and drive people to supplement their heating needs with baseboard heaters and plug-in heaters, and so heat pump savings will be revealed to be the pipe dream that it always was.
I think the real answer is we have little data. The problem isn’t just about the performance of heat pumps as measured in some lab. It’s about real world installations in properties that were never designed for them, and also about how people live their lives. It seems we have probably just seen a big reduction in heating use in many households, driven by the energy crisis extreme costs. The government has not updated this data:
Nor has it updated this study:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/274770/2_Mean_Household_Temperatures.pdf
If people are forced to live in less well heated homes they will not live as long. Perhaps that too is part of the design for Net Zero.
This is probabaly the best handle we have: it refers back to studies done over a decade ago with pilot projects. The estimate is that it would cost ~£2 trillion to insulate the housing stock adequately.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2020/02/KellyNetZero-2.pdf
The demand profile also ignores the switch from ICE to EV. Charging all those golf carts will be at night, precisely the time when solar is not working and wind is at it’s lowest.
Some historical trivia:
”Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is ancient wisdom in the West, with quotes going back to 1708. We too often ignore it, and suffer accordingly.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/12/05/extraordinary/
DAVID TURVER: “They begin by assuming that electricity demand will be 570TWh in 2050 that represents roughly halving the energy demand across residential, transport and industrial and commercial categories.”
I say to friends and relatives living here in the US Northwest that retirement of coal-fired and gas-fired generation capacity is happening at a faster pace than it can possibly be replaced by any combination of wind and solar backed by energy storage.
By 2030, we here in the US Northwest will have to learn how to get by with possibly three-quarters of the electricity supply we use today; and possibly with only two-thirds of what we now use by the year 2035.
If current trends in coal-fired and gas-fired retirements continue, this is an outcome which is baked into the Mindless Pursuit of Net Zero cake for everyone attached to the Western Interconnect.
We will not be driving millions of EV’s, we will not be converting all home heating to heat pumps. We will instead be hoping that enough wool sweaters are being made to keep us all warm in winter when our house temperatures are set at 55 degrees F or even lower.
Storage! Who needs storage? It just needs a firm hand-
Solar switch-off a must for all states, says AEMO, to control “seven Erarings” of rooftop PV | RenewEconomy
Large scale electricity storage is not a problem. Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators, remove all wind and solar from the grid. There problem solved.
David Turver :
An excellent analysis, thanks, of the RS Storage Report. It is clear it is nothing else but a sales pitch for wind and hydrogen. Its costings for wind energy, electrolysis, storage and electricity generation etc. are all wildly optimistic using, as we now say in the UK, HS2 costings, and hence should be multiplied by at least 2 or 3 times.
I make two points :
1) The apparent very low electricity demand of 570 TWhrs could be because the RS are only looking at storage to cover the intermittency of renewables and hence ignoring other methods for generating electricity, such as nuclear (a paltry 58 TWhrs in the 2022 NGESO FES for 2050 LTW), which do not require storage ?
The 2022 NGESO FES 2050 LTW shows :
Solar (95 TWhrs) + Offshore Wind (398 TWhrs) + Onshore Wind (153TWhr) + Other Renewables (20 TWhrs) – Electricity Export (?) (108 TWhrs) = 558 TWhrs, close to 570 TWhrs.
2) With regard to the “unrealistic profile of demand” I think with respect you have forgotten, and the RS report deliberately ignores/avoids where possible, that the whole purpose of electrification by 2050 is so that demand will be made to follow supply, controlled with the use of individual smart meters.
So only total energy is considered important and varying power requirements can be largely ignored.
The RS report says that the 2022 NGESO DSR (Demand Side Response) design of up to 37 GW “looks achievable”. Since the average power to achieve 570 TWhrs over a year is 65 GW this means that DSR is expected to be up to 37/65 = 57% of average demand. That will require some considerable DSR….
I have done a follow up article further exploring how they might have arrived at 40GW of solar capacity to deliver nearly 80GW. It seems they switch between splitting the renewables capacity by generation capacity and by delivered energy. So the report is not internally consistent.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/more-royal-society-inconsistencies