Miliband’s SOS

By Paul Homewood

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66cda5c1e39a8536eac0532e/sos-chris-stark-letter-clean-power-2030.pdf

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This is Miliband’s SOS letter that I mentioned the other day. (Note that “SOS” appears in the link!)

It makes you wonder what Chris Stark, now head of Miliband’s Mission Control, has been doing for the past few years while in charge at the Committee on Climate Change! After all, the CCC has been publishing goodness knows how many reports, budgets and assorted advice to government on Net Zero. Now it appears that they themselves never had the slightest clue as to how it could be achieved.

As for Fintan Slye at the National Grid, what else can he say than what is already in the Future Energy Scenarios (FES) which he published just a couple of months ago. These laid out various pathways to Net Zero by 2050, but also gave plenty of detail on how we might progress in the years leading up to 2050.

The FES included this useful table:

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Miliband’s manifesto plans for renewables in 2030 are in essence the same as the FES EE pathway in 2035 – 76GW offshore wind, 31GW onshore and 48 GW solar.

The FES also projected peak demand of 65GW in 2030, rising to 81GW by 2035. (These figures and the rest of this analysis are based on the Electric Engagement scenario (EE), which assumes mass roll out of heat pumps and EVs, and is the most likely pathway). The electricity system in place by 2030 must be robust enough to handle the increased demand in 2035, so I will stick with the figure of 81GW. In practice, you would need about 100GW of available capacity, so as to allow for plant outages and unexpected events.

So let’s dig a bit deeper. Below I have listed the FES EE capacities for 2035, but plugged in their 2030 figures for bio, nuclear and others:

So we have an immediate problem, in that we only have dispatchable capacity of 45.6GW, against a requirement of 100GW. Even adding in the 11.7GW of Interconnector capacity, we will still be well short when the wind soes not below. There are many occasions in winter when wind can run at less than 5% of capacity for days on end. And in winter solar only produces at about 3% of capacity, meaning that the contribution from wind and solar could be as little as 5GW or even less.

Leaving this issue aside however, we can also see that the FES includes 18.4GW of unabated gas, which Miliband’s plan eliminates., so matters are made even worse. They also assume 6.1GW of hydrogen burning power stations and 8.1GW of CCGT with CCS, meaning a total of 32.6GW of thermal power. There is of course no chance of having any meaningful amount of the latter by 2030, as CCS has still not been proven at scale. As for hydrogen, we simply will not have the infrastructure for distributing and storing it in that timescale. Even the FES only projects 9 TWh of hydrogen production in 2030, and 41 TWh in 2035, nowhere near enough to make a dent in electricity generation.

In any event, we will need to build a whole new fleet of thermal power stations in the next decade, as demand for electricity rises and older gas plants close. Miliband does not appear to have grasped this simple fact yet.

In theory, in overall terms there is enough electricity to power the grid over the year as a whole using Miliband’s assumptions. But that is only if we get a constant output of wind and solar power. He clearly thinks that as long as we build enough wind farms, all of the problems will magically go away.

Maybe Fintan Slye might educate Ed Miliband about the physical reality.

I am going to stick my neck out here and predict that Miliband will end up dropping his 2030 deadline for decarbonising the grid. In justification he will use the upcoming ESO report, which will essentially say it is an impossible objective, and then blame the Tories for their failure to act earlier. He will probably put back the deadline to 2035, by which time he will long be gone.