From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
In the past seven days we have been getting 61% of our electricity from gas, plus another 9% from burning trees:
As I repeatedly point out, it does not matter how many wind farms you build, three times nothing is still nothing!
Timera published this chart the other day, showing that 15 GW of CCGT capacity is at risk of retirement in the next 10 years because of age:
https://timera-energy.com/blog/ccus-faces-a-tougher-affordability-test/
This would leaves us dangerously exposed. But where the plans to replace them?
There is no financial incentive for building new gas plants, which will be on idle for most of the time and which will be banned eventually because of Net Zero.
Miliband’s answer was gas plants fitted with carbon capture, but so far only one has been given a contract – Net Zero Teesside Power, with capacity of 742 MW.
Much of his £22bn bung to carbon capture will be spent on the storage and transport of CO2, rather than the generation plants. BEIS levelised costs imply that CAPEX and OPEX for CCGT with Carbon Capture would add £2.2bn to the cost of a conventional CCGT over its lifetime, excluding interest costs.
It is therefore unlikely the budget will be enough to cover more than a handful of plants – Timera have estimated 9GW by 2040 in their modelling, but this is probably hopelessly overoptimistic. At the least, it is highly unlikely this capacity could be constructed and connected to carbon storing sites by then.
Which brings us back to the initial question. How will the grid cope if a large chunk of its CCGT capacity disappears in the next ten years?
