By Paul Homewood
At the end of February, I penned this open letter to Claire Coutinho, following a dearth of wind.
One of my contacts is actually in her constituency, so was able to write to her as a constituent. He passed this letter on to her with a few personnel comments of his own.
This presented a great opportunity to get the answers straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Similar letters to MPs are normally answered by a bog standard response from some lowly civil servant.
He has now received a reply, which I will publish tomorrow. It confirms all of the fears we have had that ministers in charge of energy policy have no idea about how our energy system works, and continue to believe the fairy tales they are fed by the green blob, who are the ones really in charge:
OPEN LETTER TO CLAIRE COUTINHO – SECRETARY OF STATE FOR ENERGY SECURITY & NET ZERO
May I start by asking if you are aware of the electricity mix during the windless spell last weekend. According to official data from the grid, in the 24 hours to 10.00 am on 25th February, wind power supplied only 2.5% of total generation. This works out at an average of 0.7 GW, just 2% of Britain’s wind capacity.
Meanwhile solar power only contributed about 1.4 GW, 8% of its capacity. However this is not dependable, as it often drops to about a quarter of this figure on cloudy days in winter, as it did earlier that week.
It is also worth noting that we are still using coal, despite your promise at COP28 that it would have been phased out by now!
This sort of weather can last for several weeks at a time in winter.
As it is the government’s plan to totally decarbonise the grid by 2035, (and by 2030 for Labour!), could you please explain how we will be able to run the grid without gas and coal then? Building yet more wind/solar farms won’t solve the problem – twice nothing is still nothing!
Battery storage, as I am sure you know, is of little help, because it can only supply enough for an hour or so. As for green hydrogen, not only would we need to spend tens of billions building electrolysers, seasonal storage, distribution and a fleet of CCGT power stations to burn it, there would simply not be enough wind and solar farms to provide the electricity needed in the first place. It is not conceivable that any of this could be in place by 2035, nor any new nuclear after Hinkley.
Switching demand from peak to off peak will also be of no help, because we will be desperately short of power at all times of day, and for weeks on end.
Carbon capture is often quoted as a solution, even though there is no evidence it actually works at scale. But, more pertinently, CCS cannot be fitted to nearly all of our CCGT fleet, as it is far too old. That would mean we would need to build a whole new fleet of CCS ready gas power stations, all at colossal expense. It would, of course, increase our dependence on fossil fuels, not reduce it, as CCS is a very fuel inefficient process. And we would need to begin that construction now, something which there are no plans for currently.
The problem is actually worse than I have laid out, because electricity demand is projected to be much higher in 2035, with EVs and heat pumps.
We are already far too dangerously reliant on imported electricity, which provided a quarter of our power in the above 24-hour period. When there are low winds here, the same usually occurs in the rest of NW Europe as well. On the same day that our wind output dropped away last week, Germany’s fell to less than half its usual level.
When the EU has also closed its coal and gas plants, it will also be desperately short of electricity during windless days. What guarantees do we have that we will still be able to import it then?
The first half of your job is “Energy Security”. I suggest you focus more on that, and less on the other half!