From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Doug Brodie
Another nail in the coffin!
From the Telegraph:
The costs of upgrading Britain’s energy grid for net zero threaten to spiral out of control, EDF has warned.
The French energy company, which operates the UK’s nuclear fleet, said a £70bn programme to modernise the grid faced a tripling in construction costs, far outstripping initial forecasts.
The energy supplier warned the companies charged with operating the UK’s high-voltage transmission system have been hit by surging inflation and lengthy procurement delays.
Rising prices mean that Labour’s target to decarbonise by the end of the decade – under the Clean Power 2030 plan devised by Ed Miliband, the former energy secretary – could cost billions more than expected, much of which will be passed on to households through higher bills.
Officials previously estimated that upgrading the grid would cost at least £70bn over the next five years, with the levies added to average annual power bills set to climb from £44 to £105.
EDF’s warning implies the final amount could be higher still.
The companies responsible for the “great grid upgrade” are National Grid, which operates the transmission grid in England and Wales, along with Scottish Power and SSE in northern Scotland.
The improvements are needed to connect new wind farms, improve old power lines and ready the grid for soaring electricity demand from technologies such as heat pumps and electric cars.
EDF said it supported upgrading the network but warned that the 2030 scheme was now so expensive the whole project should be re-examined.
Josh Buckland, EDF’s policy director, and Matthew Ball, its grid manager, warned in a blog post: “We estimate costs have risen two to three times since initial transmission operator forecasts – based on analysis of Ofgem’s own documents.”
They added: “Connections are subject to increasingly severe delays. Our own projects are suffering an average connection delay of two years, with the worst now over five years.”
Simon Gallagher, the managing director of UK Networks Services, which manages grid connections for businesses, said that Clean Power 2030 is “not achievable as currently designed”.
He added: “Those who support its aims, including us, believe the plans are too fast and too expensive.”
Full story here.
I thought we had learnt the lesson years ago that infrastructure projects invariably cost much more than originally budgeted and take twice as long!
Just think of HS2.
Remember as well that this £70 billion is just the first tranche of grid upgrades necessary for Net Zero. NESO have already stated that another £89 billion will need to be spent “beyond” 2030.
On top of that comes the truly frightening cost of upgrading the whole of our local, low-voltage distribution system, so that it can handle a doubling of demand.
In July, the Telegraph reported that OFGEM was already facing requests for substantial spending increases to build new power lines after a global equipment shortage triggered delays and higher costs. They also talked about a tripling of budgets.
Just like a politician to advise and gain the public buy-in on a cut rate cost of project only to face cost overruns and delays tripping costs to what should have been requested in the first place. Like the $$$$ Billion$ already spent on the CA Bullet Train from nowhere to nowhere with zero track laid to date.
Same with military procurement contracts. Leave out the advanced features for the initial bids, then once the initial contracts have been let, add those features back in, and by now it’s five years down the road and no one wants to go back and start over, sunk cost fallacy and all, so everyone just grins and bears it.
Sadly long out of print, everyone should read Augustine’s Laws (ISBN-13 : 978-0670809424).
I have responded to many tender invitations from the public sector over the years. I learnt quite quickly that the surest ways to lose a bid are (1) to quote what it would cost to do it the way it will end up having to be done, and (2) offer to do only what the customer thought to ask for, at the best price you could do it. Make the first error and you lose out to a vendor that is happy to fib. Make the second and your bid is too low to be credible. The trick is to say and do whatever it takes to win the business, then charge for change requests at every slight opportunity till you make some coin. —Every opportunity. Next thing you know, the business is worth two or three times the nameplate value.
Ka-ching!
It’s not just higher-education that is broken. Public procurement policy is screwed almost beyond help too.
It’s readable online. Also see, “Parkinson’s Law, or the Pursuit of Progress” by C. Northcoat Pakenson, © 1955: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Another of his is, “The number of workers within public administration tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done.” Followed by “Mrs. Parkinson’s Law,” © 1968.
My experience also. Makes for an exciting but very stressful working environment for whoever is (un)fortunate enough to win the contract.
Politicians know that once the true costs have been revealed, they will be out of office. All they are concerned about is their popularity today, not their popularity in ten or fifteen years time.
It’s no surprise that successive UK governments have refused to mandate energy companies to fully itemise customers’ bills to make it transparent how much the various ‘green’ subsidies and related levies are costing us. One estimate that I’ve seen is 16%. To add insult to injury, we’re being taxed on those levies & subsidies by the addition of VAT to domestic energy bills (which is going to be suspended for a few months over autumn/winter on electricity but not on gas, how generous).
As over 22m of the 28m+ homes in the UK are on the gas network no doubt the Treasury firmly resisted extending the VAT cut to gas.
They’re not ‘upgrades’, it isn’t ‘investment’.
There will be no improvement in efficiency or reliability or positive financial returns above and beyond what we have, in fact it will be worse regardless.
It’s an unnecessary cost imposed by the political decision to favour wind and solar generation.
The grid must be massively extended and altered because it was never designed to operate with swathes of remote electricity generation far from the point of consumption. And it was never necessary to deal with a high proportion of non-dispatchable and low-inertia/non-synchronous sources.
Absolutely. As a result the UK’s electricity cost will continue to rise until the country is totally impoverished. There is now no way back to sanity.
Oxford Prof. Dieter Helm has concluded that NESO’s scenarios assume we will end up with 300 – 450GW of capacity in order to meet a maximum expected peak demand of 90GW. (Unreliables are so cheap don’t you know!) 🙂
You assume, at risk, the UK will have electricity.
Well first up the State subsidizes and mandates dumping by fickle solar and wind which necessitates even more subsidies and mandates for time shifting and the need for FCAS-
Batteries have flattened the solar duck curve, and their profit margins at the same time
It’s a fallacy of composition problem whereby early adopters grab all the cream off the top until the mother’s milk sours for all-
Australian grid operator announces curtailment drill for rooftop PV – pv magazine Australia
Everyday in the UK, humans exhale 70 million kgs of CO2. To this should be added the CO2 exhaled from all the domestic animals ranging from cattle to canaries. Much CO2 is emitted from bakeries and breweries.
Has the government considered a plan to reduce the emission of CO2 from the humans? Of course breweries get a free pass on CO2 emision.
Nov 5 is coming soon. Plenty of time to gather pitchforks, torches and hemp rope.
/s
You left out coke and champaign.
Cheops’s Law – “Nothing is ever built on time or under budget.”
One assumes that the UK grid, like the US Grid, does need upgrading to handle, especially, the new and proposed nuclear plants. However, as the article notes, this is not the same as providing a grid that can handle multiple diverse sources of power generation, all the way from wind to heat pumps to rooftop solar. California is seeing the issue with the last-named, while ignoring powerline maintenance in forested areas (which probably initiated the recent Altadena fire).
Net Zero has failed in the UK to account for grid upgrade cost. At least in California the power companies have raised the issue regarding the cost of rooftop solar feeding into the grid. If the UK had maintained conventional power generation, instead of costly wind and solar, while building its nuclear generation capability, the cost overruns would have been avoided. And, the additional CO2 generated would have been negligible on a global scale.
But the Science! Exactly, the UK has ignored the science (and engineering and economics).
The current UK grid was built and is fit for purpose for a diverse mix of thermal and hydro plant operating up to around 60GW peak winter demand.
The need for upgrades fall into two broad categories.
New nuclear is needed because it is now nearly cost comparable with current gas prices and the cost of burning coal is too great due to emissions legislation, and it is likely that as fossil fuel prices continue to rise, people will switch to nuclear electrical power .
The real net zero is not about climate, it is about handling the spiralling prices of fossil fuel. This is a real issue in Europe, and the incompetents in charge are beginning to realise that this is no longer about virtue signalling, but will actually have to happen, and that renewable energy is exactly the wrong way to do it.
It’s not a change that is as urgent in the USA with a fair amount of coal and gas still unexploited.
But in Europe and Japan, it is a real issue
“The real net zero is not about climate, it is about handling the spiralling prices of fossil fuel.”
Actually it has nothing to do with hydrocarbon and coal prices.
Banning N.Sea drilling is part of the spiral.
This Net Zero politics has everything to do with power and control.
The decision to include nuclear power electricity in outlawed energy sources goes down as the biggest possible failure of the net zero cult. Had society used all the money that has been wasted on wind and solar over the past few decades, and instead focus on nuclear electricity development, society would probably be close to net zero by now, whether it was necessary or not. We need to remember the old punch line: ” more people have been killed from riding in Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile than from nuclear power plant radiation incidents.
I remember trying to write a spread sheet a couple of times on how to store enough wind and solar power to last over the winter. That clearly is a requirement of net zero with wind and solar power. There are simply too many unknowns and roadblocks in the formulas. There are not enough elevation change areas available for pumped hydro of any significance. Batteries self discharge, wear out, burn up, and cost too much. Long distance transmission is inefficient. How can artificial inertia be implemented on a large grid? Hydrogen electrolyzing is inefficient. High hydrogen storage in large volumes is not available. Hydrogen cannot be carried through existing pipelines without destroying the pipelines from hydrogen embrittlement and leakage. How long do Dunkelflaute last?
There a lot more issues when you get down to reality. Cost, disposal, timing, animal species damage, and grid expansion are among them. It’s time to cut the wind and solar bait, focus on nuclear power, and drill baby drill.
It is my understanding that wind and solar panel cannot theoretically provide reliable continuous power anywhere under any circumstances. Recharge of used storage cannot happen at the same time as the generated power is being supplied to the consumers.
It’s a “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead” kind of thing combined with the idea that while government has access to infinite amounts of money, if it manages to run out it can always print more. I picture a coven of witches stirring a pot …
After decades of the net-zero cult telling everyone that renewables would be cheap to free, only an idiot should be surprised that there’d be pushback when the actual bill came due.
Woodside Gas read the writing on the wall with nut zero-
Woodside scraps clean energy target, posts 7% first-half profit rise | Reuters
We’re with Trumpy and the shareholders as the dreamers won’t last
Well by buying up Green meanie cast offs (they don’t like the ugly silver edged panels and want the all black ones) I have my own grid for 7 months of the year. The remaining 5 months I top up overnight at cheap rates. Only if the grid has a total black out for more than 4 days will I have a problem. Why should I have needed to do this in a modern country, it beggars belief that a collection of PPE graduates could engineer the total destruction of a modern economy back to the dark ages. I should be feeling smug but the destruction of the UK is too hard to bear.
Only the last sentence tells us you are speaking from the UK.
How many of us know what PPE stands for and its significance?
No idea in that context. To me, PPE = Personal Protective Equipment
PPE Philosophy, politics and economics, or politics, philosophy and economics (PPE), is an academic degree that combines study from three subjects. The first institution to offer degrees in PPE was the University of Oxford in the 1920s. The Oxford PPE course has produced many notable graduates, including numerous British politicians and leaders of other countries.[1][2] PPE degrees began to be offered at other universities in the 1980s and are now offered at many colleges and universities around the world.
Now ask yourself what use is someone who has never had a proper job with this qualification.
Once we in Oz had our first female Prime Minister, a failed far Left lawyer.
She did not stop decarbonisation but she complained that the power industry was constructing gold plated poles and wires to expand the grid. Guess what they were trying to connect.
We’ll decide what we power our data centres with PM so naff off-
Queensland allowed to use coal, gas for data centres despite renewable push
Never come between a State Premier and a hard hat and hi-vis vest shoot.