By Paul Homewood
I did not have time yesterday to fully dissect this latest piece of juvenile nonsense from AEP:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/18/rich-world-needs-less-energy-net-zero/
You will recall that he thought he had magically discovered the secret to how Net Zero would be a doddle all by himself.
His little theory was that everybody was concentrating on primary energy consumption, and had ignored how “super efficient” renewable technology was, not to mention EVs and heat pumps. After all, don’t fossil fuels waste a lot of energy.
As a result, the transition to Net Zero would be cheap and easy.
I pointed out that all of the official agencies must surely have already factored these into their calculations.
As you will know, I have spent considerable time looking into the various reports and projections from the Committee on Climate Change, and I cannot recall them even barely mentioning primary energy. Instead all of their reports and plans are concerned with electricity requirements.
For instance their Sixth Carbon Budget goes into great detail projecting power capacities and supply:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/10/27/sixth-carbon-budget-does-not-add-up/
They are based on guesstimates of how much electricity we will need to power EVs, heat pumps along with everything else.
Then they extrapolate how we can do all of this with low carbon technology. (By the way, they do not attempt to estimate the emissions involved in producing solar panels and batteries in China!)
In other words, they have already taken account of the points AEP raises.
The Future Energy Scenarios published by the National Grid are formulated on the same basis.
And as we know, the CCC’s plans for Net Zero are not only unworkable, they will also be horrifically expensive.
Which all rather exposes AEP’s article for the childish piece of nonsense it is.
I call on the Telegraph to withdraw the report, and replace it with something written by somebody who knows what he is talking about.
But I find it shocking that someone like AEP is given the opportunity to write garbage like this, when he clearly has not even bothered to read any of the work the CCC has published.