Point 1 - correct, you should not sign up for something of this magnitude without a clear plan how to do it, and that plan getting full parliamentary scrutiny which it didn't, it was a fit of virtue signalling that will come back to haunt them all.
You raise a good point - if not renewables then it either has to be fossil fuels or nuclear…
Point 1 - correct, you should not sign up for something of this magnitude without a clear plan how to do it, and that plan getting full parliamentary scrutiny which it didn't, it was a fit of virtue signalling that will come back to haunt them all.
You raise a good point - if not renewables then it either has to be fossil fuels or nuclear or a combo there of.
There is the "security of supply" issue of having to import increasing amounts of oil and gas, or to frack, or to re-open coal mines or rely on potentially volatile supply and prices going forward.
And the other point, that eventually gas, oil and coal will run out, and recovering remaining reserves will over time get increasingly expensive.
Therefore a SOME POINT we will have to move from fossil fuels to either nuclear or renewables or a combo thereof.
That brings us to two questions, and the primary one of "cheap energy" underpinning a successful economy. and secondly, when and how you should move to the alternatives
Firstly "cheap" is not an absolute price term, but relative to all other economies. If fossil fuels run out, they run out for everybody and therefore everyone will have to move to another "next cheapest" alternative so competitiveness is relative not absolute.
The dash for renewables is on the back that it will stop climate change, and cutting ours certainly won't do that, and use of fossil fuels is still going up.
Add to that, that on the history of the last 800,000 years of climate change, temperature does appear strongly linked with atmospheric CO2, but most importantly it shows that when CO2 levels exceed 300ppm the climate tips into global cooling.
As you no doubt know, we are currently at 420ppm, well past the historic tipping point AND under NOAA (US climate change agency) under the best case scenario of CO2 emission reduction the earth would not get under 400ppm before 2100.
So the climate "pressure" to tip into global cooling is going to continue for at least another 100 years.
BUT - add to that that we are in a rapid NATURAL warming phase the earth would be heading up to that tipping point anyway without man made CO2 emissions, so you are fighting a losing battle.
And evidence of a climate tip is already there, the AMOC, or Atlantic conveyor which keeps Europe warm is weakening, and salinity measurements have been showing that since the early 1970's.
The belief is that the UK will keep getting warmer under climate it change, it won't, when that Atlantic conveyor of heat switches off, we will be plunged into Canadian style winters with average temperatures 8 - 15C lower than they currently are.
Under a "renewables" future, wind turbines will ice up reducing their blade efficiency by upto 50% and potentially unbalance them and air source heat pumps won't be able to get anywhere near heating your home.
So there is somewhat of a conundrum
1. If you are dashing for renewables for climate change reasons, its highly unlikely to work and leave you with sky high energy costs that will cripple the economy and living standards.
2. If we continue with fossil fuels, they will become increasingly volatile in supply and price, but the time horizon to "sort" that is decades and will be worldwide, and therefore as that becomes increasing obvious there will be a gradual shift to Nuclear and renewables without cost disadvantage as everyone else will have to follow similar solutions at similar costs.
So that brings you back to what to do now?
My assertion is that we will need renewables and we already have a lot, arguably too much already and its driving up prices - we have the second most expensive energy in Europe only just behind Germany.
Why do they drive up prices? several reasons
1. They are quoted in price at the wind turbine exit, not the whole cost, to connect these into the grid is very expensive to remove bottlenecks and will on current pricing requires 5 TIMES the grid cabling at a cost of 54bn estimated and ongoing maintenance costs for the grid 5 times higher than now going on your bills.
2. Renewables currently marginalises gas generation, gas is essential as the only large scale high variability means of balancing the grid on now both highly variable supply and demand, there is nothing credible that's cost effective to replace it.
3. As renewables output goes up, gas generation goes down. If I own a gas plant capable of 10GW output annually, I can spread the fixed costs like staff, maintenance, insurance, rates, water rates across that 10GW output cost.
If I have to run back to 5GW or 2GW a year to allow renewables onto the grid, those fixed costs remain the same (actually they go up) and therefore the cost gas stations will have to charge to break even and make a profit goes up to cover those fixed costs over lower output thereby increasing the cost per MWH charged to generate.
Finally, the more you load vary a gas plant, the higher the thermal component stress which shortens the life of the gas station and increases maintenance costs, further driving up gas generation prices.
Therefore the more generating assets you have, unable to maximise their output the more costs go up, and as a recent commons library document showed, that over the period renewables grew from 8% to 42% between 2013 and 2021 electricity prices went up 36% ABOVE inflation and that was before the gas price spike in late 2021 and gas prices were stable over that period.
There are also other rubicons we have not yet passed. to manage the grid, you don't just need a balancing of supply and demand of power, you need to manage something called reactive load, and this is handled by large generators with AVR's like nuclear and gas plants.
Nuclear will be all but decommissioned by 2028, that only leaves large gas plants to provide reactive load and voltage support mechanisms, that's not something renewables can do.
And we haven't even considered the huge costs of energy storage which will be required for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, which is a whole new world of pain and expense.
So yes, in the end we will have to transition to a renewables/nuclear generation, I'd argue we won't stop climate change and the fears are in the wrong direction, and that we need a very slow move off fossil fuels over several decades, not a suicidal move over 5 years, which i might add is impossible anyway.
A new grid connection these days takes 13 years from application to delivery.
"Add to that, that on the history of the last 800,000 years of climate change, temperature does appear strongly linked with atmospheric CO2, but most importantly it shows that when CO2 levels exceed 300ppm the climate tips into global cooling.
As you no doubt know, we are currently at 420ppm, well past the historic tipping point AND under NOAA (US climate change agency) under the best case scenario of CO2 emission reduction the earth would not get under 400ppm before 2100.
So the climate "pressure" to tip into global cooling is going to continue for at least another 100 years."
Is a wild (and perhaps wilful) misinterpretation of what the geological record shows in relation to CO2. In the time period you're talking about CO2 isn't the primary control on global temperature, orbital cyclicity is. CO2 peaks at 300ish ppm during the warm interglacials, but then is forced down when we go into glacial periods by weathering and oceanic feedbacks. There's a really good explainer here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-the-rise-and-fall-of-co2-levels-influenced-the-ice-ages/
They correlate, but the causation is an external forcing from orbital periodicity.
Orbitally speaking we wouldn't be due to tip into another glacial interval for 15,000-50,000 years. Artificially high CO2 will guarantee at least that long, not induce it to happen sooner. We are absolutely 100% not about to tip into a global cold period short of a series of supervolcanoes or meteor impacts.
AMOC slowdown *may* be a thing. But it will be a local effect on NW Europe. It probably won't get anywhere near as cold as your worst case scenario. And we'd have much worse problems with our UK housing stock than reduced efficiency heat pumps. In any event, this will be on a 50+ year timescale and well outside the expected lifespan of most heating systems.
Point 1 - correct, you should not sign up for something of this magnitude without a clear plan how to do it, and that plan getting full parliamentary scrutiny which it didn't, it was a fit of virtue signalling that will come back to haunt them all.
You raise a good point - if not renewables then it either has to be fossil fuels or nuclear or a combo there of.
There is the "security of supply" issue of having to import increasing amounts of oil and gas, or to frack, or to re-open coal mines or rely on potentially volatile supply and prices going forward.
And the other point, that eventually gas, oil and coal will run out, and recovering remaining reserves will over time get increasingly expensive.
Therefore a SOME POINT we will have to move from fossil fuels to either nuclear or renewables or a combo thereof.
That brings us to two questions, and the primary one of "cheap energy" underpinning a successful economy. and secondly, when and how you should move to the alternatives
Firstly "cheap" is not an absolute price term, but relative to all other economies. If fossil fuels run out, they run out for everybody and therefore everyone will have to move to another "next cheapest" alternative so competitiveness is relative not absolute.
The dash for renewables is on the back that it will stop climate change, and cutting ours certainly won't do that, and use of fossil fuels is still going up.
Add to that, that on the history of the last 800,000 years of climate change, temperature does appear strongly linked with atmospheric CO2, but most importantly it shows that when CO2 levels exceed 300ppm the climate tips into global cooling.
As you no doubt know, we are currently at 420ppm, well past the historic tipping point AND under NOAA (US climate change agency) under the best case scenario of CO2 emission reduction the earth would not get under 400ppm before 2100.
So the climate "pressure" to tip into global cooling is going to continue for at least another 100 years.
BUT - add to that that we are in a rapid NATURAL warming phase the earth would be heading up to that tipping point anyway without man made CO2 emissions, so you are fighting a losing battle.
And evidence of a climate tip is already there, the AMOC, or Atlantic conveyor which keeps Europe warm is weakening, and salinity measurements have been showing that since the early 1970's.
The belief is that the UK will keep getting warmer under climate it change, it won't, when that Atlantic conveyor of heat switches off, we will be plunged into Canadian style winters with average temperatures 8 - 15C lower than they currently are.
Under a "renewables" future, wind turbines will ice up reducing their blade efficiency by upto 50% and potentially unbalance them and air source heat pumps won't be able to get anywhere near heating your home.
So there is somewhat of a conundrum
1. If you are dashing for renewables for climate change reasons, its highly unlikely to work and leave you with sky high energy costs that will cripple the economy and living standards.
2. If we continue with fossil fuels, they will become increasingly volatile in supply and price, but the time horizon to "sort" that is decades and will be worldwide, and therefore as that becomes increasing obvious there will be a gradual shift to Nuclear and renewables without cost disadvantage as everyone else will have to follow similar solutions at similar costs.
So that brings you back to what to do now?
My assertion is that we will need renewables and we already have a lot, arguably too much already and its driving up prices - we have the second most expensive energy in Europe only just behind Germany.
Why do they drive up prices? several reasons
1. They are quoted in price at the wind turbine exit, not the whole cost, to connect these into the grid is very expensive to remove bottlenecks and will on current pricing requires 5 TIMES the grid cabling at a cost of 54bn estimated and ongoing maintenance costs for the grid 5 times higher than now going on your bills.
2. Renewables currently marginalises gas generation, gas is essential as the only large scale high variability means of balancing the grid on now both highly variable supply and demand, there is nothing credible that's cost effective to replace it.
3. As renewables output goes up, gas generation goes down. If I own a gas plant capable of 10GW output annually, I can spread the fixed costs like staff, maintenance, insurance, rates, water rates across that 10GW output cost.
If I have to run back to 5GW or 2GW a year to allow renewables onto the grid, those fixed costs remain the same (actually they go up) and therefore the cost gas stations will have to charge to break even and make a profit goes up to cover those fixed costs over lower output thereby increasing the cost per MWH charged to generate.
Finally, the more you load vary a gas plant, the higher the thermal component stress which shortens the life of the gas station and increases maintenance costs, further driving up gas generation prices.
Therefore the more generating assets you have, unable to maximise their output the more costs go up, and as a recent commons library document showed, that over the period renewables grew from 8% to 42% between 2013 and 2021 electricity prices went up 36% ABOVE inflation and that was before the gas price spike in late 2021 and gas prices were stable over that period.
There are also other rubicons we have not yet passed. to manage the grid, you don't just need a balancing of supply and demand of power, you need to manage something called reactive load, and this is handled by large generators with AVR's like nuclear and gas plants.
Nuclear will be all but decommissioned by 2028, that only leaves large gas plants to provide reactive load and voltage support mechanisms, that's not something renewables can do.
And we haven't even considered the huge costs of energy storage which will be required for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, which is a whole new world of pain and expense.
So yes, in the end we will have to transition to a renewables/nuclear generation, I'd argue we won't stop climate change and the fears are in the wrong direction, and that we need a very slow move off fossil fuels over several decades, not a suicidal move over 5 years, which i might add is impossible anyway.
A new grid connection these days takes 13 years from application to delivery.
Just a note that this:
"Add to that, that on the history of the last 800,000 years of climate change, temperature does appear strongly linked with atmospheric CO2, but most importantly it shows that when CO2 levels exceed 300ppm the climate tips into global cooling.
As you no doubt know, we are currently at 420ppm, well past the historic tipping point AND under NOAA (US climate change agency) under the best case scenario of CO2 emission reduction the earth would not get under 400ppm before 2100.
So the climate "pressure" to tip into global cooling is going to continue for at least another 100 years."
Is a wild (and perhaps wilful) misinterpretation of what the geological record shows in relation to CO2. In the time period you're talking about CO2 isn't the primary control on global temperature, orbital cyclicity is. CO2 peaks at 300ish ppm during the warm interglacials, but then is forced down when we go into glacial periods by weathering and oceanic feedbacks. There's a really good explainer here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-the-rise-and-fall-of-co2-levels-influenced-the-ice-ages/
They correlate, but the causation is an external forcing from orbital periodicity.
Orbitally speaking we wouldn't be due to tip into another glacial interval for 15,000-50,000 years. Artificially high CO2 will guarantee at least that long, not induce it to happen sooner. We are absolutely 100% not about to tip into a global cold period short of a series of supervolcanoes or meteor impacts.
AMOC slowdown *may* be a thing. But it will be a local effect on NW Europe. It probably won't get anywhere near as cold as your worst case scenario. And we'd have much worse problems with our UK housing stock than reduced efficiency heat pumps. In any event, this will be on a 50+ year timescale and well outside the expected lifespan of most heating systems.