AEP U Turns On Net Zero

By Paul Homewood

 

h/t Doug Brodie/Ian magness

AEP ties himself up in knots, as he tries to defend Net Zero!

 

From the Telegraph:

 

Ed Miliband has one elemental task as Energy Secretary. He must slash the cost of electricity. All else is secondary.

If Britain continues to have the highest power costs in the developed world by a wide margin, it will remain in a low-growth trap with toxic debt dynamics, and Labour will be wiped out at the next election. It will lose almost every seat in the industrial cities of the North to the other socialist party, Reform.

As matters stand, Mr Miliband is not just failing, he is in danger of failing heroically on every front at once. It is not that he is too green; it is that his whole strategy is misconceived.

Full story here.

 

He goes on to rubbish Miliband’s strategy of decarbonising the grid by 2030:

“He is captured by vested interests. He is wasting billions by the fistful on the wrong technologies, much of it subsidising oil and gas companies.

“He is bending every sinew to meet his clean power target of 2030, allowing this absolutist goal to distort all else.

“It is a fundamental error to try to decarbonise the last 10pc of our electricity generation before the 2040s. It becomes exponentially more ruinous at around that level. There are other low-hanging fruit to pick at much lower cost.”

 

Quite where he gets the idea that oil and gas are being subsidised, I have no idea. Such a silly statement shows just muddled his thinking is!

Nowhere does AEP explain that our high electricity prices are the direct consequence of reliance on heavily subsidised renewables. And his criticism of the 2030 decarbonisation target is surely a criticism of Net Zero itself.

Of course, maybe in twenty years time, some magic new technology will come along. But as things stand, we are stuck with wind, solar and nuclear – all of which are extremely expensive, when the cost of intermittency is built in.

Worse still, Net Zero inevitably involves electrifying everything from transport and heating to industry. And then making that electricity with zero emissions. That inevitably involves a massive expansion of the grid, which AEP is now beginning to realise is not only mind bogglingly expensive but not not practically possible in the timescales involved.

In simple terms, if unless you can do all of that, Net Zero itself is a mirage.

But maybe most interesting are the comments of Lord Houchen, Tory Mayor of Tees Valley:

Lord Houchen, the Tory Mayor of Tees Valley, finds himself in the awkward position of having to defend the Miliband subsidies raining down on his fiefdom – many of them for projects that he views as commercial insanity – while at the same time fearing that Labour’s energy strategy will drive the British economy to the wall.

“I genuinely can’t believe that it isn’t more of a scandal that this Government is sitting there and saying they’ll reach the 2030 target when it is physically impossible. All they are doing is front-loading huge costs for an impossible aim,” he said.

“Somebody needs to sit down with the engineers and figure out how many cables we can actually put in the ground, and how long does it take to order a substation, and where do they come from, because at the minute they mostly come from Italy, Greece, or Colombia.

“Last time I checked there was a nearly 30-month lead time to order a large-scale transformer, and to reach 2030, we’re going to need hundreds and hundreds of these. The grid will tell you they’ve got some on order, but there’s nowhere near enough to meet future reinforcement, never mind existing demand, and you’ve got to replace assets that are really old.

“We can have more nuclear or more generation of whatever kind, but the grid just can’t take it. We need a reset.”

“His team didn’t do the hard work before taking office, and didn’t understand the true state of the grid,” said one energy expert.

“They thought they could just come in and build some more renewables and that it would all be easy, and now it is a complete and utter s— show. Nobody is willing to admit how bad it is. There is a mafioso omerta.”

Houchen goes on to decry the demise of the chemical industry on Teeside saying he found it shocking that it did not feature in Labour’s industrial startegy.

But most remarkable of all was AEP’s about turn on carbon capture and hydrogen, which he has spent years promoting:

Unlike other forms of clean tech, which have collectively hit the ball out of the park, carbon capture has failed to live up to any of its promises. A study of eight CCS projects around the world by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) said none had reached a capture rate above 83pc – not to mention all the methane released earlier – and most had been a commercial and technological fiasco.

It warned last month that the UK’s carbon capture risks becoming a bottomless pit, that the £50bn of subsidies pledged so far are just the “tip of the iceberg”. The whole endeavour is “potentially catastrophic” for the credibility of Britain’s energy transition, they added.

Houchen’s description of the two big CCS projects led by BP here in Teesside takes your breath away. One is a scheme to turn expensive gas into vastly more expensive “blue” hydrogen that nobody can afford to buy.

“They don’t actually have a design. They were successful in a government competition, but they don’t know what they are building,” he said. The two figures on site supposed to be constructing it have both left BP over recent weeks.

Houchen says he has been told that the strike price for the CCGT with carbon capture proposed on Teesside was around £350/MWh.

How AEP can still support Net Zero is a mystery.