DESNZ Admit–We Will Need 50GW Of CCGT In 2035

By Paul Homewood

 

You will no doubt recall the exchange of letters with Claire Coutinho a few weeks ago, which I organised with the help of one of her constituents.

The letters concerned her Government’s decarbonisation policies, and how they were putting our electricity grid at risk.

This was the second letter we sent a month ago:

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Many thanks for your reply concerning Net Zero policy.

I appreciate the Government has many ambitious low carbon plans for 2050, which you list. However, none appear to offer a solution to the catastrophic problems facing us during the 2030s.

To lay it out in simple terms, according to the National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios, peak demand for electricity will be about 100 GW in 2035. We will probably have about 10 GW of dispatchable capacity (nuclear, biomass and hydro) – this assumes that all unabated gas power is shut down.

Even with 20 GW of interconnectors, which we most certainly cannot depend on, we will be woefully short of electricity when wind and solar power is at low levels.

You plan on 5 GW of new unabated gas, but clearly this will be nowhere enough. We will likely need ten times as much. Building new gas power plants incorporating carbon capture may be a solution, but I see no plans to do so in the time scale we are looking at, ie the mid 2030s. In any event, carbon capture adds significantly to the cost of electricity, and increases the amount of gas needed to produce each unit of electricity. Are you happy to see energy bills rising as a consequence?

The other plans you mention are currently far too small to make any difference, and will certainly not be ready in any scale by 2035.

Low carbon hydrogen, for instance, will need tens of billions spending on a whole new infrastructure – electrolysers, distribution networks, seasonal storage and hydrogen burning power stations. The new batch of projects outlined will only supply about 0.1% of the UK’s annual gas consumption, and are not grid-scale solutions.

On top of that, there simply won’t be enough wind/solar power in your plans to produce the hydrogen anyway. And if that is not enough, the contract price you have agreed for the next batch of hydrogen projects is ten times that of natural gas. Are you prepared to see household energy bills rocket to pay for these subsidies?

Similarly tidal and geothermal are extremely expensive, and the 106 MW currently procured is a tiny amount. While these technologies may bear fruit in thirty years’ time, we clearly cannot rely on them making any difference in the next decade.

You mention 35 GW of battery storage, but typically such batteries can only store enough for an hour’s use. Plainly these will be useless when we go days on end with little wind power.

So there you have it! We are staring at a gigantic black hole in our potential electricity supply come 2035.

I can only see one solution – begin construction now on a fleet of new CCGT plants, if necessary made CCS ready. (Bear in mind, CCS is still not a proven technology at scale). It will need to be at least 50 GW. In addition the current fleet needs to be contracted for at least 15 years, to provide standby capacity.

Evidently this is not part of your government’s plans. In which case, could you please explain how your plans will avoid the blackouts which appear inevitable?

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.We have now received this reply from DESNZ:

This is an extraordinary admission!

They are now accepting that everything we said was correct. It is simply impossible to totally decarbonise Britain’s grid by 2035.

Whatever technologies we may have in place in thirty years time, there is no way any will be available at scale by 2035, when supposedly the grid will be decarbonised.

Unless we place total reliance on interconnectors, we will most certainly need at least 50GW of dispatchable power, most of which will have to be gas. I would still argue that we will need even more if EVs and heat pumps are rolled out at scale.

But this is the first time I have seen any official admission of this.

And the question arises – is Claire Coutinho even aware of this issue, and if so why did not she mention it in her initial letter.

We currently have about 30GW of CCGT, but some of the older plants will likely have shut by 2035, particularly given they are no longer economic in the face of heavily subsidised renewables. Timera reckon that 7GW could be gone by 2030.

And nobody is going to build new plant, when they know the government of the day will shut it down a few years later.

It is clearer than ever that we now need an emergency programme to build at least 30GW of new CCGT, as well as guaranteeing at least 15 years of operation/capacity market payments to all existing plants.

BTW – if anybody is unlucky enough to be Ed Miliband’s constituent, would they like to write a similar letter to him after the election?