Gummer’s Renewable Dream Land

By Paul Homewood

 

 

Bishop Hill reports on the Committee on Climate Change’s response to Owen Paterson’s speech, calling for the scrapping of the Climate Change Act. In particular, he notes their response to worries that “the lights will go out”.

 

 

I know I am going over old ground, but someone really has to expose this dangerous nonsense.

 

Current Situation

The current capacity situation is tight, but still manageable. Timera Energy report that system margins could fall below 5% next year as capacity is shut down. Nevertheless, wind and solar power, which supplied 8% of total energy last year, is still insignificant enough for conventional power stations to step up and supply the shortfall when the wind does not blow.

 

Even so, renewable subsidies have already soared to £2.6bn in 2012/13, about £100/household, and DECC now need to sign up 53GW of standby capacity for 2018/19 at great cost. Most of this, of course, will be fossil fuel based power anyway. DECC have already estimated the cost of various subsidies and levies in support of low carbon generation will be £7.6 billion by 2020, and this will increase sharply in following years, as more renewable capacity is added and Hinckley C comes on stream.

(As an aside, the CCC claim that energy bills to households will only increase by £10 a year up to the mid 2020’s – can any of their figures be trusted?)

However, the real problem will arise in the 2020’s.

 

 

2020’s

The 4th Carbon Budget commits the UK to reducing GHG emissions for the period 2023-27 by 30% from current levels. In addition, demand for electricity is expected to increase sharply, by as much as 30%, as domestic heating and transport are decarbonised. This would indicate peak demand of around 75GW, and, assuming a 10% reserve margin, a required capacity of at least 82GW.

 

Current capacity, including mothballed plant, (as at end of 2013) is:

 

	GW
Coal	21
Gas	35
Oil	2
Nuclear	10
Hydro	4
Wind	11
Bio	2
TOTAL	85

 

 

We can reasonably make the following assumptions about what the position will be by the mid 2020’s:

 

1) Nuclear – All current stations, bar Sizewell B, are due to have closed. Sizewell B and the new Hinckley C, due by 2023, will give a combined capacity of 4.4GW. If any more nuclear capacity is needed by the mid 2020’s, a decision to go ahead would need to be made now.

In any event, the ever rising cost of building Hinckley C, (currently up to around £25 bn), makes any large scale expansion of nuclear hardly an attractive option.

2) All coal and oil fired capacity will have shut, either because of the EU Large Combustion Plants Directive or CO2 restrictions.

3) Expansion of biomass is limited, because of concerns that it may make little difference to CO2 emissions and air quality issues. A capacity of 5GW looks reasonable.

 

Unless CCS suddenly becomes available as a commercially viable option, we would be left with the following reliable, low carbon baseload capacity:

 

	GW
Nuclear	4
Bio	5
Hydro	4
TOTAL	13

 

However much wind and solar capacity is added is irrelevant, as it is intermittent. Therefore, to meet a peak demand of 82GW, there would need to be about 70GW of standby capacity available, most of which would logically only come from gas. This would imply a doubling of current gas fired capacity.

There is currently no indication that generators are planning to build anywhere this amount of new capacity, and current market conditions, skewed by renewable subsidies, make such investment commercially unviable.

( I gather that Owen Paterson’s proposal for mini nuclear plants has met with a certain amount of interest from the CCC – perhaps they might care to start looking at the issue seriously before thousands more useless wind turbines are built).

 

The Government is, of course, relying on the Capacity Market Mechanism to provide this standby capacity, which will start in 2018/19. Gas generators will be happy to supply this, but only at a price, and at the risk of exceeding CO2 targets.

 

The CCC claim:

Building low carbon capacity can help to keep the lights on, supported by capacity incentivised through the capacity market.

In fact, building low carbon capacity will do nothing at all to keep the lights on. For that, we need the fossil fuel capacity they seem so determined to eliminate.

 

 

Post 2030

 

In 2010, the Government published their “2050 Pathways Analysis”, which looked at possible scenarios of how they could achieve the necessary GHG reductions.

Pathway Beta assumed that CCS was not deployed at scale.

 

 

During the 2030’s, thermal generation will dwindle away to next to nothing. Nuclear will provide something like a third of total generation, and for the rest we will rely on “non thermal renewable generation”.

There is no provision for what will take up the slack when this renewable generation is producing little or no power.

For this, EU Referendum estimates we will all be paying £1.3 trillion in the next 36 years.