"Net Zero Incompetence" by Ralph Ellis

I recommend reading the following analysis and opinion piece which was posted by Ralph Ellis on his Twitter/X profile on the 29th of February, 2024.

Please note that I have inserted the links for the two reports referenced by Ralph Ellis, namely the UK Climate Change Committee 2023 Progress Report to Parliament dated 28 June 2023 and the Royal Society’s report on Large-scale electricity storage issued September 2023.

Net Zero Incompetence

By Ralph Ellis • 29 February 2024

Before we get onto New Testament revelation, this article is based upon one of my many letters to Parliament, that started the arguments and recriminations about the Net Zero energy policy. Highlighting the fact that the policy was being led by children who had no idea what they were doing….

Dear Sir / Madam / Undecided,

There has been a sudden and largely inexplicable drive towards Net Zero energy by 2035 and 2050, all across the Western world. With little regard for the fact that Far Eastern nations are not going to comply with these edicts, and so any CO2 reductions in the West will be totally inconsequential. The West can go back to grinding poverty and mud huts, and it will have absolutely no effect on CO2 emissions if China and India are not onboard with this new climate agenda. (If you believe that increasing plant-food in the atmosphere is a problem.)

Pursuant to this new agenda, three reports were sent to the UK government, including from the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and the Royal Society (RS). Yet these were the most inarticulate, biased, and misleading reports ever received by government. If this is the quality of modern academia, the nation is doomed.

The CCC Report:

For instance, the CCC report contains the following technical clanger about grid-level battery storage of electricity (ie: very large Tesla batteries):

Quote:

The power output capacity of grid storage is currently around 2 GW. This will need to rise to 7 GW by 2025 and 8-9 GW by 2028. Grid storage capacity in Great Britain will more than double by next winter, as 2.3 GW of new-build battery storage (come on-line). A further 5.0 GW of new-build battery storage (is due) in 2026/27. Based on this considerable pipeline [office-speak for new infrastructure], we judge this indicator to be on track. (Progress in Reducing UK Emissions, June 2023, p206)

The only trouble being that GW is not a unit of energy storage, so this entire chapter on storage is totally meaningless. It is like saying that the distance from London to Manchester is 60 mph. Totally meaningless.

It turns out that this Kamala Harris style word-salad was copied from a website called Solar Media Market Research, which obviously employs junior school imbeciles. But there is no excuse for this nonsense being copied straight into a report to government. It implies that these government reports are merely a compendium of random web-searches, just as the famous ‘15 minutes to launch weapons of mass destruction’ was based upon similar random web searches.

In explanation, the real unit of electrical energy storage is the GWh, not GW. The difference being that we need to know how long the storage battery will last. In theory, a 7 GW storage battery might only be the size of a standard car battery. Such a micro-storage system may well (in theory) give 7 GW for a picosecond or femtosecond, but it is not going to power the nation - which is what we want to know.

Judging by the size of the new Tesla battery system in Cottingham on the UK east-coast, the CCC report may be referring to an additional 14 GWh of real energy storage. But unfortunately this will only power the entire nation for just 7 minutes. This is the shortfall and problem that Britain (and the Western world) faces. To backup Britain’s electrical system, when we have gone all-electric and have closed down all the gas power stations, we will need about 25,000 GWh of stored energy, to cover for 10 days of renewables outages.

Thus we need 25,000 GWh of stored energy backup. Yet the CCC is saying that building 14 GWh (and then a further 100 GWh), is somehow ‘on track’. On track for what, we might ask? On track for the complete collapse of our technical civilisation, and a return to mud huts, would be the correct answer.

The Royal Society Report:

The RS Report is no better. It starts off by assuming that total demand for energy in the UK in 2050 will be 570 TWh. Well, at least they are using the right kind of unit, which is a step above the CCC Report. However, the amount quoted is ridiculously low.

The UK consumes about 40 GW of energy, every second of the average day. That equates to 960 GWh a day, or 350 TWh a year. But that is just electricity. If we are to account for transport, heating, and industry all being powered by electricity, we will need 3.5 times that amount, or 1,225 TWh a year. That is more than double the RS assumption. Yet the RS makes no comment on what luxuries will have to be curtailed, to reduce our energy demand by half. What will have to go? Your car? Your heating? Your food?

We cannot begin to plan our energy future for 2050, if the powers-that-be cannot even decide upon how much energy we will be using. Needless to say, the cost of this enormous transition to Net Zero depends directly upon the amount of energy we will consume, and therefore need to produce. Thus the RS costings are grossly in error from the very start.

Then they look at hydrogen for energy storage instead of batteries, because we will need a battery the size of Coventry to power the nation for ten days. They also disregarded pumped water storage; because although this is simple, safe, and quite efficient, it needs large upland areas to work. And Britain simply does not have enough upland areas. Holland and Denmark would have even greater problems (although Denmark has been using Scandanavia as a region for pumped water energy storage).

But although hydrogen storage has some merits, its disadvantages are immense. Firstly, this has never been done before. Grid-scale electrolysis and storage in 2,000 ft deep undersea salt caverns, has never been tried before. So the proposal is to bet the entire farm - our technological civilisation and all the people who live in it - upon a paper-based proposal that has never been tried before. I could think of any number of problems that may halt this project in its tracks, leaving the nation without stored backup and thus without electricity. And everything in our technological society depends upon electricity - we could go from prosperity to the Stone Age in three weeks, if all the lights went out.

In addition, the entire hydrogen storage system (a hydrogen battery) is hugely inefficient. At best we will only get 30% of the energy out, that was put in the first place. Not only does this make the system even more expensive, it means that a huge amount of extra wind generation is now needed to charge up the system. Normally, a battery (chemical or pumped water) can rely on the ‘overcharge days’ - when the wind is blowing well and there is a great deal of excess energy - to charge up the battery. But with hydrogen being this inefficient, extra generation will be required to charge up the leaky battery. This will, of course, have a significant knock-on effect on costings.

Due to all these many errors and absurd assumptions, the cost of the RS’s entire Net Zero electrical system is just 1/10th of the real costs. The entire Net Zero system includes:

• Wind to power the present electrical grid total 2,660 turbines

• multiply 2.5 for capacity factor total 6,660 turbines

• multiply 3.5 to power all energy needs total 23,000 turbines

• multiply 1.25 for hydrogen inefficiency total 29,000 turbines (or 22 turbines a week, of the largest 15 MW wind turbines)

• (each turbine is about £45 million)

• Electrolysers for 80 gw input (recharge in a month)

• Vast de-mineralised water plants

• 800 deep-sea salt caverns, 2,000 ft down

• Associated pipes, heat exchangers, and high pressure pumps

• 60 brand new 2 GW hydrogen powered power stations

• All new transmission line grid, with many undersea cables.

Royal Society estimate £ 410 billion

Ralph Ellis estimate £4,200 billion

It is abundantly clear that the authors of these reports are climate activists who want to sucker the government down the Green Energy route, whether it works or not. They want it to appear to be simple and affordable, even if the final cost is unachievable and ruinously expensive. They don’t even care if our nation and Western civilisation will fail, through a combination of ruinously expensive costs and widespread energy blackouts. In fact, since they regard humanity as a planetary disease, our extinction would be a bonus to them.

We let these nihilists succeed at our peril. We saw what they did during Covid, with their calls for lockdowns being based upon Professor Pantsdown’s absurdly exaggerated potential death-tolls. We must not let them do it again with our energy supplies.

Ralph

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Please click on the images below to read the official reports which the UK Government are relying upon for their “net zero” policy as referenced by Ralph Ellis in the foregoing replication of his tweet.

The following video was published as a companion piece to the UK Climate Change Committee’s 2023 Progress Report.

Required under the Climate Change Act, the report “provides the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) assessment of progress to reduce emissions and reach Net Zero in the UK. This video with Lord Deben - Chairman, Chris Stark - Chief Executive and Emily Nurse -Team Leader, Carbon Budgets of the CCC provides the key messages from the report.”

Please click on the image below to read the complete Large-scale electricity storage report as published by The Royal Society in September 2023.

Related posts:

"A Semi-Competent Report On Energy Storage From Britain's Royal Society" by Francis Menton

"National Grid Resorts to Propaganda" by David Turver