Johnson's energy plan is total madness
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Boris Johnson has announced his full energy strategy to tackle soaring gas prices and increase the UK’s independence from international suppliers. The plan includes building up to eight new nuclear reactors by 2050, as well as speeding up approvals for new offshore wind farms and boosting North Sea oil and gas production.
The good news is that the Tories appear to have kicked onshore wind into the long grass. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Energy Secretary, said the UK can’t impose infrastructure on people like other countries so local consent is an ‘important principle’ needed for onshore wind. The bad news is that they’re still dragging their heels on fracking.
The core of the plan is to increase Britain’s offshore wind power capacity fivefold by the end of the decade as part of a push to make 95 per cent of the country’s electricity “low carbon” by 2030. Putting it bluntly, this is high fantasy. It’s typical Johnsonian pie-in-the-sky much like his bridge to Northern Ireland. There is zero likelihood of meeting such a target, and rapid expansion of offshore wind simply isn’t going to happen.
The wind industry has warned that raw material and logistics inflation have led to an unsustainable situation where wind manufacturers are selling at a loss. The state of the supply chain is unhealthy right now. GE Renewable Energy chief executive for onshore wind, Sheri Hickok, told a panel at the WindEurope 2022 conference. “It is unhealthy because we have an inflationary market that is beyond what anybody anticipated even last year. Steel is going up three times.” “It is really ridiculous to think how we can sustain a supply chain in a growing industry with these kind of pressures”.
The energy transition requires enormous quantities of special raw materials. Some of these are already in short supply, and individual countries have near-monopolies on others. Traders are already warning of the next dependencies. This flies in the face of the green blob’s repeated assertion that wind energy is cheap and getting cheaper all the time. They’re lying.
Kwasi Kwarteng boasts that the focus on renewable energy will create 250,000 jobs but job creation shouldn’t be the aim of an energy policy. The aim should be to reduce manpower overheads. Energy costs will destroy more jobs than Net Zero boondoggles create. Kwasi Kwarteng has admitted it will not reduce energy bills for up to half a decade but it’s hard to see how this plan addresses energy prices at all.
Supposing there were a realistic chance of a five fold increase in offshore wind, it is still the case that Britain can experience days and weeks at a time with no wind. Every GW of installed wind capacity needs equivalent backup. The government intends for new nuclear plant to fulfil this role, meaning the plant is sitting idle or running below optimal thermal efficiency (at considerable cost) for much of the time. Plugging that capacity gap in the meantime means up to ten years of running old coal and gas plant long past their original retirement date.
It should also be noted that many of the older offshore wind farms are also reaching retirement age and will require a life extension retrofit or replacement just to maintain current capacity. With material and labour costs going up, it’s hard to see how the industry can keep pace with the government’s high fantasy ambitions.
The plan to build eight new nuclear reactors is welcome news, insofar as it is news, but it’s far to little, and far too late. This plan does nothing whatsoever to address the affordability emergency in the near to mid term, and precious little in the long term. Thanks to decades of policy neglect and climate virtue signalling, crippling energy costs are here to stay – even if we had a remotely sane energy policy.
What we needed to see was a recognition that action is needed now to bring down costs, but this plan is more of the same incoherence and “jam tomorrow”. The government is in complete denial of the severity of the energy cost crisis and this plan is really just a wish list that won’t survive first contact with reality. In reality we’re going to see more delays to both nuclear and wind developments as costs rise, and as more wind capacity is added, the more we’ll require emergency reserve capacity which means even higher wholesale energy prices at peak demand.
An intelligent energy policy would recognise that renewables are an expensive distraction. There are two main priorities. Firstly to bring down energy costs by any means necessary, and secondly, to ensure our long term energy security. Wind can’t do this. Even if we could say that wind turbines were “cheap”, mitigating the intermittency and connecting them to the gird via long distance cables isn’t cheap at all. The system was never designed to cope with intermittent diffuse energy. Moreover, gas remains the only viable backup source which means we still need gas, often at times of peak demand.
The focus on wind energy is primarily to satisfy the environmentalist ideology rather than meet our energy needs. This was never a credible basis for energy policy but especially not now as households face next winter with no heating at all. Johnson has put us on a dangerous path.
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