Four of Britain’s top institutions have made erroneous estimates of the cost of Net Zero
By Paul Homewood
Four national institutions have failed to model the 2050 energy system correctly, and all of them in ways that lead to understatement of the costs of Net Zero.
Over the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph reported that the Climate Change Committee has got its energy system modelling wrong. The revelation was made by Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, the lead author of the recent Royal Society report on electricity storage, in remarks made at a seminar at Oxford.
According to Sir Christopher, the Climate Change Committee’s estimates of the costs of Net Zero are fundamentally flawed because they have only modelled isolated years. As he pointed out in the seminar, low-wind years can happen back to back, which means that the Climate Change Committee need twice as much storage capacity as they thought. As a result, they have underestimated the costs.
However, the Sunday Telegraph didn’t mention that it’s not just the Climate Change Committee that has made this mistake. In the same seminar, Sir Christopher pointed out that the National Infrastructure Commission has done the same thing, despite being warned of the problem of clusters of low-wind years. So they too will have underestimated the costs.
The National Infrastructure Assessment…is also based on one year…they were told by the Met Office ‘you can get extreme events’…it’s not enough to look at one. They looked at one, so they got the answer wrong. The Met Office are really angry, because they told them ‘don’t do it’, but they did it.
I can also reveal that National Grid ESO, in its Future Energy Scenarios, has done the same thing. I wrote to the NGESO team to ask how they did things, and was told that their models are prepared using weather conditions in 2013, which they describe as an “average year”. They are starting to run tests against low-wind conditions (so-called ‘dunkelflautes’), but back-to-back wind droughts don’t seem to be on their radar yet:
The generation provided from renewables, as well as the demand profile, is typically based on an average weather year (2013).
For FES23, we also conducted an initial piece of analysis looking at abnormal weather conditions (resulting in abnormal supply and demand patterns), the results of which can be found in our FES23 publication under the title Dunkelflaute Period. We took a period of extreme weather, in this case between Jan-Feb 1985, and applied it to our Consumer Transformation scenario in 2050, to look at how the system would respond to a sustained period low renewable output…
We are planning on looking at abnormal supply and exceptional demand in more detail going forward as well as the effects of more extreme weather.
That means that they too will have underestimated the cost of Net Zero.
The Royal Society is to be congratulated for clarifying the problem. However, it turns out that their own modelling is fundamentally flawed too. That’s because, while they model 37 years of different wind speeds, they assume that electricity demand is always the same. Sir Christopher has admitted that this is not correct, in a podcast broadcast last year. As he put it then:
And now I confess something that is a bit of a weakness in our report. We’ve got this model of one year of demand…based in the weather in 2018…We simply repeat that 37 times.
This is clearly wrong, because in 2050 it is imagined that we will all heat our homes with electric heat pumps. Electricity demand will therefore be much higher in cold years than in mild ones, and if we have back to back cold years, we are going to need much more storage.
So, four well funded national institutions have failed to model the 2050 correctly, and all of them in ways that low-balls the cost of Net Zero. That’s a remarkable coincidence, and one that should probably raise alarm bells about the extent of the rot in the British establishment.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“That’s a remarkable coincidence”. Maybe because they have an agenda?
The agenda includes groupthink.
It’s not a coincidence at all. They all use the same set of sock puppet consultancies and academics to underpin their conclusions. They are on some secret approved list. As I’ve pointed out, most of the underlying work for the Royal Society comes from the same sources. Their only “innovation” has been to look at 37 years of weather data in calculating renewables outputs.
From my evidence to the BEIS Select Committee back in 2022:
Studies commissioned by BEIS, OFGEM and the CCC never seem to examine storage requirements properly: they either look at very short periods and assume that a combination of short term storage and demand curtailment will work and that storage will be full, or that supply is magically available when limited storage runs out, either via interconnectors that are assumed to have dispatchable availability or because the wind blows again. The reality is that storage or other output has to cover for interseasonal variations and against a year (or even a run of years) with low output from renewable sources.
Perhaps Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith finally read it?
They all resort to the same tricks
A further error is you can’t model this on an average year, because if you get a worse than average year the lights will go out.
You need to be modelling based on worst years and including additional safety factors.
Note also that the impact of climate change (if you believe the models) predicts a reduction in wind speed for Europe of 8-10% by 2050. Simple physics of temperature gradients driving extra-tropical weather systems in a warming world.
They are all talking bollocks. And we are paying for it both on funding these idiots and paying for the policy consequences.
A drop in wind speed of 10%, all other things being equal, will result in power reductions of roughly 30%, or 27.1% to be pendantic.
And, to recover the lost future production, the capacity based on current wind speeds will need to be increased by 37.17%.
Indeed, 1 – 0.9^3 = 0.271
But thanks for the second calculation – what’s that based on?
If X is the fractional increase needed:
(1 – 0.271) * (1+X) = 1
X = ( 1 / (1 – 0.271) ) – 1
X = 0.3717
Excellent, thank you!
Institutions are supposed to be sources of enlightenment.
However, when those institutions are funded by politicians drunk with power who want to micromanage every aspect of people’s lives, they also realize their true purpose is to provide support.
Drunks and lamp posts.
A lot of our learned institutions that were once respected for their expertise are now embarrassingly bad at this. My former engineering institution disappeared down the green plughole so badly that the magazine resembled a Guardian colour supplement that was barely readable apart from a spoof student blog. Finding a copy from an earlier time was quite a shock in finding how mush more intelligent it was.
The learned institutions are rewarded for providing support. Lose your integrity, keep your job.
Indeed. Mine was once one of the greatest Engineering Colleges there was. No longer. Currently famous for lots of gobby arts students outside screaming about foreign wars. The nature of a BSc. was such that 9-5 weekdays was in a lecture theatre or lab, before and after working on tests or projects and maybe a few pints after. Not outside waving an idiot placard. They have so lost their way.
You can bet the Government will do nothing about all this. They will just wait and hope it all comes out ok in the end.
The Royal Society of Chemistry has unfortunately gone the same way – endlessly lecturing its members on climate change, and on diversity and inclusion
As Climate Change is going to continue unabated, as nobody is doing anything to make a reduction in CO2 emissions, then any assumptions using typical or worst case for wind are likely to be way off the mark anyway.
I did write to Professor Llewelleyn Smith, I hope as politely as I know how. Asked him to invite Professors Happer, van Wijngaarden and Lindzen to the Royal Society to put their case. Apparently the science is settled and whatever I think about co2 being relatively unimportant is wrong. Oh well, that’s good to know.
It would be interesting to know why Llewellyn Smith considers himself better informed than Happer, van Wijngaarden and Linzen. It may be that he is right and they are wrong. But whichever way round is wrong it is surely important from every standpoint that we all know that so that we can proceed with some confidence, no?
Not really his thing. In his career, he ran CERN and JET Culham. He’s a particle physicist, not a climate scientist, with . However, having lifted the corner of the carpet to reveal the cockroaches scurrying beneath with bad assumptions in support of bad policy perhaps he could be persuaded to do more of the same and question more of the assumptions made in the work for the CCC, NGESO, DESNZ and OFGEM. These days his main interest is energy.
https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/llewellyn-smith
If the current (circa 1%) rate of UK population increase is sustained, then estimates need to be further increased by 30% by 2050.
Funny how the crises are always based on the worst case scenario model (look at predicted v actual CJD deaths, for example), but the downsides of the actions proposed are based on ridiculously optimistic models. Who’d have thought it?
Worse that that.
a. The RS assume annual electrical demand at 570 twh, which is woefully short of the true figure, by 2050. I have assumed 1,200 twh, and one of the other reports (Oxford, I think) assumed 1,500 twh. How can they estimate cost, if they cannot agree how much electricity we will need?
b. The RS estimate £410 billion, for the complete renewable system, including turbines, storage, and new grid. My estimate was £4,200, an order of magnitude greater.
c. The RS had a hydrogen battery that was only 30% efficient at best. But did not include any extra generation capacity to make up for the shortfall (the 70% energy being lost in their hydrogen ‘battery’).
R
“So, four well funded national institutions have failed to model the 2050 correctly, ” should read “So, four well funded national institutions have DELIBERATELY failed to model the 2050 correctly, …” Fixed! Every qualified engineer reading this post knows that you design for a realistic worst case and then add a safety factor for the unknown, which acknowledges the fact that we don’t know everything. Any engineers working for these institutions – I am sure there are some (and God help us if there aren’t any!)- should be ashamed of the institution and ethically should speak up! Alas, I am 70 and a retired engineer and I am dismayed by the lack of ethics in the engineering world these days. When I started I was told community first, self second. I was also told in my very first general engineering lecture that the world has advanced to where it is on the back of cheap and reliable energy.