The crippling problem of renewable green energy cannot be solved
By Paul Homewood
h/t George Heraghty
From the Telegraph:
In a Net Zero world, what will we do when the wind isn’t blowing? Environmentalists like to point out that we will have solar power as well, but of course the sun doesn’t shine at night, so windless nights are a big problem.
Next, it is suggested that we can store electricity. But in winter we frequently get long wind lulls, and with the sun low in the sky, there will be little or no solar power either. These so-called “dunkelflautes” mean little or no electricity supply from the renewables fleet.
A dunkelflaute can last for weeks. That means you need huge, unfeasible quantities of electricity storage. The Royal Society recently concluded we’d need enough to cover more than two months’ demand, and, whatever storage technology is adopted, this isn’t going to be affordable or probably even possible. The Royal Society’s numbers suggest we’d need to deliver a project equivalent in size to HS2 every year, forever. Worse, that number is likely to be hugely understated, because the report’s authors used extraordinarily optimistic projections of what might happen to costs and efficiencies in the next 25 years. Using assumptions grounded in the technologies and costs prevalent today, we’d conclude that we’d need six months’ storage, and would have to settle ongoing annual bills equivalent to five HS2 projects per year.
It’s a huge problem, which makes the idea of Net Zero a hard sell. One of the wheezes dreamt up by the greens to make the costs look a bit smaller is to assume that we will get a significant proportion of our electricity down the “interconnectors” – the big cables that connect the UK grid to our European neighbours, or which would stitch together the various grids of North America. There are already several international interconnections in operation – from the UK to Norway, France, Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands – as well as others bringing power from region to region. More are on the way.
However, as with so much of the energy “transition”, there is a lot of wishful thinking going on.
Firstly, it is glibly assumed that the electricity delivered down interconnectors is zero-emission. Remarkably, this is the case, no matter how many coal-fired power stations are in operation on the continental grid at the time. In other words, replacing an idle wind farm in the UK with a coal-fired power station in Belgium would be assumed to represent an emissions-reducing move.
Secondly, it is assumed (in equally glib fashion) that the continental grid will always have power to spare for the UK, and that there will always be power to spare somewhere in the USA. This is simply not the case. Firstly, if it is midnight in the UK, it is dark across the whole of Europe. If it is two AM in New York it is midnight in Los Angeles, so nobody is going to be generating any solar power.
Secondly, although we are frequently told that “the wind is always blowing somewhere”, weather systems are extremely large things and they frequently affect whole continents. As a result, wind speeds are highly correlated across any continent; if there’s no wind in the UK, the chances are high that it’s not windy anywhere nearby either.
Even if the continent is windy when it’s calm in the UK, or if it’s windy in Texas when it’s calm in California, the ability to send power where it’s needed depends on there being surplus generating capacity in the precise place where the wind is blowing.
If, say, it’s windy in Scandinavia but the rest of Europe is experiencing a lull, you need enough spare windfarms in the Baltic and Nordic seas to meet demand from almost half a billion people. That’s a huge amount of windfarms. Then again, the windy spot might be in the Atlantic, off the coast of Iberia. So you’d need to build the same enormous number windfarms again, this time off the coast of Portugal. The again, and again – basically every local neighbourhood would have to have enough capacity to supply the entire continent. Hopefully this shows that the idea is rather ridiculous.
The same arguments apply to the idea of getting power from further afield. There is a currently a proposal to build an interconnector to Morocco, where the stiff breezes found in the seas off the Atlantic seaboard and deserts full of solar panels will, it is claimed, deliver an electricity bonanza. Unfortunately, as I write, wind speeds are rather low across most of Europe, while off the Western seaboard of Morocco they are … even lower. It’s gusty off Portugal though.
A lack of generating capacity in the right place is only one of the problems with interconnectors. They also turn out to be rather unreliable. For example, the Western Link, one of the interconnectors from England to the South of Scotland has failed regularly in its short lifetime, going down for months at a time, causing nightmares for grid managers tasked with making up the difference. Similarly, the IFA1 interconnector to France was hit by a fire in 2021, losing half of its capacity for a period of more than a year. Of course, any part of the electricity grid can suffer an outage, but the loss of an interconnector can take out a significant proportion of supply for long periods.
Worse still, interconnectors represent a risk to security of supply in other ways. Those long cables, hidden deep beneath the waves, are an inviting target for hostile powers. Just last week, a small flotilla from the navies of several European nations was scrambled to an area adjacent to the East Anglia One windfarm, after a Russian vessel was seen to be hanging around the area. We can’t know if it was sizing up the windfarm’s grid connection or the adjacent gas pipeline, but the point is the same; it is very hard to protect subsea infrastructure from sabotage (and impossible when it is a thousand-mile cable from here to Morocco).
The problem of what to do when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining is all but insurmountable. In technological terms, the only feasible solution is a vast fleet of windfarms and a gigantic store of green hydrogen, along the lines envisaged by the Royal Society. However, barring a series of dramatic technological breakthroughs, the costs would make the recent energy price crisis look like nothing.
It’s high time to put a stop to the wishful thinking on Net Zero.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/31/green-energy-solar-wind-renewable-energy-interconnector/
Michael Kelly is Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the Royal Society of New Zealand, of the Institute of Physics and of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, as well as Senior Member of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineering in the USA
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Thank you Professor Kelly.
Carbon Brief has attempted a rebuttal of Kelly, which Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch hits out of the park here…
https://www.netzerowatch.com/why-dr-evans-is-wrong/
At last someone who knows what they are talking about .
But he did avoid saying that the whole scheme is to destroy the economy of Western countries .
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
Which is why they are still going along with the Climate Change fraud and getting rid of efficient means of generation and trying to replace it with something that does not work and is incredibly expensive .
If renewables are generating just enough leccy to run the country when the wind blows and sun shines what are they going to charge the batterys with? You can’t use electricity twice.
You need generating capacity that is several times the instantaneous demand. And ways of storing that electricity as well.
If you do the sums you will find that if you want 150 gw 24/7 you need 600 gw installed. And you need a huge amount of hydrogen storage. I caan send you the calculation if you ask
The Royal Society Report referred to found that
“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. (Emphasis added)
They concluded that batteries would only provide “short term grid balancing services”
He just states the obvious, so why do the experts at National Grid just go along with this madness, surely someone at the top can understand that intermittent renewables are just not going to work to supply reliable electricity at a reasonable price. The undersea connectors to the offshore wind farms and to the continent are unreliable and vulnerable to damage, accidental or sabotage.
Getting rid of the gas network without a reliable alternative is just crazy, blowing up the coal fired generating, before we had a reliable green replacement was just plain irresponsible. China controls the lithium and graphite needed for all the batteries as well as neodymium for the magnets in both wind farms and BEVs. Sooner or later the National Grid is going to fail, I just pray that it happens sooner and the realisation of the impossibility of a world without fossil fuels becomes clear. This winter it is going to be really touch and go to keep the lights on, it really depends on the weather and that is not a good position to be in a relatively well developed country like the UK.
NG is a rate of return business. The more capital equipment it owns and runs the higher the potential revenue and profit allowed under regulation. The more its execs get paid, are in receipt of bonus, options and pensions. They are therefore incentivized to go along with this madness. Having existing power stations replaced where the transmission system is already strong does absolutely nothing for growth in their future financial returns. However covering the country and seas with new cables makes them very rich.
It could also make BT and its shareholders wealthy too.
BT’s buried treasure: Internet giant’s fading underground wire network ‘worth billions’
https://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/1827006/bt-british-telecom-buried-treasure-copper-billions
Although it could extend digging up roads for some considerable time
Don’t lecture me about 20%.
Tell Andrew Harding, because my initial response was a reaction to his “2000 parts in 10,000” posting above. Which is 20% by volume.
That is where it came from.
An increase from 3 CO2 molecules in every 10,000 other atmospheric molecules to 4.2 per 10,000 is creating a ‘climate crisis’?
I don’t think so!
If that was the case, how did green, blue/green algae, plants and other life-forms thrive when atmospheric CO2 was 2000 molecules per 10,000?
How would humans, or any other advanced life form, survive in 20% CO2 ?
Irrelevant. Ask how humans should survive winters with inadequate heating.
20%? Do you mean 20% increase in a “trace gas”. Currently the level is 0.04%
Here is some free information to help you to put CO2 into context.
1. CO2 is the gas of life. It is not a pollutant. It is the single most important molecule to life on the planet and the source of the oxygen you I and most of life on the planet breaths.
2. The starting place should always be establishing context but that not support the climut gang so they simply ignore facts which challenge their fact free campaignbut here there are.
Geological history
A. During the Cambrian when there was an explosion in species diversity the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 7000ppm.
B. When the Angiosperms evolved ( the plants we eat) the concentration was 2500-2800ppm. This is why commercial greenhouse growers pump CO2 into the air because at 410ppm plants are better off than at 280ppm but still starving. Increasing the concentration of CO2 in the greenhouse results in plants growing larger, faster while using less water.
C. When the Primates (our ancestors evolved the concentration was 1500ppm).
D. Only one time in geological history has the atmospheric concentration of CO2 been as low as it is today.
E. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been in linear decline for 160 million years caused by the evolution of shelly marine life forms which sequestrate CO2 in order to make hard shells from calcium carbonate. Their success is demonstrated by the huge volumes of shelly limestone around the world which represent CO2 removed from the Carbon Cycle. where it belongs.
E. During the first part of the CURRENT ice age, atmospheric CO2 levels fell to around 180ppm, 30 ppm above the level at which photosynthesis stops. When this happens plants die and all life further up the food chain dies. Life on Earth dodged an extinction bullet only a few thousand years ago.
F. The starting point for reference therefore should not be the frightening abnormally low level of 280ppm at the end of the Little Ice Age but more reasonably the average over geological time which is….2500ppm. Also the ISSUE today should be that 160million year linear decline not a very recent modest increase in atmospheric CO2.
Here endeth today’s lesson
Many thanks for such a succint reply. I would like to use this, with cult members, if I may?
With pleasure but do not be surprised how the religiously indoctrinated react to statistically significant empirical data based science because the clever lefties who run the show have given them permission to “blank” anything which does not agree with their brainwashing.
But that’s why it’s so much fun challenging their stupidity and groupthink 🤣
It always reminds me of the video of all those “enthusiasts” in the crowd at the Nuremberg Rallies making the ziegheil salute, people who strangely afterwards denied either being there or being Nazis…. The internet is to blame for a lot of this because all those weak minded who used to need religion to give their lives meaning now turn to the new religions and “likes” for a feeling of worth and in a lot of cases power. If you ever had the misfortune of encountering born again Christians you will understand the blind obedience and shear hypocrisy shown together with complete intolerance towards anyone who had not yet seen the light. People who are inarticulate and soft brained now have powerful slogans to use, a bit like red and yellow cards. They can make a statement calling you “Denier” etc which is the beginning and end of the conversation, a conversation they are incapable of contributing anything more to. Lenin learned and practiced this over 100 years ago when energising the illiterate.
It is so predictable that those making the most noise regarding nonsense about thaving the pwanet are actually those who know the least but then being part of the mob is always more attractive to cowards than challenging it! How else to understand public demonstrations by the asinine followers of XE and Just stop oil who are walking talking celebration of hydrocarbons dressed as they ALL are in synthetic clothing? Irony and personal awareness is lost on them!
How did our 21st Century civilization reach this point where demonstrating wilful ignorance in public is now seen as a virtue?
It might have something to do with the fact that anyone who subscribes to social media has the view that their opinions are worthy of broadcasting worldwide; no matter how ignorant and abusive they are? The PTB seem to pay an inordinate amount of attention to these outpourings; conflating quantity with quality. The MSM wants to compete with this 24 hours rolling news cycle and thus focus on speed rather than accuracy of reporting.
As one example, in the autumn/winter of 1968/69 the Hong Kong flu epidemic swept through the UK. The infection fatality rate was much greater than C19 and it affected all age groups; not just the elderly with co-morbidities. The country was not shut down, people were not paid to stay at home, schools were not shut down and the NHS was not shut down. Contrast that with the hysteria that affected the body politic; so aptly demonstrated by the supporters of the government narrative at the ‘Covid Inquiry’.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence that social media were not available back then and grown ups were running the country, not History & PPE graduates with zero scientific knowledge and common sense?
Oldbrew are you really saying that 20% CO2 in the atmosphere would be acceptable to keep the heating on ?!
Pardenmeforbreathing (indeed). Humans and modern life is evolved to live in an atmosphere containing only trace concentrations of CO2.
People would find 0.25% CO2 is very bad. Forget about any athletic activities in that. It would be a global ecological catastrophe irrespective of any effect on climate.
Why would we ever get to 20% CO2?
It is at 0.04% now.
And why would 0.25% be “very bad”? Submarines regularly operate between 2000 and 5000 ppm, with no ill effect:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325500867_Acute_Exposure_to_Low-to-Moderate_Carbon_Dioxide_Levels_and_Submariner_Decision_Making
It is typically around 1000 ppm CO2 inside buildings, as I discovered after buying a CO2 monitor.
Paul: “no ill effect” on fit healthy young individuals on limited times in submarines is not really a good measure of wellbeing. In any case, the other studies mentioned did indeed find a bad effect on decision making at only 0.1% CO2.
People go to the countryside and coastal resorts for “fresh air”. There would be outrage if people were expected to live in submarine air their whole lives.
climanrecon:
1000ppm is 0.1%.
People struggle for breath at 3%, and 4% is immediately dangerous to life.
Every increase in CO2 means you have to breath more to compensate for it. Your athletic performance in endurance events will be decreased in proportion.
Humans and most advanced life around today is tuned to trace concentrations of CO2. Who knows what the result would be if it was increased to say submarine levels. Not good I suspect.
Since CO2 stimulates respiration, experimentation has shown that up to 35% it excites respiration and circulation, above that it depresses it and becomes toxic above 50%.
The atmospheric C02 concentration aboard submarines on average reaches 5 000ppm and beyond, with no harmful effects to crew.
Commercial green houses increase atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 1 000 to 1 200ppm to enhance plant growth, with no harmful effects to staff
The contents of our lungs are mostly CO2 prior to each expiration.
All medical oxygen contains trace CO2 to stimulate respiration. Without CO2 in our lungs, respiration stops.
All round more is better, less is worse.
John Bowman:
I don’t know where you got those figures from. 35% or 50% CO2 would kill you.
The CO2 content of expired air is about 4% and the concentration in our lungs is also around this.
So I would look it up on Wikipedia if I were you, because you have some serious misconceptions.
You are correct that medical grade oxygen can contain extra CO2 to stimulate respiration, because that is indeed what it does.
So do we want to go round 24/7 with our respiration being stimulated ? I suspect not.
kzbkzb
Most of the CO2 that was in the atmosphere 500 million or more years ago is currently held in carboniferous rocks like Limestone, Chalk, Shale and Marble. Most of that CO2 is going to remain there for a few more hundred million years. As many forms of life in the oceans are still using CO2 to make their shells things like corals, mussels, oysters, scallops, pipis, abalone, clams and anything with a hard shell.
This removal of CO2 from the atmosphere is in part the cause of its reduction in the atmosphere.
As it beyond the capability of man to restore all this CO2 to the atmosphere your question about 20% totally irrelevant. Even using every gram of Fossil Fuel is unlikely to raise the level of CO2 much above 1000ppm. The flora and fauna of Earth will increase the rate they remove it again and in a few 10s of millions of years we’ll be back at starvation levels
Don’t lecture me about “20%.”
Tell Andrew Harding, because my initial response was a reaction to his “2000 parts in 10,000” posting above. Which is 20% by volume.
That is where it came from. I’ve never said it was likely, it was a simple reaction to his post.
‘CO2 is the gas of life. It is not a pollutant. It is the single most important molecule to life on the planet’
This limnologist says it is water that is most important. Life was anaerobic for billions of years.
Nicely sums up what I have been thinking for the last 20 or so years and telling anybody who will listen. Sadly most folks are more interested in the latest soap plotline.
Not us lot obv.
my unanswered question to my M.P. is how are government advisors selected?
If the government requires advice, how can it chose what advice is correct, or what advisor is reliable, simply they can’t and that is the big problem.
It is blatantly obvous to anyone with grid and generation knowledge that our current policy is unworkable. It seems that a catastrophic (and very expensive) failure is required to bring the government to their senses?
‘In other words, replacing an idle wind farm in the UK with a coal-fired power station in Belgium would be assumed to represent an emissions-reducing move.’
I’VE GOT IT, THEN! Belgium gets their power from you, and you get yours from them! Then y’all generate it any way you want to.
‘the ability to send power where it’s needed depends on there being surplus generating capacity in the precise place where the wind is blowing.’
And people willing to sell it to you. Just because they have it doesn’t mean they will let you have it.
I would say Micael Kelly is a brilliant man (which, of course he is) but he’s only pointing out the bleeding obvious to the Janet and John green blob, in Janet and John terms, that they still can’t grasp.
If the situation is as hopeless as presented here, just what are we going to do when the oil and gas runs out ?
Good question , but it was answered nearly 80 years ago when we started to eplore nuclear power. Why we gave up when France in particular forged ahead I have no idea , but there are hundreds of nuclear power stations around the world so even the currently intellectually challenged representatives of British science and engineering should be able to cobble a few together.
As for oil and gas. If we still needed these there is fracking and still plenty of coal to use as power or converted to hydrocarbons by well known processes.
There’s not enough uranium in world. If the whole world used nuclear power for the bulk of its energy requirement, it would be burned through in about 20 years.
To extend this we would need the full nuclear fuel cycle, i.e. fast-breeder reactors and reprocessing. A plutonium energy economy for all nations of the world. Hmmm… is there a problem there ?
People will say, well thorium reactors. But that is unproven and also depends on breeder reactors. Because it’s not thorium they are burning. All fission starts with uranium-235.
232Th + n-> 233U which is the fissile fuel.
IDAU
A Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) is a nuclear reactor that uses fast neutron to generate more nuclear fuels than they consume while generating power, dramatically enhancing the efficiency of the use of resources?
Yes a fast breeder is a reactor which makes plutonium from uranium-238, the most common isotope of uranium.
As pointed out, the so-called thorium reactor depends on fissionable U-233 being made from Th-232, the most common isotope of thorium. So the thorium fuel cycle is dependent on breeder reactors and also on U-235 or Pu-239 to start it, because Th-232 is not itself fissionable.
The U-232 which is also formed as an impurity is fiercely radioactive and makes a whole new reprocessing problem.
To my knowledge the “thorium” reactor is at best experimental. It’s a long way off being commercially viable.
Use coal.
Nuclear Fusion is only 50 years away
I thought it was 20 years, but that was 30 years ago.
Please be careful Prof Kelly, your namesake who went against the Blob ….
We could reach Net Zero. First frack and exploit all available fossil fuel resources. Use the resultant prosperity to build a fleet of small modular reactor — uranium and thorium — and as they are built gradually replace the fossil fuel generators. By 2050 we should be running on nuclear power alone.
Well, it makes more sense than the hand-wavey solutions offered from renewables. But for some reason the Blob doesn’t want solutions, it would rather live in a Green never-never land.
JF
Small modular reactors solve what problem?
Thorium solves what problem?
Gamecock,
small modular reactors can be used at decommissioned sites with existing grid connection. That is a practical and economical. Not a complete answer but a step forward.
This has been put forward but we seem very slow in implementing this technology?
Ian Reid – your proposal means the nationalisation of the power generation industry, because the private sector will not accept nuclear risks and liabilities. Both the Conservative and Labour parties are behind the creation of GB Nuclear as the “delivery body” for a new fleet of nuclear power stations. It is targeting (initially) a 25% share of the industry – which private market would you expect to see the government targeting a share?
GB Nuclear spells the end of the Thatcher experiment on private sector provision of power. How does private sector investment fit around this? The answer is: give us a crutch, otherwise we walk away. So that’s exactly what you see today.
Is this a “step forward”?
The best (only) chance for anything remotely approaching the privatised model envisaged by Thatcher would be to lift the ban on coal fired generation, for the Government to stop driving technology choice for decarbonisation, and for the Government to stop providing crutches to lame duck generation technologies: that means wind and nuclear.
Jordan: Perhaps nationalization was always the plan. Renewables make no sense, except as tools to get the people to accept communism.
Gamecock: agreed.
The game is: “Nuclear is the answer, now what is the question.”
It’s decarbonisation, if the Government thinks this has public support, so it’s best make everything else either ineffective or hideously expensive. If this mask slips, the Government will turn to energy security and dependency on gas (still banning coal though).
That’s how to make nuclear the preferred choice. The future of the industry is administered pricing, plus other important administrative arrangements. REMA has been underway for at least a year now (review of electricity market arrangements). There has been public criticism of marginal pricing in setting power price – if this idea goes anywhere, and there is move away from marginal pricing, the industry will be unable to evaluate the opportunity costs of supply and demand. What kind of market do we expect from this?
In future, there will be a subsidiary role for some private sector interests, as permitted by central agencies. So there might still be an illusion of competition in power generation.
We are well down that road today. The GB power industry has lapsed into a sclerotic condition, having happily danced to the discordant tune of government policy for the last 10 years.
The next big announcement in the power industry is Sizewell C (already half announced), and the successful commissioning of Hinkley Point C is absolutely crucial.
Build a fleet of small vehicles with small modular reactors that provide locomotion, heating, cooling, wipers, digital environment, and strawberry ice cream on demand.
Sound good to me.
And flying? Cars? Cooking? Boilers?
In the cold war years, there was a design for a nuclear ramjet. It blew highly radioactive fuel fragments out the back, but that was seen as a bonus over enemy territory.
Well obviously the solution is winter lockdowns, where people must stay in their houses, don’t go to work, eat only what they stored in summer, and the government switches off the electricity supply. We could call it “nudge hibernation”, because such vast social engineering would be called a “nudge” by the authorities.
” Emeritus ”
I looked up the origin of this term and found that the current usage is a bit different than the original.
But, my question is – – Has this fellow made his views known before he became emeritus — that is, retired?
Indeed he did: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2995239/Why-Royal-Society-wrong-climate-change-devastating-critique-world-s-leading-scientific-organisation-one-Fellows.html
+1
Being emeritus does not imply no longer being academically active. It just removes the obligations of being the active holder of a chair to give lectures, teach and administer your department and run research programmes. You get to choose how much you do, and in Oxbridge colleges you retain the right to dine at High Table. Several emeritus professors who taught me are still active in various fields.
I’ve monitored the grid daily and for months have been astounded that the interconnector supply has very often been 15% to 20%. What are we paying for this? Why don’t we use our own generation? Is National Grid fit for purpose?
Most likely the imported energy is cheaper than producing our own, or very worrying, we might not have enough generating capacity ourselves. As for National Grid – one of my shareholdings – they run the grid, not the generating capacity. The government controls the generation capacity through its legislation which currently discriminates against anyone wanting to build fossil fuel generation by legally restricting their output and imposing tax on them. Within this framework the job of National Grid is to manage what generation there is and the grid network to deliver it.
It looks as though today wind and hydro are cutting the need for gas generation in Europe.
https://windeurope.org/about-wind/daily-wind/electricity-mix
Who wants to live in a country with a Storm Babete or Ciaran every week?
He’s missed a point about Morocco, as in Islamic country, if there’s a government in power that’s antithetical to us, would they cut the power off?
Great piece but it seems to have been “disappeared” by the DT. I wasn’t aware of its existence until I saw it here.
ATM wind is meeting 44% of the UK’s electricity demand, unsurprisingly. What is surprising is that we are still importing so much electricity from the Continent. Why is that?
https://gridwatch.co.uk
It could be that the imported electricity is cheaper than our own generation and those that have generated it need to get rid of it.
Thing is gezza, it definitely is “cheap” power being dumped on the market….BUT that is not reflected in the end user price. As I type the UK is importing an absurdly high 20% of its demand (with no inertia, frequency control, reactive power et alia) through interconnectors. This 20% is likely dirt cheap, possibly free or even negatively priced but the wholesale balancing price is still £130 per MWh.
Before Putin dropped in on Ukraine I was paying £0.175p retail per kWh.
Of course the interconnectors are there because of our EU membership and its single electricity market, interconnecting the grids of EU members and the EEA and Efta nations bar Iceland. I wouldn’t say it was a good idea, as with the single currency, it was more political than well thought out.
I wonder where prices would have gone without the West fomenting the war in Ukraine given prices were already on the rise prior to it. I note this morning that the GB News financial commentator when talking about inflation mentioned energy prices but of course avoided saying that the main driver of prices is Net Zero. I guess they would be told off by the fascists at Ofcom again for stating facts if they had.
Mike, it is straight on dumping. Look at this website (n.b. the French Gridwatch)
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
France regularly dumps excess nuclear onto the market. Similarly Germany now has large coal running (they have almost 38GW of capacity) and regularly run over 20GW – they often dump power (especially through the night) at even negative prices to keep their plants running.
The problematic issue is that despite the theoretical low prices, the perverse market system still guarantees a high end user price. Heads they win, tails you lose.
I‘be been reading Prof Kelly for some time now. His arguments are irrefutable. But only concern electricity generation. What are the Net Zero ists planning for lorries? Aviation? Shipping? Agriculture Construction. I cup my ear
Kelly makes a very good case and he is more likely to be correct than the climate mobsters.
You make a very good point on what we are going to do to fuel heavy vehicles, ships, aviation and agriculture ( and of course wars). Essentially there is no scalable, affordable alternative at preset and probably never will be. I will now be reminded that hydraulic fracturing will unleash copious amounts of hydrocarbon to continue BAU. There will be those who claim we can transform coal into transport fuels. After 45 years in the oil, gas and petrochemical business (production, refining and petchems) and having spent a lot of time on evaluating processes I am afraid that these are not solutions. Aviation presents a particular problem as jet kerosine has no viable affordable method of synthetic production at scale. Very few FT processes exist globally( less than 10 ) and most are small scale. All now use natural gas as the feed,. No FT projects were deemed to be viable in the US with gas at $2 MMBTU. The largest FT plant in Qatar was only built because the gas feed was free until the plant was paid out. It cost a mere $22 + billion(2008) to produce around 7.5 million tonnes of products per year, which today is a medium size refinery.
As I regularly state at conferences – “there are many process that are available, but not all of them make sense”.
Anyone wishing to make statements on shale oil and gas really needs to do their homework. Shale exploitation, like wind and solar , is not cheap. There is much hype and mis-information on costs. Wells are not becoming cheaper to drill and complete; quite the opposite. Recovery of the oil in place is very poor, and well owners go for maximum production at the expense of well life and optimum rates of recovery. The fast buck syndrome. What that is now left of US shale resource is the lower quality Tier 2 and 3 benches and basins that will cost more to produce.
Even if the UK was to permit hydraulic fracturing there is no guarantee that it would produce affordable gas. A whole gas gathering infrastructure would need to be put in place, and a large number of wells would be required. Anecdotal evidence suggest that the Bowland shale is highly faulted and may not be viable. Just like Kelly, we do not have the trained personnel or equipment to carry out the exploitation of shale in the UK.
Now that’s an article worth reading
YCMIU
I’m not sure of the situation today but in 2022 half of France’s nuclear powerstations were offline for repair. The start of 2023 was a record low for French nuclear. Even so they seem to be able to have 40GW nuclear online.
The problems were exacerbated by Macron’s 2018 plan to go renewable which I think still involves 50 offshore wind farms by 2050, with 40GW of capacity.
The German situation is interesting as they have recently been a net importer since the nuclear plants were shut down.
As the battery car industry is on the edge of collapse as the realisation dawns that normal people don’t want them, having worked out how useless they are, so the wind industry will follow in due course. All the European windmill makers are in trouble and those building and running wind farms are complaining of costs.
Off topic but wind developer pulls out.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/worlds-largest-offshore-wind-farm-developer-abandons-two-major-us-projects-renewable-bust
Not quite on topic but relevant when considering size of windmill compared to a desk. https://www.swri.org/press-release/swri-gti-energy-ge-celebrate-mechanical-completion-of-155-million-supercritical-co2
This is typical. They move away from what works and it creates an issue, so they try and plug the issue with something extra that also has an issue, so they try another additional plug, which also doesn’t solve it, etc. etc. The solution is “if it aint broke, don’t fix it!”. This is an engineering rule that just works.
‘Renewable’ energy requires the invention of perpetual motion.
Wind power is not sustainable, it cannot sustain continuous supply, it is intermittent and unreliable.
The farther away generation is from its point of use, the greater the power loss due to the resistance of the copper wire, therefore the greater the output required to make up the loss, and the greater the cost to the consumer who has to pay for the lost electricity.
Just add to the list of why Net Zero is a fantasy.
Let’s first of all dispel that misinformation that renewables are green – from materials needed for manufacture, to the toxic waste from end of life into landfills
Simple – adopt the Ireland Secondary Fuel Obligation and use our gas turbine generators to burn distillate fuels at competitive oprices.
kzbkzb I challenge your numbers. “People would find 0.25% CO2 is very bad”. Where does that and your other quotes come from? If you read my rant you will see reference to the explosion in life when the level was 7000ppm (0.7%) How do you defend your statement when the US Navy used 5000ppm (0.5%) as a “nice to have” upper limit for those males who work and function in their nuclear submarines? https://www.cibse.org/knowledge-research/knowledge-portal/cibse-case-study-ventilation-in-a-submarine
Hi pmfb, I no longer respond to, nor bother to read kzbkzb’s posts. Why? because I do not believe he is a real person. When I used to read posts from this “source” I noticed some serious inconsistencies and came to the conclusion they are deliberately attempting to cause disruption on this site. Call me paranoid if you like but if you objectively analyse any series of this “sources” posts they appear to be from multiple different angles and inconsistent view almost as if from multiple people.
Good observation and point taken. Also more worrying if the comments come from a leftie world AI generator because all it takes then is the person or persons to press a button…minimal effort, comparted to the reasoned reply….
Show me one example of an inconsistency. Also, if I was AI, would I be inconsistent ?
My motivation is only to educate when there is a factually incorrect post, because that is simply more ammunition for the other side.
Primitive life may well have evolved in 7000ppm CO2. Just because some microbes are OK with that does not mean that everything is. We are tuned to operate in trace CO2 concentrations.
On submarines, that very article says CO2 exceeding 2,000ppm is hazardous for pregnant women. So 2,500ppm (0.25%) could be fairly interpreted as very bad for the human population.
The primary driver of breathing is maintaining CO2 balance (NOT oxygen). Every increase in atmospheric CO2 means you have to breath more in proportion. Fit young people may not notice, unless they are running a marathon or something. But we have a lot of persons who are not fit or young.
The article does indeed say that and this is an arbitrary number like the 5000ppm. We do seem to live in a time where we do not think about the consequences of the latest fashion before acting on them. I ask again for you to provide links to scientific literature which supports your claim regarding the crazy numbers you discuss and the likelihood of them occurring as a consequence of what is a temporary uptick in atmospheric CO2 levels ( if the humans did it meme is actually factually correct). I would welcome also your view on the issue of a 160 million year linear decline in CO2 available to the Carbon Cycle which is a significant issue worthy of much discussion but strangely like the work on paleo temperature, Scotese (1999), paleo CO2 concentration, Berner (2001) and Davis (2017) who considered both not brought to public awareness in the currently skewed narrative surrounding this subject which geological history shows us is a non issue. This decline has also occurred while the Earth has repeatedly warmed and cooled supporting the observation that over geological time there exists no correlation of any kind between atmospheric concentration of CO2 and surface temperature. The Earth and it’s atmosphere are dynamic in nature and yet we are being fed a narrative which pushes the asinine claim that somehow there was stasis up until 150 years ago. My final point which I mention frequently is that this whole narrative is claimed to be based on science which in turn only exists when a claim or assertion is supported by statistically significant empirical data. Regarding the claimed link between increase in the concentration of CO2 available to the Carbon Cycle and temperature of the surface of the planet or more importantly the Troposphere, no such data exists. Regarding the claimed link between the increase in CO2 available to the Carbon Cycle due to the actions of man and temperature increase, no such data exists. Firmly held beliefs and assertions do not science make no matter how famous a film star you are or how many school strikes petulant young Swedish girls instigate.
Once again, I never brought up the crazy numbers. Ask Andrew Harding (and others) about that. It wasn’t me, I am merely responding to it.
Similarly I never even mentioned any other topic in the rest of your post. The discussion was never about any of that.
The discussion is about one very narrow point. And that is about the acceptability of either paleo CO2 concentrations or submarine CO2 concentrations in the modern world.
The reason being, the other side will look at this and say “these lunatic fossil fuel shills are saying it is OK for us to live in 0.5% CO2”.
Well are you really saying that? Are you really saying you will burn coal until we are on the edge of suffocation ? Because that is how it will be presented.
Also, given the choice of two atmospheres to live in, which would you choose ?
The one with 0.04% CO2 and 21% oxygen, or the one with 0.5% CO2 and 20.5% oxygen? Which would you choose ?
That is what this discussion is about, nothing more, so please do not put any more words in my mouth.
Unless ALL the organic shelly limestone in the world is stripped of it’s CO2 content (impossible), then this is a pointless discussion because that will only reach a maximum level of 2500ppm which is the level it was when the angiosperms we eat evolved. The quantities of commercially realizable oil and gas by comparison are miniscule. Another side to oil and gas conveniently ignored by the climate zealots are petrochemicals. Bird killing windmills only produce electricity (erratically). An increasing part of the value of oil gas AND coal is not it’s calorific value but its chemical value which completely supports our 21st century civilization. Take that away and it is back to the Stone Age and lots and lots of wars. Given that the primates evolved when the level was 1500ppm it is reasonable to use that as a starting point, however we are lung breathers so the level when lungs appeared which clearly was much higher would be the correct level to go for. As I said given that a looming mass extinction in just over 1 million years ( or less if the climate zealots get their way) is coming unless we find a way to stop that 160 million year trend imposing it’s self so far from this asininity of removing CO2 from the atmosphere we need to find ways to add more!
I recall reading something about the Gaian hypothesis many years ago. That is, humans had been evolved precisely to dig up and burn fossil fuels, and thereby restore the optimum CO2 concentration. So we are just doing our job, but if we destroy ourselves in the process it’s simply “job done” as far as Gaia is concerned.
Anyhow it would be interesting to calculate just how much fossil fuel needs to be burnt to increase CO2 to 1500ppm or whatever you want. I suspect it’s not that much, if we go by simple dilution in the known mass of atmosphere.
I suppose the simple answer is that CO2 levels have risen by 2.5ppm in the last 12 months:
https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2
So at that rate, we will be up to about 670 ppm in 100 years time. Whether there are enough fossil fuels in the ground to do that is debatable!
“In a Net Zero world, what will we do when the wind isn’t blowing? ” … the same as you did when it is blowing, because in a net zero world, there is no coke to produce steel for windmills, there is no fertiliser to produce food, even if there were food to grow without fertilisers, there are no fuels for tractors, or if you grow bio-fuel, there is no land left to grow food.
So, what you do, is get hungry, poor and die … whether or not the wind blows.
I estimate London’s 8,000,000 people would have less than a month to live.
Even if food is produced in the hinterlands, there will be no way to get it to London. The wise populace will evacuate to the countryside early.
Something sounds familiar . . .
‘Under the Marxist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside. But this dramatic attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost, and whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.’
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” — Twain