There is universal agreement that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced as soon as possible. How that should be achieved lacks consensus.

On 18th July 2022, Mr Justice Holgate ruled: 

“the UK government’s plan for reaching net zero emissions was unlawful because it provided insufficient detail for how the target would be met.”

In other words, the government did not have a plan at all. The judge’s ruling that one should be produced by 31st March 2023 produced a flurry of documents from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) labelled “strategy” and “plan”, but none had substance.

On 23rd June, the Public Accounts Committee reported:

“the Department should bring these together in a coherent delivery plan so that it can understand how realistic its ambition is, and coordinate and sequence its interventions to best effect.”

DESNZ does not do arithmetic. It may recognise that almost all energy in 2050 will take the form of electricity and that our growing population will need at least as much as we use now- about 2,000 TwH. The number of days when wind failed to supply 4 GW at some stage of the day or night fell from 196 days in 2020 to 183 days in 2022. So never mind how many renewables they build, about half the year they won’t work.

Their plan should show how the energy shortfall will be covered. That is, how large the baseload of nuclear plus tidal power needs to be and, when that is insufficient to cover demand, how the surplus demand will be covered by fossil fuels (presumably made clean by carbon capture and storage).  

The general expectancy is that the baseload provided by renewables will be 30% of electricity demand, meaning that fossil fuel energies will fulfil 70% of electricity demand during dunkelflaute (dark) days.

The DESNZ’s failure in the arithmetic department is matched by HM Treasury’s failure to understand nuclear and tidal energy. 

Hinkley Point C was the last nuclear plant approved, but that was nine years ago. Before that was Sizewell B, 27 years earlier.

Modern nuclear plants, called ‘Small Modular Reactors’ (SMRs) are the subjects of similar unjustified hesitancy. In 2015 Chancellor George Osborne recognised SMRs as better value for money, running a selection competition. Yet, eight years later, not a single one has been ordered or built. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) recommended tidal power to be properly considered, yet DESNZ has ignored that. And when the supply of renewables and nuclear power are inadequate, we maintain the status quo - fossil fuels - proven by the latest interview with the CEO of Shell, Wael Sawan:

“The reality is, the energy system of today continues to desperately need oil and gas”

A related issue is the unnecessarily absolutist thinking that the UK, which causes 1% of global emissions, can solve global warming through unilateral action. This is not only fanciful, but delusory.

To conclude, the DESNZ is failing to do the basic arithmetic on the need for renewable energy to cover the nations’ baseload energy demand; HM Treasury continues to evade commitments to nuclear energy; and activists like Just Stop Oil demand a ludicrous cessation of the mining of fossil fuels. This is a tragic state of affairs, and the responsible institutions would do well to heed the ASI’s advice, and commit to the nuclear agenda. In the meantime, we simply continue burning the fuels destroying our planet.