Doesn’t Ben Marlow Know Anything At All About Energy?

By Paul Homewood

 

 

h/t Ian Magness/Ian Cunningham

Why is this incompetent still employed by the Telegraph?

 

 

 

Well, that didn’t take long. Britain’s first big snowfall of the year brought the country to its usual standstill. As temperatures as cold as -15C were being recorded in Braemar, Aberdeenshire, and weather warnings came into force across the country, chaos inevitably ensued.

Gatwick and Stansted Airports were forced to close their runways, drivers on the M25 were stranded for hours, and schools closed. With reports warning us to brace for a 15 day-long Arctic blast in the run-up to Christmas, one can only imagine what the country will look like when the weather finally eases.

Countries that experience regular severe weather and manage to still function perfectly well are perplexed and amused in equal measure at the UK’s total inability to cope with a sudden cold snap. Still, at least some resourceful soul found the time to build a life-sized snowman in the middle of London’s North Circular ring road.

Yet nowhere was the sheer sense of disarray captured more strongly than in the decision to fire up two old coal plants as part of an emergency scheme to prevent blackouts. As people stayed at home with the lights and TV on, wholesale prices for electricity rocketed to £2,585.80 per megawatt-hour on Sunday night, roughly 50 times higher than the average price before the energy crunch struck last year.

National Grid, the company whose task is to ensure the lights stay on, was at pains to point out that the move does not mean the coal-fired power stations will be used – merely that they will be ready to produce energy if called on. Fine but the idea that such a plan “should give the public confidence in Monday’s energy supply”, as the Grid claims, is risible.

On the contrary, it is an indictment of the Grid itself. It’s not just that a contingency plan is necessary, it’s that the best the UK can come up with is to put our remaining dirty coal power stations on stand by – awkward for a Government that has repeatedly boasted about its success in cutting emissions – largely by phasing out coal – and is no stranger to lecturing other countries about their failure to follow suit.

Critics of green energy have wasted little time in pointing the finger at wind power. The still “Dunkelflaute” weather conditions of the weekend have left Britain’s wind farms virtually motionless. Solar and wind has slumped to just 4pc of our electricity with gas, coal and wood producing nearly three quarters.

Yet, it’s not wind energy that’s the problem – that’s a giant red herring. What opponents of renewables neglect to mention is that wind has provided 28.5pc of our total energy output over the past year. Yes, it is an unreliable energy but the answer isn’t coal. The Grid needs to adapt to a modern digital economy, in which the world is rapidly electrifying.

Electricity demand is expected to soar three-fold by 2050 but Greg Jackson, boss of Octopus Energy, said last month that the Grid was “not fit for purpose” even today. He has previously accused it, along with the Government, of “a phenomenal failure to innovate”, and the entrepreneur is right.

A return to coal is clearly not an option. Old king coal is dead. Opening a new mine in Cumbria is not going to change that. Better to accept the reality, and concentrate zealously on improving the reliability of wind and other renewable sources by dragging the Grid into the 21st century.

We need massive investment in energy infrastructure to ensure it is fit for purpose. But this can’t happen without intense Government scrutiny and pressure. Ministers must find a way to impose genuine competition and reform on a bloated monopoly, that is slow moving and stuck in the 20th Century – literally.

In a country where swathes of the power supplies were built in the post-war years, it takes seven years on average to connect a new wind farm to the Grid. There are also pockets of London where it is impossible to build new homes because the electricity grid has run out of capacity to support them.

The Government wants 50GW of new wind and and 70GW of additional solar power by 2030 and 2035 respectively, as it seeks to boost energy independence and meet ambitious net zero targets. But that can’t happen without a radical building programme.

Without new connections, and more modern transmission infrastructure, such as pylons, underground copper cables, and interconnectors, the system will continue to suffer from the threat of outages and remain unable to distribute wind power from the North Sea to high density parts of the country.

Proper storage is critical too. Wind turbine construction needs to go hand in hand with developing giant battery facilities that capture excess electricity and distribute it either during periods of high demand or low generation. With the right technology, electric cars will be able to store enough back-up energy to power a house for several days.

But there needs to be real competition too. There is no risk in the system. This is exacerbated by a regulatory set-up that restricts what it calls “anticipatory investment” to avoid a temptation to over-egg investment requirements, with customers left to foot the bill.

Energy bosses also bemoan a bureaucratic system that has a tendency to treat increased demand as a problem whereas in the private sector the natural reaction would be to cheer. Until that attitude changes, Britain will never be able to deliver a clean energy system that can manage a bit of a cold snap.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/12/13/wind-doesnt-blow-sometimes-coal-cant-answer/

 

If he knew anything at all about our energy system, he would know that it would be utterly impractical and impossibly expensive to store enough electricity to keep the grid running during weeks on end like this one, when there is not much wind.

And the problem is not the grid, as he suggests. It is the absurdity of ever thinking that we should rely on old fashioned windmills to power our country, all of course to meet the demands of the eco-lobby. There is nothing “21st Century” in that.

For a supposed business correspondent, I am amazed that Ben Marlow has not bothered to investigate the enormous costs of the things he is suggesting, such as the tens of billions needed for upgrading the transmission infrastructure. Not to mention the question of who was going to pay for it.

Marlow loves to slag this country off, this time mocking our continued reliance on coal. Yet he makes no mention of the fact that Germany still relies on coal for 17% of its energy. In the UK the figure is just 3%.

The failure of Marlow and the rest of his ilk to raise these pertinent issues long ago before we committed ourselves to the Net Zero insanity is black mark for which the country will be paying for years.