The Price Britain Will Pay

Sallust
The Daily Sceptic

The New Statesman has a piece by Dieter Helm about the price Britain is going to pay for Trump’s Iran war, specifically thanks to years of an energy policy that has left the nation woefully unprepared for shocks. The OECD and IMF say Britain will be the hardest hit of nations that import Gulf oil and gas. Worse, this has all been done in the name of Net Zero but has done nothing whatsoever to offset the emissions because all Britain has done is outsource carbon-based production:

Britain already had an energy crisis: it had the highest industrial energy prices of any of the G7 countries and among the highest domestic prices. British industry and British households were already in serious trouble, with large industry closures and an alarming growth of bad debt.

How could this be, since the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero tells us that renewables are nine times cheaper than gas? The answer is that the renewables are intermittent, whereas the existing and new industries demand firm power 24/7.

To meet a peak demand of around 45GW in Britain, we once had around 60GW of total capacity as insurance against shocks and outages so that the lights would stay on. The national electricity grid met the requirements to connect the big power stations. Now we need around 120GW to meet a slightly smaller peak demand, and because the wind is decentralised and of low energy density and in small units, we need to roughly double the size of the grid for the same 45GW peak demand. On top of this, we need lots more batteries and storage, and 10GW of interconnectors and 35GW of gas running to meet periods of low wind and sun… yet still 35GW of gas is what it will take if we meet the 2030 target for Net Zero power.

The Iran war has made a bad situation even worse. Britain relies on gas for 35 per cent of its total energy supply, about the same for oil. The rest is nuclear (a small and currently declining share) and renewables. Britain has almost no coal to fall back on (unlike Italy, Germany and Poland and, of course, China, which burns more than 50 per cent of the world’s total coal). Britain is deliberately reducing existing North Sea gas production (through a windfall tax) and banning new gas licences (preferring Norwegian North Sea gas to British North Sea gas). At the margin, Britain is even forced to buy US LNG (liquefied natural gas), which is fracked gas that is then liquefied and hence much more environmentally damaging than local North Sea gas.

On top of all that, there has been a chronic reduction in gas storage and oil. Moving to wind and solar hasn’t brought, and can’t bring, ‘security’:

We are not going to “just stop gas” any time soon. That means deciding whether we want Norwegian North Sea gas or British North Sea gas, and pipeline gas rather than US LNG at international prices. 

Then there are industrial prices:

If industry closes down in Britain, as it has been doing, it makes no contribution to the energy system costs, and these system costs do not fall. As Grangemouth, refineries in Scotland and Hull, the steel industry, the fertiliser industry and the car industry contract and close, more burden falls on domestic customers. Time instead to set the prices to industry at levels that to keep it in Britain [sic].

What about the mirage of the march to Net Zero?

Britain boasts fast and deep cuts in territorial emissions. It is illusory. Deindustrialisation has offshored emissions, disguising the carbon consumption we are all responsible for. As Britain closes its energy-intensive industries in the face of its very high energy costs, emissions are outsourced as we carry on buying the products with imported carbon. Britain’s energy policy is not leading us to no longer cause climate change.

It is time to… recognise that we are not on our way to becoming a clean-energy superpower. Other countries do not, as Boris Johnson once claimed, look to Britain to find out how to do it. They look to us with our high prices as a case study on how not to do energy policy.

Given that the piece is in a left-leaning magazine, it’s worth reading in full.

This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.