Blain’s Morning Porridge – 31st March 2023: The UK needs an Energy Transition Plan, not Regurgitated Political Posturing
“It’s actually really bad. The incoherence is really transparent.”
This morning: The UK announced a new energy strategy – but its nonsense. It’s not a transition plan, but a ploy to placate the courts. We need better if the UK is take advantage of the opportunity Climate Change and Renewable Energy represents.
Yesterday we were treated to a new UK energy strategy. It gave the BBC the excuse to flash up some gratuitous shots of Boris and Liz Truss hamming it up at the Glasgow COP 26 from 2021 on the screens. Nasty, but after the 9.00 pm watershed.
No matter how destabilising these images were to my perilous mental fragility, or how shallow and devoid of joined-up thinking the new, (but actually just old repackaged ideas), “Powering up Britain” policy is… I remain tremendously bullish about the future! Whatever the challenges thrown at humanity in terms of everyone (ultimately) sharing in a more prosperous society – I expect we will muddle through. We usually do. The success of mankind has been our ability to adapt and turn adversity into opportunity.
Global warming should not prove the end of everything! It should not be the block on any growth head-in-the-sand environmentalists demand, nor will climate-change deniers stop it happening by denying the downright obvious. Climate Change is happening – and to be fair it probably always has been (we might have accelerated it a bit!) It’s going to require hard and difficult decisions, but if we’re smart it’s going to prove a growth driver, and a massive opportunity across technology and global cooperation!
The saner parts of the climate change lobby say we need to approach this like a War – which is exactly what some nations are doing. The Americans have put in motion the $369 bln inflation reduction act – which is broadly a massive subsidy programme to support climate mitigation and renewable technologies. The Europeans are working on a similar range of supports and enticements to create new climate positive growth.
Here in the UK?
Our government has thought about it quite-a-lot, talked more about it than almost anyone else, hosted some tea and coffee mornings to chat around it, held that jolly good conference about climate change in Glasgow, and even asked a few environmentalist types about it. Surely that’s enough?
Thing is, after being in government for quite a long time, surprisingly the piggy bank is somewhat empty, and, as the chancellor says we don’t want to go “toe-to-toe” with the US “distortive” subsidy regime. Instead, we’ve got some pretty charts showing we aren’t using much coal these days, and by covering the nation in solar farms and filling the sea lane with wind turbines we’re doing awfully well in terms of replacing our decaying nuclear facilities with nice, clean renewable power – which we bought on the cheap from China… said the energy security minister.. (Ahem.)
It’s all working remarkably well. The UK is cutting emissions. Yay!
Except of course when we get a Dunkelflaute – when the wind doesn’t blow, the freezing still air has come in from the Kremlin, and we suddenly don’t have any energy being generated. But, hey, that’s ok because Dunkelflaute is a German concept, and therefore post-Brexit can’t legally be applied to what we jokingly call the UK’s green energy transition strategies.
I must have missed the part in the new energy policy about how the UK’s energy security works when the wind aint blowing and its cold – as happens every time a blocking high descends upon us during the winter. There is a solution – energy storage. Capacitance, the holy grail of energy transition, would allow us to store all that electric the wind farms generate when we don’t need it. The government gets all excited about lithium batteries and using that power to make hydrogen. Or we could store it in hydro-electric schemes like the Welsh Electric Mountain or Ben Cruachan in Scotland. They work and are deliverable today.
Nor does the government address the IP domicile issue. New-technology UK energy projects, including Drax’s dubious bio-waste projects – which was rejected for a government programme y’day – are moving to the States to take advantage of the subsidies there – which don’t exist here.
Aside from the momentary amusement of Climate Mitigation Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary of State Grant Shapps going full-Churchill in a war-room with a map dotted with windfarms, the UK is giving a masterclass in political dither and puff.
It’s all a bit of a flaff. Yesterday, we got reams and reams of regurgitated policies and announcements wrapped up in a badly tied package, all because last year Friends of the Earth persuaded the UK courts the governments “Net Zero” strategy contained legally binding targets, therefore the govt was given until the end of March to announce how it is going to achieve these targets.. Nothing confusing in that – oh, and Kwasi Kwarteng was the minister who launched the Net Zero strategy.. imagine him tripping on his own shoelaces…
The reality is Climate Change, Renewable Energy, and Transition Strategies to get us to New Zero is a serious issue. Far too serious to be entrusted to the exigency of simply meeting a court ordered date to announce firm policies on the road map to Net Zero.
The centerpiece of the new Powering up Britain finagle is a $20 bln bet the government is placing on carbon capture tech over the next 25 years. The idea is to store carbon under the North Sea. The problem is there is no guarantee we can make these technologies work at the scale required. It also contains new proposals for boosting UK home owners to convert to heat pumps – which can’t heat most homes without completely rebuilding the central heating first.. Or how about Carbon Border taxes penalising high-carbon goods from overseas.. that won’t trigger trade retaliation at all…
The reality is the UK can get to Net Zero. But only with a properly thought out transition plan. It should involve nuclear, renewables, capacitance, but also innovation in hydrogen and new tech, plus how to use gas as part of the transition plan, while greening the environment and improving soils with carbon. That is not what we got yesterday. We got a hashbag of recycled ideas. We deserve better.
There are ways of transitioning to net zero. They require joined up thinking. We ain’t getting that. Go try again Mr Shapps.
Five Things to Read This Morning
BBerg UK House Price Fall Quicker Than Expected With Higher Rates
FT Enough green platitudes – business wants action
FT Flood of cash into US money market funds could add to banking strains
WSJ China’s Consumers Extend Economic Rebound from Pandemic
Thunderer Donald Trump indicted over “hush money” payment to Porn Star Stormy Daniels
Out of time, and have a great weekend. Boat is back in the water – time to go sailing!
Bill Blain
Strategist – Shard Capital
I don’t wish to be a perennial kill-joy but…
This whole energy security mess stems from the decision of a previous Tory government to sell off our entire energy generation sector to spivs and city wide boys in order to make a quick buck. Energy security requires long term planning and taking decisions that take years to come to fruition – such as deciding to build new nuclear power stations to replace the old ones. Which of course entails “risk”. But your spivs and wide boys aren’t interested in that they just want to make a quick buck so they won’t do it. Far simpler to build a few cheap gas powered stations and rake in the millions when energy prices go up because there isn’t enough supply to meet demand when the old nuclear plants are taken out of service (regardless of whether the wind blows or not). Too cynical? Meh.
Expecting Mr Market to solve your energy security is like expecting a pack of wolves to be very good at looking after your flock of sheep.
ONLY a sensible government has the ability to make such decisions and see them through. We haven’t had one of those for well over 40 years and are unlikely to get one in the next 10 so good luck with that.
And the current New Nuclear is too little too late and too expensive because our glorious government decided once again to try and keep it off the balance sheet and class it as “not a public project” because idealogically we wouldn’t want to actually OWN an asset that might keep the lights on.
Everything else, as you have so rightly pointed out, is window dressing and the emperor’s new clothes rolled into one. Buy a diesel generator and put it in the back garden would be my advice.
The only branch of Goverment that get’s it – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1b7nH8L5Ko
Underground CO2 storage sounds superficially very attractive until one remembers that to be effective this has to be foolproof not for 10s or even 100s of years, but many 100,000s years, otherwise all we would be doing was delaying rather than solving the problem. Although we in this country might be able to persuade ourselves that we have the engineering capability of achieving such a level of reliability, would we really trust the third world countries who claimed that they themselves were going to adopt such a solution. I really don’t think so, therefore any solutions to the problem have to be visibly auditable as and when they are being used.
I don’t believe that hydrogen, in and of itself, is a solution to the problem of getting to net zero, because its energy density is far too low. To get over this some vehicles have been devised with extremely heavy high pressure hydrogen fuel storage systems, but this is unlikely to provide a long term answer to most of our transport needs; if only because in the event of the slightest leak all of the fuel will disappear through it in seconds – hydrogen being the second smallest molecule on this or any other planet.
The same would be true if we were to attempt to back-up our gas turbine generator systems with hydrogen fuel storage to use when the wind stops blowing for a week or two at a time and the sun is too low over the horizon in the middle of The amount of such high pressure hydrogen storage would need to be huge.
My belief is that we need will need to rely very heavily on wind power to supply our power systems but that we will need to use a completely different approach to the design of an integrated power generation system. The current approach is to have the owners of individual wind farms negotiating with the Grid to allow them to generate power up to an agreed maximum limit, beyond which the turbines have to begin to be feathered. One major reason for this limitation is the need to keep the whole of the Grid operating “in phase”, a task which is relatively easy to do at present with the vast majority of the generated power being produced by large pieces of rotating machinery whose inertia provides “capacitance” to the system because their speed can be carefully controlled. This task of phase control will become increasing difficult as the more and more of the power generation comes directly from solar and wind power which in and of themselves have no such “inertia”.
Because wind farm designers wish to be able to offer supply this agreed maximum power for as long as possible the turbines themselves will be designed to produce it at reasonably modest wind speeds, meaning that the phenomenon of feathering is actually a very common one, though because the blades are still rotating it is not obvious to an observer on the ground that it is happening.
Now, the power availability from set of turbine blades is a function of the cubic power of the wind speed such that a wind farm were designed to give the negotiated maximum if the wind speed were to drop to half of the designed maximum then the power output would drop to one sixteenth of the agreed maximum, and were the wind speed were to double then the “potential” power available from the blades themselves would increase sixteen times. One possibility which would seem to be worth exploring therefore would be to beef up the on-board generators, sitting behind the blades, as well as the DC cables running to the shore, so as to be able to transmit a much higher power output from each turbine. Once on shore convert only the maximum agreed power output to AC via an inverter for feeding directly into the Grid, but send the excess DC power to an electrolysis plant to produce hydrogen. This hydrogen could be stored temporarily in a gasometer but then compressed and piped to a central facility for the production of men than oil/ethanol fuels which can be stored at atmospheric pressure and have an energy density even at atmospheric pressure many times that of compressed hydrogen.
This liquid fuel could then be shipped to existing CCGT generating stations, or used to power road transport.
Underground CO2 storage sounds superficially very attractive until one remembers that to be effective this has to be foolproof not for 10s or even 100s of years, but many 100,000s years, otherwise all we would be doing was delaying rather than solving the problem. Although we in this country might be able to persuade ourselves that we have the engineering capability of achieving such a level of reliability, would we really trust the third world countries who claimed that they themselves were going to adopt such a solution. I really don’t think so, therefore in my opinion any solutions to the problem need to be visibly auditable as and when they are being used.
I don’t believe that hydrogen, in and of itself, is a solution to the problem of getting to net zero, because its energy density is far too low. To get over this some vehicles have been devised with extremely heavy high pressure hydrogen fuel storage systems, but this is unlikely to provide a long term answer to most of our transport needs; if only because in the event of the slightest leak all of the fuel will disappear through it in seconds – hydrogen being the second smallest molecule on this or any other planet.
The same would be true if we were to attempt to back-up our gas turbine generator systems with hydrogen fuel storage to use when the wind stops blowing for a week or two at a time and the sun is too low over the horizon in the middle of The amount of such high pressure hydrogen storage would need to be huge, even to last for a couple of days.
My belief is that we need will need to rely very heavily on wind power to supply our power systems but that we will need to use a completely different approach to the design of an integrated power generation system. The current approach is to have the owners of individual wind farms negotiating with the Grid to allow them to generate power up to an agreed maximum limit, beyond which the turbines have to begin to be feathered. One major reason for this limitation is the need to keep the whole of the Grid operating “in phase”, a task which is relatively easy to do at present with the vast majority of the generated power being produced by large pieces of rotating machinery whose inertia provides “capacitance” to the system because their speed can be carefully controlled. This task of phase control will become increasing difficult as the more and more of the power generation comes directly from solar and wind power which in and of themselves have no such “inertia”.
Because wind farm designers wish to be able to offer supply their agreed maximum power for as long as possible, the turbines themselves will be designed to produce it at reasonably modest wind speeds, meaning that the phenomenon of feathering is actually a very common one, though because the blades are still rotating it is not obvious to an observer on the ground that it is happening. What is much more visible are large numbers of wind turbines standing idle in the North Sea off Blythe, or across Scottish hillsides when the power from them is “not required”.
Now, the power availability from set of turbine blades is a function of the cubic power of the wind speed such that a wind farm were designed to give the negotiated maximum if the wind speed were to drop to half of the designed maximum then the power output would drop to one sixteenth of the agreed maximum, and were the wind speed were to double then the “potential” power available from the blades themselves would increase sixteen times. One possibility which would seem to be worth exploring therefore would be to beef up the on-board generators, sitting behind the blades, as well as the DC cables running to the shore, so as to be able to transmit a much higher power output from each turbine. Once on-shore inverters would be used only up to the maximum agreed power output to AC via an inverter for feeding directly into the Grid, but send all the excess DC power to an electrolysis plant to produce hydrogen. This hydrogen could be stored temporarily in a gasometer but then compressed and piped to a central facility for the production of men than oil/ethanol fuels which can be stored at atmospheric pressure and have an energy density even at atmospheric pressure many times that of compressed hydrogen.
This liquid fuel could then be shipped to existing CCGT generating stations, or used to power road transport.
People will argue that electrolysis and conversion to alcohol fuel will be very inefficient, and so it will be, but remember that the power required will all come from the electricity which would otherwise have been suppressed by feathering the blades of the turbines.
Ammonia, much easier to transport and store than hydrogen.
This is an extremely naive piece.
1. The problem is much bigger than Dunkelflautes. A wind drought, like the one in 2021, can reduce wind output by 20%. In a net zero grid, demand might be 3TWh per day. The store will turn over once per decade. Unit costs will be impossibly high.
2. Some years ago the grid surveyed the UK for sites suitable for pumped hydro. They reckoned we could quintuple our capacity. An hour or sons demand in a net zero grid.
3. The round trip efficiency of green hydrogen is only 35% or so. Less if you have to compress it (which you would have to do to store it).
There is a reason the government’s plan doesn’t mention storage, and it’s not that nobody ever suggested it before.