AEP Away With The Fairies Again
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
AEP is away with the fairies again!
A cardinal fallacy reigns over the debate on green energy and global decarbonisation. It taps into deep Malthusian instincts and creates near universal confusion.
It causes well-educated people to accept the claim that stabilising greenhouse emissions by mid-century will prove to be a near impossible task. It contaminates economic models and explains why the UK Treasury and other bodies – though not the Energy Institute – cling to exorbitant estimates of what it will cost.
The larger silent fallacy that subverts all else is the notion of “primary energy demand”, promoted by the International Energy Agency (IEA) during the oil shock of the 1970s. It shaped a generation of academics and energy analysts, and still informs IEA reports.
In a nutshell, it assumes that we have to replace all the energy extracted from hydrocarbons. It seems an obvious truism, except that we do not need to do any such thing. Two-thirds of fossil energy is currently wasted, mostly in thermal heat lost to the air.
Cutting-edge research suggests that we will require just 40pc to 45pc of today’s total energy supply to replace the old system, and to lift the global South, and to satisfy the voracious demand of data centres, all at the same time. So rejoice.
“The entire decarbonisation challenge is far smaller than is made out by its critics. Primary energy demand, irrespective of how it’s defined, is simply not a matter of any importance,” said Michael Liebreich, global technology guru and founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
If you light your study with a 10-watt LED bulb powered off wind or hydro, you consume 95pc less energy for the same light as a 75-watt incandescent bulb powered by a coal plant working at 37pc thermal efficiency. Real life usually falls between these two theoretical extremes, but you get the picture.
If you switch from a VW Golf to an electric VW ID3 charged at night off British wind, or charged during the day off Australian solar, you cut primary energy use by 75pc at a stroke.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/18/rich-world-needs-less-energy-net-zero/
Societies have been improving energy efficiency for decades, but still use more energy every year. Indeed arguably we have been doing this for thousands of years.
In fact it is part and parcel of a much wider transformation of improving industrial efficiency, which has allowed us all to consume so much more.
And does AEP really not understand that the likes of the IEA and CCC have not already factored these changes into their calculations? He must be extremely naive to believe the word of the head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, whose sole purpose is to make money from renewables, something which depends on the useful idiots in the media continuing to promote its agenda.
While the West continues to reduce energy consumption, its efforts will continue to be swamped by the rest of the world.
But regardless of the exact amount of energy the world will need in thirty years time, nothing changes the fact that no modern economy can be run solely on intermittent wind and solar power, despite AEP’s assertions to the contrary.
AEP has clearly become totally unhinged where Net Zero is concerned, clutching at every straw which comes along.
It was not long ago that he was claiming we don’t need Net Zero Acts and targets, because renewables were so cheap and wonderful.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“a 75-watt incandescent bulb“
I believe these are nearly gone in the USA. Meanwhile server-facilities for the internet and now new computer uses (cloud, AI) produce demand not foreseen when the anti-incandescent vibe began 10 or 15 years ago.
Ambrose Evans writing in the Telegraph is indeed a confused man. He believes that the world is warming catastrophically because of man made CO2 emissions just like little GretaThunberg, and he believes that e-cars will save the day by reducing these emissions. And so he demonises fossil fuels. But I hate to tell him that for 2/3 of the people in the world those man-made CO2 emissions are here to stay. Get real Ambrose . .
Yes. His attitude is rather like the SNP putting the boot in because their Environment minister wants to delay NZ in Scotland. It’s the cognitive dissonance of wanting to cut their emissions but not having a clue of the effect on world-wide temps – two-tenths of SFA.
In order to reduce the load on the power grid, it would be best to eliminate AI, crypto and electric vehicles.
Data centres could also fit into that list.
I remember working in a huge data centre in the 70s-80s in the days when monster CPUs were water-cooled: as you approached the building at start of day you could always tell how busy it was by the huge clouds of steam coming from the cooling systems.
My grandson built a Personal Computer for me, two or three years ago, it is water cooled. I am creating this message on that same computer.
They put “green fuel” in a huge ship, the engine quits and the ship knocks down a bridge, balance the savings of using the “green fuel” with the energy used to demolish and rebuild the bridge. Just a thought that faulty “green fuel” is a most likely cause, if it is, that information may not ever be released.
Crikey, what the heck is he smoking!
It is not obvious why the Telegraph employs A E-P. Does nobody at the helm of the Telegraph read the rubbish he writes or the comments on his articles? Do they not realise that 99% of commenters have more intelligence that A E-P? Take this comment as an example:
There are so many technical flaws in this article that it should be withdrawn. Complete nonsense from start to finish.
He must be paid a hefty fee from some organisation if he has to write this guff.
Have you not noticed that the Telegraph became leftist many years ago – like the Tory party. I expect AEP is being paid by the green lobby to write all this rubbish.
They say: ‘Never trust an Irishman with a double-barrelled name.’ and no doubt the same goes for a Welshmen!
Quite so! In fact, AEP is a major embarrassment to we who are Welsh!
He seems to be extrapolating from one very significant technological change to change in everything. Aviation and shipping are decades away from any significant reduction in fossil fuel usage, and EVs will only replace ICEs if we are coerced. Most are not keen on replacing gas heating and cooking. Gas and coal will remain dominant for global electricity generation for at least 30 years. There is not going to be any signifiant reduction in global emissions in my lifetime without hugely authoritarian restrictions in the West and complete reversals of policy in Asia.
Surely shipping could go straight to zero emmissions by using nuclear power similar to that used in submarines.
Not that we need zero emmissions anyway since the climate changes naturally and reducing CO2 in the atmosphere will have zero effect.
For a nuclear sub cost is the least consideration. No-one got around to following up the NS Savannah, except for the Russian ice breakers, where again endurance trumps cost.
No, we can’t. It is a fallacy to equate military systems with civilian systems. There are big differences for real reasons.
Seventy to Eighty years ago, the US was designing Nuclear Power for Airplanes, a reactor was tested in a flying airplane. It did not power the plane, but the feasibility was proven before the project was canceled by John F. Kennedy. Two reactors that were built for the testing are at a museum at Idaho National Labs.
Modular Nuclear Power is coming, it will not be many years before Modular Nuclear will be available for ships and even airplanes.
Power Grids have gotten too large, too complicated, too exposed to dangers from man and nature and too marginal for reliable operation. Modular Nuclear Power, and/or Fossil Fuel Power is needed in each local region such that entire large regions that include multiple states, even multiple countries do not lose power due to an event that may be far away.
In the first years of my life, I lived on a farm. I recall some power outages, most were a few minutes or hours, I recall only one outage that was long, and it was only 18 hours. Longer would have been bad because we needed power to run electric milking machines. Seventy years ago, electric power was abundant, reliable and low cost, even at the edge of the local power grid. It likely was not that good everywhere, now, it is worse than that almost everywhere.
Nope. Not even close. Because it’s not feasible.
RR has been promising ‘modular’ for 9 years. It’s like “We’ll have fusion in 20 years.”
Plus, every use of ‘modular’ I’ve seen isn’t modular at all. One unit a year isn’t modular.
When people talk about global energy requirements and CO2 (and methane emissions), do they count all the wood and animal dung being burnt every day by about 6 billion people in rural Africa/Asia and other places?
So as these areas develop, his will they be able to use less energy?
”If you light your study with a 10-watt LED bulb powered off wind or hydro, you consume 95pc less energy for the same light as a 75-watt incandescent bulb powered by a coal plant working at 37pc thermal efficiency. Real life usually falls between these two theoretical extremes, but you get the picture.”
That would be wind and hydro backed up by a coal plant running in the background burning coal but only intermittently supplying the grid when the others drop out. And… incandescent bulbs give off a lot of heat, so this heat in colder times is replaced by central heating systems. Swings – roundabouts.
What is that in whale oil lamps?
“A cardinal fallacy reigns over the debate on green energy and global decarbonisation.”
Too true. It is the narrative that there is a crisis that needs addressing, and all the bogus science wheeled out as evidence and all the bogus solutions to those bogus problems.
Why doesn’t this nut job just work for his buddies at the Grauniad? After all they think “youths” are anyone between 18 and 30. An unhinged tw@t like AEP would fit in perfectly.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/19/sunak-rejects-offer-of-mobility-scheme-for-young-people-between-eu-and-uk
There seems to be some confusion about the meaning of the word modular here. As if modular is some kind of new revolutionary principle in the same way as nuclear fusion.
When Triumph Motorcycles relaunched in the 1990s a modular system of engine designs was used in order to keep costs down. By using two different stroke lengths they created a cylinder unit of 250cc or 300cc. This allowed them to create three and four cylinder engines of 750cc, 900cc, 1,000cc and 1,200cc that shared numerous common parts.
In the case of nuclear power it simply means producing a compact nuclear reactor and then building power stations that use different numbers of reactors depending on requirements. In practical terms the main problem is probably the cost, whether lots of small reactors are more expensive to produce than one large one or whether the economies of producing lots of the same type of reactor cancels that out. But there is nothing mysterious about the modular principle itself.