Doug Sheridan concludes…
“ However, barring a series of dramatic technological breakthroughs, the costs are beyond prohibitive. It’s high time to put a stop to the wishful thinking on Net Zero.”
Prof Michael Kelly writes in the Telegraph, in a Net Zero world, what will we do when the wind isn’t blowing? Environmentalists like to point out we will have solar power as well, but the sun doesn’t shine at night, so windless nights are a big problem.
It's suggested we can store electricity. But in winter we frequently get long wind lulls, and with the sun low in the sky, there will be little or no solar power either. These so-called “dunkelflautes” mean little or no electricity supply from the renewables fleet.
A dunkelflaute can last for weeks. That means you need huge, unfeasible quantities of electricity storage. The Royal Society recently concluded we’d need enough to cover more than two months’ demand, and, whatever storage technology is adopted, this isn’t going to be affordable or probably even possible.
The Royal Society’s numbers suggest we’d need to deliver equivalent one mega infrastructure project at its original cost every year, forever. Using assumptions grounded in the technologies and costs prevalent today, we’d need six months’ storage, and would have to finance and build five mega projects per year.
One of the wheezes dreamt up by the greens to make the costs look a bit smaller is to assume we will get a significant proportion of our electricity from interconnections. However, as with so much of the energy transition, there is a lot of wishful thinking going on.
First, it ignores that electricity delivered by interconnector might not be zero-emission. In fact, it might be that electricity is available and affordable precisely because it's generated by coal plants out of sight. Countries that need energy when they need it won't care what color the electrons are.
Second, it is assumed the interconnected grid will have power to spare for a needy state or nation. This is simply not the case. If it is midnight in the UK, it is dark across the whole of Europe. If it is two AM in New York it is midnight in Los Angeles, so nobody is going to be generating any solar power. And wind speeds are highly correlated across any continent.
Even if the continent is windy when it’s calm in the UK, or if it’s windy in Texas when it’s calm in California, the ability to send power where it’s needed depends on there being surplus generating capacity in the precise place where the wind is blowing. This means we'd have to overbuild in every windy location.
To Sum It Up: The problem of what to do when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining is all but insurmountable. In technological terms, the only feasible solution is a vast fleet of windfarms and a gigantic store of green hydrogen, along the lines envisaged by the Royal Society.
However, barring a series of dramatic technological breakthroughs, the costs are beyond prohibitive. It’s high time to put a stop to the wishful thinking on Net Zero.