The Dummies Guide to UK Net Zero
The Dummies Guide to UK Net Zero
How an imagined Climate Emergency will destroy the UK. A paper by John Sullivan & Steve Whitehouse.
1. Executive Summary
Whether by ignorance, malign intent, or a combination of both, the people of the world are being egregiously misled by the champions of the increasingly deranged Net Zero cult.
We show that the cost of achieving Net Zero - if it were actually achievable in practice - would likely approach £2.5 Trillion. But Net Zero is not achievable in practice. No one, least of all the UK government, has any detailed or costed plan. In this paper, we essentially attempt to construct such a plan, somewhat in the style of reductio ad absurdum, to prove the truth of what many people instinctively know.
As recently as 2015, even some at the World Economic Forum (WEF) knew that the narrative around wind power was a work of fiction. The truth is that if you are presently fortunate enough to live in a ‘developed’ country, the Net Zero madness will completely and irrevocably destroy your life - and the lives of your children and grandchildren. If you live in a ‘developing’ country, Net Zero will condemn you and your descendants to eternal poverty and misery.
From all fuels (natural gas, electricity, petrochemicals, other) and across all forms of energy use (heating and lighting, industry, agriculture, transportation, other), the UK currently uses almost 2,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually. After accounting for waste heat at power stations and other losses, around 1,500 TWh is delivered to end users.
As detailed in sections 4 and 6, less than 6% of this delivered energy is presently provided by non-thermal renewables (mostly wind and solar). Including nuclear and controversial biomass, this rises to about 11%.
Put another way, at least 89% of energy used in the UK today comes from fossil fuels.
As covered in section 6, it will be a significant challenge to simply maintain, let alone significantly increase, the contribution from the UK’s ageing legacy nuclear fleet in the medium to long term. It may be feasible to increase the percentage of bionergy to some degree but, given the considerable controversy already present in this area, this is unlikely to be significant.
So, in practice, the 89% gap can only be resolved by a massive reduction in energy use and/or an enormous increase in non-thermal renewable generation. Both are seriously problematic but, of course, this does not trouble the globalist ‘elites’ of the UN and its agencies (the IPCC & the WHO), the WEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and others – they want you impoverished - to “own nothing and be happy”.
An ‘enormous increase in non-thermal renewable generation’?
This may be achievable, in principle, given the political will - although somewhat deleterious to our natural environment. There are currently around 11,500 wind turbines in the UK - 8,827 onshore and 2,652 offshore.
As detailed at section 6, this would need to increase more than 10 fold (more than 100,000 additional turbines) to achieve Net Zero - there will hardly be a corner of the UK land or sea scape that will not be blighted by huge bird-killing monstrosities.
The cost will be astronomical; not only would we need to build the extra wind farms and connect them to the grid but, in the absence of electricity storage capabilities at anything like the scale required, we would then need to build an equivalent capacity of fossil fuel generators to take up the load when the wind doesn’t blow - they would lie idle most of the time, so the unit cost of backup power produced would be hugely exorbitant.
But it gets much worse. To replace the 80% of energy consumption that is currently not electric, the delivery infrastructure - the cables, wires, transformers and other components of the national transmission and regional distribution networks - will require a massive upgrade. Not only will this too be horrendously expensive, it will involve digging up almost every urban and suburban street in the country, in order to replace all the cables. Still, at least no one will be using the streets, because in reality no one will own a car.
A ‘massive reduction in energy use’?
This means, inter alia, that ordinary people must be denied the opportunity to travel - within their own countries, let alone internationally - to eat meat, and many other basic freedoms which we have taken for granted for centuries. As is already being proven by recent events in Oxford, Canterbury and elsewhere, you will be confined to your local 15 minute zone, with little opportunity to obtain travel permits to venture more widely, and you will eat insect bug burgers.
But the expense of Net Zero means far more than the massive public infrastructure costs - we will need to insulate homes, install electric heat pumps or hydrogen boilers, purchase electric cars, and more. We estimate that, while Net Zero is not achievable in practice, the theoretical cost to the UK would be somewhere around £2.5 Trillion.
Analysis of certain costs, such as the cruel impact of fertiliser restrictions on agricultural food production, are beyond the scope of this document. However we have conducted a broad analysis of costs in several areas, totalling some £1.75 Trillion, as follows.
Once details of the out of scope items are included, the overall costs are almost certain to approach, or possibly even exceed, £2.5 Trillion. For comparison, the calamitous UK response to the Covid pandemic is estimated to have cost up to £500 billion and the UK economy - as well as social cohesion – has now collapsed as a result. Imagine for a moment what the impact of an (entirely futile) expenditure five times greater will be.
However, to discuss the cost to the country is to somewhat miss the point because, as ever, this is all about the money in the end. Where there is a buyer, there is a seller; where there is a payment, there is a recipient. The Net Zero agenda represents a huge opportunity for any organisation or individual shrewd enough to jump on the gravy train early enough. Just as we’ve seen with Covid, some people will make an awful lot of money from this scam.
Regardless of whether government grants are made available for some items, ordinary taxpayers will end up paying for everything in the end - in reality of course, many will be unable to pay, so they’ll go cold, bankrupt, or both.
The focus of this paper is on the UK, to use a concrete example which highlights the absurdity and impossibility of achieving Net Zero in practice - by 2050 or in any foreseeable timeframe. However, it is important to recognise throughout that the UK is only (directly) responsible for 1% of global CO₂ emissions, though in truth we have outsourced many of our emissions to communist China – yet another example of the dishonest narrative and government misdirection.
In short, the cult of Net Zero is complete insanity. There is no conceivable way it can be achieved in any reasonable timeframe or at anything like an ‘affordable’ cost, but countries - including the UK - will be bankrupted and destroyed in the attempt. Even the (comparatively trivial) ambition to install smart meters has been a complete fiasco, running years late (almost 15 years after it was first conceived) and significantly over budget.
We the people must stand up and put a stop to the lunacy, before our civilisation is totally wiped out.
2 The Slow Death of Truth in Public Discourse
2.1 Recent Examples of Propaganda & Censorship
Most people know by now that the ‘official narrative’ does not provide them with the whole, unbridled truth – to put it mildly!
They’ve seen it with Covid for the past 3 years: “Two weeks to flatten the curve”, “safe and effective” vaccines, constant flip-flopping on mask effectiveness, censorship of information on Vitamin D and Ivermectin, “it came from the lab, it came from the wet market”, and so it goes on.
They’ve seen it increasingly with the brazen interference in democracy - for example in the US elections, in the UK Tory Party leadership coup, and in the almost total absence of reporting (aka censorship) of various pro-democracy protests around the world.
And many people are now increasingly seeing the same thing around climate change and net zero propaganda - they know that something just doesn’t add up.
Inexplicably though, most people still believe/accept the biggest falsehoods which lie at the heart of the official misinformation - including that Net Zero could actually be achievable in a few short years while having a beneficial economic impact.
To any truly objective and dispassionate observer, mainstream media (MSM) giants like the BBC, CNN and Sky News are left-wing activist campaigners, not serious news outlets. Yet they continue to get away with the neo-Marxist globalist indoctrination of their audiences on a daily basis - aided and abetted by supposed regulators. Consider as an example the BBC coverage of the football world cup; 50% sports coverage, 50% left-wing activism. Consider also the total lack of interest from Ofcom and the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) in sanctioning the BBC for the outrageous misinformation and bias in their ‘Unvaccinated’ documentary.
Then there is social media. Over the past 3 years, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, even LinkedIn, became nothing but gatekeepers for the neo-Marxist globalist narrative dictated by unelected oligarchs and technocrats from the UN, the WEF, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), and many others. The recent takeover by Elon Musk is slowly exposing Twitter for the far-left instrument of the ‘Long March’ that most of us have suspected it was for a very long time.
Why should any independent thinker believe a word of any of it?
2.2 But the Climate Change Narrative is Different - Surely?
Of all the activist left-wing narratives constantly espoused by the MSM, the global warming / climate change agenda is the longest running and the most valuable to the enemies of truth and democracy, who want to fundamentally and irrevocably alter our way of life in a dystopian ‘Great Reset’.
As with every activist campaign, everything being promoted in the name of fighting the cLiMaTe EmErGeNcY is, of course, for our own good - für Ihre Sicherheit, one might say.
As many suspect, but are unable to adequately articulate in the face of a constant torrent of official misdirection, none of it is true but it is all built around a tiny kernel of truth. With Covid, a real virus was in circulation - though nothing like the threat is was made out to be. Similarly with the entire climate hoax; carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a ‘greenhouse gas’. But that is where the science ends and the anti-scientific baloney begins.
We are once again told it’s all for the greater good. It will be net cost free, even beneficial. After all, the Covid measures were cost free and beneficial! Apart from the hundreds of billions of debt amassed on furlough, test & trace, and ineffective, unsafe vaccines. Apart from the long-term consequences for child development and mental health from masking and disrupted education. Apart from the chaotic consequences of shutting down the health service for 2 years.
In the same alternative Universe, spending trillions to avert a fictitious man made climate catastrophe will be a net economic benefit. Just think of all the opportunities to prosper in the new green economy where the UK, naturally, will be a ‘world leader’.
None of this will be to the detriment of you or your nearest and dearest. The economy will boom, those cuddly polar bears will be safe, you will continue to travel freely in your electric car and on electric planes, your home will be toasty in winter courtesy of your shiny new heat pump, and you will just love your new diet of healthy insect Bug Burgers. Life will be good!
Sadly, it is all complete hogwash. The fact of the matter is that there is no serious intention on the part of politicians anywhere for us all to be driving electric cars or heating our homes with heat pumps or hydrogen boilers in any timeframe - the practicalities and costs are simply prohibitive. As Neil Oliver so astutely observed in his 19th November 2022 broadcast, the real objective is to stop people - you & me - from travelling freely, heating their homes comfortably, or eating a natural human diet.
When your gas boiler is banned and your internal combustion engine (ICE) car is confiscated, you will be reliant on your home electricity supply (or your own solar panels and batteries) for all your energy needs - which, as we show in the following detail sections, is absolutely not feasible in any reasonable timescale or at any reasonable cost.
The escalating war on farmers being waged by the WEF and other usual suspects – in Ghana, Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Germany, UK, South America and elsewhere - will impact the ability to feed a growing global population, and the shortfall will not be made up with a tasty, healthy diet of insects - whatever new fictions are invented to persuade us otherwise in the coming months and years.
World population growth will therefore have to be dramatically and ruthlessly curtailed. The same globalists are frequently quoted espousing the need to dramatically control the numbers of irksome ‘little people’.
Want to have children in this brave new world? Apply for a license - and be sure to have your vaccine passport and social credit certificates ready. As with so much of the dystopian madness, China has of course already shown the West how to do it.
Euthanising the old, the frail and the disabled? It surely couldn’t happen in our 21st century civilised world, where everyone has only the purest of motives and the sincerest of virtue-signalling credentials to prove it? Except that Canada, benevolently (sic) ruled by Justin Trudeau, that most woke of sanctimonious dictators, is already perilously close to a general euthanasia policy for ‘useless eaters’. You think this is hyperbole? 1 in 30 deaths in Canada last year were the result of ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’, MAID.
2.3 There is no “Climate Emergency”
There is no climate emergency. Ergo, the ‘Net Zero’ agenda is delusional madness which will bankrupt the west and impoverish entire populations.
The arguments against an invented climate emergency have been thoroughly exposed countless times before, by innumerable genuinely impartial and scientifically knowledgeable commentators. One excellent source is Professor John Christy from the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH), as per this YouTube interview. Another is William Happer of Princeton University, the world’s leading atmospheric physicist, for example in this presentation.
We previously addressed the misinformation and corruption around the entire climate change narrative in an earlier paper (see specifically section 3).
But the purpose of this paper is not to rehearse the arguments about the Climate Emergency nonsense. This, in any case, would be futile because the alarmists simply meet genuine scientific evidence with yet more deflection: As with so many topics of public debate, neo-Marxist globalist activists constantly move the goalposts and invent new terminology to muddy the waters. None of it makes any sense - but then it isn’t meant to.
The climate cultists also resort quickly to the ‘precautionary principle’ - if we’re ‘not sure’ (we are sure), where’s the harm in ‘going green’ anyway? After all, investment in cheap green renewable energy will give us independence from that nasty Mr Putin, while giving our economy a boost from our new status as world leaders in a highly profitable emergent green industry.
So the goalposts are constantly shifted, imperceptibly to most. Net Zero is a GoOd ThInG, regardless of the details or scale of the man-made global warming (MMGW) ‘problem’. The opportunities for sanctimonious virtue-signalling by the usual suspects are almost endless!
3. An Introduction to ‘Net Zero’
3.1 Net Zero - a Simple Summary
Net Zero means simply that there should be no net increase in the level of ‘Greenhouse Gases’, GHG’s, which essentially form an insulating ‘blanket’ trapping heat in the atmosphere - the sum of emissions and any permanent capture of GHG’s must add to zero.
The most important GHG’s, are water vapour (clouds to you and me – and by far the most significant contributor), CO₂, and methane (CH₄). Ironically, sulphur hexafluoride, SF₆, which is used in electrical switchgear, is a potent GHG and has been released in incidents at wind generation installations.
CO₂ is released when we burn things containing carbon, primarily fossil fuels and wood, and it is a reduction in CO₂ emissions - often referred to colloquially, and incorrectly, as ‘carbon’ - which has traditionally been the target of net zero proponents.
Until recently, ‘emissions’ in the context of net zero has referred mainly to CO₂ emissions from human activity, but lately climate extremists have targeted all GHG emissions, from both human and natural sources - such as nitrous oxide, N₂O, from the use of nitrogen fertilisers in farming, CO₂ from volcanic activity, and the release of methane, CH₄, from livestock farming, rice paddies and methane hydrates in permafrost or under the seabed.
With respect to CO₂ in particular, some often refer to the ‘offsetting’ of emissions - from flying for example - by sponsoring the planting of trees. The use of ‘biofuels’ also relies on replanting any trees or plants used to produce the fuels, although there can be a lag of several years before any newly planted crops have grown sufficiently to re-absorb the CO₂ released.
As with many mooted Net Zero technologies, artificial methods of ‘carbon capture and storage’, as it is colloquially known, are not yet mature - though there is no limit to the insanity of those who would invent deranged schemes such as reflecting sunlight to reduce the warming effect of the sun. Tinkering with the planet’s solar radiation balance; what could possibly go wrong?
So the (re)planting of crops is currently the only practical offsetting mechanism and, because of the lag and the difficulty of effectively auditing the process, it is somewhat controversial. It is worth noting though that the increase in atmospheric CO₂ to date has resulted in a significant & positive re-greening of the planet.
All this means that the main tool the alarmists currently advocate for Net Zero is the elimination of fossil fuel use (‘carbon emissions’) as rapidly as possible.
3.2 The Shortage of Genuine Expertise
The energy industry is complex. Restructuring the UK’s entire energy landscape in pursuit of Net Zero is hugely complex, hugely costly, and hugely disruptive. Most importantly, it is hugely dangerous in the hands of naïve politicians and ‘expert advisors’ with an agenda.
There are very few people, in the UK or worldwide, who have the requisite knowledge to understand holistically what net zero would involve - it’s complicated - and no one has a credible overall plan for how to achieve it in the timescales being mooted; in the UK’s case, by 2050.
It is obvious that the costs of net zero are either not understood by politicians and their unscrupulous advisers, or people are being deliberately disingenuous - to further a political agenda and/or benefit financially from the ‘green energy revolution’. The parallels with the Covid fiasco are clear.
Many rational people "know in their bones” that the narrative around climate change and net zero is a complete nonsense. But they do not have easy access to information with which they can counter dishonest claims like “renewable energy is nine times cheaper than fossil fuels”.
We have decades of experience in all areas of the electrical power industry, in the UK and internationally. In this paper we will lay out - in layman’s terms as best we can - the true challenges around net zero. Our hope is that it gives fellow climate and net zero ‘sceptics’ the ammunition they need to challenge the false propaganda of the alarmists.
But we will need your help as our direct audience is limited. If you find the information in this paper of benefit, please share as widely as you can.
4. Overview of GHG Emissions
4.1 Energy Use in the UK
4.1.1 Overall Energy Situation - All Fuels
Contrary to the impression often given by politicians and the media, achieving net zero is not simply a case of ‘decarbonising’ existing electricity generation. Far from it.
To understand our use of different types of fuel at different scales, e.g. at the level of a single home or the entire country, and to properly distinguish between power (instantaneous use, e.g. kW) and energy (power used over a period of time - often measured in hours, e.g. kWh), it is important to use a common set of measurements.
Just as distances can be measured in yards, meters and so on, there are many ways to measure units of energy, e.g. kWh (and multiples thereof), British Thermal Units (BTU’s), barrels or Tonnes of oil equivalent, and more. The multiples of these units can further confuse, for example 1,000 kWh is 1 megawatt-hour (MWh), 1,000 MWh is 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh), and 1,000 GWh is 1 terawatt-hour (TWh). For an example conversion between different units, 1 Tonne of oil equivalent is roughly equal to 11.63 MWh.
To get a feel for some of these numbers in the real world; there are something like 28 million private households in the UK; a number which is constantly increasing with the growing population. An average household uses around 10.66 kWh of electricity per day. 10.66 kWh times 365 days = 3,890 kWh, or ~3.89 MWh. Multiply that by 28 million homes and we have 108,900,000,000 kWh, or 108.9 TWh.
The UK government (Department for BEIS) publishes annual statistics on energy production and consumption in at least 2 formats: A UK Energy Consumption report and a Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES). As with many official UK data sets, it is something of a challenge for lay people to interpret these documents and to “compare apples with apples” - so the official data is summarised at figure 3 below, in what is hopefully an easy to digest format.
Figure 3 shows that total energy used in the UK during 2021 (excluding ‘non-energy’ use of petroleum products) was 1,987 TWh - 1,987,000,000,000 kWh or around 128 million Tonnes of oil equivalent. There are a number of important points to note as follows:
By far the largest components of energy consumption are:
The use of petroleum products for transportation - 416 TWh excluding losses.
Low efficiency & losses in the generation & delivery of electricity - 352 TWh
Household use of natural gas - 318 TWh
Overall electricity use, including losses, of 637 TWh only accounts for around 1/3 of the 1,987 TWh total UK energy use - and only 1/5 when generation inefficiency and other losses are excluded; i.e. only 1/5 of energy delivered to final consumers.
Residential households currently use over 3 times as much energy from natural gas as they do from electricity. However, because so much energy is lost as heat at power stations (hence those huge cooling towers venting steam), the overall energy impacts of electricity and gas use are similar.
Even if we ‘decarbonised’ (or offset) ALL existing electricity generation, we would only get one third of the way to net zero. To achieve net zero, the UK needs to replace (or offset) all of the table cells at figure 3, amounting to the full 1,987 TWh of UK consumption.
These points explain the need, inter alia, for (largely ineffective and frequently impractical) electric heat pumps, or hydrogen boilers (for which the delivery infrastructure does not currently exist), to replace gas boilers - and (expensive, environmentally deleterious, frequently unsafe, often impractical) electric vehicles to replace internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.
Even if all existing generation were ‘decarbonised’, and the myriad issues with heat pumps, hydrogen boilers and electric vehicles were resolved, this would still not deal with over 500 TWh of energy used by Business, Commerce, Agriculture and Industry in the UK.
However, providing all 1,987 TWh of UK energy use from ‘low carbon’ electricity is not simply a case of generation capacity. In fact generating the power is, in many ways, the simplest part of the puzzle - but we almost never hear about the other issues. In particular, the challenges involved in delivering that much power to where it’s needed - every home, business and industrial unit in the country - and then managing the instantaneous demand for electricity so as to not destroy the transmission and distribution networks in the process, are huge. See section 9 for details.
4.1.2 Some Energy Consumption Initiatives & Financial Implications
One aspect of the ‘net zero’ agenda is to reduce overall levels of energy consumption by improving efficiency - essentially better insulation as far as the residential sector is concerned. This of course is expensive - for a ‘modern’ house built in the last century, typically £1,000 - £2,000 for loft & wall insulation, plus £5,000 or so for new or replacement double glazing.
At present, there are almost 33 million passenger cars registered in the UK; the amount of rare earth minerals and cobalt required to build the electric vehicle (EV) batteries to replace all 33 million of these cars (and all other ICE vehicles worldwide) is mind boggling. Tesla is currently working on significantly reducing / phasing out the use of cobalt in its batteries, but this is just one of a vast number of hurdles to overcome in the mass adoption of electric vehicles globally.
In implicit acknowledgement of the additional cost of electric vehicles, the UK government introduced a grant scheme to offset that cost - initially up to £5,000. But these grants have now been significantly reduced and will soon likely be phased out completely. Similarly, the qualification criteria for £350 home charging point grants have been tightened, and the chancellor has already announced that exemption from vehicle tax for electric cars is to be discontinued: This clearly demonstrates that the Government are not genuinely interested in moving people from petrol to electric cars – the intent is to STOP people using cars at all.
The concept of ‘15 minute cities’ is already being trialled by some far-left councils in the UK, including Oxford and Canterbury. In Saudi Arabia an entire city is being planned for 9 million people to live in dystopian rabbit hutches, while the same ‘visionaries’ propose a private island paradise for the privileged elites.
4.1.3 Existing Electricity Generation & Consumption Statistics (2021)
Figure 4, reproduced from the DUKES document previously referenced, shows the balance between energy sources for UK electricity (left hand side), and final consumption in the various sectors (right hand side). The grey components in the middle show the energy used by the power industry itself - mostly waste heat generated at thermal power plants, including nuclear.
Figure 4 provides a useful visual summary of the fuel mix but, because of the different efficiencies for each type of generation, as well as the electricity consumed in the generating process itself, the final contribution by fuel towards energy delivered mix is somewhat different.
Fortunately, the supplementary data tables to the DUKES report also provide details of the end result in terms of electricity actually delivered to end users, as summarised at figure 5.
Note that, for non-thermal generation, the ‘generation’ figures exactly match the ‘fuel used’ figures: Although in reality wind turbine ‘efficiency’, for example, is actually lower than that of modern thermal generation, this ‘doesn’t matter’ from a Net Zero perspective; it’s purely an economic factor. While waste heat from thermal generation implies additional CO₂ emissions, low wind turbine efficiency simply means that full energy from the wind is not being captured.
While a similar rationale could be applied to ‘low carbon’ nuclear generation, DUKES does apply an efficiency reduction to the statistics for nuclear because although, again, it ‘doesn’t matter’ in terms of CO₂ emissions, waste heat clearly exists and can be measured. All of this simply goes to show the importance of interpreting all data from a perspective of real-world understanding; otherwise, it all becomes a case of ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’. On that point, it takes around 2.5 TWh to pump the water in order to generate the1.9 TWh of pumped storage hydro - so the net contribution from this source is actually negative (the 2.5 TWh is included in the 22.1 TWh for ‘Energy Industry Use’, in grey at figure 4). So it would be incorrect to include any contribution from pumped hydro in the contribution of ‘renewable energy’.
From figure 5, therefore, the total contribution of non-thermal renewables is 27.9% of all electricity consumed. If we add the contribution from “thermal renewables” or Bioenergy (primarily controversial wood pellets burned at power stations such as Drax in North Yorkshire, with a thermal efficiency of ~38%), the percentage contribution to electricity supplied from ‘renewables’ rises to 40%. If we then add the ~42 TWh (14.2%) supplied by nuclear energy, we get to a total of 54.2% electricity supplied from ‘low carbon’ sources - controversies around biomass notwithstanding.
Understanding the present split of fuel use, including intermittent renewables, is crucial for two reasons.
Firstly, it shows that the ~28% contribution from non-thermal ‘renewables’ still has some way to go to match the ~46% contribution from fossil fuels.
Even including questionable bioenergy, to take the percentage of ‘renewables’ to 40%, it highlights the potential for misleading claims - knowingly or unknowingly - of the ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’. Eco-warrior activists are constantly guilty of course but frequently so is the industry itself - for example with the claim that “2020 marked the first year in the UK’s history that electricity came predominantly from renewable energy, with 43% of our power coming from a mix of wind, solar, bioenergy and hydroelectric sources”.
Is 43% “Predominant”, is bioenergy truly “Renewable”, or is the UK public being taken for a ride?
Secondly, the impact of the current 28% contribution from intermittent non-thermal renewables on the overall stability and economics of the UK’s generation portfolio - while significant, especially in economic terms - is just about manageable: When the wind doesn’t blow, the 28% generation shortfall can still be taken up (at considerable cost in terms of largely idle capital) by the other forms of generation, and the national transmission network is still flexible enough to adjust power flows accordingly.
But imagine a situation where wind (when it blows!) could routinely generate 50%, or 75%, of the UK’s current needs. Now further imagine that UK electricity consumption has doubled or tripled from its current levels, as ‘cheap, clean, green’ electricity replaces the natural gas and petroleum product consumption summarised at figure 3.
For example, 75% of a doubled demand, or 50% of a tripled demand, would equate to 150% of today’s total consumption: When the UK is becalmed, all of that power needs to be satisfied from alternative generation sources (or from massive scale storage for which the technology simply does not currently exist - see section 7). The capital costs of holding alternative generation capacity in reserve for those times when the wind doesn’t blow will be astronomical - it just isn’t going to happen, which will mean that ‘embedded’ local generation (e.g. solar panels on your roof) will need to be massively scaled up. Good luck with that in a central London high rise.
It is worth noting that the current contribution of ~42 TWh from nuclear is significant by today’s measure. As most readers will know, much of the UK nuclear fleet is due for retirement, but additional plants are scheduled at Hinckley Point C, Sizewell C and, potentially, Bradwell B and others. In addition, there has been much excitement of late over ‘Small Modular Reactors’ (SMR’s) - potentially a ‘leaner and meaner’ way to boost the UK’s nuclear generation capacity.
One way or another, nuclear will help, but maintaining - or even doubling - the current capability of 42 TWh will hardly make a dent in the overall 1,987 TWh, less future energy saving efficiencies, that we will need for Net Zero.
4.2 Other Factors
It is important to remember always that it is not only the energy and domestic transport sectors which produce GHG emissions. Other human activities which contribute to our overall ‘sins’ - as the climate alarmists would characterise things - include:
Agriculture
Emissions of methane, e.g. from cattle flatulence, and nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions resulting from the use of nitrogen fertilisers, are also in the cross-hairs of the eco-warrior activists. To date, only specific countries have been seriously targeted by the globalist totalitarians - including Ghana, Sri Lanka and The Netherlands.
The ruinous effects of globalist enforced ‘green’ policies on the Ghanaian and Sri Lankan economies have been catastrophic, resulting in violence and revolution, while recent demonstrations by farmers in The Netherlands, protesting about the outrageous totalitarian actions of the Dutch government, have received little to no coverage by the global mainstream media. And so the madness spreads further - to Canada, home of the totalitarian Marxist Trudeau, and elsewhere – including the UK where farmers are now being offered money to ‘re-wild’ the land.
The ultimate intent of this war on farming is to eradicate consumption of meat - except for the wealthy ‘elite’ of course. The little people will be eating vegetables and insects - bug burgers will be the new luxury! According to the tyrants of the World Economic Forum (WEF) - you will own nothing but you will be happy.
International Transport
Airline travel and sea freight are also key contributors to the overall CO₂ emissions balance sheet. As with domestic transportation, the pressure will be on to ‘decarbonise’ existing and new vessels with electric or hydrogen propulsion systems.
Air travel? They’ll just do away with most of it - not for the ‘elites’ of course, but your annual foreign holiday will most certainly not survive the assault from the Net Zero cult.
Miscellaneous Human and Natural Factors
These include deforestation for logging or crop growing purposes, volcanoes, oceanic carbon and methane sinks, permafrost and others. To date, these human-caused and natural items have generally not been included on the ‘emissions’ side of the Net Zero equation - but the eco-zealots increasingly have their eye on them.
5. Overview of the Power Industry
Below, the implications for every area of the UK power industry are explored in detail. The power industry comprises a complex set of interconnected elements as illustrated at figure 6.
Each of these areas is pertinent in terms of Net Zero to a greater or lesser degree and each is covered in the following sections.
6. Generation
6.1 The Overall Supply-Demand Equation
6.1.1 Generation Summary
The DUKES document previously referenced reports that the UK’s “Total de-rated generation capacity rose to 76.6 GW in 2021”, with a breakdown between fuels as follows:
Renewables: 23.2 GW
Fossil fuels: 42.5 GW
Nuclear: 8.1 GW
Miscellaneous balance: 2.8 GW
‘De-rated’ capacities are downwards adjusted from nameplate ratings, to take account of average plant availability by fuel type and generation technology. De-rated capacities provide a more realistic indication of overall capacity likely to be available on average at any given time.
Combined nuclear and fossil fuel capacity is 50.6 GW, to which we can add around 1.6 GW and 3.8 GW of relatively dependable ‘major power producer’ generation from hydro and biomass respectively - giving a total of nuclear plus so called 'dispatchable’ generation of 56 GW.
With 56 GW of reliable generation (assuming no limitations on the availability of gas), the UK would ordinarily be fine to meet current winter demand peaks, even when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. The official demand forecast from National Grid for the two weeks from 9th December 2022 is illustrated at figure 7, showing a forecast peak of a little over 45 GW on December 13th.
The forecast demand profile at figure 7 reflects that electricity demand in the UK varies significantly throughout the day as well as by day of the week and by season. We use more electricity in the winter months, with a daily peak typically around 5 or 6pm as darkness falls and people arrive home from work - switching on lighting, TV’s, kettles and so on. Note that the daily evening peak in demand, around 5 or 6 pm, is always after sunset at this time of year, so solar generation can never contribute at this peak time.
So, in normal circumstances - when gas isn’t rationed - the UK has reasonable security of supply for its current needs. But how can we ramp up capacity to meet future demand in a Net Zero scenario?
6.1.2 Nuclear
The capacity of the UK’s ageing nuclear fleet is now 8.1 GW as of 2021, when it supplied 41.7 TWh of electricity; just over 14% of the UK total.
Nuclear generally provides reliable ‘base load’, with a high capacity factor - while the capital costs of nuclear are very high, the low fuel costs mean that nuclear ranks highly on the generation ‘merit order’; if available, it runs. However, as plant ages, and given the safety protocols around nuclear operations, it experiences more and more downtime - as seen recently in France (the 28.7 TWh of ‘Imports’ referenced at figure 4 covers interconnectors with France and elsewhere, so the UK also benefits from the French nuclear fleet).
The UK is currently progressing with the confirmed construction and commissioning of two nuclear plants, at Hinckley Point C and Sizewell C, with a combined capacity of 6.4 GW. This capacity, and that from additional nuclear plants mooted for future development, will replace existing capacity as legacy stations are retired. In the short to medium term, however, it will not make any kind of dent in the overall capacity required to support net zero.
Jeremy Hunt - the UK’s third finance minister in as many months - confirmed the UK government’s commitment to Sizewell C in his autumn budget statement on 17th November, asserting this could power 6 million homes. The BBC then parroted this claim on its web site implying that this would be “enough to provide 7% of the UK's needs …. for 60 years”.
An illustrative capacity factor (see discussion under Wind generation below) for a large nuclear station is 90%, so Sizewell C can reasonably be expected to generate around 25 TWh per year over its operating life. From this, we must subtract the energy used in running the plant, as well as the network losses before delivery to the end user. These amount to around 17%, or 4.25 TWh, of the total power generated, so power delivered to end users is ~20.75 TWh; 7.25% of the 286 TWh (see figure 3) total energy delivered to end users in 2021.
So Jeremy Hunt and the BBC were telling the truth? Well, not “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. As we have come to expect in recent years, both Hunt and the BBC are subliminally misleading the public (‘Net Zero will be easy to achieve’) by cherry picking statistics and using ambiguous language.
The output from Sizewell C will amount to 7% of today’s electricity needs. Under the Net Zero agenda though, we will use up to 1,200 TWh (see under Wind generation below) of electricity by 2050 - well within the 60 year operational lifetime of Sizewell C, which will then provide only 1.7% of our needs.
Quoting 7%, although wildly misleading in the context of a Net Zero scenario, provides both Jeremy Hunt and the BBC with ‘plausible deniability’ in terms of deliberately deceiving the public.
All that said, nuclear does in our opinion have a significant role to play in any future UK energy mix. As already stated in section 4.1; “One way or another, nuclear will help”, with Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) potentially having a valuable part to play.
6.1.3 Thermal Renewables
Thermal ‘renewable’ power comes from the burning of biomass in generation stations rather than fossil fuels.
As at figure 5, bioenergy supplied 35.7 TWh of UK electricity in 2021 - 12.1% of the total - with the largest single source being Drax power station in North Yorkshire.
In theory, more thermal stations could burn biomass in a Net Zero future, but there is considerable controversy around how genuinely ‘green’ or ‘renewable’ biomass fuels are - and, in this case, your authors are in rare broad agreement with the eco-warrior activists who are highly resistant to an increase in capacity for this category.
Because this is such a controversial area, it is unlikely that large scale biomass will be a significant factor in the future energy landscape of the UK - although relatively small-scale local heat and power provision from waste incineration will continue to feature.
6.1.4 Non-Thermal Renewables
This category covers wind, solar, hydro, wave and tidal energy.
While in theory the UK has access to significant tidal resources, the engineering and environmental challenges mean that these have not been exploited to date - and it is difficult to see this changing in the near to mid term.
For the foreseeable future in the UK, non-thermal renewables overwhelmingly means wind, with solar (largely ‘embedded’, i.e. locally generated at small scale) a distant second, and hydro an even more distant third.
At present, around 13.4 GW of the UK’s total 23.2 GW de-rated renewables capacity is from wind (11 GW) and solar (2.4 GW). Hydro capacity, excluding pumped storage, is 1.6 GW.
6.1.4.1 Solar
The possibility exists, in principle at least, to install additional solar generation - particularly roof-top solar which, if combined with in-home battery storage such as a Tesla’s 13.5 kWh Powerwall, could reduce the amount of wind required, while at the same time alleviating pressure on the transmission and distribution networks to deliver power from remote sources. At face value, this seems like a win-win.
However, there are a few issues!
Installing a Powerwall with solar panels is likely to cost a typical home owner around £10,000 - in addition to the cost of your new heat pump, home insulation, new double/triple glazing and electric car.
A 3 kW solar panel installation (requiring at least 20 m² of roof space) will produce ‘around 2,500 kWh of electricity per year’ or a year round average of 7kWh per day. But output will be a fraction of that in Winter - nowhere near enough for today’s average demand per home of 10 kWh, let alone future demands including heat pumps and electric cars.
The lithium and cobalt requirements (Tesla claims to be phasing out cobalt) to equip each property with an in-home battery - as well as the batteries we are told will power our electric cars - would exceed the global reserves.
It is not possible to install roof-top solar panels for every property, e.g. in high rise apartment buildings.
Finally, it is important to remember as per DUKES - that the Net Zero challenge is not just about residential energy use and private transportation. Domestic electricity consumption for example currently only accounts for 1/3 of the national total.
In short, ubiquitous rooftop solar for every home is a pipedream, which would not in any case provide more than a fraction of the overall energy required to achieve Net Zero.
The UK would be looking at an aggregate cost close to £300 billion if rooftop solar were a technical and practical possibility. Since it is not, we will disregard this ‘solution’ and assume for our further purposes that most of the UK’s future power requirements in a Net Zero scenario would come from wind.
Of course, solar/battery solutions will be appropriate for some properties, and the costs incurred will offset some costs assumed for a full wind powered approach. But it would be largely ‘swings and roundabouts’ - the overall costs to the country would likely not be significantly impacted, either up or down.
6.1.4.2 Wind
The UK has scope to increase its wind generation capacity significantly, especially offshore.
The government’s ‘ambition’ is to “deliver up to 50 GW by 2030, including up to 5GW of innovative floating wind” - so the objective is to significantly expand the existing ‘Operational Capacity’ of 28 GW in well under a decade. As part of this process, the government is currently looking to ‘relax’ the approval process for building onshore wind.
This is all intended to look impressive, in support of the disingenuous inference that Net Zero is a serious and achievable goal by 2050. But we need to examine the numbers a little more closely to get to the truth of things.
As per section 4.1, the UK presently consumes around 2,000 TWh of energy, or 1,500 TWh excluding losses. If we assume 20% savings from energy efficiency measures over the next decade or two - in all areas including transportation - future end user energy needs of 1,200 TWh will need to be met entirely from ‘low carbon’ electricity generation.
This capacity will not be coming from nuclear in anything like this timescale, nor from biomass. Neither, despite what the BBC and other climate-fanatical MSM propagandists would have you believe, will it be coming from chemical batteries; the “huge” battery energy storage facility built by Harmony Energy near Hull has an output capacity of 98 MW for 2 hours.
As shown at figure 5, nuclear, bioenergy, natural flow hydro and solar currently provide around 95 TWh in aggregate. Taking a very conservative viewpoint - assuming that we could more than double this existing contribution to 200 TWh, and ignoring losses in the transmission and distribution networks - we would therefore need at least 1,000 TWh from wind in order to achieve Net Zero.
When considering energy delivery, we must reference de-rated capacity - which takes account of intermittent nature of wind: We need significantly more installed capacity than first appears in order to achieve our target level of energy provision. Figure 9 shows the simple calculation to determine the ‘capacity factor’.
From figure 5, the total energy supplied by wind in 2021 was 64.7 TWh - from an installed capacity of 27.9 GW. This implies a capacity factor for wind generation in 2021 of ~25% - notwithstanding that some installed capacity may have been commissioned during the year (so not available for the full number of hours) and that, according to DUKES:
“Generation from renewable sources decreased 9.3 per cent to 122.2 TWh in 2021. This was driven by less favourable weather conditions for wind, hydro and solar generation. In particular, wind generation dropped to 64.7 TWh in 2021, down 14 per cent despite increased capacity. This was because of unusually low average wind speeds across most of 2021.”
Let’s take the DUKES statement at face value and consider that, in another ‘more typical’ year, wind output might be as much as 20% above that in 2021. This gives a capacity factor of ~32%, which implies the need for a total installed wind capacity of 357 GW to deliver 1,000 TWh of energy. “Up to 50 GW by 2030” no longer sounds quite so impressive.
So what about the cost of all this additional wind capacity?
An excellent, detailed breakdown of all capital costs involved in building and commissioning a new offshore wind farm (along with an assessment of operational costs for those interested) is provided here, indicating an all-inclusive cost of approximately £2.4 million per MW capacity. And, as discussed here, onshore wind costs are typically around 55-60% those of offshore equivalents; let’s say £1.35 million per MW.
The UK government’s recent signal that the approval process for new onshore wind installations is to be to relaxed is extremely concerning from the point of view of likely environmental impact. However, given the sheer scale of the requirement, it is unlikely that much of the additional capacity needed would be built onshore; with the capacity of the 9,000 or so existing onshore turbines aggregating to just 14 GW, we would need somewhere in the region of 100,000 new onshore turbines to meet around half of the estimated future demand. One would hope that even the current Tory government is more politically astute than to try that!
All things considered, we will assume an average cost of £2.25 million per MW, or £2.25 billion per GW. For the additional 329 GW required (357 less the 28 we already have), we therefore arrive at an approximate capital cost of £740 billion.
But wind capacity is not ‘firm’; we will need backup thermal generation for when the wind doesn’t blow. For example, at lunchtime on December 11th 2022, wind output was negligible, supplying just 1% of UK demand.
6.1.5 Fossil Fuels
We don’t need to consider a capacity factor for fossil fuel plants, because we are talking about covering the peak demand in a fall-back scenario rather than looking to achieve an energy delivery target.
Peak UK winter demand has fallen somewhat since reaching over 60 GW in the first decade of this century, and is currently something around 50 GW. Simplistically, this would imply future peak demand of approximately 200 GW if electricity consumption increases by a factor of four after accounting for energy efficiency measures.
But things are unlikely to be quite that straightforward in practice.
On the positive side, we can potentially smooth out the peaks in energy demand through appropriate incentives in the retail market (see section 10). To use a phrase which will live forever in infamy after the Covid pandemic, we can ‘flatten the curve’ at figure 7. This would not reduce overall energy use but would simply spread the demand more evenly across the day.
On the other hand, the pattern of electricity consumption would change significantly in a Net Zero scenario - peak demand would be far more correlated with winter heating requirements than at present, as gas boilers are replaced with heat pumps and electric space heaters.
Furthermore, peak demand is affected by economic growth, population changes and political choices. For example, any reversal of the ‘outsourcing’ of manufacturing to China could significantly affect our industrial use of electricity.
For these reasons and more, it is difficult to precisely forecast maximum simultaneous demand in a future Net Zero scenario. For the sake of this analysis we will assume a peak demand of 240 GW, with up to 40 GW provided by nuclear, bioenergy and other ‘dispatchable low carbon’ sources.
We would therefore need to cover 200 GW of peak demand with backup fossil fuel generation. A reasonable ballpark estimate for the capital cost (link dated Nov 2021) of new combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) generation is £1 billion per GW - so we are looking at another £200 billion for the 200 GW of backup capacity required.
6.2 Misinformation from the Climate Activists
You have probably heard the claims from climate propagandists that “renewable energy is 9 times cheaper than gas” at current prices. However, as is so often the case, policy makers and the public are being wilfully misled by shameless ‘experts’ and ‘journalists’ who make their living from the climate alarmist bandwagon.
As per the analysis above, the capital cost for new and replacement generation to achieve Net Zero, comprising £740 billion for wind farms plus £200 billion for backup gas generation, totals £940 billion.
If we consider the true cost of capital, with a discounted cash flow (DCF) assuming a discount rate of 5% and an economic life of 20 years, this capital cost translates to around £75.4 billion annually; £2,700 per year for each the UK’s 28 million households.
This component of the Net Zero cost alone is more than twice the average bill under the energy price cap in 2021, and roughly equal to the average capped amount under the UK government’s current energy price guarantee - purely to repay the capital cost of generating stations, disregarding operating and maintenance costs, and all other costs associated with Net Zero discussed elsewhere in this paper.
It is true that, compared to natural gas generation, electricity can presently be generated from wind farms at relatively low ‘marginal’ prices, i.e. disregarding the upfront construction costs: Once you’ve spent all that money on a wind farm, you might as well use it when ‘free wind’ is available.
But current gas prices are hugely inflated falsely and temporarily by the geo-political fallout from the war in Ukraine, as well as widespread anti-fossil fuel sentiment in the West. Investment in gas production and storage, including fracking, has largely dried up; in the latest news, Shell has announced a review of its planned £25bn investment in UK projects after chancellor Jeremy Hunt increased the windfall tax on energy companies in his recent autumn budget.
In short, the current price of gas in the UK is almost entirely the result of policy decisions and exceptional short-term factors - there is no fundamental reason why prices should not return close to previous levels in the medium to long term.
The UK now plans increased imports of liquified natural gas (LNG) from the US, produced largely from ‘fracking’ - while effectively banning fracking here. At the same time, the UK acted as a European import hub for LNG during the first half of 2022, exporting large quantities of both gas and electricity to Germany and other countries in northern Europe. Germany is now completing construction of its own LNG handling facilities to enable it to import directly from producing countries.
With very little gas storage capability of its own, the UK will be hoping that its European partners return the favour this winter, by providing electricity and gas back to the UK when we are short - time will tell how long this friendly international cooperation lasts for, if and when the chips are truly down.
However, we digress. The climate alarmist and net zero narrative demands that gas prices are high, so high they will stay, primarily as a result of insanely irrational decisions with regard to domestic production of fossil fuels. The reaction of the usual activist suspects, including the BBC, to the recent announcement that the UK’s first new coal mine in 30 years is to be built in Cumbria, is depressingly familiar. Note how the BBC give absolute prominence to the reaction of a tiny number of their allies, the extremist ‘critics’, while utterly ignoring the huge number of scientists, engineers and economists who believe the Net Zero agenda amounts to national suicide.
7. Storage
While every little helps of course, capacity for electricity storage in the UK is currently very limited, even in terms of today’s electricity demand, and is not yet available at anything like the scale required to meaningfully support a Net Zero ambition - where demand could be well in excess of 5 TWh on a cold winter day. Furthermore, there is no sufficiently mature technology in existence to provide such storage capacity in the near to mid term.
There are a number of existing and potential storage technologies at relatively small scale, each of which is outlined briefly here.
(Pumped) Hydro
In a dammed hydro system, the reservoir provides an energy storage analog, in that modulated release of water allows electricity to be ‘instantaneously’ produced as necessary. Unfortunately, the UK has no significant potential for damming rivers to build hydro schemes.
But the UK does have some capability to use electricity at times of light demand to pump water uphill to an artificial reservoir, which can then be released to generate electricity at times of high demand. The pumped storage schemes at Ffestiniog & Dinorwig in Wales provided 2.7 TWh of storage in 2021, as is typical of the last several years.
Classical Batteries
Contrary to public perception, influenced as it is by highly questionable messaging from government and vested interests, the potential of existing lithium-ion battery technology to support a ‘green’ (sic) energy revolution is negligible.
So called ‘Grid Scale’ batteries are useful for short term, fast response backup for low-inertia renewable generators, but their storage capacity is measured in hundreds of MWh, not the GWh / TWh that would provide meaningful sustained backup to intermittent wind and solar generation.
In a full Net Zero scenario, the UK would be consuming in excess of 3 TWh of electricity per day on average, with a peak demand of 240 GW as detailed at section 6.1. A new ‘megapack’ installation, breathlessly reported by the usual suspects at the BBC, can provide just 196 MWh of energy in a single cycle and support 98 MW of instantaneous demand - well under 0.1% of requirements in an ‘all-electric’ Net Zero scenario.
In addition, there remain serious concerns about the fire safety of large battery installations (and indeed battery electric transport) which have not been adequately addressed to date.
Novel Battery Technology
Companies like Samsung are working to develop ‘solid state’ batteries, which are claimed to have higher energy density and to overcome the safety fears with lithium-ion batteries, but the technology is not yet mature.
Molten salt batteries are also gaining increasing attention as a possible alternative, with claimed advantages of high energy densities and long life. As with solid state batteries, large scale commercial viability may yet be some way off.
Compressed/Cryogenic Gas
Companies such as Highview Power have been developing liquid air energy storage for a number of years. Air is cryogenically frozen when (renewable) energy is plentiful, e.g. from wind farms, then re-gasified to drive turbines when needed.
It is claimed that this technology can provide storage quantities of the same order as pumped hydro schemes which, if borne out, could make a significant contribution in a Net Zero scenario.
Hydrogen
In many respects, hydrogen shines a light on the fundamental dishonesty in the debate around ‘green energy’ and Net Zero.
Hydrogen can be used to generate electricity, burned directly in a hydrogen boiler or to power a vehicle, or in many industrial processes. It is the most common element in the Universe, but it does not exist on Earth in its natural state - it needs to be extracted from water using (large amounts of) electricity.
Critics and ‘hydrogen economy’ sceptics point to the inefficient conversion cycle from electricity to hydrogen and then - in the case of backup electricity generation - back to electricity. ‘Round trip’ efficiency can be as low as 35%.
But if the electricity to produce the hydrogen is ‘free’ (marginal cost at or close to zero) then the inefficiencies are all but irrelevant. Critics say that no one will invest in wind and solar plants to provide ‘free’ electricity to produce hydrogen, but this somewhat misses the point: Because of the wind generation capacity factor discussed at section 6.1, it is inevitable that there will be periods of excess supply - which would otherwise go to waste - in a genuine Net Zero scenario.
Hydrogen also has an advantage in that it is suitable for long term storage - e.g. between summer and winter - and that it is relatively easy to transport, either by ship or pipeline (although, as hydrogen can easily leak due to the small molecule size, pipes must be suitably designed and constructed – at significant expense of course).
If the world’s politicians were serious about Net Zero we could also, for example, construct a massive concentrated solar plant in the Sahara - where sunshine is abundant and reliable (predictable), supplying electricity to Africa and producing hydrogen at times of low demand, which could then be shipped to wherever it was needed.
But a hydrogen production and distribution infrastructure does not exist yet and it would be some time before one could be developed.
Some or all of these storage technologies are likely to deliver some benefits over the next few years, reducing to some extent the need for peak lopping or backup fossil fuel generation. But they will cost money of course - any savings in generation capacity or network infrastructure costs would likely be at least offset by the additional storage costs, so the overall economics of Net Zero would not be significantly reduced.
8. Wholesale Markets
The wholesale market mechanisms required to manage a predominance of intermittent renewable power are fundamentally different to those which have developed over the past few decades to manage reliable nuclear baseload and dispatchable fossil fuel plants.
Because fossil fuel and nuclear generation capabilities are fully predictable (notwithstanding unplanned or emergency outages), their forecast capacity can be ‘sold forward’ well ahead of scheduled delivery dates and any exposure to market risk managed via ‘hedging’.
With a gas plant, for example, the main variable cost of generation relates to the price of gas - which can be ‘bought forward’, as forecast output power is sold forward, to match the expected generation requirements. Other variable costs, such as ‘carbon credits’, foreign currency exposures and the like can also be hedged as required - all because there is an ‘expected’ generation schedule based on the Wholesale Market position taken by the generator. Where a generator is also a retail supplier, they can balance their retail and wholesale positions months or even years in advance, thus minimising their overall financial risk.
None of the above is applicable for intermittent renewables in the UK, which cannot confidently predict their future generation capacity to the same degree of granularity. In particular, the unpredictable nature of wind, beyond a few days into the future, has a fundamental impact on the operation of Wholesale Markets. Short term market mechanisms, covering days to a few weeks ahead, become far more important.
Furthermore, as the proportion of generating capacity from intermittent renewables - which will always top the ‘merit order’ when the wind blows or the sun shines - it then becomes impossible for fossil fuel generators to know when they will be called on to provide backup power.
In general, this discussion reflects an intellectual / logistical challenge, rather than one of physical engineering or underlying economics. For this reason, wholesale market arrangements do not represent any fundamental obstacle in terms of Net Zero ambitions.
What is worth noting here though is that the UK wholesale market is currently fundamentally broken. Generators, including wind generators, are currently making a killing from selling power via the short term mechanisms, including ‘day ahead’ and real time ‘balancing mechanism’, BM, arrangements. On December 12th 2022, one generator was being paid a record £6,000 per MWh - equivalent to £6 per kWh - via the BM.
In his autumn budget statement, chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced a new 45% windfall tax for power generators - the Energy Profits Levy (EPL), which takes effect from Jan 1st 2023 and will apply to all electricity sold above a baseline £75 per MWh. This tax is essentially an implicit admission that wholesale markets are currently not fit for purpose.
The UK gas and electricity regulator, Ofgem, continues throughout to be the usual incompetent, toothless force that it has always been. Yet, as with the Covid shambles, it is this very same bureaucrat class who continue to mislead the nation about the viability of the Net Zero agenda.
9. Transmission and Distribution
9.1 Overview & Definitions
As described above, the challenges around electricity generation and extremely limited storage are great enough, but the delivery network infrastructure is an even more intractable problem.
In loose terms, this delivery network infrastructure is divided into two parts - the country wide transmission system owned and operated (mostly) by National Grid and the ‘local’ networks operated by regional distribution companies.
The National Grid transmission network operates at extremely high voltage - 275,000 and 400,000 volts (275 & 400 kV) - and is widely visible as huge pylons which crisscross the country. Underground cables operating at these voltages are incredibly expensive and technically challenging, so their use is restricted to the largest cities and environmentally sensitive areas. Because of the technical challenges, most sub-sea interconnectors operate as direct current (DC) rather than alternating current (AC) links, and converting between AC and DC at either end adds further cost and complexity.
Regional and local distribution networks operate at a range of voltages, from 132,000 volts down the 230/240 volt (it’s an EU thing!) supply to your home. Typically, your property will be within a couple of hundred meters or so of your local transformer substation, which converts from the 11,000 volts of your local ‘high voltage’ network down the ‘low voltage’ mains cable (or overhead line if you live in a rural area) in your street.
As shown at figure 3, residential properties currently use nearly 3 times as much energy from natural gas (318 TWh) as from electricity (109 TWh). So, all other things being equal, future residential electricity consumption under a Net Zero scenario would be four times what it is at present. The impact of any at-home electric vehicle charging would increase this, but any energy efficiency improvements such as home insulation would work in the opposite direction. However, peak demand in a Net Zero scenario would correlate more closely to domestic winter heating requirements - and it’s peak simultaneous demand, not overall energy consumption, which dictates the capacity requirements of the network. We’ll assume a five-fold increase in simultaneous demand for the purposes of this discussion.
In practical terms, this theoretical increase in electricity use (according to the fiction of political and eco-warrior propaganda) would comprise three main elements.
Electric heat pumps (or hydrogen boilers) to replace gas boilers
Electric ovens and hobs to replace gas cookers
EV charging to replace combustion engine vehicles
The existing electricity transmission and distribution networks quite simply do not have the capacity to deliver this much power to every property. Although most homes have a nominal electricity supply rated for an instantaneous 20 kW, the design of the transmission and distribution systems rely on the fact that people use electricity at different times: People do not usually switch on their electric kettles at exactly the same time - except at half time during world cup football games (this is a real phenomenon carefully monitored by the national grid).
In section 6, we have assumed for simplicity (since overall generation costs will be a matter of ‘swings and roundabouts’) that the extra demand will be provided almost entirely by large new wind installations and, in extremis when the wind fails, from centralised thermal backup plant.
Any significant increase in small, locally embedded generation and / or storage - especially rooftop solar and in-home batteries - will somewhat reduce the need to reinforce transmission and distribution networks. However, given that UK peak demand is in winter when we have minimal daylight, it would require a huge number of rooftop solar installations to have any significant impact - it is very difficult to see even a 10% reduction in demand on the network.
The bottom line is that Net Zero is simply not possible with the UK’s existing electricity infrastructure. The entire network would require a massive upgrade in an infeasibly short period of time to get anywhere close.
9.2 Distribution Networks
As outlined above, most residential electricity supplies are rated at 20 kW.
The ‘service’ cable from the street mains to your property, your main supply fuse, and your meter, are all rated to deliver 20 kW - enough, at first glance, to handle both the increased average daily energy requirements under Net Zero and the instantaneous maximum power demands of say a 6 or 8 kW heat pump and/or your 7 kW electric vehicle charger.
However, if you live in an older property which was not originally fitted with electric heating, the likelihood is that the design ‘allocation’ of concurrent power usage to your property - known as 'After Diversity Maximum Demand', ADMD - is less than 2 kW. This is the capacity of the local mains infrastructure, which may be several decades old, by which electricity is delivered to your kerb-side.
This is because, although each property may presently use 5 or 10 kW for brief periods - e.g. when using an electric shower while dinner is cooking in the electric oven - the chance of all properties in the same street drawing this much power at the same time is vanishingly small.
But if you and your neighbours all want to power your new electric heat pumps simultaneously, or fast charge your 50 or 100 kWh electric car battery at the same time, one of two things is likely to happen.
Initially, in the case of relatively small load increases, the voltage at your meter will probably drop significantly because, as more current is drawn along the mains, more power is lost as heat in the mains cable. This means that all your electrical equipment will operate less efficiently (you will get less power to your heat pump, cooker, etc.) and, in extreme cases, your appliances and electronic devices may be damaged.
Of course, if the cable gets too overloaded / hot, it will burn out. This is why there are fuses at the substation. Once the additional demand in your street is sufficient, these fuses will blow, leaving you without power altogether. Simply replacing the fuses, without upgrading the network, will only result in repeat occurrences.
Until or unless all local networks nationwide can be upgraded, other measures may be required to prevent blown fuses or permanent damage all over the local mains networks - some form of power rationing will be required. This could be ‘voluntary’, managed via time-of-day, day-of-week or seasonal tariff structures, or mandated - e.g. your Smart Meter issues an alarm at a certain power threshold depending on the time of day, and disconnects you if you ignore the alarm for a defined period.
To upgrade your local network, additional transformer substations and new mains cables will be needed. Aside from the logistical challenges - supply chain issues, skilled people, acquiring land for substations, digging up and making good nearly every suburban street (with attendant dystopian disruption to normal life) and so on - the cost will be enormous.
Exact costs are difficult to estimate, given that some properties - e.g. those built more recently or designed as all-electric from the outset - will already have sufficient capacity, any rooftop solar and in-home battery solutions will reduce peak demand on the network and so on. In addition, there are some ‘band-aid’ solutions to improve the efficient utilisation of existing local networks, e.g. the employment of power electronics technology for phase balancing and voltage boosting. But the overall impact of such measures is likely to be negligible in the greater scheme of things.
According to the Statista web site, around 80% of UK homes currently rely on gas heating, so overall it is probably not unreasonable to estimate that local networks serving 2/3 of UK homes would require upgrading to some degree, at an average cost of say £7,500 per property; in the region of £140 billion nationwide.
9.3 Transmission Grid
The national transmission system is affected in two ways by the push for Net Zero.
Costly Grid connections to feed the generated power into the national network, together with reconfiguration of the grid as a whole, including fast-response battery storage, to manage the wider dispersal of generation assets and protect against the vulnerabilities of an increasingly ‘low-inertia’ system (see section 6).
General reinforcement of the system to cope with increased electricity demand.
Point 2 is self-explanatory. If peak demand increases five-fold, capacity required to meet that demand also increases five-fold. The impact on the transmission network is then very similar in principle to the impact on the distribution network, as described above.
On point 1, the cost of renewable energy is not comprised only of the direct generation costs. Wind and Solar farms need additional grid connections to be built and maintained - at a cost - and they are a ‘low inertia’ source of energy.
‘Thermal’ generating plants, whether fossil fuels or nuclear, are powered by massive gas and steam turbines weighing hundreds of tonnes and spinning at 3,000 revolutions per minute (50 times per second to produce the familiar 50 Hz supply to your home). These units act as massive flywheels, tending to smooth out any shocks to the system: If a generator is suddenly disconnected somewhere on the network due to a fault, the remaining units are essentially asked to take up the load - and they start to slow down under the strain. Because of the inertia in all that spinning steel, this deceleration is gradual, providing precious seconds or minutes for backup generation to be brought on-line before the whole system collapses.
But renewable generation does not have the same level of inertia; to protect the entire system from a catastrophic slow-down and chain reaction blackout, fast-response battery power is needed to bridge the gap while backup sources are introduced. This battery storage is expensive (around £86 million for a 100 MW system, excluding installation), as are the additional grid configuration requirements, all adding to the real costs of renewable energy.
The historical grid design in the UK benefitted from centralised planning and efficiencies of scale associated with high capacity nuclear and fossil fuel power plants. Highly dispersed, small scale wind and solar farms do not provide such design efficiencies; even large offshore wind installations (e.g. the 400 MW Rampion wind farm) only deliver a fraction of the power supplied by a base load thermal plant (e.g. 3,200 MW from Hinckley Point C).
Detailed costs are impossible to accurately determine without access to up-to-date National Grid statistics, but it is easy to envisage an overall budgetary cost for the transmission system of around half that for the distribution network, i.e. £70 billion.
10. Retail
Other than the price tag for Smart Metering - initially £7 billion, then £11 billion, now officially £13.4 billion (in reality probably significantly more) - the direct cost implications of Net Zero for companies in the retail supply sector are negligible.
However, some of the tools available to government and supply companies to influence end user behaviour, have significant potential to reduce costs in generation, transmission and distribution (these potential savings have been factored into the analysis of those costs elsewhere in this document).
In order to encourage a switch from natural gas to electricity, for example, the UK government plans to transfer ‘green levies’ (a component of environmental and social obligation costs) from electricity bills to gas bills.
The main tool suppliers have is the structure of bills, to encourage consumers to minimise use of electricity at peak times and, for larger business and industrial customers to reduce their own peak demand.
Seasonal and time of day, STOD, tariffs incentivise customers to use electricity at times of lower demand. Historically, this was a fairly blunt instrument, e.g. through the use of 2 rate or ‘Economy 7’ meters to charge separately for peak and off-peak electricity.
Now that smart meters are becoming the default, suppliers have far greater scope to vary prices for different times throughout the day, down to individual half-hour periods in the extreme case.
‘Maximum Demand’, MD, metering has long been the norm for non-domestic customers who draw more than 50 kW from the network. However, as the Net Zero agenda is ever more vigorously pursued, it is possible that residential properties will be ‘rate limited’ in their use of power - e.g. to 10 kW or even 5 kW at times of peak demand.
STOD tariffs are designed to relieve the strain on both generation and network capacity; since they penalise use of power at times of high national demand, they help maximise the efficiency of the entire generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure.
MD tariffs are geared more towards the efficient operation of the local network, since they limit the capacity requirement of transformers and cables directly in the vicinity of the capped load.
11. Energy Consumers
11.1 Residential Consumers
Aside from the discretionary option to install solar panels, discussed in section 6.1, the Net Zero agenda will involve significant mandatory changes in the way that private individuals consume energy, in a number of areas.
Home Heating
Central heating systems will need to change from a 78% predominance of gas boilers to electric heat pumps and/or hydrogen boilers.
Since there is no realistic prospect of large scale hydrogen production and distribution in the short to mid term, we will assume heat pumps, at an average installed cost of around £10,000, or around £7,000 more than the typical £3,000 cost for a replacement gas boiler.
The total additional cost of heat pumps for 78% of the UK housing stock (0.78 * ~28m = 21.8m) would therefore be £153 billion
Electric Cooking
The proportion of UK properties with gas ovens has been falling in recent years, and stood at around 38% in 2017. If we assume a similar number of homes have gas hobs, a residual percentage of 25% who would not naturally have changed to electric as a preference by 2050, and a cost of £1,000 per property to switch, we arrive at an additional Net Zero cost of £7 billion.
Insulation & Double/Triple Glazing
Typical costs for loft & wall insulation are £1,000 - £2,000, and £5,000 new or replacement double glazing.
If half of the 28 million homes in the UK require these efficiency measures, we arrive at a total national cost of £91 billion.
Electric Vehicles
2050 is 28 years away and, since, most cars in the UK currently are less than 28 years old, it is a reasonable assumption that most will be ‘naturally’ replaced during the target timescale for net zero.
The current list price of a petrol powered Vauxhall Corsa Ultimate model is £24,050, compared to £33,735 for the equivalent full electric version - a £9,685 or 40% premium for the electric model. The cost of installing a home charger, from around £800, takes the total premium to £10,485.
Taking the Corsa as a typical example, the additional cost to replace all 32 million private cars with full electric vehicles would therefore be around £335 billion.
The total cost of government mandated Net Zero measures for private homes and transport would be 153 + 7 + 91 + 335 = £586 billion.
11.2 Other Consumers
The impact of Net Zero on business and industry will be unique to each sector. For example the restaurant industry will be impacted if the gas cookers favoured by most professional chefs are outlawed.
A thorough analysis of the practical impact across all non-residential sectors is beyond our scope here; we leave it for others to research in detail.
12. Conclusions
The BBC makes the following claim in an article on its web site:
“The UK is already a world leader in offshore wind. It currently has capacity of about 10GW, which Mr Johnson's government promised to increase to 50GW by 2030. This would generate enough energy to power every home in the UK”.
This statement is flat out untrue. Firstly, it conflates two very different quantities; the ‘current’ 10 GW (it’s actually 11 GW as we discuss in section 6) is a measure of de-rated capacity, taking account of the intermittent nature of wind, while the ‘increase to 50 GW’ (actually ‘up to’ 50 GW in the government’s own words) refers to installed capacity, with a likely real-world capacity factor of around 32%.
The article also conflates energy demand with peak power demand. It is true that 50 GW of installed capacity could provide the short term power requirements of the UK today in the days and hours when wind conditions are optimal. This is a far different proposition from continuously powering “every home in the UK”.
50 GW of installed capacity, could potentially provide around half of the current electrical energy requirements of the UK. But by 2030, according to the Net Zero narrative so dishonestly promoted by the BBC and others, the UK needs to be well on the way to ‘decarbonising’ all energy use - today’s requirements for electricity may have doubled by then, in which case 50 GW of installed capacity, or 17 GW of de-rated capacity, could potentially provide just one quarter of our needs.
The writers of the BBC article - the laughingly named “Reality Check team” - either know this, and are simply being disingenuous, or have no genuine understanding the UK energy industry and are misleading the British public with their ignorance. It is probably a mixture of both, but the underlying reasons don’t really matter; the end result is that - just as they did throughout the Covid fiasco - the BBC continues to mislead the UK public, and the world, with misinformation and / or disinformation.
This paper has covered many of the factors involved in any attempt to achieve Net Zero, especially those in the power industry, and has estimated likely costs for those approaches which the authors consider to be practically feasible with current technology - some ‘solutions’ are ruled out as not technically achievable with currently available technologies.
Some aspects of our analysis are no doubt open to debate. Alternative approaches - relying more on advances in storage technology for example - may prove possible. It is likely in practice that any serious attempt to achieve Net Zero would involve a hybrid ‘solution’ involving all the elements we have discussed. But such an approach would simply transfer some percentage of the overall costs between the different elements of the ‘solution’ - the UK would still end up bankrupt and broken.
If we are mistaken - if someone in government, the ‘deep state blob’, or the international globalist cabal, has a complete and workable plan - one that is costed in detail and supported by a credible implementation schedule - then let’s all see it.
The truth is that no such plan exists. The costs will be of the order that we have described here - up to £2.5 Trillion in total - and the economy, as well as the social cohesion, of the UK will be permanently destroyed.
But of course the UK cannot in reality afford to spend this kind of money, and the possibility that any UK government could successfully manage a programme of work of the scale described here to a successful conclusion is … nil.
So we end up in what the BBC would have you believe is ‘conspiracy theory’ territory. It is all an egregious lie; Net Zero is not possible and, in the immortal words of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective:
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth!”
So what ultimately is the truth? Sadly, nothing good:
The ‘globalist elites’ have no intention of letting ordinary people continue to travel freely, heat their homes comfortably, eat meat, or retain any of the freedoms which our forebears worked so hard to achieve, and to which we have become so complacently accustomed.
Above all, we need to remember that the whole farce is based a nonsensical lie: There is no climate emergency, CO₂ is not a pollutant but the basis of all life on Earth. More CO₂ in the atmosphere leads to greening of the planet - a good thing!
Now is the time for ordinary people to comprehensively reject their dystopian vision for humanity.
This is an excellent and eye opening summation that deserves more traction. Sharing.
Brilliant and many thanks ! New paper on climate emergency hoax -
''If in fact ‘the science is settled’, it seems to be much more settled in the fact that there is no particular correlation between CO 2 level and the earth’s temperature.''
https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jsd/article/view/0/47745