Future Energy Scenarios 2025

By Paul Homewood

 

It’s time for this year’s FES, which is the same fanciful nonsense as usual:

 

 

https://www.neso.energy/publications/future-energy-scenarios-fes

The 2030 stage I presume is little changed from their November Clean Power 2030 Plan, so let’s take a closer look at 2050.

As usual there are four scenarios, but I will concentrate on the Electric Engagement (EE), which assumes go full out on electrification.

Demand for electricity will more than double to 785 TWh, with peak demand reaching 144 GW.

This is the electricity system they envisage for 2050:

If we simplify this, we get this for EE in 2050:

 

In short, even including Interconnectors, we will only have firm capacity of 120 GW, Without Interconnectors, it drops to 96 GW, but we will need 144 GW to meet demand. The latter is based on ACS peak demand, essentially an average of peaks over several winters.

They should be using true peak demand, say on a 1-in-20 year basis, which would probably push the number up to around 160 GW.

We can effectively discount solar power in winter, and we know that we can have days and weeks on end with wind power running below 10% of capacity.

So how does NESO propose to fill this gap?

Storage will help to meet the peaks for an hour or so, but their own table above indicates that their 81 GW will only be enough for three hours. In a two week dunkelflaute, there will be no surplus power to recharge them ready for the next day.

Daily demand will probably average out at around 150 GW at its winter peaks, looking behind the NESO calculations.

So how will NESO fill the gap? Use less, apparently!

They naively believe they can draw 51 GW from EV batteries at peak times. How many drivers will even be at home at those times? And who in their right mind would plug their car in and simply allow the grid to draw off half their juice, in the hope it will be replaced overnight?

Even ignoring EVs, they also expect peak demand to be voluntarily cut by 31 GW, about a quarter. Half of this will come from switching off heating at home. Forget about switching your heating and hot water on in the early morning – you will just have to heat your home at night instead.

And, again, will there be enough electricity at off peak to charge up all those EVs?

NESO talk about “rewarding consumers” for halving demand. What they really mean is that if they don’t they will be punished via extortionate prices. It’s like telling a criminal he is lucky because you only cut one of his hands off, not both!

But perhaps the most remarkable admission in this NESO report is that conventional thermal power will still play the dominant role in 2050, not flaky renewables.

My dispatchable table above splits down:

The hydrogen comes from steam reforming with CCS and electrolysis, in roughly equal quantities.

We will therefore have to spend tens, probably hundreds, of billions building new nuclear, hydrogen burning generators, CCS gas plants, not to mention all of the associated infrastructure. Electrolysers and steam reformers will be needed, along with hydrogen storage and distribution networks.

So why bother to spend billions more on intermittent wind and solar farms?

Given the fact that hydrogen is much more expensive than natural gas, the electricity system we end up with be be horrifically expensive.

I’ll leave you with the NESO graph of the electricity supply in a “typical” week in winter:

 

Demand peaks at 137 GW.

On three days, large scale “demand turn down “ is required, as much as 63 GW.

This is despite low carbon generation and imports working flat out.

A closer look at that period of Tuesday into Wednesday, when renewable output was low – hour 39 to 68.

Renewables averaged 25.2 GW, still probably double we could reasonably expect on windless days. The system was reliant on 4.9 GW of storage discharging, which would not have lasted much longer than this 29 hour period.

And we were also heavily reliant on imports.

To balance the books, demand had to be reduced by 10.8 GW, from a total of 97.3 GW.

Forget about charging your cars and running your heat pumps at off peak. There would not be enough electricity even at those times to meet overall demand for the whole day.