Energy Security and Hot Air
The authors of “Energy Security Strategy” seem not to have read the manual provided by a previous Energy Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor Sir David Mackay: Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air. His “sole recommendation is this: Make sure your policies include a plan that adds up!” (p.203) Unfortunately the new Strategy does not.
The best part is the recognition, at last, of the importance of nuclear to provide the baseload for wind and solar. But Mr Johnson’s arithmetic is dodgy. He claims 95 percent of energy needs will be low carbon by 2030, but Hinkley Point C will be the only nuclear plant planned to be operating by then, contributing seven percent. By 2050, another seven Hinkleys would contribute 49 percent, not counting the unknown number of small nuclear reactors, if demand remained flat. The Strategy expects nuclear to be 25 percent of 2050 demand which implies demand is expected to more than double but the Strategy states “we do know that electricity demand is highly likely to double by 2050”. That has to be nonsense because electricity is only 20 percent of energy now and if energy increases at all, since virtually all energy will be in the form of electricity, electricity demand will have to increase more than fivefold.
The Strategy confuses demand units, or usage, (which should be expressed as GWh) with capacity units (which should be expressed as GW). It uses the latter to express the former when, obviously enough, we need far more capacity than usage to cater for peaks and troughs, especially of the volatile wind and sun. In 2020, usage is 33 percent of capacity in the UK and 37 percent in the USA.
Storage can provide some shifting of peaks to troughs and hydrogen will be the main means of that but it is not itself a source. Indeed, it is a wasteful form of storage: of the electricity used to make either form of hydrogen, you only get about half back. The Strategy states “we plan to blend up to 20 percent hydrogen into the natural gas grid” which is not a good idea since hydrogen, per therm, costs more than natural gas.
Electricity security is not just a matter of generation; power lines have to be secure too. Increasingly volatile weather will knock them out more often and responses will need to be sped up but what about the network as a whole? A proposal has been made but not by the PM’s Strategy paper.
Amongst the various strange claims in the Strategy are “by 2050 all our buildings will be energy efficient with low carbon heating”, “we expect a five-fold increase in [solar] deployment by 2035”, i.e. 70 GW, and “by 2030 over half our renewable generation capacity will be wind”. It would have been better to suggest the first as a direction and explain why the Treasury will restrain itself from blocking that further. The second implies that solar alone will supply about as much as nuclear and the three together will supply more than 100 percent of demand.
The Strategy launches a few more quangos, such as “the £120 million Future Nuclear Enabling Fund”, “the Great British Nuclear Vehicle” and the “Future Systems Operator”. One can never have too many of them.
The paper is full of perfectly good, but itsy bitsy, ideas and cost packages but these are not “strategy”. We need a proper energy strategy that adds up.