Richard, have you come across the John Lee Pettimore X account? it is grounded and useful in showing ordinary citizens just how absurd the notion of net zero is.
As an American who has laughed himself into nearly apoplectic fits over Wodehouse since I was 12, reading Lyon's piece is magnificent. The combination of straight ahead thinking and logic combined with a wit that is dry like Phoenix in August makes me giggle. I don't know which I liked better, his idea of taking out a healthy appendix when the wind is blowing thereby removing the unpleasantness of not being able to do so because of wind drought or the bit about banning fracking while proposing to inject hydrogen into the ground in mass quantities. Either way, we are only two months away from those same proposals being thrown at us by perhaps the dumbest VP in modern history (and that includes Dan Quayle).
This is an example of what might be called the pharaoh complex. An unimpressive man of no talent finds himself in a position of political power. He uses this power to coerce the erection of a vast and useless structure in the hope that the sheer size of the project will earn for him the admiration of his fellows. Gazing into the mirror of his own egotism he fondly whispers “people are talking about me “
It’s a good job what you describe isn’t what is going to happen then. What does FES2024 say the generation mix in 2035 will be, as that’s probably, more or less, what we’ll have
What I describe is absolutely not what's going to *happen*, not least because what I describe - its necessity under notionally binding legislation notwithstanding - is physically and financially impossible . At issue is the amount of damage they will cause before they are compelled to abandon the effort.
There are two aspects to this question: what they assume; and what is necessitated, having made targets legally binding, that is not contained in assumptions. They *assume* "a significant decrease in hydrocarbons, abated through carbon capture" with an increasing use of biofuels. Assuming a role for hydrocarbons, while prohibiting the development of future hydrocarbons, obviously contradicts the policy's stated aim of "energy security". Carbon capture is not, and will never be, economically viable. Biofuels cannot scale, are environmentally damaging, and uneconomic. Although not stated in the assumptions, meeting legal targets requires, e.g. closure of all but two airports, and the effective deindustrialisation of the UK with commensurate collapse in living standards, and is therefore politically unachievable. Finally, no cost projection for what is proposed has been provided or, given that many of the assumed technologies don't exist, can be developed.
So what is being proposed is of no material significance.
I remember JFK proposing to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth
My point though is you have stated a scenario that no one credible has ever suggested won’t work. That’s dead easy. It also won’t be possible to power the U.K. on fairy dust, but writting an article about it is pretty pointless
JFK proposed to land on the moon with another 60 years of high gradient energy expansion in front of him. With an expanding energy supply we can, through technology, solve many problems. Since technology requires an excess of energy, the one problem technology cannot solve is a deficit of energy.
Since no-one credible has ever suggested a scenario that does work, it's not clear to me why you think analysing different unworkable ones is pointless. How else do we reach the conclusion that there are none, unless we investigate each?
Thanks for the summary. It's valuable, because of course we don't all have the time to read every document.
"in Victorian times, when net energy levels were at “Net Zero” levels" - it took me a moment to realize you were turning the tables on the term "Net Zero" - to mean net energy level of zero instead of net carbon level of zero.
"Having restated his determination to force it down our throats, technically illiterate and clueless Mr Miliband wrote this week to the Transmission network’s boss for ideas on how to do it." Too bad he didn't think to ask that before implementing his crazy policies.
Thanks Al. As a point of clarity. "Net Zero" formally means "Net Zero CO2 emissions". This have-your-cake-and-eat-it term supposes that there is some quantity of trees you can plant (for example) that absorb your economy's CO2 emissions such that, on balance, you emit no CO2.
At that point, there will be some energy available to the economy. The point I am perhaps making too quickly is that this level of energy is comparable to the energy that was available to a Victorian society, when many people lived in slums and died young from cold, disease, and poverty for lack of an adequate energy supply.
If net zero needs trees to balance the CO2, why are they cutting down so many trees for solar and wind plantations? We may get back to Elizabethan days soon and still not reach net zero.
The ESO have been saying for about the past five years that it’s possible, providing certain policy changes were made (forget what exactly), and in FES2024 they show how it’s possible by 2035 (as that was their scope). When they conclude their piece of work we’ll get to see how doable it really is
Francis Menton reached a similar conclusion in a 2022 report for the GWPF: “Fully replacing natural gas backup with battery storage is a multi-trillion-dollar project, likely costing a multiple of the country's GDP, and thus completely infeasible”: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2022/11/Menton-Energy-Storage-Conundrum.pdf.
Douglas - more useful links - thank you. There's a few of these. You'll have seen Euan Mearns analysis, which estimates LCOE for storage-backed unreliable electricity sources of $700-$1100/MWh in the UK, and discusses comparable findings in the US.
I think a general conclusion is that, while an accurate estimate is hard to produce, they are all dimensionally the same (a two to three order of magnitude increase in energy cost) and are entirely absent from the lobbyists' cost comparison claims.
The GWPF aren’t exactly known for being impartial! No one credible has ever suggested replacing all current gas power with batteries as that’s misunderstanding the role batteries will play
Objective facts and analyses are free of partiality. Net zero emissions by 2050 means net zero fossil fuels, so replacing the gas power stations which currently keep the lights on is exactly what these pie-in-the-sky trillion-dollar batteries would (not “will”) be used for, alongside other lunacies like carbon capture and storage. Such incredible self-flagellation, all for the doubly-pointless crusade to achieve unilateral decarbonisation.
After ten years of this, what is being proposed is still so unclear that the UK Minister for Net Zero and Energy Security was forced a few days ago to write to the head of the Transmission network for ideas.
What facts would you suggest we address, Jonathan?
The SoS wrote to the ESO because FES2024 was based on a 2035 date for a decarbonised grid, while the SoS wants 2030. It’s quite reasonable to ask if what they concluded for 2035 could be pulled forward by five years
That would be genuinely interesting and useful to have that critiqued
Some of us have been pointing out the infeasibility of Net Zero and its 80% Climate Change Act predecessor for more than two decades. Hardly any politicians and precious few of the general public ever took any heed. I was often told I was a crank for my troubles (here in 2015): https://euanmearns.com/time-for-the-tories-to-repeal-the-2008-climate-change-act/.
Some blame this situation on “groupthink” but I think it is a problem of lack of critical thinking. We have got to the stage where most scientists, most of the MSM and most of our Uniparty (Lab/Con/Lib/SNP) politicians toe the “climate change” party line laid down by unaccountable globalist bodies like the Club of Rome (“The real enemy, then, is humanity itself”), the United Nations (“global boiling”, “oceans overflowing”), the COP pantomimes, Big Money influencers and the Paris Agreement (and Kyoto before it) meekly accept that we must stop using fossil fuels and instead use short-lifespan, toxically non-recyclable, impossibly expensive to construct and integrate, heavily resource-depleting, inefficient, unreliable, weather-dependent so-called renewables.
They disregard the proper science that tells us that atmospheric CO2 is not a threat because its global warming effect is already “saturated”, meaning that even a far-distant doubling of its concentration from the present level will have negligible effect on the climate. They also ignore the fact that unilateral decarbonisation by the UK is doubly pointless given that the majority non-Western world is not following suit.
They apparently never stop to think that Net Zero is totally infeasible technically and is certain to lead to mass destitution and depopulation, which seems to be the ulterior motive of the globalists who are calling the shots. If any of them do harbour any doubts, they never voice them publicly.
This is a problem of submission to centralised control and authoritarian brainwashing on an unlimited budget, leading the people in a terribly bad direction. It was the same with the Covid so-called plandemic led by the unaccountable WHO (a subsidiary of the United Nations) and Big Money.
President Trump did the right thing in taking the USA out of the WHO, only for Biden to join up again. If Trump survives to take office again, he will hopefully succeed in taking on and defeating the evil supranational forces which are, by one means or another, intent on leading us to ruination.
Resource-depleting wind turbines, tons of concrete and steel, lots of rare earth minerals mined by Congolese children in abject conditions, unrecyclable fibreglass blades, all so much junk after about 20 years. How do they think replacements can be built without fossil fuels? https://x.com/JohnLeePettim13/status/1831681381123899739?t=XFiaTOzGN0se3qBs15ooag&s=19.
Indeed! Francis Menton recently commented on the sad lack of any demonstration projects to ascertain the feasibility (or not) of a Net Zero electricity grid. Referring specifically to Germany, he concludes: “In short, this large and seemingly sophisticated country is completely delusional, with no sane voices anywhere to be heard. A demonstration project that fails spectacularly is the only thing with any hope of saving them”: https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-8-17-zvdhrux7385fv8959ljfldowmrxbmn.
It was strange that the Tories didn't make Milliband, the eco militant, more of a 'bogeyman' during the election campaign. A man who can stand in front of an 'Edstone' with pledges on it (during another election campaign) is clearly a battery with no volts.
The storage 'problem' is our problem not his - he doesn't live in the areas where unstable materials will be deposited.
Didn't the Climate Change Committee in 2008 base their analysis of wind production for the future on 1 year's 'supply' of wind? He paints the scenario of not being dependent on the energy of mad dictators on the Continent but says nothing about himself.
Amen. Neither does Barack Obama, Al Gore, the Clintons or Joe Biden live adjacent to wind and solar farms. Wealthy pols tend to avoid messy, dirty folk unless they have to be near them to curry favor during election seasons. Otherwise, the folks who carry the burden for every harebrained scheme is invariably the less educated and unwealthy. It's gotten so that western liberals are a scandalous danger to the citizens who vote for them out of loyalty and media manipulation. It is utterly grotesque.
The Uniparty Tories are just as guilty of treasonous oppression of the people as Uniparty Labour. I used to think they were just misguided on “climate change” and Net Zero and that rational argument could persuade them of the error of their ways. Then they showed their true colours through their evil Covid “plandemic”, their deliberately-provoked war in Ukraine (500,000 killed and counting) and their weaponisation of mass immigration which they never tell us is coordinated by the UN’s IOM (International Organisation for Migration).
They proposed increased storage capacity, gas generation with carbon capture, and hydrogen. As far as I'm aware, their analysis did not evaluate available 37 year UK wind and solar generation potential data, which the RS acknowledges is likely to severely underestimate 100-year probabilities.
The people who support these ruinations of our country are either mad or bad and quite frankly they need to face a Nuremberg 2 day of reckoning because, as with the Nazis, the excuse of “I was only following orders” doesn’t cut it.
Richard, have you come across the John Lee Pettimore X account? it is grounded and useful in showing ordinary citizens just how absurd the notion of net zero is.
As an American who has laughed himself into nearly apoplectic fits over Wodehouse since I was 12, reading Lyon's piece is magnificent. The combination of straight ahead thinking and logic combined with a wit that is dry like Phoenix in August makes me giggle. I don't know which I liked better, his idea of taking out a healthy appendix when the wind is blowing thereby removing the unpleasantness of not being able to do so because of wind drought or the bit about banning fracking while proposing to inject hydrogen into the ground in mass quantities. Either way, we are only two months away from those same proposals being thrown at us by perhaps the dumbest VP in modern history (and that includes Dan Quayle).
This is an example of what might be called the pharaoh complex. An unimpressive man of no talent finds himself in a position of political power. He uses this power to coerce the erection of a vast and useless structure in the hope that the sheer size of the project will earn for him the admiration of his fellows. Gazing into the mirror of his own egotism he fondly whispers “people are talking about me “
It appears the GB is competing with Germany and Dieter for the most self destruction. Who will win?
For all of you who seem to have missed this
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/322316/download
2035 was the deadline when this was written
It’s a good job what you describe isn’t what is going to happen then. What does FES2024 say the generation mix in 2035 will be, as that’s probably, more or less, what we’ll have
What I describe is absolutely not what's going to *happen*, not least because what I describe - its necessity under notionally binding legislation notwithstanding - is physically and financially impossible . At issue is the amount of damage they will cause before they are compelled to abandon the effort.
“with no hydrocarbon or nuclear backup”
This is not what is being proposed
Again, what does FES2024 have for 2035? Assuming that can be pulled forward to 2030
There are two aspects to this question: what they assume; and what is necessitated, having made targets legally binding, that is not contained in assumptions. They *assume* "a significant decrease in hydrocarbons, abated through carbon capture" with an increasing use of biofuels. Assuming a role for hydrocarbons, while prohibiting the development of future hydrocarbons, obviously contradicts the policy's stated aim of "energy security". Carbon capture is not, and will never be, economically viable. Biofuels cannot scale, are environmentally damaging, and uneconomic. Although not stated in the assumptions, meeting legal targets requires, e.g. closure of all but two airports, and the effective deindustrialisation of the UK with commensurate collapse in living standards, and is therefore politically unachievable. Finally, no cost projection for what is proposed has been provided or, given that many of the assumed technologies don't exist, can be developed.
So what is being proposed is of no material significance.
I remember JFK proposing to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth
My point though is you have stated a scenario that no one credible has ever suggested won’t work. That’s dead easy. It also won’t be possible to power the U.K. on fairy dust, but writting an article about it is pretty pointless
JFK proposed to land on the moon with another 60 years of high gradient energy expansion in front of him. With an expanding energy supply we can, through technology, solve many problems. Since technology requires an excess of energy, the one problem technology cannot solve is a deficit of energy.
Since no-one credible has ever suggested a scenario that does work, it's not clear to me why you think analysing different unworkable ones is pointless. How else do we reach the conclusion that there are none, unless we investigate each?
Ok, so you don’t believe that FES2024 would work and that the ESO have failed in their statutory duty?
Lead the campaign to have them gaoled
Thanks for the summary. It's valuable, because of course we don't all have the time to read every document.
"in Victorian times, when net energy levels were at “Net Zero” levels" - it took me a moment to realize you were turning the tables on the term "Net Zero" - to mean net energy level of zero instead of net carbon level of zero.
"Having restated his determination to force it down our throats, technically illiterate and clueless Mr Miliband wrote this week to the Transmission network’s boss for ideas on how to do it." Too bad he didn't think to ask that before implementing his crazy policies.
Thanks Al. As a point of clarity. "Net Zero" formally means "Net Zero CO2 emissions". This have-your-cake-and-eat-it term supposes that there is some quantity of trees you can plant (for example) that absorb your economy's CO2 emissions such that, on balance, you emit no CO2.
At that point, there will be some energy available to the economy. The point I am perhaps making too quickly is that this level of energy is comparable to the energy that was available to a Victorian society, when many people lived in slums and died young from cold, disease, and poverty for lack of an adequate energy supply.
If net zero needs trees to balance the CO2, why are they cutting down so many trees for solar and wind plantations? We may get back to Elizabethan days soon and still not reach net zero.
The ESO have been saying for about the past five years that it’s possible, providing certain policy changes were made (forget what exactly), and in FES2024 they show how it’s possible by 2035 (as that was their scope). When they conclude their piece of work we’ll get to see how doable it really is
David Wojick recently published a simple “back of envelope” calculation of the cost of the electricity storage capacity required to replace today’s fossil-fuelled electricity generation in the USA. He calculates that the cost of electricity might jump a whopping 28 times today’s cost: https://www.cfact.org/2024/09/03/the-green-new-deal-could-make-electricity-28-times-more-expensive/.
Francis Menton reached a similar conclusion in a 2022 report for the GWPF: “Fully replacing natural gas backup with battery storage is a multi-trillion-dollar project, likely costing a multiple of the country's GDP, and thus completely infeasible”: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2022/11/Menton-Energy-Storage-Conundrum.pdf.
Douglas - more useful links - thank you. There's a few of these. You'll have seen Euan Mearns analysis, which estimates LCOE for storage-backed unreliable electricity sources of $700-$1100/MWh in the UK, and discusses comparable findings in the US.
I think a general conclusion is that, while an accurate estimate is hard to produce, they are all dimensionally the same (a two to three order of magnitude increase in energy cost) and are entirely absent from the lobbyists' cost comparison claims.
https://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries-included/
The GWPF aren’t exactly known for being impartial! No one credible has ever suggested replacing all current gas power with batteries as that’s misunderstanding the role batteries will play
Objective facts and analyses are free of partiality. Net zero emissions by 2050 means net zero fossil fuels, so replacing the gas power stations which currently keep the lights on is exactly what these pie-in-the-sky trillion-dollar batteries would (not “will”) be used for, alongside other lunacies like carbon capture and storage. Such incredible self-flagellation, all for the doubly-pointless crusade to achieve unilateral decarbonisation.
But what you describe isn’t what is being proposed. Address the facts not your assumptions
After ten years of this, what is being proposed is still so unclear that the UK Minister for Net Zero and Energy Security was forced a few days ago to write to the head of the Transmission network for ideas.
What facts would you suggest we address, Jonathan?
The SoS wrote to the ESO because FES2024 was based on a 2035 date for a decarbonised grid, while the SoS wants 2030. It’s quite reasonable to ask if what they concluded for 2035 could be pulled forward by five years
That would be genuinely interesting and useful to have that critiqued
The ESO are not head of NGET
Some of us have been pointing out the infeasibility of Net Zero and its 80% Climate Change Act predecessor for more than two decades. Hardly any politicians and precious few of the general public ever took any heed. I was often told I was a crank for my troubles (here in 2015): https://euanmearns.com/time-for-the-tories-to-repeal-the-2008-climate-change-act/.
Some blame this situation on “groupthink” but I think it is a problem of lack of critical thinking. We have got to the stage where most scientists, most of the MSM and most of our Uniparty (Lab/Con/Lib/SNP) politicians toe the “climate change” party line laid down by unaccountable globalist bodies like the Club of Rome (“The real enemy, then, is humanity itself”), the United Nations (“global boiling”, “oceans overflowing”), the COP pantomimes, Big Money influencers and the Paris Agreement (and Kyoto before it) meekly accept that we must stop using fossil fuels and instead use short-lifespan, toxically non-recyclable, impossibly expensive to construct and integrate, heavily resource-depleting, inefficient, unreliable, weather-dependent so-called renewables.
They disregard the proper science that tells us that atmospheric CO2 is not a threat because its global warming effect is already “saturated”, meaning that even a far-distant doubling of its concentration from the present level will have negligible effect on the climate. They also ignore the fact that unilateral decarbonisation by the UK is doubly pointless given that the majority non-Western world is not following suit.
They apparently never stop to think that Net Zero is totally infeasible technically and is certain to lead to mass destitution and depopulation, which seems to be the ulterior motive of the globalists who are calling the shots. If any of them do harbour any doubts, they never voice them publicly.
This is a problem of submission to centralised control and authoritarian brainwashing on an unlimited budget, leading the people in a terribly bad direction. It was the same with the Covid so-called plandemic led by the unaccountable WHO (a subsidiary of the United Nations) and Big Money.
President Trump did the right thing in taking the USA out of the WHO, only for Biden to join up again. If Trump survives to take office again, he will hopefully succeed in taking on and defeating the evil supranational forces which are, by one means or another, intent on leading us to ruination.
My latest debunking of the climate change hoax is here: https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.
Resource-depleting wind turbines, tons of concrete and steel, lots of rare earth minerals mined by Congolese children in abject conditions, unrecyclable fibreglass blades, all so much junk after about 20 years. How do they think replacements can be built without fossil fuels? https://x.com/JohnLeePettim13/status/1831681381123899739?t=XFiaTOzGN0se3qBs15ooag&s=19.
Good point.
Good question. https://www.therightinsight.org/Ultimate-Demonstration
Indeed! Francis Menton recently commented on the sad lack of any demonstration projects to ascertain the feasibility (or not) of a Net Zero electricity grid. Referring specifically to Germany, he concludes: “In short, this large and seemingly sophisticated country is completely delusional, with no sane voices anywhere to be heard. A demonstration project that fails spectacularly is the only thing with any hope of saving them”: https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-8-17-zvdhrux7385fv8959ljfldowmrxbmn.
Funny how things connect. Here’s the latest post from The Energy Bad Boys on the disaster that is Germany’s Energiewende (Energy Transition): https://energybadboys.substack.com/p/energiewende-more-like-energieweimar.
However, they are on the path to a national scale demonstration which is likely to fail spectacularly. The UK is not far behind.
It was strange that the Tories didn't make Milliband, the eco militant, more of a 'bogeyman' during the election campaign. A man who can stand in front of an 'Edstone' with pledges on it (during another election campaign) is clearly a battery with no volts.
The storage 'problem' is our problem not his - he doesn't live in the areas where unstable materials will be deposited.
Didn't the Climate Change Committee in 2008 base their analysis of wind production for the future on 1 year's 'supply' of wind? He paints the scenario of not being dependent on the energy of mad dictators on the Continent but says nothing about himself.
Amen. Neither does Barack Obama, Al Gore, the Clintons or Joe Biden live adjacent to wind and solar farms. Wealthy pols tend to avoid messy, dirty folk unless they have to be near them to curry favor during election seasons. Otherwise, the folks who carry the burden for every harebrained scheme is invariably the less educated and unwealthy. It's gotten so that western liberals are a scandalous danger to the citizens who vote for them out of loyalty and media manipulation. It is utterly grotesque.
The Uniparty Tories are just as guilty of treasonous oppression of the people as Uniparty Labour. I used to think they were just misguided on “climate change” and Net Zero and that rational argument could persuade them of the error of their ways. Then they showed their true colours through their evil Covid “plandemic”, their deliberately-provoked war in Ukraine (500,000 killed and counting) and their weaponisation of mass immigration which they never tell us is coordinated by the UN’s IOM (International Organisation for Migration).
I summed it all up in what I thought (hoped) would be my final post: https://metatron.substack.com/p/my-heretical-epitaph.
Have you read the ESO’s response to dunkelflaute in FES2023?
They proposed increased storage capacity, gas generation with carbon capture, and hydrogen. As far as I'm aware, their analysis did not evaluate available 37 year UK wind and solar generation potential data, which the RS acknowledges is likely to severely underestimate 100-year probabilities.
Then that’s what needs to be done
The people who support these ruinations of our country are either mad or bad and quite frankly they need to face a Nuremberg 2 day of reckoning because, as with the Nazis, the excuse of “I was only following orders” doesn’t cut it.