Fintan Slyly Moves the Goalposts
National Grid ESO responds to DESNZ and will not properly answer the questions posed
A few weeks ago, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and his Head of Mission Control, Chris Stark wrote a public letter to Fintan Slye of the National Grid ESO asking for practical advice on how to deliver a clean power grid by 2030.
The letter asked Slye to set out a range of pathways to enable a decarbonised power system by 2030. For each pathway they asked for the forecast energy generation and demand mix and the underlying assumptions that need to be met for these to be deliverable. They also asked for the key requirements for the transmission network and interconnectors and for a high-level assessment of the costs, benefits, opportunities, challenges and risks as well as the key actions to be taken by Government, NESO, Ofgem and industry to enable delivery of the pathways.
Recently, Fintan Slye took to Twitter/X to announce his initial response. Strangely Slye’s letter is not addressed to Miliband or Stark, but takes the form of an open letter to industry.
The letter starts off with warm words announcing the formation of a “cross-cutting delivery unit” that will report back to Government by the end of Autumn 2024, less than three months away. They say their plan will be:
“A whole systems spatial view of what is required to deliver a clean, secure, operable electricity system by 2030. The plan will consider possible clean energy generation mixes and their associated network, market, and operability requirements, referred to as pathways.”
That sounds good as far as it goes. However, the letter then goes on to say that all pathways will “meet clean power in 2030 against a definition to be agreed with UK Government.” In other words, there is no agreed definition of what a zero-carbon grid by 2030 actually means. They do not know what the target is. It seems that Miliband and Labour have set the country on a journey without properly defining the destination. And the initial request from Miliband and Stark reveals they don’t know how to get there. It’s the blind leading the blind to an unknown destination.
Slye’s letter then states that ESO recognises that accelerating the decarbonisation of the electricity system presents a “significant opportunity.” To capture this opportunity, they will engage with “industry and those with wider expertise” through two stakeholder forums aimed at industry and societal delivery partners. Those societal delivery partners sound quite ominous – are they going to bring out the nudge unit to shame us all into compliance?
Even more worrying is what Slye’s letter misses out. He was asked to provide a high-level assessment of the costs, benefits, opportunities, challenges and risks of delivering a net zero grid by 2030. Slye’s letter makes no mention of costs, benefits or risks. He is only focused on the “opportunity.”
In other words, Fintan has slyly moved the goalposts. The work of NESO will not inform the Government or the public about the costs and risks of delivering the as yet undefined net zero grid by 2030. This is now the blind leading the blind to an unknown destination without knowing the price of the ticket. Fintan Slye is ducking his responsibility and we are going to be short-changed again.
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I see that OFCOM continue to omit the complaints about Rowlatt:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/about-ofcom/bulletins/broadcast-bulletins/2024/issue-506/issue-48-of-ofcoms-bulletin-for-complaints-about-bbc-online-material.pdf
To be honest and fair, from the GetGo, no one has stated what the Nett Zero National Grid would consist off- the talk has been of Wind and Solar as the Be All and End All, but given the intermittent nature and loss of productive power from Solar during the night, this was never going to happen. Drax has been talked about but faces charges for the destruction of forests not allocated for wood chip production, plus the sheer amount of CO2 produced to both harvest, chip, ship and transport to site has never been considered thus making a complete mockery of the claim that burning wood chips is Carbon Neutral. We will need a Gas/Coal/Oil/Nuclear backup system that will switch in at a moments notice- Fintan Slye of the National Grid ESO knows this but is engaging in obfuscation to force Miliband (MiniBrain to his friends), force him and his department to actually state what THEY want the grid to look like. The reason no costing’s were given is that he knows the figure is just over £1trillion, the timeframe of 2030 cannot be achieved, the Power Transmission cabling alone is a thirty year project (could be longer as the only three manufacturers of suitable cabling have committed order books till 2035, with more orders being placed), the infrastructure to build the network is not there, and the expertise is limited, so delays inevitable.
The question they are being asked is simple, given that the existing Energy infrastructure took almost 75years to build, can it be replaced in 5years and how much should Great British Energy put in its budget to cover it!, and rather than say “No this is ridiculous, the job should have started twenty years ago, there should have been a agreed plan that was totally and strictly non-political but a stated agreement by ALL political parties that regardless they would stick to the plan, the only changes being where improved technology became available- no cancelling bits just for the hell of it”. National Grid ESO know this is a typical Miliband trick and to their credit they have not fallen for it, passing the poisoned chalice back to Miliband so he is forced to “make a decision” which can then be costed and published. They know that the moment the public hear that Miliband wants to spend at 2024 costing’s, £1trillion, that the proverbial is going to hit the fan- and given that demand for the key infrastructure components will be high, and none are manufactured in the UK, and that one of the main components being High Grade Construction Steel, which we no longer manufacture, not only will there be supply chain issues but demand will force prices up- steel in high demand usually doubles within a three month period- the £1trillion will be nearer £2trillion by start date. Further issues will be planning, although MiniBrain has vowed to get over all challenges regardless as this is critical infrastructure, he will find that each and every HV Pylon will have an objection and hearing- 90,000 will be required.
Whilst you may not accept that Fintan Slye answered MiniBrain’s question, he has skilfully passed it back and demanded details of what Edward Miliband Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero of the United Kingdom actually wants, after all, he is the Secretary of State and therefore must have some deep knowledge of what his department is supposed to be doing.