EU To Spend Trillions On Net Zero Grid Expansion
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
The EU is going to plough on with Net Zero insanity, regardless of the cost:
The EU is looking to front-load massive anticipatory investments into its energy infrastructure, shifting risk from industry to consumers and risking a landscape with unneeded or under-used pylons.
Amid its green transition, Europe needs almost €600 billion in investments into high-voltage power lines, transformers and wires by 2030—an unprecedented need for investments into the grid.
Zsuzsanna Pató, senior advisor at clean-energy think-tank RAP, says the transition “has caused a massive mismatch” between power generation and transport capacity.
She explains that the traditional challenge of connecting power demand to generation is exacerbated by the energy transition, which involves “shifting where power is generated while boosting demand through electrification.”
Energy-rich, windy, and sunny sites are often far away from where older coal or gas plants are located.
Timing matters, too. “There is a big pressure to speed up grid building to prevent a widening of the lead time gap between renewables and new loads,” said Pató.
Brussels is betting on a fresh approach to solving the problem: “anticipatory investments.” Unlike regular investments, which are more closely tied to immediate and short-term expected demand, anticipatory investments deliver power lines and wires multiple times larger than what is needed today.
Ghost pylons
However, Europe could be left with unused ‘ghost pylons’ littering the countryside if renewable projects do not materialise or if power demand forecasts are incorrect.
However, Europe could be left with unused ‘ghost pylons’ littering the countryside if renewable projects do not materialise or if power demand forecasts are incorrect.
There are many examples of massive investments in infrastructure that were subsequently underutilised or unused. In the 1980s, the US built $100 billion of unused nuclear power plants, and Spain boasts major airports that never welcomed more than a handful of passengers, which were built during the credit-fuelled boom of the 2000s.
The anticipatory approach’s proponents say these big investments, taking the plunge, are indispensable if the EU is to meet its decarbonisation goals.
“We need to invest more. That is inevitable. And regulators should act accordingly,” stresses Nicolò Rossetto, a research fellow at the Florence School of Regulation.
Normally, Europe’s energy regulators closely monitor which investments grid operators can make, and only approved investments can be recouped from consumers via higher grid tariffs.
None of this massive expenditure would be needed if it were not for EU net zero policy. And as with the similar grid expansion here, it is the public who will pay the bill.
And the will end up being much more than the 600bn euros quoted. Projects like these always cost more than budgeted, particularly where the EU is concerned. And if they want to spread the cost over say 20 years, there will be the interest cost to add.
Two trillion will probably be an underestimate.
And just as with the UK, EU citizens will get no say in the matter.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“The public will pay the bill” (and live with disruption and destroyed views)??
Now then Paul, you know our Beloved Leaders have promised that Wind and Solar are absolutely free!
Vote Uniparty!
The war on CO2 is costly, but it is fun to spend other people’s money. I suspect those that started this nonsense will be gone before the folly is well and truly finished. For example, John Kerry is 81 – past his best-by date by about 80 years! António Guterres of the UN – 75, James Hansen – 83.
Some site needs to make a list and check them off as they go.
One of the reasons all those people are desperately trying to speed up the changes.
As someone once said “Beware of old men in a hurry”.
Yes, we do need to get a move on so we can string them up before they fall off their perches.
Unfortunately, these oldsters have succeeded in indoctrinating a whole generation of youngsters that the end of the world really is nigh, unless we rush to net zero. Young couples are deciding not to have babies because they believe there’s no future for them
Anticipatiory Demand development, hmmmm, in any dictatorship it is easy to anticipate anything, the Central Party just tells the victims what they can or cannot have and models the “future” around proving that they got it right by having the “Right Goods/Infrastructure in the Right place at the Right Time”, in this case, sufficient HV cabling to service BEV, Heat Pumps and increased IT demand as out of work people languish at home staring at TV’s, tablets and phones because all the high value industrial jobs no longer exist leaving just warehouse distribution centres, supermarket shelf filling and other zero hours, low wage jobs to fill, and then there are only so many of those.
Interesting point, the HV cable industry worldwide has an existing order book that takes it into the early 2030’s, so given the scale of the upgrade, without building new production capacity, where will the cabling be sourced.
The new load capacity HV cable pylons are approx 3 to 7 times the size of current pylons, the CO2 footprint will be massive- access roads, concrete bases, and more importantly High Grade Steel which is not possible in electric arc steel manufacturing- oh goodness, more industrial Green Energy jobs exported to……..China, India, Brazil.
Then we have to consider the overall environment impact, and NIMBYs, we are bloody minded in the U.K. about our landscape, Europeans are equally bloody minded, do you think for one minute that these Don Quixote monsters will get passed without a fight, especially in the ECHR- the right to a quiet life.
Trillions will be spent, nothing will improve, millions of jobs will be lost, Energy will continue to increase in price to pay for the vanity project of Nett Zero.
As an aside, reports currently state that the (entire) Planets temperature is higher than it has ever been, but since thermometers have only been around about 500yrs, the Planet is thought to be about 4.54 billion years old, just how can anyone with any reliability know the actual temperature at any point during this period, certainly we know that it has been hot, cold and that guesses can be made as too whether that was -20 or +40 but the Climate Cult speak as it they have the authority to know the exact temperature at every point of the Planet history. What I know as a layman is that the sooner it gets warmer in the Northern hemisphere the better as cold is a killer.
High Voltage transformers are made to order, it is a very specialised industry, there is just not enough capacity to meet the deadlines imposed by Net Zero madness. Probably end up with a Chinese manufactured grid, with Chinese kill switches hidden away.
Ed Miliband and his EU counterparts will just have to bark louder at the can’t doers 🙄
OPPORTUNITY COST. Every €1 spent building transmission lines is a €1 not spent on something else. Every construction worker building this stuff is a construction worker not building other stuff. Building before it’s needed is even worse in terms of opportunity cost.
Looks like the makers of the TV programme “Abandoned Engineering” will be kept employed for a long time into the future.
The dinosaurs and the planet quite happily coped with CO2 levels twenty times current levels, and obviously didn’t go into meltdown.
In 1931, 100 scientists wrote a book about why Einstein was wrong about relativity. Just because the majority agree on something doesn’t mean it’s right, particularly when based on observational studies that don’t even observe reality, just models that can’t even predict the temperatures we have had since they started.
Einstein famously quipped, “Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”
No sooner said than done. Where will the resources: raw materials, labour, construction, manufacture, transportation, energy, capital come from to fulfil this fantasy?
And with all that high tension transmission sorted in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, what about all the upgrade and expansion of local distribution to get the power to its point of use?
Net Zero is just a jumble of stated ambitions, blurted out in no particular order, with no overall concept or plan of how the parts fit together and what resources are required.
It’s OK, Ed Milliband will just command all the infrastructure to happen – and it will. If that does nevertheless fail, I hear he’s asked Sooty to lend him his magic wand.
Front-load = freeload, business as usual.
Cables to nowhere. Rhymes with bridges to nowhere.
Happy birthday.
Thx!
Look up TOFU Chinese steel, it will make you proud that we are 100% determined to have our future High Tensile Steel supplied via China.
I did look it up and strewth I am now really worried. TOFU Chinese Steel coming to a nuclear reactor near you!
It is not ‘investment’ but a huge waste of resources. On the plus side it is physically impossible to deliver this insanity by 2030 just the same as Red Labour’s ‘carbon free’ generation is. But then maybe the watchword for a Red Labour government will be ‘when resources allow’ and given 2 Homes electoral criminal Rayner’s plan to hammer businesses with worker rights and no zero hours contracts, growth will be restricted to plants not the economy. Who would have thought they would find out what it was like to inherit an economy ruined by a socialist Tory government.
The EU aren’t spending anything, taxpayers are