The UK is in an extremely awkward place (literally) for net zero. The energy source of the middle of the 21st century will be solar (plus batteries) - we live further north than 99% of humanity and this is not a good option for us like the US - California and Texas are the same latitude as North Africa, and New York is the same latitude as Madrid).
Wind power maybe seemed like an ok option but it has more or less stopped declining in price, unlike solar (it also does not pair especially well with batteries).
It is not at all obvious how we can get both cheap and clean energy here. Unless the nuclear bros are right and tbh I think they have a point.
I wrote this up in more detail a couple of weeks ago:
Nice article. Just a small comment about the northernness of the UK: it probably doesn't affect average insolation as much as you think. Cloud cover is going to be a bigger discriminating factor between locations, unless you get really far north. Assuming panels tilted at 30 degrees (a typical roof?), the year-average clear sky solar flux (W/m^2) for New York is only about 6% more than for London. Of course, as you say, the northernness does create a bigger summer-winter imbalance, which is definitely a disadvantage.
Thanks. I would actually have assumed it was a bit higher, but yeah I think the summer winter disparity is the bigger problem (I don't think I emphasised that in the article enough) - the same number of solar panels (plus batteries) could power the UK as another country in the summer, but we would need about half an extra grid's worth of production just for the winter (and there aren't any current options that are both cheap and green). We're going to be at a big cost disadvantage to most other countries unless we can address that.
I've tried to do a wonk-dive into energy policy over the past few months and have come to similar conclusions. Green energy isn't quite so cheap as I initially assumed, when you factor in the additional grid capacity needed to cope with the moments of peak generation. Green hydrogen will be part of the solution of storing the energy, but I'm increasingly very sceptical that it would be enough to deal with sustained periods of low wind in the winter months.
Also, I think we underestimate how much more energy we are going to need, as we shift more and more transport and home heating onto electricity, and we are likely to need more for steel production, data, and down the line possibly food production. We also use comparatively less than other similar countries.
Modular nuclear is probably the best long-term contributor to solution, but in the interim, gas is still going to be required, and North Sea gas is lower carbon in production than US LPG, and Soviet-era gas (with all its methane leakages), even ignoring the geopolitical preferences. There's also something to be said for viewing the North Sea reservoirs as de facto 'storage' which can be dialed up and down when needed - a flexibility that nuclear doesn't really have, or other current low/zero carbon options, even with green hydrogen.
Do you have any idea how much tax would be raised from increasing North Sea production? Is it significant enough to be ring fenced to pay for future CfD's and reduce the burden on consumers? Just a thought...
“Despite the current debate, I still haven’t really heard an argument from Kemi Badenoch or any other sceptic of the current policy about what a path to Net Zero actually looks like if we dump the current approach. Like, what should the revised timeline look like?”
This is a terrific article 👏 But I highlighted this bit for a reason - and it’s the classic leftie blindspot in action (for context, I am a leftie…)
I spent 2015-2024 building net zero carbon homes. And trust me we learned very quickly that nobody - absolutely nobody - bought one because they were green, had super low carbon emissions etc. People told us - after telling themselves - that’s their motivation, best in the end it was obvious it was low energy bills that mattered. That they were delivered through incredible energy efficiency was a nice to know but meaningless. So I always marketed our developments as ‘save a fortune on your bills’ - never ‘save the planet’. Because nobody cares about saving the planet if it’s going to cost them to do it.
So I’m on Kemi’s said here. The problem with any form of government subsidy is it distorts the market and leads to poorer outcomes ultimately. They are useful to get an industry established - solar, heat pumps - but the key is to know when to step away and let the private sector do its thing. That time is now for renewables.
Which brings us to the timeline argument. Classic left wing thinking goes along the lines of ‘the market will never do this, we will have to drag people kicking and screaming to it because evil capitalism or whatever’. Except of course the market IS doing it right now - investment houses don’t want to invest in fossil fuels, people don’t want to buy them (witness the extraordinary growth in EVs) etc.
‘Oh yeah but EVs are only selling because they’re subsidised so that doesn’t stand up Martin…..” - some truth in that perhaps. But when I leased my Ford Puma last October, the price started at just under £400 a month - or £300 once you factor in my reduced fuel costs from no petrol. While this process was going on, the government introduced a new subsidy and I ended up paying £283 a month - before the £100 ish I saved a month no longer putting petrol in the car.
I would have leased it at full whack anyway, but cheers taxpayers 👍🤯
In short, people will love green energy, but only if it’s cheap green energy. The market will provide more of it, because the growth in it is unprecedented in modern industrial times.
This is an essay that fails on its own terms by retreating into comfortable leftwing talking points rather than grapple with the fundamentals of the skepticism that the general public has. The likes of Badenoch are pushing at an open door.
Criticism 1: does the UK have obscenely expensive domestic and industrial energy prices? Yes by a mile. They are larger than our European neighbours even accounting for tax differentials
Fundamentally the system is broken and obviously hasn't been driven by global market prices otherwise we would be paying similar amounts to our neighbours. Sure Trump doesn't help but everyone pays a Trump Iran tariff.
Criticism 2: is Net Zero an excuse for fraudulent activity? Yes. You only have to look at the nonsense that is Drax to understand that NZ is good for fiction.
For those not aware, Drax was a coal-fired power station converted to wood pellets. Wood releases huge amounts more CO2 than coal but the argument is that it can be offset by a hundred years of tree planting. Jason Arday has more credible arguments. Nobody is doing the auditing for that. It's just handwaving fiction. And the kicker is that we import the wood pellets from North America transported by diesel ships.
Then you have the joke that is wind turbines. The onshore turbines have a life expectancy of 15 years. Onshore. Not the offshore turbines being bombarded by salt. Onshore.
And the terrible thing is that these are one and done jobs. Nothing gets recycled. We're not saving any carbon given the energy costs needed to build the things. More than 30 years of subsidies and they're still not robust enough to actually reduce carbon emissions or compete with other energy sources.
Also not doing stuff in this country but importing it from outside is the equivalent of pretending ice cream is empty calories.
Let's face it. Net Zero is an argument about statistical methodology.
Criticism 3: does Net Zero improve people's lives? No. It is all jam tomorrow and based on the kindness of strangers.
This is the most damning criticism and the left has to get its head around it. Policy cannot be abstract.
We are currently in an El Niño event that has pushed the atmosphere pass the 1.5° figure (the figure was always 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures of the mid 19th century). People need to have the ability to cope with the weather as it is.
Any sane government would be looking at improving the greenery in urban conurbations to reduce UHI as well as an expansion of mitigations (air conditioning etc). We need to be climate robust today for a flourishing economy.
None of this stops us from investing in technology and reducing emissions by smartness. But unless you get into the arena where the fight is, who knows what gets thrown out with the bathwater?
It's also added around £8bn to the overall cost of our electricity system through FiTs. You might be better off but you're adding costs to poorer families
Bloody hell man, none of that is happening either locally to the UK or globally. Your solar panels are non-recyclable and produces toxic offruns and your battery requires huge amounts of energy to mine and manufacture. There's huge amounts of carbon being produced for you to pretend that you're not.
PMSL - they saw you coming. Globally the mix of fossils and renewables are the same now as 20 years ago. And sure, if you're willing to spend huge amounts of money and energy, you can recycle solar panels but it makes them have even more of a carbon footprint. It's self defeating which is why they're just being dumped
I like that you have engaged with the trade offs, I need to listen to the pod too. There is also the intermittency problem. Which is the crux, because it means net zero, whatever you think of it, is not actually possible with wind. You still need gas for the month when there is no wind in December. And batteries for the amount of contingency would cost more than the UK's entire GDP.
In short, in choosing wind (and to a lesser extent, solar) we have opted for zero carbon generation source that is fundamentally flawed and cannot even deliver the net zero promise because of intermittency.
We should have chosen nuclear. We will realise eventually, but by then how many very expensive CFDs will be signed? As you have noted, a lot already have, the pig is in the python and when all the costs are factored in, electricity is going to get much, much more expensive.
I appreciate you touching on the North Sea drilling aspect. I think the ban came across as ideological from Labour given that we are continuing to import, which puts ordinary people off the entire Net Zero objective and they remember it every time energy costs go up. Obviously that isn't entirely fair, since the way to reduce costs is to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels and the impact of drilling on costs will be low, but "why import when we can drill our own" is too powerful a distraction to ignore politically.
Indeed per-person, we now use around 60% of the energy we did back then. AIUI that's even excluding people putting solar panels on their roofs, and despite all the electric cars people are buying these days, as well as all the other things people are doing to switch to electricity for heating etc.
People worry about how we're going to cope with switching to electricity for everything. If we do what we need to and just build out our electricity grid to cover all the people who live here, I think we have it covered.
Another side to the net zero debate is that focusing just on electricity generation means less focus on electrifying things that currently directly burn fossil fuels - if we get to net zero for electricity generation but are slow to electricity transport and heating homes and other buildings we can have slower carbon reductions than if we settled for 80-90% renewable electricity and put the money saved into accelerating the switch to electric cars and heat pumps. Particularly as the last 10% of electricity generation gets really expensive, for various reasons. So we get more emissions cuts for less money with that approach.
I came across this argument from Michael Liebreich. He wrote "The Pragmatic Climate Reset" as a response to Blair - and it's fair to say he was not a fan of Blair's argument.
Thankyou for a very clear exposition of the clean energy discussions. “The Price is Wrong’ by Brett Christophers also offers very useful guidelines to understanding the economic issues of Net Zero. What I don’t understand is why the British always proudly declare the UK 1% contribution
Sorry not finished: re the UK 1% contribution to world CO2, no one ever mentions that thé UK doesn’t mention that thé UK fails to account for the CO2 component of all goods imported into the UK. Also surely China is a leading country in finding solutions to global warning.
The UK is in an extremely awkward place (literally) for net zero. The energy source of the middle of the 21st century will be solar (plus batteries) - we live further north than 99% of humanity and this is not a good option for us like the US - California and Texas are the same latitude as North Africa, and New York is the same latitude as Madrid).
Wind power maybe seemed like an ok option but it has more or less stopped declining in price, unlike solar (it also does not pair especially well with batteries).
It is not at all obvious how we can get both cheap and clean energy here. Unless the nuclear bros are right and tbh I think they have a point.
I wrote this up in more detail a couple of weeks ago:
https://jpod.substack.com/p/the-uk-has-limited-options-for-energy
This is an incredibly interesting read - thanks for sharing it!
Thanks!
Nice article. Just a small comment about the northernness of the UK: it probably doesn't affect average insolation as much as you think. Cloud cover is going to be a bigger discriminating factor between locations, unless you get really far north. Assuming panels tilted at 30 degrees (a typical roof?), the year-average clear sky solar flux (W/m^2) for New York is only about 6% more than for London. Of course, as you say, the northernness does create a bigger summer-winter imbalance, which is definitely a disadvantage.
Thanks. I would actually have assumed it was a bit higher, but yeah I think the summer winter disparity is the bigger problem (I don't think I emphasised that in the article enough) - the same number of solar panels (plus batteries) could power the UK as another country in the summer, but we would need about half an extra grid's worth of production just for the winter (and there aren't any current options that are both cheap and green). We're going to be at a big cost disadvantage to most other countries unless we can address that.
I've tried to do a wonk-dive into energy policy over the past few months and have come to similar conclusions. Green energy isn't quite so cheap as I initially assumed, when you factor in the additional grid capacity needed to cope with the moments of peak generation. Green hydrogen will be part of the solution of storing the energy, but I'm increasingly very sceptical that it would be enough to deal with sustained periods of low wind in the winter months.
Also, I think we underestimate how much more energy we are going to need, as we shift more and more transport and home heating onto electricity, and we are likely to need more for steel production, data, and down the line possibly food production. We also use comparatively less than other similar countries.
Modular nuclear is probably the best long-term contributor to solution, but in the interim, gas is still going to be required, and North Sea gas is lower carbon in production than US LPG, and Soviet-era gas (with all its methane leakages), even ignoring the geopolitical preferences. There's also something to be said for viewing the North Sea reservoirs as de facto 'storage' which can be dialed up and down when needed - a flexibility that nuclear doesn't really have, or other current low/zero carbon options, even with green hydrogen.
Electrifying reduces the amount of energy we need.
EV’s only need to use ~30% of the energy used by a petrol car as ~70% of the energy in petrol is lost to heat.
Similarly heat pumps require much less energy to generate the same level of heat as gas boilers.
Do you have any idea how much tax would be raised from increasing North Sea production? Is it significant enough to be ring fenced to pay for future CfD's and reduce the burden on consumers? Just a thought...
I’ve no idea but this sounds like a clever idea to me.
“Despite the current debate, I still haven’t really heard an argument from Kemi Badenoch or any other sceptic of the current policy about what a path to Net Zero actually looks like if we dump the current approach. Like, what should the revised timeline look like?”
This is a terrific article 👏 But I highlighted this bit for a reason - and it’s the classic leftie blindspot in action (for context, I am a leftie…)
I spent 2015-2024 building net zero carbon homes. And trust me we learned very quickly that nobody - absolutely nobody - bought one because they were green, had super low carbon emissions etc. People told us - after telling themselves - that’s their motivation, best in the end it was obvious it was low energy bills that mattered. That they were delivered through incredible energy efficiency was a nice to know but meaningless. So I always marketed our developments as ‘save a fortune on your bills’ - never ‘save the planet’. Because nobody cares about saving the planet if it’s going to cost them to do it.
So I’m on Kemi’s said here. The problem with any form of government subsidy is it distorts the market and leads to poorer outcomes ultimately. They are useful to get an industry established - solar, heat pumps - but the key is to know when to step away and let the private sector do its thing. That time is now for renewables.
Which brings us to the timeline argument. Classic left wing thinking goes along the lines of ‘the market will never do this, we will have to drag people kicking and screaming to it because evil capitalism or whatever’. Except of course the market IS doing it right now - investment houses don’t want to invest in fossil fuels, people don’t want to buy them (witness the extraordinary growth in EVs) etc.
‘Oh yeah but EVs are only selling because they’re subsidised so that doesn’t stand up Martin…..” - some truth in that perhaps. But when I leased my Ford Puma last October, the price started at just under £400 a month - or £300 once you factor in my reduced fuel costs from no petrol. While this process was going on, the government introduced a new subsidy and I ended up paying £283 a month - before the £100 ish I saved a month no longer putting petrol in the car.
I would have leased it at full whack anyway, but cheers taxpayers 👍🤯
In short, people will love green energy, but only if it’s cheap green energy. The market will provide more of it, because the growth in it is unprecedented in modern industrial times.
This is an essay that fails on its own terms by retreating into comfortable leftwing talking points rather than grapple with the fundamentals of the skepticism that the general public has. The likes of Badenoch are pushing at an open door.
Criticism 1: does the UK have obscenely expensive domestic and industrial energy prices? Yes by a mile. They are larger than our European neighbours even accounting for tax differentials
Fundamentally the system is broken and obviously hasn't been driven by global market prices otherwise we would be paying similar amounts to our neighbours. Sure Trump doesn't help but everyone pays a Trump Iran tariff.
Criticism 2: is Net Zero an excuse for fraudulent activity? Yes. You only have to look at the nonsense that is Drax to understand that NZ is good for fiction.
For those not aware, Drax was a coal-fired power station converted to wood pellets. Wood releases huge amounts more CO2 than coal but the argument is that it can be offset by a hundred years of tree planting. Jason Arday has more credible arguments. Nobody is doing the auditing for that. It's just handwaving fiction. And the kicker is that we import the wood pellets from North America transported by diesel ships.
Then you have the joke that is wind turbines. The onshore turbines have a life expectancy of 15 years. Onshore. Not the offshore turbines being bombarded by salt. Onshore.
And the terrible thing is that these are one and done jobs. Nothing gets recycled. We're not saving any carbon given the energy costs needed to build the things. More than 30 years of subsidies and they're still not robust enough to actually reduce carbon emissions or compete with other energy sources.
Also not doing stuff in this country but importing it from outside is the equivalent of pretending ice cream is empty calories.
Let's face it. Net Zero is an argument about statistical methodology.
Criticism 3: does Net Zero improve people's lives? No. It is all jam tomorrow and based on the kindness of strangers.
This is the most damning criticism and the left has to get its head around it. Policy cannot be abstract.
We are currently in an El Niño event that has pushed the atmosphere pass the 1.5° figure (the figure was always 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures of the mid 19th century). People need to have the ability to cope with the weather as it is.
Any sane government would be looking at improving the greenery in urban conurbations to reduce UHI as well as an expansion of mitigations (air conditioning etc). We need to be climate robust today for a flourishing economy.
None of this stops us from investing in technology and reducing emissions by smartness. But unless you get into the arena where the fight is, who knows what gets thrown out with the bathwater?
Yes, you’ve really exposed me.
I’ve invested in solar panels & a battery which is helping to reduce UK dependence on fossil fuels.
Guilty as charged 🫡
Solar panels and an EV have improved my life by significantly reducing my household electricity & fuel costs
It's also added around £8bn to the overall cost of our electricity system through FiTs. You might be better off but you're adding costs to poorer families
Which is offset by the savings from pushing fossil fuels out of the energy mix.
My solar + batteries are also reducing demand, as I import less from the grid, and shift usage away from peak times, which also helps reduce prices
Bloody hell man, none of that is happening either locally to the UK or globally. Your solar panels are non-recyclable and produces toxic offruns and your battery requires huge amounts of energy to mine and manufacture. There's huge amounts of carbon being produced for you to pretend that you're not.
Not sure what you think isn’t happening locally or globally?
Solar panels & batteries are definitely reducing demand from the grid, and shifting load away from peak times, both in the U.K. & globally.
P.s. 99% of the materials in solar panels are recyclable 🤷🏻♂️
https://www.sunsave.energy/solar-panels-advice/maintenance/recycling
PMSL - they saw you coming. Globally the mix of fossils and renewables are the same now as 20 years ago. And sure, if you're willing to spend huge amounts of money and energy, you can recycle solar panels but it makes them have even more of a carbon footprint. It's self defeating which is why they're just being dumped
I like that you have engaged with the trade offs, I need to listen to the pod too. There is also the intermittency problem. Which is the crux, because it means net zero, whatever you think of it, is not actually possible with wind. You still need gas for the month when there is no wind in December. And batteries for the amount of contingency would cost more than the UK's entire GDP.
In short, in choosing wind (and to a lesser extent, solar) we have opted for zero carbon generation source that is fundamentally flawed and cannot even deliver the net zero promise because of intermittency.
We should have chosen nuclear. We will realise eventually, but by then how many very expensive CFDs will be signed? As you have noted, a lot already have, the pig is in the python and when all the costs are factored in, electricity is going to get much, much more expensive.
It is a mess.
LOL - they're piling up in landfills because they're not recyclable in the real world. Are you getting much cover from that figleaf?
I appreciate you touching on the North Sea drilling aspect. I think the ban came across as ideological from Labour given that we are continuing to import, which puts ordinary people off the entire Net Zero objective and they remember it every time energy costs go up. Obviously that isn't entirely fair, since the way to reduce costs is to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels and the impact of drilling on costs will be low, but "why import when we can drill our own" is too powerful a distraction to ignore politically.
We do account for emissions on a consumption basis. The estimates are here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uks-carbon-footprint
But there are significant uncertainties, inevitably.
As a result we, and every other reporting country, submit territorial emissions estimates to the UNFCCC.
That was supposed to be in response to T J Putnam below.
One thing that seems to be left out of many analyses, is the surprising fact that since the mid-2000s UK energy usage has been declining- https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-kingdom .
Indeed per-person, we now use around 60% of the energy we did back then. AIUI that's even excluding people putting solar panels on their roofs, and despite all the electric cars people are buying these days, as well as all the other things people are doing to switch to electricity for heating etc.
People worry about how we're going to cope with switching to electricity for everything. If we do what we need to and just build out our electricity grid to cover all the people who live here, I think we have it covered.
Another side to the net zero debate is that focusing just on electricity generation means less focus on electrifying things that currently directly burn fossil fuels - if we get to net zero for electricity generation but are slow to electricity transport and heating homes and other buildings we can have slower carbon reductions than if we settled for 80-90% renewable electricity and put the money saved into accelerating the switch to electric cars and heat pumps. Particularly as the last 10% of electricity generation gets really expensive, for various reasons. So we get more emissions cuts for less money with that approach.
I came across this argument from Michael Liebreich. He wrote "The Pragmatic Climate Reset" as a response to Blair - and it's fair to say he was not a fan of Blair's argument.
You can read it in full at https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/liebreich-the-pragmatic-climate-reset-part-i/ and https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/liebreich-the-pragmatic-climate-reset-part-ii-a-provocation/
His podcast is also well worth a listen: https://cleaninguppod.substack.com/
This, on making electricity cheaper, is also well worth a read https://mliebreich.substack.com/p/make-electricity-cheap-again
Thankyou for a very clear exposition of the clean energy discussions. “The Price is Wrong’ by Brett Christophers also offers very useful guidelines to understanding the economic issues of Net Zero. What I don’t understand is why the British always proudly declare the UK 1% contribution
Sorry not finished: re the UK 1% contribution to world CO2, no one ever mentions that thé UK doesn’t mention that thé UK fails to account for the CO2 component of all goods imported into the UK. Also surely China is a leading country in finding solutions to global warning.