In a paper on the UK’s Net Zero Carbon plan, produced for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Prof. Michael Kelly says that ‘we are certain to have an economic and societal catastrophe if we persist on the projects to deliver the net-zero economy by 2050.’ And, via a tour of the energy sectors, he provides chapter and verse on why he thinks that the planned programme can’t realistically achieve its targets.
In terms of heating, he worries about the idea of replacing gas use with electric heat pumps. He notes that ‘in winter, we use three times as much heat as electricity. If this heat was provided by radiant heaters, we would need a grid four times the size of today’s just to keep homes & businesses warm. If we use air-source & ground-source heat pumps, with a coefficient of performance of 3:1 - optimistic given the poor quality of the thermal envelope of UK houses - then the grid would need only to be double the size, for the heat element alone’.
However, combining this result with the expanded power demand from Electric Vehicle use, he says ‘the grid in 2050 will prime facie need to be 2.7 times its present size’, though he admits that ‘it may be possible to reduce the amount of electricity required by insulating buildings’. But he notes ‘increasing the size of the grid is not just a matter of increasing generating capacity. Another major project is the need to rewire homes, street distribution & local substations.’
He points out that ‘Many older houses have 60-A (amp) fuses, a size set when 4 the most demanding appliance was a kettle drawing 8–9A, Wiring in the streets and substations was sized to match a maximum 60-A draw from each house (with the average draw much lower). In the all-electric home of the future, much larger draws will be common. Ground-source heat pumps may draw 58A on start-up, while radiant hobs when starting up draw 27A, fast chargers for electric vehicles draw 33A, and even slow ones may draw 12A, while electric showers draw 33A. At the very least the mains fuse will need upgrading, and the local substations greatly expanded. In some configurations, the wiring in houses and along streets will need upgrading to carry the extra currents’. He puts the cost of this at £700 billion.
His next focus is on the transmission to users of ‘nearly three times as much electricity’ as today- replacing the gas transmission that shifted the energy needed for heating before. He puts the grid upgrade cost at £200 billion. He then calculates the cost of the extra generating capacity needed: ‘Today we have 75GW installed capacity, and we need a further 150GW. We have to be able to cover a peak demand of about 150GW in 2050 without renewables, as storage at grid scale will not play a significant role in the UK within the next 30 years, even if there were a massive break- through in battery technology tomorrow. For power generation, capital costs are often expressed as overnight cost per megawatt of capacity. The relevant estimated costs are: £2m/MW for a mix of onshore and offshore wind, £1.5m/MW for solar, and £4m/MW for nuclear. Assuming a mix of technologies is used – to give better security of supply – we should assume a weighted average of just over £3m /MW, and we can thus arrive at an estimate of £500 billion for new generating capacity’.
So that’s £1,400 bn overall. Quite a lot. But doesn’t that mean lots of work then? Kelly says yes, but there won’t be enough skilled people to do it. He notes Atkins’ estimate that ‘a £1 billion project in the electrical sector implies about 1000 years of professional engineering time and somewhere between 3000 and 4000 years of the time of skilled tradespeople. This amounts to 30 or more engineers and 100 or more skilled tradespeople, employed fulltime for 30 years. Scaling up these figures up for the £1.4 trillion electricity sector, we will need 42,000 electrical engineers and of the order of 130,000 skilled people employed full-time for the 30 years to 2050. Since we currently have 38,000 professional electrical engineers in the UK, the workforce will need to double in size’. He comments that ‘there are no prior examples of skilled workers being generated and maintained on such a scale over 30 years’.
And there also won’t be enough materials. He says that ‘the transition from fossil fuels to renewables is a move from a fuel-intensive energy sector to a materials-intensive energy sector’ and claims that ‘a corollary of the multiplicity of turbines or solar panels is that connecting them to the grid is more materials intensive’.
Specifically he says wind and PV only generate 2–3 W/kg of steel compared to 200W/kg for CCGT gas plants and 1kW/kg for nuclear, so there really is no contest. And while he admits that renewables don’t need fuel to run, he says we still have to mine for rare minerals to build them: ‘The extraction of oil and gas only has a small impact on the earth’s surface compared with the opencast mining of the minerals used by wind turbines & solar farms’. All very provocative.
The over-riding issue though is about the alleged absence of a proper cost-benefit analysis which stands up to scrutiny. That’s what Sir Iain Duncan Smith pointed up in his Forward to the report, in which he says Kelly makes clear that ‘the need for materials, the required workforce, and the scale of the costs should be considered in the most robust manner, but that this did not appear to have happened so far.’
Actually though that’s not quite right. It has been done quite well, although at a global level, by researchers at University College London. Their study, published in January, looks at just about all those issues and sees few problems. Using a logistic substitution model, it examines a series of potentially fundamental constraints that could inhibit continued growth in renewables. And even adopting conservative assumptions, it says there are ‘no insuperable constraints across physical and raw materials requirements, manufacturing capacity, energy balance (EROEI), system integration and macro-economic conditions, to this outcome’.
So where are we with Kelly’s GWPF study? Basically, while interestingly contrarian in parts, much of it seems to reflect some odd ideas- some of which seem to contradict the analysis. For example on population, Kelly says that ‘the average family size in the world has halved, from 5 children in 1960 to 2.5 children now, and is continuing to fall. In developed countries, with universal primary education and more people living in cities than the countryside, the figure is below 2, and indigenous populations are in absolute decline, as it takes 2.1 children per family to maintain a population’ That may all be true, but if so, then many of our growth and consumption related problems may be solved! However evidently not the material scarcity problem. He says: ‘A century from now, when we need copper, we will not mine it, but strip it from abandoned cities.’ Seems he is predicting a total societal crash.
Perhaps more understandable are his arguably rather conservative views on the need for slow adaptation to ‘the slow burning issue of climate change’, rather than the proposed radical mitigation, which in any case he sees as having negligible effect, despite its very high cost. He says ‘Mankind has adapted to the climate over recent millennia, and is better equipped than ever to adapt in the coming decades. With respect to sea-level-rise, the Dutch have been showing us the way for centuries. Climate adaptation in the here and now is a much easier sell to the UK citizenry than mitigation’.
He concludes ‘the mitigation of climate change via a net-zero emissions UK economy in 2050 is an extremely difficult ask. Without a command economy, the target will certainly not be met’. Instead he says ‘there is a very strong case to repeal the net-zero emissions legislation, and replace it with a rather longer time horizon’, adding colourfully that ‘the continued pressure towards a net-zero economy will become a crime of sedition if the public rise up violently to reject it.’ And finally he says ‘The silence of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the professional science & engineering bodies about these engineering realities is a matter of complicity’.
Strong words! Is he right? Nigel Farage has been making similar sorts of points about the cost of Net Zero, but got slapped down. Some of Kelly’s views on specific policies may be a bit harder to dent, although, arguably, they are rather undermined by his views on climate change- can it really just be shrugged off as mild and long term, as the GWPF also seems wont to do?
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