Excellent - thank you! The good news is that the CCC, clearly a political instrument, is at last being politically challenged. I recently gathered that Kathryn Porter is consulted by the Tories and Reform (but not so far by Labour or Lib Dems). Sadly, the recent opportunity to move Miliband to Minister for Rockall, was missed. Your piece shows the inability of politicians to adapt and change course in light of facts, while the taxpayer bears the cost.
She has also been in touch with the SDP, and described their new energy manifesto as "surprisingly good". I don't think that means she agrees with all of it, but they appear to have picked up on a number of themes she has been championing, and much of their underlying analysis is robust and a class above offerings from Miliband and the CCC.
Those delivered prices for solar are somewhat shocking, nearly a thousand pounds per kW?
Even at retail premium panels are £200/kW, a 50kW inverter is £4800
That’s under £300 per kW, clearly that’s plus the land, the cabling, the ground level structures, the installation, the connection, but another £700 per kW is ridiculous.
Not that solar is any use at our latitudes.
When you see the complexity of conventional generation, for instance Carrington CCGT, delivered in the UK, albeit nearly a decade ago at circa £600/kW, or just over half the price of solar today you wonder what the hell is happening.
Your paying all up costs of £50/hr for skilled electricians and not less than £30 for general operatives. Then add in all the equipment and grid connection charges and it soon racks up.
On a CCGT they will be at least double in price now so we do need to compare apples with apples. Of course add in the all up system costs of Solar and we get a fundamentally different outcome but of course none of the evangelists what to talk about what happens when its dark.
The sad truth is that our leaders have made one of the biggest geopolitical mistakes in perhaps centuries in attempting to “decarbonise” the economy based on flimsy climate pseudoscience using unsustainable, ruinously expensive and totally inappropriate weather-dependent technologies. All they are achieving is to slowly but surely deindustrialise the economy and impoverish the populace.
The Uniparty incumbents are in too deep to admit their mistake and will have to be swept away.
The legally-binding Climate Change Act needs to be repealed. I believe that’s what Reform UK intend to do. They should join forces with the SDP who seem to have a well-developed stance on this: https://thecritic.co.uk/how-to-fix-britains-energy-crisis/.
The SDP i remember was the gang of four!! Anyhow thats an interesting policy but any suggesting of coal is going to sink them without trace given the negativity that's ascribed to that form of generation so I would have gone all in on gas and nuclear.
I certainly agree that planning has gone badly awry post privatisation and had we had the CEGB they would have at least come up with a more sensible approach to decarbonisation over decades rather than the daft CP2030 which is clearly unachievable but Milibrain is going all in and will end up bankrupting the country.
They seem to ignore the investments already made in renewables which are a fact of life and can't be disregarded. Anyhow a good starting point for others to build off into something thats more reflective of todays reality.
I haven’t heard anything of the SDP for decades. I only came across their article because it was included in a NZW Samizdat. Now I think about it, I don’t remember seeing any such energy plan from Reform UK.
For sure but I would be very weary about promoting coal given how bad a name its been given. Whether we like it or not thats lodged in peoples mind from decades of brainwashing. Thus by promoting out you just give the eco evangelists and easy stick to undermine your policy and thus credibility with the electorate.
The issue may become do you want to wait 8 years or more for more CCGT capacity, or would you be prepared to authorise some coal that could be built in 3-4 years. The commentary around the next Capacity Market auction for T-4 should be interesting. 4 years is now too short given the order backlogs and earlier failures to procure new capacity. Plant will be closing.
Given many CCGTs are running less hours now they may be able drag out a few more years and certainly continue to participate in capacity market. They were given 65/kW/yr in 27/28 delivery year and 29GW of gas units have a contract. Competition in 28/29 drove it down to 60 and gas dropped back to 27.3GW but they keep lowering requirements as we deindustrialise. So for many older sites where plant is written down anyhow they juts need enough cash to cover keeping the plant ready to go. Whether £60/kw is enough I don't know but if it isn't they have a T-1 to fall back on and whats to stop them holding a T-3 with a higher price anyhow.
My take is someone with some nouse in NESO/DENZ will have a handle on what it takes to keep a CCGT on standby and thats what drives the starting price.
Supposedly from the next CM auction gas generation must be hydrogen or CCS ready to be awarded a capacity contract. That may exclude a lot of existing plant which will be nudged towards closure, and be insufficient to justify new plant with the capability. The best estimates I've seen of the closure timelines have come from Timera, but it's a while since they updated them. So long as plant is just mothballed you can pay a fancy price at T-1 to resurrect it.
However, I think the order book delays add an important factor. GE Vernova has invested in expanding their H class production by 25%, but it's not enough to shorten the order book significantly. They don't want to be left with capacity they can't use in a few years, so further expansion depends on major changes in energy outlook at the global level.
I just wanted to say it in a “neutral” way for a change. I agree it is malign and deliberate. They showed their true colours through their Covid “plandemic”. I spell it out in my recent post “The charade of Net Zero”: https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/the-charade-of-net-zero-2/.
Disappointing that CCC continue to believe in rapidly falling cost of equipment and unrealistic capital costs - the 2008-2021 low interest rate environment was unprecedented and not an indication of future norms.
Coincidentally I have just written a piece looking at the BCG experience curve concept in renewables and why it is running out of steam - something CCC seems to completely ignore.
Excellent post again and stimulates the grey matter om a Sunday morning.
I applaud what Coutinho has done but to a degree she has been hoist by her petard here though as Topping can cite how the basis of CB7 is only an update of that which her department oversaw under the previous government which was apparently endorsed by one of her minions at the time. I was also perturbed to read that her govt accepted the recommendation to socialise levies and policy costs on general taxation. This would a disastrous policy shift and we are left to hope that Reeves and Treasury officials resist that approach which as we now just buries the costs and doesn't address the underlying issues.
Ultimately the CCC don't really care how much it costs nor does the man on top of the throne so onwards and downwards we go.
I want top know how they bury it. If they 'can't' increase income tax and Reeves is talking about zero VAT on energy, where are they going to find the money? i guess this is all pointing to deliberately inflate gas prices to absorb it all.
For sure as the last change to the price cap shows they are going to load more into the gas price by stealth but that will never cover all the policy and levy costs. If they did that they would just create another problem with having to increase subsidies to the less well off even more.
My hope is that Reeves has a black hole to dela with from known spending commitments and can't afford to add anything further in so the line will be held.
The tragic and criminal history of British energy policy reveals that the CCC is the axis of evil.
A few years ago a newspaper and The Global Warming Policy Forum did some detective work and found that the CCC lied barefaced about the prevalence of wind droughts provided to the May Government to support the net zero by 2050 legislation. That moved the Royal Society to get involved and they did a massive amount of work to little effect:)
This piece is too detailed for popular consumption, but something for the records.
I use two AI tools to look into the allegation that the CCC lied about wind droughts. This is what I found
Google (response edited for brevity)
An unsubstantiated and false claim exists that the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) intentionally lied to the May Government about the frequency of "wind droughts" to promote the net zero by 2050 legislation. The claim is contradicted by the CCC's public statements and reports. Two explicit warnings are quoted:
1/ In a March 2023 report, the CCC stated that the design of the UK's future electricity system "must account for the risk that climate change will result in longer wind droughts, increasing the need for more back up gas and hydrogen generation".
2/ Need for resilience: A March 2023 briefing from the CCC noted "mixed progress" in ensuring the energy system's resilience to extreme weather events, including possible wind droughts. The committee has repeatedly recommended that the government review and strengthen energy system resilience.
ChatGPT
Claim CCC lied about prevalence of wind droughts
Evidence? No—no documented evidence or retractions suggesting deliberate misrepresentation.
Perhaps you can provide the hard evidence that the CCC mislead the May Government
Good to see fact-checking, there should be more of it. The statements in 2023 can be seen as damage control because they come well after the June 2021 Dunkelflaute appeared as if from nowhwere and demonstrated that the wind drought problem had been covered up. Incidentally, that was well before the war that is usually blamed for the price of gas.
Can you search further back and find the records of the investigative journalism and the persistent inquiries by the Global Warming Policy Forum that exposed some of the corruption or incompetence in various agencies.
I got ChatGPT to look at CCC reports and investigate the tone used to describe wind droughts. This is the findigng
Summary of Evolution
2012–2013 → Dismissive → Mild recognition.
2017–2018 → Intermittency accepted as real; solutions explored (storage, hydrogen).
2019–2020 → Integrated into modelling; managed through system design; but no explicit recognition of “wind droughts.”
So the CCC shifted from downplaying intermittency (2012) to systematically incorporating it into models (by 2020). However, they never really addressed the rare but prolonged calm periods (“wind droughts”) before 2021 — which is where some critics argue their advice underestimated risk.
==========================
In conclusion
1/ There is no hard evidence that the CCC lied about wind droughts.
2/ There are grounds to consider that the CCC underestimates their frequency and impact (this concern is also levied at NESO and DESNZ)
Well, that's putting it mildly. Chris Stark as CCC CEO went to great lengths to try to poo-poo the Royal Society work that gave a much more honest appraisal of the risk, even if it grossly underestimated the costs of dealing with it precisely by sticking to the absurd cost assumptions criticised in today's article. NESO seem to think that pretty charts covering one week per season are adequate exploration of the issue. None of the CCC, NESO and DESNZ have done proper work in this area or commissioned it. Instead we get silly Goldilocks scenarios where the wind magically starts blowing again before storage runs out, and where vast amounts of "flexibility" a.k.a. powercuts are imposed on demand with no proper justification of feasibility.
I performed much the same analysis as the Royal Society a good couple of years before they did, and drew attention to my conclusions in written evidence to the BEIS Select Committee,
In 2025 NESO attempted to model wind droughts. They failed. An AI review of the report identified many project failures. Two key ones were:
1/ Failure to meet key objectives – The project set out to deliver robust statistical analyses of Dunkelflaute/wind droughts and their impact on system stress, but instead pivoted to a lighter “proof of concept” using pre-defined AWSFES scenarios. This left the original aims only partially addressed.
2/ Limited statistical robustness – Few events were tested, and the return period confidence was weak. This undermines the ability to quantify risk for planning or policy purposes.
NESO did not appear to do a literature search which would have identified recent work by Kittel et al (January 2025) which identified multiple wind droughts in the last 36 years using open-source software. NESO appears to have used its own software with very limited success. The original Kittle paper is rich in details, is was subsequently superseded by a much more streamlined policy paper. The original may be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ngb1oTp_Ye9L0z-fHt0k-ap-BFBSj9vB/view?usp=sharing
Kittel et al (January 2025) identified that winter 1996/7 was the worst that they found for wind droughts in Europe. Their analysis included the UK but I cannot identify whether this was the worst ever for the UK. The graphic on page 9 shows theoretical UK storage being fully depleted between mid-November and early February, a period of some 75 days
Kittel made some key observations relevant to CCC/NESO/UK
• It is necessary to analyse summer to summer to identify long period that span years (page 21)
• the maximum long-duration storage need in Europe, driven by the most extreme renewable drought in the winter of 1996/97, exceeds the next highest storage need found for the weather year 1984/85 by 42%. Market actors are unlikely to invest in such rarely utilized long-duration storage capacity without additional deployment incentives. (page 20)
• the selection of weather years has a notable impact on long-duration storage use in energy system models, which confirms previous research ………………………. However, due to computational limitations, many policy-relevant studies rely on only one or a limited set (page 20)
The annual minimum for storage in a solar/wind optimised system is usually around September. Total wind generation is optimally much higher than total solar to give a better fit to seasonal demand. Nominal capacities are similar, but wind averages a much higher capacity factor than solar. Winter generation tends to result in uneconomic to store surpluses as an offset to Dunkelflaute. Summer solar depends on short duration storage providing overnight coverage which gets a much better return than seasonal storage. Surpluses beyond that get curtailed.
In response to your post there have been a number of allegations made about the CCC advice about wind droughts but no one has actually stated the content of this CCC advice. In an attempt to resolve this impasse I have submitted an FOI to the CCC. I hope to have more information in a month
I read the relevant parts of the "Methodology behind the CCC’s carbon budget advice for the UK, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, published in 2025" to look for numerical values of LCOE but there are none! However, I came across several references in the Methodology to the document DESNZ Electricity Generation Costs 2023 which quoted an LCOE of £43.17
The example uses a gross load factor of 65% and an availability of 95% to produce an LCOE of £43.17. I experimented by using a gross load factor of 40% with 100% availability which aligns with typical DUKES values for offshore load factor and the LCOE increased to £65.10
This demonstrates how sensitive the LCOE can be to load factor and a possible pointer to where the CCC is getting its very low LCOE values from.
I doubt he wrote the substantive part of the letter. If he did it shows a) he's incapable of simple maths b) Is not at all on top of his brief if he has any mathematical nouse at all.
Very true. I imagine a group of civil servants wrote and designed it to match the grand con and the fellow just put a small approved paragraph at the bottom and signed it.
Disgustingly, you don't collect these roles if you're not prepared to play the game and go along with the hoax. If he were honest he'd be out of a job. So would most of the green blob.
Lies are all they have left. That's why they invent all these comedically complicated faragoes to ensure the truth is hidden under layer upon layer of acronyms, systems and reams of stats that only fellows like Mr Turver can unravel.
How revolting. So Topping's description of himself as a mathematician ignores the adjective 'failed' which is so important in these times of bureaucratic clowns taking office and vomiting prevarication as a normal activity.
"Unrealistic" sums up the entire Net Zero edifice, whether that's by 2030, 35, 40, 50 and onwards. One could add, 'unrealisable', 'counter productive', 'ruinous'. However, that is of no concern to the CCC because 'realism' would cost them their well feathered sinecures.
I have some questions to ask, from the perspective of someone who is not very knowledgeable on the industry but familiar with financial modelling. I like to look at figures, build a model and test the model with what if scenarios. In the discussion of capital costs you refer to a turbines capacity in calculating the capital cost per kW. How is that capacity determined? Is it the maximum output achievable when wind conditions are optimum? They certainly will never be optimal all the time so is the capacity rating scaled back to some average annual percentage utilisation. And then that scaling will be very locality dependent. Do the capital costs include all the costs involved to connect the turbine into the grid, including any grid upgrade, if required. Or is it assumed that someone else will pick up the grid upgrade costs. And what about decommissioning costs ate the end of the turbines life, or can we expect to see our countryside and North Sea scarred by decaying abandoned turbines in 25 or 50 years time. Has the government even thought about decommissioning commitments in the permissions that have been awarded? To make sensible assumptions about how capital costs translate to likely costs in our bills we need to have an idea off the operating life of a turbine.
What happens if we get an extended period of largely windless days. It doesn't happen often but it is possible. For example, In the winter of 1962-3 we had almost two months of blocking arctic high pressure and very little air movement. I remember it well, as I was 14 and my father was taken to hospital on 3rd January, the day the snows came, and came out of hospital on 26th March when we still had snow on the ground. Life was very difficult for the family those weeks without dad. Weeks on end of freezing temperatures, at times down to -15degC. Suppose we have a similar period in a few years time, when gas has been banned for direct space heating, and we are all relying on heat exchange units (which I understand are less efficient al very low temperatures). With most turbines idle (and solar panels probably covered in snow) how will our electricity demand be met?
All good questions. The capacity is the nominal nameplate capacity. For offshore wind a load factor around 38-42% is achieved in the real world.
Sometimes the costs include the cost of getting power to shore, sometimes not. That's something to watch for. The costs never include the increased spending to upgrade the transmission grid to get the power from Scotland to southern England.
Decommissioning costs are typically not included in LCOE calculations for wind.
The whole farce of 'climate change' (the marketing having changed regularly to dodge when reality hasn't matched the hoax) is, I believe; simply an economic weapon to enforce poverty and decline. It seems a desperate effort to control people into accepting rationing and a lower standard of living: fewer choices and higher costs all for some insane Left wing, socialist agenda. It certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with energy generation, rational economic future, let alone the environment.
Folk repeat the drivel the department for no energy excrete out such as it's 'home grown' 'clean'. Challenging such with the facts, that the things are made elsewhere and owned by foreign investors is often censored.
The very department title 'net zero and energy security' is a lie.
The blob will keep on lying. They lie habitually, reflexively to keep people ignorant of their malice. Until we can stop them, they'll keep on lying and wasting our money on this demented ideology.
Excellent - thank you! The good news is that the CCC, clearly a political instrument, is at last being politically challenged. I recently gathered that Kathryn Porter is consulted by the Tories and Reform (but not so far by Labour or Lib Dems). Sadly, the recent opportunity to move Miliband to Minister for Rockall, was missed. Your piece shows the inability of politicians to adapt and change course in light of facts, while the taxpayer bears the cost.
She has also been in touch with the SDP, and described their new energy manifesto as "surprisingly good". I don't think that means she agrees with all of it, but they appear to have picked up on a number of themes she has been championing, and much of their underlying analysis is robust and a class above offerings from Miliband and the CCC.
It’s clear there are few people of integrity in British public office who are willing to tell the truth.
Other than public uprisings and voting out the existing government, I’m unsure what is left.
Of course, this is just one of many very important issues the current administration is showing evil and malfeasance in office.
Those delivered prices for solar are somewhat shocking, nearly a thousand pounds per kW?
Even at retail premium panels are £200/kW, a 50kW inverter is £4800
That’s under £300 per kW, clearly that’s plus the land, the cabling, the ground level structures, the installation, the connection, but another £700 per kW is ridiculous.
Not that solar is any use at our latitudes.
When you see the complexity of conventional generation, for instance Carrington CCGT, delivered in the UK, albeit nearly a decade ago at circa £600/kW, or just over half the price of solar today you wonder what the hell is happening.
Your paying all up costs of £50/hr for skilled electricians and not less than £30 for general operatives. Then add in all the equipment and grid connection charges and it soon racks up.
On a CCGT they will be at least double in price now so we do need to compare apples with apples. Of course add in the all up system costs of Solar and we get a fundamentally different outcome but of course none of the evangelists what to talk about what happens when its dark.
The sad truth is that our leaders have made one of the biggest geopolitical mistakes in perhaps centuries in attempting to “decarbonise” the economy based on flimsy climate pseudoscience using unsustainable, ruinously expensive and totally inappropriate weather-dependent technologies. All they are achieving is to slowly but surely deindustrialise the economy and impoverish the populace.
The Uniparty incumbents are in too deep to admit their mistake and will have to be swept away.
The legally-binding Climate Change Act needs to be repealed. I believe that’s what Reform UK intend to do. They should join forces with the SDP who seem to have a well-developed stance on this: https://thecritic.co.uk/how-to-fix-britains-energy-crisis/.
The SDP i remember was the gang of four!! Anyhow thats an interesting policy but any suggesting of coal is going to sink them without trace given the negativity that's ascribed to that form of generation so I would have gone all in on gas and nuclear.
I certainly agree that planning has gone badly awry post privatisation and had we had the CEGB they would have at least come up with a more sensible approach to decarbonisation over decades rather than the daft CP2030 which is clearly unachievable but Milibrain is going all in and will end up bankrupting the country.
They seem to ignore the investments already made in renewables which are a fact of life and can't be disregarded. Anyhow a good starting point for others to build off into something thats more reflective of todays reality.
I haven’t heard anything of the SDP for decades. I only came across their article because it was included in a NZW Samizdat. Now I think about it, I don’t remember seeing any such energy plan from Reform UK.
Coal would be cheaper, more efficient and less polluting than the North American wood pellet biomass used to fuel Drax. Here’s NZW’s Andrew Montford being pragmatic about coal: https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/the-uk-is-going-back-to-coal.
For sure but I would be very weary about promoting coal given how bad a name its been given. Whether we like it or not thats lodged in peoples mind from decades of brainwashing. Thus by promoting out you just give the eco evangelists and easy stick to undermine your policy and thus credibility with the electorate.
The issue may become do you want to wait 8 years or more for more CCGT capacity, or would you be prepared to authorise some coal that could be built in 3-4 years. The commentary around the next Capacity Market auction for T-4 should be interesting. 4 years is now too short given the order backlogs and earlier failures to procure new capacity. Plant will be closing.
Given many CCGTs are running less hours now they may be able drag out a few more years and certainly continue to participate in capacity market. They were given 65/kW/yr in 27/28 delivery year and 29GW of gas units have a contract. Competition in 28/29 drove it down to 60 and gas dropped back to 27.3GW but they keep lowering requirements as we deindustrialise. So for many older sites where plant is written down anyhow they juts need enough cash to cover keeping the plant ready to go. Whether £60/kw is enough I don't know but if it isn't they have a T-1 to fall back on and whats to stop them holding a T-3 with a higher price anyhow.
My take is someone with some nouse in NESO/DENZ will have a handle on what it takes to keep a CCGT on standby and thats what drives the starting price.
Supposedly from the next CM auction gas generation must be hydrogen or CCS ready to be awarded a capacity contract. That may exclude a lot of existing plant which will be nudged towards closure, and be insufficient to justify new plant with the capability. The best estimates I've seen of the closure timelines have come from Timera, but it's a while since they updated them. So long as plant is just mothballed you can pay a fancy price at T-1 to resurrect it.
However, I think the order book delays add an important factor. GE Vernova has invested in expanding their H class production by 25%, but it's not enough to shorten the order book significantly. They don't want to be left with capacity they can't use in a few years, so further expansion depends on major changes in energy outlook at the global level.
I don't believe it is a mistake. An error would be corrected by now, even in big fat state. This is now intentional malice.
I just wanted to say it in a “neutral” way for a change. I agree it is malign and deliberate. They showed their true colours through their Covid “plandemic”. I spell it out in my recent post “The charade of Net Zero”: https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/the-charade-of-net-zero-2/.
Disappointing that CCC continue to believe in rapidly falling cost of equipment and unrealistic capital costs - the 2008-2021 low interest rate environment was unprecedented and not an indication of future norms.
Coincidentally I have just written a piece looking at the BCG experience curve concept in renewables and why it is running out of steam - something CCC seems to completely ignore.
https://open.substack.com/pub/ukenergythoughts/p/the-experience-curve-and-renewable?r=4ie0c9&utm_medium=ios
Excellent post again and stimulates the grey matter om a Sunday morning.
I applaud what Coutinho has done but to a degree she has been hoist by her petard here though as Topping can cite how the basis of CB7 is only an update of that which her department oversaw under the previous government which was apparently endorsed by one of her minions at the time. I was also perturbed to read that her govt accepted the recommendation to socialise levies and policy costs on general taxation. This would a disastrous policy shift and we are left to hope that Reeves and Treasury officials resist that approach which as we now just buries the costs and doesn't address the underlying issues.
Ultimately the CCC don't really care how much it costs nor does the man on top of the throne so onwards and downwards we go.
I want top know how they bury it. If they 'can't' increase income tax and Reeves is talking about zero VAT on energy, where are they going to find the money? i guess this is all pointing to deliberately inflate gas prices to absorb it all.
For sure as the last change to the price cap shows they are going to load more into the gas price by stealth but that will never cover all the policy and levy costs. If they did that they would just create another problem with having to increase subsidies to the less well off even more.
My hope is that Reeves has a black hole to dela with from known spending commitments and can't afford to add anything further in so the line will be held.
The lie will be something like 'gas is so expensive on international markets that we have to pass those costs on to you'.
Most folk, not understanding will never look at their bill and see the unit cost for the material is 6p and £1.80 is tax.
This is a great piece from last year, https://assets.realclear.com/files/2023/12/2321_2320_realclear-report-rupert-darwall-v7_1.pdf
The tragic and criminal history of British energy policy reveals that the CCC is the axis of evil.
A few years ago a newspaper and The Global Warming Policy Forum did some detective work and found that the CCC lied barefaced about the prevalence of wind droughts provided to the May Government to support the net zero by 2050 legislation. That moved the Royal Society to get involved and they did a massive amount of work to little effect:)
This piece is too detailed for popular consumption, but something for the records.
https://assets.realclear.com/files/2023/12/2321_2320_realclear-report-rupert-darwall-v7_1.pdf
I use two AI tools to look into the allegation that the CCC lied about wind droughts. This is what I found
Google (response edited for brevity)
An unsubstantiated and false claim exists that the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) intentionally lied to the May Government about the frequency of "wind droughts" to promote the net zero by 2050 legislation. The claim is contradicted by the CCC's public statements and reports. Two explicit warnings are quoted:
1/ In a March 2023 report, the CCC stated that the design of the UK's future electricity system "must account for the risk that climate change will result in longer wind droughts, increasing the need for more back up gas and hydrogen generation".
2/ Need for resilience: A March 2023 briefing from the CCC noted "mixed progress" in ensuring the energy system's resilience to extreme weather events, including possible wind droughts. The committee has repeatedly recommended that the government review and strengthen energy system resilience.
ChatGPT
Claim CCC lied about prevalence of wind droughts
Evidence? No—no documented evidence or retractions suggesting deliberate misrepresentation.
Perhaps you can provide the hard evidence that the CCC mislead the May Government
Good to see fact-checking, there should be more of it. The statements in 2023 can be seen as damage control because they come well after the June 2021 Dunkelflaute appeared as if from nowhwere and demonstrated that the wind drought problem had been covered up. Incidentally, that was well before the war that is usually blamed for the price of gas.
Can you search further back and find the records of the investigative journalism and the persistent inquiries by the Global Warming Policy Forum that exposed some of the corruption or incompetence in various agencies.
I got ChatGPT to look at CCC reports and investigate the tone used to describe wind droughts. This is the findigng
Summary of Evolution
2012–2013 → Dismissive → Mild recognition.
2017–2018 → Intermittency accepted as real; solutions explored (storage, hydrogen).
2019–2020 → Integrated into modelling; managed through system design; but no explicit recognition of “wind droughts.”
So the CCC shifted from downplaying intermittency (2012) to systematically incorporating it into models (by 2020). However, they never really addressed the rare but prolonged calm periods (“wind droughts”) before 2021 — which is where some critics argue their advice underestimated risk.
==========================
In conclusion
1/ There is no hard evidence that the CCC lied about wind droughts.
2/ There are grounds to consider that the CCC underestimates their frequency and impact (this concern is also levied at NESO and DESNZ)
Well, that's putting it mildly. Chris Stark as CCC CEO went to great lengths to try to poo-poo the Royal Society work that gave a much more honest appraisal of the risk, even if it grossly underestimated the costs of dealing with it precisely by sticking to the absurd cost assumptions criticised in today's article. NESO seem to think that pretty charts covering one week per season are adequate exploration of the issue. None of the CCC, NESO and DESNZ have done proper work in this area or commissioned it. Instead we get silly Goldilocks scenarios where the wind magically starts blowing again before storage runs out, and where vast amounts of "flexibility" a.k.a. powercuts are imposed on demand with no proper justification of feasibility.
I performed much the same analysis as the Royal Society a good couple of years before they did, and drew attention to my conclusions in written evidence to the BEIS Select Committee,
In 2025 NESO attempted to model wind droughts. They failed. An AI review of the report identified many project failures. Two key ones were:
1/ Failure to meet key objectives – The project set out to deliver robust statistical analyses of Dunkelflaute/wind droughts and their impact on system stress, but instead pivoted to a lighter “proof of concept” using pre-defined AWSFES scenarios. This left the original aims only partially addressed.
2/ Limited statistical robustness – Few events were tested, and the return period confidence was weak. This undermines the ability to quantify risk for planning or policy purposes.
NESO did not appear to do a literature search which would have identified recent work by Kittel et al (January 2025) which identified multiple wind droughts in the last 36 years using open-source software. NESO appears to have used its own software with very limited success. The original Kittle paper is rich in details, is was subsequently superseded by a much more streamlined policy paper. The original may be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ngb1oTp_Ye9L0z-fHt0k-ap-BFBSj9vB/view?usp=sharing
The NESO project closedown report can downloaded as a PDF from the documents tab in this link: https://smarter.energynetworks.org/projects/nia2_neso093
Yet they're happy to predict energy generation from windmills that suit their models - that don't come close to reality - aren't they?
The CCC has systematically underestimated the challenge of wind droughts and sought to cover it up when found out.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidturver/p/the-ccc-clams-up-goes-insane?r=nhgn1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Your report refers to the Big Freeze in 2010/11.
Kittel et al (January 2025) identified that winter 1996/7 was the worst that they found for wind droughts in Europe. Their analysis included the UK but I cannot identify whether this was the worst ever for the UK. The graphic on page 9 shows theoretical UK storage being fully depleted between mid-November and early February, a period of some 75 days
Kittel made some key observations relevant to CCC/NESO/UK
• It is necessary to analyse summer to summer to identify long period that span years (page 21)
• the maximum long-duration storage need in Europe, driven by the most extreme renewable drought in the winter of 1996/97, exceeds the next highest storage need found for the weather year 1984/85 by 42%. Market actors are unlikely to invest in such rarely utilized long-duration storage capacity without additional deployment incentives. (page 20)
• the selection of weather years has a notable impact on long-duration storage use in energy system models, which confirms previous research ………………………. However, due to computational limitations, many policy-relevant studies rely on only one or a limited set (page 20)
The original Kittel paper is rich in detail, it was subsequently superseded by a much more streamlined policy paper. The detailed paper original may be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ngb1oTp_Ye9L0z-fHt0k-ap-BFBSj9vB/view?usp=sharing
NESO’s job is to keep the light on at all time – when you look at their attempt in 2025 to model wind droughts (see my comment https://open.substack.com/pub/davidturver/p/ccc-dissembles-in-response-to-coutinho?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=155922383) you begin to wonder whether they are on top of their game when it comes to wind droughts
The annual minimum for storage in a solar/wind optimised system is usually around September. Total wind generation is optimally much higher than total solar to give a better fit to seasonal demand. Nominal capacities are similar, but wind averages a much higher capacity factor than solar. Winter generation tends to result in uneconomic to store surpluses as an offset to Dunkelflaute. Summer solar depends on short duration storage providing overnight coverage which gets a much better return than seasonal storage. Surpluses beyond that get curtailed.
Dr Capel Aris did a small pilot analysis over many years which makes dire reading for wind generation.
20 weeks in a year was at 20 per cent or less.
That research is available but I don’t expect the CCC even read it.
That is better but you are still far short of the
Why are you protecting serial liars?
In response to your post there have been a number of allegations made about the CCC advice about wind droughts but no one has actually stated the content of this CCC advice. In an attempt to resolve this impasse I have submitted an FOI to the CCC. I hope to have more information in a month
Good work, let's see what turns up!
I read the relevant parts of the "Methodology behind the CCC’s carbon budget advice for the UK, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, published in 2025" to look for numerical values of LCOE but there are none! However, I came across several references in the Methodology to the document DESNZ Electricity Generation Costs 2023 which quoted an LCOE of £43.17
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-generation-costs-2023
It contains Annex B: Example cost of levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) calculator:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64f19bbf9ee0f2000fb7bd53/Annex_B_-_Example_LCOE_calculator_correction_20230831.xlsx
The example uses a gross load factor of 65% and an availability of 95% to produce an LCOE of £43.17. I experimented by using a gross load factor of 40% with 100% availability which aligns with typical DUKES values for offshore load factor and the LCOE increased to £65.10
This demonstrates how sensitive the LCOE can be to load factor and a possible pointer to where the CCC is getting its very low LCOE values from.
Look at Figure 5.1 and Table 7.5.1 for levelised costs and also Table 4.1 for capex. You're right that LF also has an impact, as does cost of capital.
https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/The-Seventh-Carbon-Budget.pdf
I doubt he wrote the substantive part of the letter. If he did it shows a) he's incapable of simple maths b) Is not at all on top of his brief if he has any mathematical nouse at all.
Very true. I imagine a group of civil servants wrote and designed it to match the grand con and the fellow just put a small approved paragraph at the bottom and signed it.
Disgustingly, you don't collect these roles if you're not prepared to play the game and go along with the hoax. If he were honest he'd be out of a job. So would most of the green blob.
Lies are all they have left. That's why they invent all these comedically complicated faragoes to ensure the truth is hidden under layer upon layer of acronyms, systems and reams of stats that only fellows like Mr Turver can unravel.
How revolting. So Topping's description of himself as a mathematician ignores the adjective 'failed' which is so important in these times of bureaucratic clowns taking office and vomiting prevarication as a normal activity.
"Unrealistic" sums up the entire Net Zero edifice, whether that's by 2030, 35, 40, 50 and onwards. One could add, 'unrealisable', 'counter productive', 'ruinous'. However, that is of no concern to the CCC because 'realism' would cost them their well feathered sinecures.
Your last sentence is the most important, David!
When does optimism become misleading become dishonesty become blatant lying become fraud?
Do you think this fella actually believes his own figures?
They must know their models are wrong.
I told them months ago in an FOI request.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/7th_carbon_budget_cost_of_renewa#outgoing-1854988
They don't care. There's an agenda to force this chaos on western economies.
All this has nothing to do with the environment or energy generation. It is appears to simply be a weapon to immiserate and impoverish.
I have some questions to ask, from the perspective of someone who is not very knowledgeable on the industry but familiar with financial modelling. I like to look at figures, build a model and test the model with what if scenarios. In the discussion of capital costs you refer to a turbines capacity in calculating the capital cost per kW. How is that capacity determined? Is it the maximum output achievable when wind conditions are optimum? They certainly will never be optimal all the time so is the capacity rating scaled back to some average annual percentage utilisation. And then that scaling will be very locality dependent. Do the capital costs include all the costs involved to connect the turbine into the grid, including any grid upgrade, if required. Or is it assumed that someone else will pick up the grid upgrade costs. And what about decommissioning costs ate the end of the turbines life, or can we expect to see our countryside and North Sea scarred by decaying abandoned turbines in 25 or 50 years time. Has the government even thought about decommissioning commitments in the permissions that have been awarded? To make sensible assumptions about how capital costs translate to likely costs in our bills we need to have an idea off the operating life of a turbine.
What happens if we get an extended period of largely windless days. It doesn't happen often but it is possible. For example, In the winter of 1962-3 we had almost two months of blocking arctic high pressure and very little air movement. I remember it well, as I was 14 and my father was taken to hospital on 3rd January, the day the snows came, and came out of hospital on 26th March when we still had snow on the ground. Life was very difficult for the family those weeks without dad. Weeks on end of freezing temperatures, at times down to -15degC. Suppose we have a similar period in a few years time, when gas has been banned for direct space heating, and we are all relying on heat exchange units (which I understand are less efficient al very low temperatures). With most turbines idle (and solar panels probably covered in snow) how will our electricity demand be met?
All good questions. The capacity is the nominal nameplate capacity. For offshore wind a load factor around 38-42% is achieved in the real world.
Sometimes the costs include the cost of getting power to shore, sometimes not. That's something to watch for. The costs never include the increased spending to upgrade the transmission grid to get the power from Scotland to southern England.
Decommissioning costs are typically not included in LCOE calculations for wind.
The whole farce of 'climate change' (the marketing having changed regularly to dodge when reality hasn't matched the hoax) is, I believe; simply an economic weapon to enforce poverty and decline. It seems a desperate effort to control people into accepting rationing and a lower standard of living: fewer choices and higher costs all for some insane Left wing, socialist agenda. It certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with energy generation, rational economic future, let alone the environment.
Folk repeat the drivel the department for no energy excrete out such as it's 'home grown' 'clean'. Challenging such with the facts, that the things are made elsewhere and owned by foreign investors is often censored.
The very department title 'net zero and energy security' is a lie.
The blob will keep on lying. They lie habitually, reflexively to keep people ignorant of their malice. Until we can stop them, they'll keep on lying and wasting our money on this demented ideology.