The new Labour government is speeding up Britain’s lunatic exercise in central planning.
Britain’s new Labour government is turning out to be oriented far further to the left than some wishful thinkers once believed. A key part of its agenda will be picking up the pace even faster than their feckless Tory predecessors in the “race” to net zero, a lunatic exercise in central planning (but I repeat myself) incompatible with the maintenance of much of a modern free-market economy.
Matt Ridley, writing in the Daily Telegraph:
Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, wants to double onshore wind, quadruple offshore and treble solar capacity. If he has a plan to deal with the resulting volatility and intermittency, he has yet to reveal it.
That’s too harsh. Miliband’s plan is to deny that there’s a problem. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll say that it is the unavoidable price of saving the planet (despite the fact that Britain’s current contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions is less than 1 percent). And if that doesn’t work, he’ll find some wicked capitalists to blame.
Ridley repeats some familiar complaints about wind and solar before turning to the most important, their unreliability:
On a cold, still winter evening, when we need a lot of power, wind and solar contribute the square root of sod all. The more wind turbines we build the more expensive it becomes to maintain a back-up system of gas-fired power stations that goes unused for much of the time. . . .
To keep the lights on, the grid increasingly relies on investors building facilities that can be fired up quickly. These people will demand and get high prices during emergencies and are licking their lips at the growing volatility of Britain’s grid. Ironically, the fastest-responding gas stations are open-cycle ones, with higher emissions than combined-cycle plants.
The central problem is that you cannot store electricity affordably – not like you can store a pile of coal. Batteries are vastly expensive on the scale required. To store just a day’s worth of electricity for the UK would require a battery that would cost £300bn. Pumped storage (using spare power to pump water uphill) could be cheaper, but we don’t have nearly enough mountains. Compressed-air storage, making hydrogen with spare power and other such schemes are all achingly expensive and impractical.
And this is before considering the extra demands that the switch to heat pumps and electric vehicles will put on the system.
A key part of the net-zero strategery of successive failed Conservative governments and their Labour successor is reliance on “interconnectors” (high-voltage undersea cables that allow the U.K. to export and import electricity). The U.K. is Europe’s second-largest importer of electricity (after Italy), and this is, Ridley rightly argues, a huge vulnerability. That’s somewhat ironic given the way that net zero is often touted as a means of assuring energy security, but climatist disinformation is what it is. The reasons that Ridley gives for this vulnerability are economic. For example, “Norway has already passed a law allowing it to cut off its interconnector and the people of Iceland are balking at seeing their cheap hydro and geothermal power sent to Britain because of the effect on their domestic electricity prices.”
To that it’s worth adding the danger of sabotage. It would be easy enough for the Russians, currently stepping up the level of their “gray zone” conflict with the West, to wreck some of these cables.
There’s also the small matter of cost. Britain’s industries, writes Ridley, have to pay some of the highest electricity costs in the world: “It has domestic prices that are two and a half times those of America and more than four times those of China.” Part of that, of course, stems from years of malinvestment in renewables. The comparison with the cost in China is striking. After all, China is a source of much of the renewable-energy equipment used in the West. Lenin (reportedly) said that “the Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” The current Chinese regime is subtler and more cost-conscious. It is selling the West the rope with which it will hang itself.
Ridley’s article was inspired by warnings from Executives from the National Grid’s Energy Systems Operator (ESO).
The Daily Telegraph published more details on that here.
An extract:
National Grid executives have warned of blackouts before the end of the decade unless the South East pays more for power than other regions.
In private conversations with the energy industry, executives from the Grid’s Electricity System Operator (ESO) claimed the network was becoming so congested that “there will be blackouts in the South East by 2028”, one industry source claimed.
They blamed the looming threat on the switch to less predictable wind and solar power, coupled with outdated market rules that critics say are exacerbating bottlenecks.
The ESO is campaigning to introduce so-called zonal pricing where power suppliers can be paid more in the South East than elsewhere if demand is higher.
This couldn’t happen in the U.S., of course.