The CCC gets its authority from higher echelons than the British people or our Government. That is why they don't really care a hoot about the quality of their work. They were set up after pressure from the Friends of the Earth and the globalist trend cooking for the last 50-60 years (starting with bankers like the Rockefellers, Maurice Strong, eugenicists and neo-Malthusians) with the unpublicsed intention to de-industrialise, cause poverty, general mayhem and create a world government to deal with it all, using tech, electronics, digitalisation and super control.
There is a parallel universe where the residents have departed from reality rails in several way; on the threat of warming, on the role of plant food in warming, on the difference it makes if Britain and Australia reduce our emissions, and the possibility of the transition to wind and solar.
We tend to get bogged down in the technical problems of keeping the grid up and controlling voltage and frequency.
We have to insist that the transition is completely out of the question due to wind droughts and lack of grid-scale storage. We should be talking about a strategy to get wind and solar off the grid and exit net zero.
The green fanatics of the Climate Change Committee have been caught out again on the wind supply issue because not enough people know about wind droughts even though Australian investigators clearly documented them over a decade ago. The Dunkelflautes are just wind droughts when the sun is out as well, everywhere in the world that is happens when the wind is low at night.
We need to talk simply and clearly about wind droughts to draw a comparison with conventional droughts. Prudent farmers will avoid areas with crippling droughts but the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply and now Britain and Germany are being ruined by the failure of the meteorologists to issue wind drought warnings and the neglect of due diligence by the RE planners.
What makes anyone think the government can estimate or execute any large scale project? Its record on software implementation is laughable and the HS2 project was originally estimated at £32bn for the full monty. The 2019 estimate would be £80bn at today's prices. Half of it is cancelled.
Thanks for this informative post. I think that he storage requirement problem is insurmountable so the failure to respond to FOI requests could be a sign that the CCC know understands the problem.
Here is what I think. Today’s electric system resource planners for a conventional system base the amount of capacity that they think will be needed based on decades of observations of the fallibility of power plants. The result is that they know the probability there will be a shortage of available capacity to meet load when the installed reserve system capacity margin is a fixed percentage of the expected load very well. In New York State the installed reserve margin to meet the accepted probability of a loss of load expectation of an outage no more than once in ten years reliability metric is around 20%.
A fundamental observation is that there is no expectation that the failure of conventional power plants will be correlated. We do not expect that many will fail at the same time. That in turn means that even if we decided to set the reliability metric based on a one in thirty-year probability that there would not be much of an increase in the installed reserve margin.
That all changes when the electric system transitions to one dependent upon wind and solar weather-dependent resources. We know that solar energy is zero and night and much lower in the winter. Similarly, we know that wind energy is much lower in a high-pressure system, that those systems are huge and cover all of Great Britain and much of western Europe at the same time, and, exacerbating the problem, that those conditions are associated with the hottest and coldest episodes with the greatest expected electric loads.
Your post shows that looking at one year is absurd. Not looking at the worst year on record is nearly as bad: “They used 1987 as a 1-in-20 year stress test, when they admit that 2010 was a 1-in-50 year event”. The insurmountable problem is that we know that if an even longer period of record was used there would very likely be an even worse event. Instead of the confidence in the current planning process that increasing the lookback period will not markedly change the resources needed for the worst case, relying on weather-dependent resources means that inevitably there will be a period of extreme weather that exceeds the planning criteria chosen resulting in a catastrophic blackout.
In addition to periods of low/no renewable generator output, renewable generators and storage systems also fail, as occurred recently at the Moss Landing battery storage facility in California. Undersea transmission lines also fail.
Spot on! The Royal Society report showed that the low wind years of their 37-year analysis period were 2009-2011. I remember that the winter of 2010 was freezing cold for weeks on end without a breath of wind due to a blocked anti-cyclone which covered the entire UK and most of neighbouring Europe. We have had a few winter Dunkelflautes in recent years but nothing near as bad as that one.
We currently have no long-term battery storage (and probably never will have), only short-term storage for hours at most to cover transient outages. A repeat of the 2010 conditions in our projected Net Zero grid would require massive rolling blackouts for weeks on end.
Depends on where medium-duration ends and long-duration begins; and, on how many total "dunkelflaute" days and how many successive "dunkelflaute" days the system must operate through. Also, the current long-duration storage approaches being considered have far lower round-trip efficiencies than batteries and require longer recharge cycles. Fortunately, overbuilding storage could self-correct as demand and operating experience grows.
Ultimately, it is a question of how close to the "bleeding edge" you are willing to live.
Amazing that CCC can’t publish the numbers that they’ve subtracted from each other to demonstrate that their balanced approach is the best solution. We need to understand how much this “saving” is of the whole system costs. If it’s 80%- then some inaccuracy in the capex estimates can be tolerated - but not to the level of £38MWHr vs AR7 price. If it’s under 10%, then there’s no justification for doing any of this as the reward is too small for the input.
And that I suspect is why they will say nothing - because their result is a very small difference between 2 very big numbers and thereby incredibly uncertain.
It’s the same game the zonal electricity pricing gang play - look how big this number could be - whilst not talking about the total price of electricity.
She seeks to absolve the CCC from all responsibility for the plans they put forward, claiming that their role is simply to rubber stamp the plans that emerge from NESO/DESNZ. NESO of course have told us that CP 2030 is feasible, if difficult. We will shortly see that the difficulties will make it infeasible. Bill Esterson MP, the Chair of the ESNZ Select Committee was foolish enough to welcome the 7th Carbon Budget:
"The Climate Change Committee’s 7th Carbon Budget makes clear the huge prize to be won from a keen focus on the clean energy transition. The question is not only about the increased likelihood of cheaper energy bills, hundreds and hundreds of pounds cheaper, as we progress towards the goal – it’s about avoiding massive hikes to bills from the next price shock inherent in being reliant on fossil fuels. No one can look at recent geo-political developments and imagine that further gas price shocks are not coming."
He is seriously deluded. There is still time to submit to the ESNZ Select Committee inquiry
If the government had full confidence in net nonsense zero we would all be fully aware of. But they don’t believe their own words therefore they obfuscate on an industrial scale. Clearly net zero is the latest cult .. but I’m not sure what their end game really is
I have made my own submission to ESNZ. They're picky about accepting evidence that hasn't already been published. Will publish my evidence once I know the status of my submission.
There are 3 separate calls for evidence running. One on nuclear, the one I linked on promoting net zero in the face of rising opposition, and a third on energy cost and the plans to transfer subsidy billing from electricity to gas etc. I hope to finalise a response to each of them by the deadline of 5p.m. on Tuesday.
I see the CCC suggested they would provide the information you requested re. the baseline etc. Did they commit to a date?
I share your scepticism wrt the comparative analysis of CapEx and OpEx they are all too easy to manipulate. I suspect when they say they have some information it means they have cherrypicked cost elements for the comparison. As you point out the only way of knowing is to see the full detail.
Astounded they can get away with what in effect amounts to hiding data from parliament.
Thank you David. Those involved in making things know that the process involves trial and error, and are confronted all the time with their own fallibility and limitations: the cover of my copy of 'To Engineer is Human' by Henry Petroski shows the collapse of (I believe) the Tacoma Narrows bridge. The response of the CCC to your enquiries typifies that of people who never made anything.
The gigantic brains of the Royal Society give us a sense of the scale of storage in a renewables-only system: 'They calculated that to run a renewables-only grid delivering 570TWh of demand we would need 123TWh of hydrogen storage or 68TWh electrical equivalent.' Assuming a yet-to-be-achieved electrolyser efficiency of 86% gives 143TWh electricity required for storage, so a total generating capacity of 713TWh, 20% of which is needed for storage.
By my reckoning, 123TWh of hydrogen is 3.7 million tonnes or (at 15 cubic metres per tonne), that's 55.5 million cubic metres of liquid hydrogen.
Disregarding entirely the hazards involved, this strikes me as a massive engineering project, the costs of which I suspect are barely known. All projects are subject to the "quality triangle" of quality (what you really want from the project), cost and time, pick any two. Time has been nailed in net-zero legislation, a reliable grid is a given, and cost, as you, David, have been consistently pointing out, is the variable that therefore has to give.
I may have made errors in my calculations, but then I'm not the CCC.
They also always forget that whatever storage is used it requires a lot of available energy when that energy again becomes available and can be spared for storage.
I assume that it'll need to be a priority and may, itself, cause blackouts. If they can't recharge then blackouts will follow quicker when the wind stops blowing.
Problem here is they are talking about so far in the future Milibrain and his cohort will be long gone from office so they can sign us upto whatever lunacy they want and nobody is going to be bothered. What we really need is Coutinho and Tyce taken this excellent analysis and use it in the HoC or at the DENZ select committee to keep undermining the foundations and then hopefully a wider group of MPs will start to wake up as well but its going to take time.
What we are seeing is a whole structure built to sustain itself off the back of taxpayers money that is completely unnecessary. The minute we stop with the Climate Change Act, CCC and the rest we save money. Same with hate speech laws, online safety, unelected quangos. We save billions.
Which is why it will be so hard to remove them without good leadership and swift decisions. The whole unelected advisory nonsense leads to grift on grift.
We don’t need any of it. But if your nose is in the trough then it’s essential.
I think there's a false assumption in your critique, i.e., that the CCC is proposing hydrogen storage as the sole means of meeting demand in a 1 in 20, or 1 in 50, year of low wind speeds. You don't mention that they only identify the need of between 3 to 9TWh of long-duration hydrogen storage. That's a tiny percentage of annual demand. It suggests to me that there are many other stratagems in play. We will have to be patient and wait for the supplementary report from AFRY, due to be published next month, to see how things stack up (or don't).
It seems they are content only to model typical seasonal weeks in a very non-transparent way. They are simply way off the pace in terms of design of a system that properly reflects the need for storage if you insist on relying on renewables, although they have toned down their assumptions about achieving 100% zero carbon to 95%.
I've not yet got into the peer reviewed papers that you cite, Ed, but your summary focuses almost entirely on battery storage. I don't know of anyone that seriously regards batteries as an option for long-duration storage. In this context the idea that the US would need 5,887,347 19.3MWh Tesla Megapacks is not to be taken literally. A 19.3MWh Megapack used for short to medium-term storage, associated for example with a solar Pv array, would charge and discharge on a daily basis, thus delivering electricity measured in TWh per year.
Michael, I focused on battery storage because that is what is available today. A system that relies for its success on unavailable technology is almost certainly doomed to failure. I don't "smoke" anything potent enough to believe in "Green Hydrogen". ;-)
I'm with you on that, Ed. That's why I'm hoping that the CCC's estimates are about right and the need for long-duration hydrogen storage is modest, perhaps small enough to be stored above ground, adjacent to the very few applications where it's needed. Storing natural gas is much less of a problem, and is an established technology. The Rough field was being used for just this purpose from 1985 until 2017, when the UK government chose not to cough up for essential maintenance. That facility held around 30billion cubic metres of natural gas, representing about 40TWh of energy storage capacity.
The problem with Rough style storage is that the rate of fill and drawdown is quite limited: it takes several months in each direction. Hence why talk is of salt caverns, but hydrogen ones would operate at lower maximum pressure because hydrogen is likely to seep out if the pressure is too high, meaning they'd have to be even bigger than triple the methane store equivalent to account for lower energy density. There is also a large overhead of cushion gas that remains in store at the lowest pressure. That is needed to prevent risk of collapse.
Stublach cavern storage can empty in a fortnight. An LNG ship discharges over 1TWh in under 24 hours - enough to feed about 20GWe of CCGT generation for a day.
Except the UK is not the US. We're at a higher latitude so solar produces the square root of sod all in Winter. So here, storage requirements are mostly a function of wind variability.
Exactly. Your 10% CF is mostly summer generation when it is not needed.
Most striking is data of MINIMUM generation. Although you’ve added an impressive 24GW of mostly wind in the past 7 years…the MINIMUM generation changed not a whit.
Showing there’s never a date when enough VRE is added that any firm generators can be retired.
And with Norway tiring of being your backup…it shall be interesting.
The U.K. desperately needs to add dispatchable capacity; blackouts are the alternative.
Speaking of which: U.K. Black Start procedures are entirely theoretical.
The CCC's estimate of long duration hydrogen storage is quite a bit lower than NESO in their FES report. And CCC assume only 38GW of low carbon dispatchable capacity.
Either way basing the storage requirement on a single year, and not even the worst year in the record is foolish.
It's true that NESO's estimate of long-duration hydrogen storage is higher (14TWh in the Electric Engagement pathway, and 19TWh in the Holistic Transition one), but they don't indicate any storage of natural gas. Given that both CCC and NESO recognise that some natural gas will still be needed in 2050, and given that its volumetric energy density is four times that of hydrogen, it makes a lot of sense to include natural gas storage. However, we should maintain a sense of proportion. We're considering long-duration hydrogen storage in the range of 3 to 19TWh in an anticipated 2050 annual energy economy of around 1,220TWh!
I'd be inclined to agree, except that there are a few applications (see the top rung of Michael Leibriech's ladder) where the the prospect for high value added justifies the cost. Everything else should be targeted for electrification. It's this scenario that results in the very modest storage levels of long-duration hydrogen storage indicated in the CCC and NESO estimates.
Even in their Electric Engagement pathway NESO only estimate nuclear's contribution by 2050 to be 12.4% of the UK's primary energy supply, which, although much higher than the 2.5% it was in 2023, is nowhere near meeting our needs. Admittedly, this is in the context of demand reducing by 28%, but it's inconceivable to accelerate a nuclear construction programme much beyond a resultant increase of 260% in just 25 years.
We can assume that if gas demand is to be made wholly intermittent by replacing all boilers and limiting consumption to occasional OCGT runs then the supply would come as (costly) LNG: the Norwegians are unlikely tolerate an intermittent supply contract and will instead sell to more appreciative markets such as Poland. So long as you have a core delivery network still intact the existing LNG capacity is probably sufficient providing you are prepared to pay a premium price to divert LNG vessels. There might also be some supply via the pipelines to Belgium and perhaps the Netherlands: we have previously used these to connect to Continental storage to boost supply to meet winter demand. Again, we could expect to pay a premium price as a result of shutting down the UKCS.
We would need a lot more gas storage if we still use gas in the household market and no longer have UKCS input.
By 2050 gas extraction from the UK continental shelf will have diminished to almost zero, not because the wells have become entirely depleted, but because continued extraction has become financially uncompetitive. Rather than be left with stranded assets, the companies involved are likely to be amenable to selling back their extraction licences to GB Energy at a bargain-basement prices. This could meet the modest need for natural gas storage in place.
Even the IEA don't regard nuclear as anything more than marginal, with capacity falling to 8% of total global generating capacity by 2050. That's with increasing demand outpacing the increase in nuclear power capacity. Much of that growth in global demand will be in developing countries. In the Uk, which is certainly not a developing country, overall demand is estimated to fall by around 28% by 2050 compared to present demand.
"Even the IEA" has been entirely captured by the green monster and is unable to see beyond the end of its nose. It is no longer a useful organisation, not that it ever really did much that was useful even ahen it was set up to try to handle the consequences of the Arab oil embargo.
Did you note that the CCC is also advocating the storage of natural gas? How much is not indicated. We'll have to wait until we see the report from AFLY.
Who is making money out of their reports results? Are there any connections to the committee? Destroying our economy by wrecking our energy market and infrastructure so someone makes £'s should be some form of treason. We should be building natural gas power stations and using North Sea gas while we deploy SMRs over the next 20 years. :/
Thank you for your post. See this reference: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/04/13/implication-of-assessment-of-extreme-renewable-resource-lulls/
The CCC report is a work of fiction. The numbers and charts are made up to give the end result that the authors wanted.
The CCC gets its authority from higher echelons than the British people or our Government. That is why they don't really care a hoot about the quality of their work. They were set up after pressure from the Friends of the Earth and the globalist trend cooking for the last 50-60 years (starting with bankers like the Rockefellers, Maurice Strong, eugenicists and neo-Malthusians) with the unpublicsed intention to de-industrialise, cause poverty, general mayhem and create a world government to deal with it all, using tech, electronics, digitalisation and super control.
There is a parallel universe where the residents have departed from reality rails in several way; on the threat of warming, on the role of plant food in warming, on the difference it makes if Britain and Australia reduce our emissions, and the possibility of the transition to wind and solar.
We tend to get bogged down in the technical problems of keeping the grid up and controlling voltage and frequency.
We have to insist that the transition is completely out of the question due to wind droughts and lack of grid-scale storage. We should be talking about a strategy to get wind and solar off the grid and exit net zero.
The green fanatics of the Climate Change Committee have been caught out again on the wind supply issue because not enough people know about wind droughts even though Australian investigators clearly documented them over a decade ago. The Dunkelflautes are just wind droughts when the sun is out as well, everywhere in the world that is happens when the wind is low at night.
We need to talk simply and clearly about wind droughts to draw a comparison with conventional droughts. Prudent farmers will avoid areas with crippling droughts but the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply and now Britain and Germany are being ruined by the failure of the meteorologists to issue wind drought warnings and the neglect of due diligence by the RE planners.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-late-discovery-of-wind-droughts
https://open.substack.com/pub/rafechampion/p/we-have-to-talk-about-wind-droughts
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/escaping-the-wind-drought-trap
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/wind-and-solar-the-energy-thieves
What makes anyone think the government can estimate or execute any large scale project? Its record on software implementation is laughable and the HS2 project was originally estimated at £32bn for the full monty. The 2019 estimate would be £80bn at today's prices. Half of it is cancelled.
Thanks for this informative post. I think that he storage requirement problem is insurmountable so the failure to respond to FOI requests could be a sign that the CCC know understands the problem.
Here is what I think. Today’s electric system resource planners for a conventional system base the amount of capacity that they think will be needed based on decades of observations of the fallibility of power plants. The result is that they know the probability there will be a shortage of available capacity to meet load when the installed reserve system capacity margin is a fixed percentage of the expected load very well. In New York State the installed reserve margin to meet the accepted probability of a loss of load expectation of an outage no more than once in ten years reliability metric is around 20%.
A fundamental observation is that there is no expectation that the failure of conventional power plants will be correlated. We do not expect that many will fail at the same time. That in turn means that even if we decided to set the reliability metric based on a one in thirty-year probability that there would not be much of an increase in the installed reserve margin.
That all changes when the electric system transitions to one dependent upon wind and solar weather-dependent resources. We know that solar energy is zero and night and much lower in the winter. Similarly, we know that wind energy is much lower in a high-pressure system, that those systems are huge and cover all of Great Britain and much of western Europe at the same time, and, exacerbating the problem, that those conditions are associated with the hottest and coldest episodes with the greatest expected electric loads.
Your post shows that looking at one year is absurd. Not looking at the worst year on record is nearly as bad: “They used 1987 as a 1-in-20 year stress test, when they admit that 2010 was a 1-in-50 year event”. The insurmountable problem is that we know that if an even longer period of record was used there would very likely be an even worse event. Instead of the confidence in the current planning process that increasing the lookback period will not markedly change the resources needed for the worst case, relying on weather-dependent resources means that inevitably there will be a period of extreme weather that exceeds the planning criteria chosen resulting in a catastrophic blackout.
They simply cannot admit that
In addition to periods of low/no renewable generator output, renewable generators and storage systems also fail, as occurred recently at the Moss Landing battery storage facility in California. Undersea transmission lines also fail.
Spot on! The Royal Society report showed that the low wind years of their 37-year analysis period were 2009-2011. I remember that the winter of 2010 was freezing cold for weeks on end without a breath of wind due to a blocked anti-cyclone which covered the entire UK and most of neighbouring Europe. We have had a few winter Dunkelflautes in recent years but nothing near as bad as that one.
Here’s one from December 2023 when coal-fired power (now fully retired) and CCGT saved the day: https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/cold-weather-in-britain-lays-bare. The UK recently recorded a period of 0% contribution from wind power.
We currently have no long-term battery storage (and probably never will have), only short-term storage for hours at most to cover transient outages. A repeat of the 2010 conditions in our projected Net Zero grid would require massive rolling blackouts for weeks on end.
Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
'I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, 'so I can't take more.'
'You mean you can't take LESS,' said the Hatter: 'it's very easy to take MORE than nothing.'(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 1865, Chapter 7)
We have dropped down the rabbit 🐇 hole. I keep thinking of the Cheshire Cats smile every time I look at Ed Millibrain.
David,
Two peer-reviewed studies conclude that a renewables plus storage grid requires storage equal to approximately 25% of annual generation.
https://edreid.substack.com/p/current-storage-deficit
Depends on where medium-duration ends and long-duration begins; and, on how many total "dunkelflaute" days and how many successive "dunkelflaute" days the system must operate through. Also, the current long-duration storage approaches being considered have far lower round-trip efficiencies than batteries and require longer recharge cycles. Fortunately, overbuilding storage could self-correct as demand and operating experience grows.
Ultimately, it is a question of how close to the "bleeding edge" you are willing to live.
Amazing that CCC can’t publish the numbers that they’ve subtracted from each other to demonstrate that their balanced approach is the best solution. We need to understand how much this “saving” is of the whole system costs. If it’s 80%- then some inaccuracy in the capex estimates can be tolerated - but not to the level of £38MWHr vs AR7 price. If it’s under 10%, then there’s no justification for doing any of this as the reward is too small for the input.
And that I suspect is why they will say nothing - because their result is a very small difference between 2 very big numbers and thereby incredibly uncertain.
It’s the same game the zonal electricity pricing gang play - look how big this number could be - whilst not talking about the total price of electricity.
It seems that Emma Pinchbeck is confused as to the role of the CCC that she now heads.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/29/uk-net-zero-tsar-i-understand-why-people-are-angry
She seeks to absolve the CCC from all responsibility for the plans they put forward, claiming that their role is simply to rubber stamp the plans that emerge from NESO/DESNZ. NESO of course have told us that CP 2030 is feasible, if difficult. We will shortly see that the difficulties will make it infeasible. Bill Esterson MP, the Chair of the ESNZ Select Committee was foolish enough to welcome the 7th Carbon Budget:
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/664/energy-security-and-net-zero-committee/news/205461/esnz-chair-bill-esterson-comments-on-uk-7th-carbon-budget/
"The Climate Change Committee’s 7th Carbon Budget makes clear the huge prize to be won from a keen focus on the clean energy transition. The question is not only about the increased likelihood of cheaper energy bills, hundreds and hundreds of pounds cheaper, as we progress towards the goal – it’s about avoiding massive hikes to bills from the next price shock inherent in being reliant on fossil fuels. No one can look at recent geo-political developments and imagine that further gas price shocks are not coming."
He is seriously deluded. There is still time to submit to the ESNZ Select Committee inquiry
https://committees.parliament.uk/call-for-evidence/3597/
The committee is now inviting evidence from individuals and organisations on any or all of the following questions:
Has the Government properly explained the potential benefits of the energy transition to the average citizen?
Is there a clear understanding of the costs of the energy transition to householders and businesses?
Is there a need for public campaigns to counter the anti net zero narrative?
How should the Government be more positively engaging the public with this goal?
Robin Guenier - I hope if you read this you are contributing one of your excellent explanations of the basic facts of net zero death.
If the government had full confidence in net nonsense zero we would all be fully aware of. But they don’t believe their own words therefore they obfuscate on an industrial scale. Clearly net zero is the latest cult .. but I’m not sure what their end game really is
Bring our green and pleasant land to its knees 🤔
I have made my own submission to ESNZ. They're picky about accepting evidence that hasn't already been published. Will publish my evidence once I know the status of my submission.
There are 3 separate calls for evidence running. One on nuclear, the one I linked on promoting net zero in the face of rising opposition, and a third on energy cost and the plans to transfer subsidy billing from electricity to gas etc. I hope to finalise a response to each of them by the deadline of 5p.m. on Tuesday.
Yes, I should have been clearer. I responded to the energy cost inquiry.
I see the CCC suggested they would provide the information you requested re. the baseline etc. Did they commit to a date?
I share your scepticism wrt the comparative analysis of CapEx and OpEx they are all too easy to manipulate. I suspect when they say they have some information it means they have cherrypicked cost elements for the comparison. As you point out the only way of knowing is to see the full detail.
Astounded they can get away with what in effect amounts to hiding data from parliament.
They just said "in due course." I challenged that in my request for an internal review.
Thank you David. Those involved in making things know that the process involves trial and error, and are confronted all the time with their own fallibility and limitations: the cover of my copy of 'To Engineer is Human' by Henry Petroski shows the collapse of (I believe) the Tacoma Narrows bridge. The response of the CCC to your enquiries typifies that of people who never made anything.
The gigantic brains of the Royal Society give us a sense of the scale of storage in a renewables-only system: 'They calculated that to run a renewables-only grid delivering 570TWh of demand we would need 123TWh of hydrogen storage or 68TWh electrical equivalent.' Assuming a yet-to-be-achieved electrolyser efficiency of 86% gives 143TWh electricity required for storage, so a total generating capacity of 713TWh, 20% of which is needed for storage.
By my reckoning, 123TWh of hydrogen is 3.7 million tonnes or (at 15 cubic metres per tonne), that's 55.5 million cubic metres of liquid hydrogen.
Disregarding entirely the hazards involved, this strikes me as a massive engineering project, the costs of which I suspect are barely known. All projects are subject to the "quality triangle" of quality (what you really want from the project), cost and time, pick any two. Time has been nailed in net-zero legislation, a reliable grid is a given, and cost, as you, David, have been consistently pointing out, is the variable that therefore has to give.
I may have made errors in my calculations, but then I'm not the CCC.
They also always forget that whatever storage is used it requires a lot of available energy when that energy again becomes available and can be spared for storage.
...and that the storage is useless until recharged. Recharging storage is not a "when we get around to it" priority.
I assume that it'll need to be a priority and may, itself, cause blackouts. If they can't recharge then blackouts will follow quicker when the wind stops blowing.
Problem here is they are talking about so far in the future Milibrain and his cohort will be long gone from office so they can sign us upto whatever lunacy they want and nobody is going to be bothered. What we really need is Coutinho and Tyce taken this excellent analysis and use it in the HoC or at the DENZ select committee to keep undermining the foundations and then hopefully a wider group of MPs will start to wake up as well but its going to take time.
What we are seeing is a whole structure built to sustain itself off the back of taxpayers money that is completely unnecessary. The minute we stop with the Climate Change Act, CCC and the rest we save money. Same with hate speech laws, online safety, unelected quangos. We save billions.
Which is why it will be so hard to remove them without good leadership and swift decisions. The whole unelected advisory nonsense leads to grift on grift.
We don’t need any of it. But if your nose is in the trough then it’s essential.
Growth growth is all we here from the govt so this is the time to act
I think there's a false assumption in your critique, i.e., that the CCC is proposing hydrogen storage as the sole means of meeting demand in a 1 in 20, or 1 in 50, year of low wind speeds. You don't mention that they only identify the need of between 3 to 9TWh of long-duration hydrogen storage. That's a tiny percentage of annual demand. It suggests to me that there are many other stratagems in play. We will have to be patient and wait for the supplementary report from AFRY, due to be published next month, to see how things stack up (or don't).
You can get a flavour of NESO's modelling if you have spreadsheet software
https://www.neso.energy/document/346781/download
It seems they are content only to model typical seasonal weeks in a very non-transparent way. They are simply way off the pace in terms of design of a system that properly reflects the need for storage if you insist on relying on renewables, although they have toned down their assumptions about achieving 100% zero carbon to 95%.
I've not yet got into the peer reviewed papers that you cite, Ed, but your summary focuses almost entirely on battery storage. I don't know of anyone that seriously regards batteries as an option for long-duration storage. In this context the idea that the US would need 5,887,347 19.3MWh Tesla Megapacks is not to be taken literally. A 19.3MWh Megapack used for short to medium-term storage, associated for example with a solar Pv array, would charge and discharge on a daily basis, thus delivering electricity measured in TWh per year.
Michael, I focused on battery storage because that is what is available today. A system that relies for its success on unavailable technology is almost certainly doomed to failure. I don't "smoke" anything potent enough to believe in "Green Hydrogen". ;-)
https://edreid.substack.com/p/the-great-green-hope
I'm with you on that, Ed. That's why I'm hoping that the CCC's estimates are about right and the need for long-duration hydrogen storage is modest, perhaps small enough to be stored above ground, adjacent to the very few applications where it's needed. Storing natural gas is much less of a problem, and is an established technology. The Rough field was being used for just this purpose from 1985 until 2017, when the UK government chose not to cough up for essential maintenance. That facility held around 30billion cubic metres of natural gas, representing about 40TWh of energy storage capacity.
The problem with Rough style storage is that the rate of fill and drawdown is quite limited: it takes several months in each direction. Hence why talk is of salt caverns, but hydrogen ones would operate at lower maximum pressure because hydrogen is likely to seep out if the pressure is too high, meaning they'd have to be even bigger than triple the methane store equivalent to account for lower energy density. There is also a large overhead of cushion gas that remains in store at the lowest pressure. That is needed to prevent risk of collapse.
Stublach cavern storage can empty in a fortnight. An LNG ship discharges over 1TWh in under 24 hours - enough to feed about 20GWe of CCGT generation for a day.
Except the UK is not the US. We're at a higher latitude so solar produces the square root of sod all in Winter. So here, storage requirements are mostly a function of wind variability.
Exactly. Your 10% CF is mostly summer generation when it is not needed.
Most striking is data of MINIMUM generation. Although you’ve added an impressive 24GW of mostly wind in the past 7 years…the MINIMUM generation changed not a whit.
Showing there’s never a date when enough VRE is added that any firm generators can be retired.
And with Norway tiring of being your backup…it shall be interesting.
The U.K. desperately needs to add dispatchable capacity; blackouts are the alternative.
Speaking of which: U.K. Black Start procedures are entirely theoretical.
Good times!
Yup. Covered that here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/to-infinity-and-beyond
The CCC's estimate of long duration hydrogen storage is quite a bit lower than NESO in their FES report. And CCC assume only 38GW of low carbon dispatchable capacity.
Either way basing the storage requirement on a single year, and not even the worst year in the record is foolish.
It's true that NESO's estimate of long-duration hydrogen storage is higher (14TWh in the Electric Engagement pathway, and 19TWh in the Holistic Transition one), but they don't indicate any storage of natural gas. Given that both CCC and NESO recognise that some natural gas will still be needed in 2050, and given that its volumetric energy density is four times that of hydrogen, it makes a lot of sense to include natural gas storage. However, we should maintain a sense of proportion. We're considering long-duration hydrogen storage in the range of 3 to 19TWh in an anticipated 2050 annual energy economy of around 1,220TWh!
I'd be inclined to agree, except that there are a few applications (see the top rung of Michael Leibriech's ladder) where the the prospect for high value added justifies the cost. Everything else should be targeted for electrification. It's this scenario that results in the very modest storage levels of long-duration hydrogen storage indicated in the CCC and NESO estimates.
Even in their Electric Engagement pathway NESO only estimate nuclear's contribution by 2050 to be 12.4% of the UK's primary energy supply, which, although much higher than the 2.5% it was in 2023, is nowhere near meeting our needs. Admittedly, this is in the context of demand reducing by 28%, but it's inconceivable to accelerate a nuclear construction programme much beyond a resultant increase of 260% in just 25 years.
We can assume that if gas demand is to be made wholly intermittent by replacing all boilers and limiting consumption to occasional OCGT runs then the supply would come as (costly) LNG: the Norwegians are unlikely tolerate an intermittent supply contract and will instead sell to more appreciative markets such as Poland. So long as you have a core delivery network still intact the existing LNG capacity is probably sufficient providing you are prepared to pay a premium price to divert LNG vessels. There might also be some supply via the pipelines to Belgium and perhaps the Netherlands: we have previously used these to connect to Continental storage to boost supply to meet winter demand. Again, we could expect to pay a premium price as a result of shutting down the UKCS.
We would need a lot more gas storage if we still use gas in the household market and no longer have UKCS input.
By 2050 gas extraction from the UK continental shelf will have diminished to almost zero, not because the wells have become entirely depleted, but because continued extraction has become financially uncompetitive. Rather than be left with stranded assets, the companies involved are likely to be amenable to selling back their extraction licences to GB Energy at a bargain-basement prices. This could meet the modest need for natural gas storage in place.
Miliband is determined to halt it by 2030, never mind 2050.
There will be no long-duration hydrogen storage. There’s almost 130 outfits on a hydrogen death watch, after the dozens already bankrupt.
And at hydrogen leakage rates, it’d be all gone anyway.
Without a mostly nuclear grid, NetZero is a Dead Man Walking.
And having no effect, whatsoever, on global CO2 levels.
Even the IEA don't regard nuclear as anything more than marginal, with capacity falling to 8% of total global generating capacity by 2050. That's with increasing demand outpacing the increase in nuclear power capacity. Much of that growth in global demand will be in developing countries. In the Uk, which is certainly not a developing country, overall demand is estimated to fall by around 28% by 2050 compared to present demand.
Nuclear is the only viable grid-scale zero-carbon solution.
Period
"Even the IEA" has been entirely captured by the green monster and is unable to see beyond the end of its nose. It is no longer a useful organisation, not that it ever really did much that was useful even ahen it was set up to try to handle the consequences of the Arab oil embargo.
Did you note that the CCC is also advocating the storage of natural gas? How much is not indicated. We'll have to wait until we see the report from AFLY.
If any of the U.K.’sc NetZero plans were viable, they would not have the need to constantly obfuscate information, lie about costs, and so forth.
No matter how much VRE is added, they’ll still be reliant on power imports; capacity factors often approaching zero guarantee that.
Who is making money out of their reports results? Are there any connections to the committee? Destroying our economy by wrecking our energy market and infrastructure so someone makes £'s should be some form of treason. We should be building natural gas power stations and using North Sea gas while we deploy SMRs over the next 20 years. :/
Read this and weep. Riddled with conflicts.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/disband-the-climate-change-committee?utm_source=publication-search
OMG, CCC needs abolishing immediately and these people need to be punished.