Climate summits – with delegates flying in on private jets to discuss reductions in carbon emissions – tend to be hotbeds of irony. But the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – also known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP – has elevated such lack of self-awareness to an art form.
Last year’s event was held in the United Arab Emirates, which holds the world’s seventh-largest reserve of natural gas. Next year’s event will be in Brazil, which recently joined Opec, the cartel of oil exporters.
Ilham Aliyev, the president of this year’s host nation Azerbaijan, opened proceedings in Baku by declaring that fossil fuels are “a gift from God”. The country’s deputy energy minister, who was also the conference’s chief executive, was secretly filmed promoting oil and gas deals on the sidelines.
The British contingent to COP, which included Sir Keir Starmer and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, inadvertently embraced the spirit of the event. The Prime Minister declared that the “single most important” way to hit emissions targets will be to generate more renewable energy.
But back at home, the UK was generating much less renewable energy than normal because the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing. Northern Europe was labouring though another period now known in energy circles by the German word Dunkelflaute, which roughly translates as “dark doldrums”.
Meanwhile, the Energy Secretary was repeating now-debunked claims about how his plan to deliver clean power by 2030 (five years earlier than the Tories’ plans) will result in cost savings for the average household, while supporters of the UK’s net zero ambitions and sceptics alike have been picking holes in the Government’s proposals.
Climate leader without followers
During a speech in Baku, Starmer said he wanted to restore the UK’s role as “a climate leader on the world stage”. But delegates from the US, China, India, Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico and the European Union were conspicuous by their absence.
An air of pessimism hung over the event in the wake of the re-election of Donald Trump, who pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement during his first presidency.
Can the UK be a leader if nobody follows? And what kind of example are we setting? “Britain is the only major economy to have halved emissions [from 1990 levels], but we have to recognise that we are only responsible for one per cent of emissions and around the world emissions are soaring,” says Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary.
“Keir’s approach is to push our targets ever further without being honest about the costs to the British people. But if living standards fall and jobs move abroad as a result, we may be world-leading but no other country will want to follow our lead.”
This is a concern shared by net zero sceptics. “Net zero has become an article of faith,” says Andrew Montford, director of Net Zero Watch. “As far as I can tell no one has done a proper cost-benefit analysis. I suspect that we’ll keep marching along the path we’re on until the pain gets so bad that everyone comes to their senses.”
In the “pro” camp, the Climate Change Committee, an independent, statutory body that advises the Government, has warned that the UK is “off track” for net zero. Some Greens worry that the UK won’t be able to meet its target because of a long-term failure to maintain or add to its fleet of nuclear power stations and the reluctance of politicians to encourage people to make the lifestyle changes they believe are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Many of these issues predate the current Government – it was the Conservative prime minister Theresa May who first announced the UK’s plan “to eradicate its net contribution to climate change by 2050”. But the issues are coming into sharper focus as Starmer and Miliband tighten up the UK’s commitments and the relevant target dates fast approach.
Unreliable weather and neighbours
Last week’s Dunkelflaute was not even the worst this year. Between February 26 and March 8 the capacity factor – the measure of how often turbines generate their maximum power – of the UK’s wind fleet failed to rise above 20 per cent. In fact, as the wind refused to blow, the fleet’s average over the 11 days was just 11 per cent – less than a quarter of what it achieved in the month before and after. It was the longest Dunkelflaute that Britain has experienced in the last decade.
Some six times in the past 30 years, such cold spells with little wind have affected large parts of Europe for a week or more, including areas in which most onshore and offshore wind projects are located, according to analysis by the International Energy Agency.
But there are worries that climate change means wind droughts are becoming frequent. Scientists working for the United Nations’s intergovernmental panel on climate change have forecast that average wind speeds in the UK are expected to drop by up to three per cent by 2050 and by 10 per cent by the end of the century.
Ofgem, the energy regulator, recently approved controversial plans for the building of new undersea interconnector cables that will link the UK to Dutch and Belgian windfarms and combine with existing interconnectors that will give the grid access to Norwegian hydro-electric stations and French nuclear power.
However, critics have pointed out that it is hard to square such reliance with claims of greater “energy security”. They worry what Norwegian and French politicians might do if the interconnectors expose their populations to energy price spikes caused by Dunkelflautes as Europe becomes evermore reliant on wind power.
The think-tank Agora Energiewende believes that, were countries to hit their net zero targets, the proportion of Europe’s electricity coming from renewable sources will rise from 44 per cent now to 96 per cent by 2050. Europe is also set to become more reliant on electricity as households are encouraged to switch from petrol to electric cars and from gas-fired boilers to electric heat pumps. At the moment, electricity meets just over 20 per cent of the continent’s energy demand but this could rise to 70 per cent by 2050.
“You hear people saying: ‘It’s always windy somewhere.’ But European wind speeds are highly correlated,” says Montford. “You frequently get weather systems that are large enough to cover everywhere from here to south of the Sahara.” Scientists and energy experts agree that managing periods of Dunkelflaute and wind drought will therefore require a stepchange in electricity storage.
Costly and untested electricity storage plans
The Royal Society conducted a study modelling solar and wind generation, which used 37 years of weather data, and found that wind droughts lasting days or even weeks would require the UK to develop long-duration electricity storage adding up to “some tens of [terawatt hours]”.
Its numbers, which are based on some fairly optimistic forecasts about what will happen to both costs and efficiencies over the next 25 years, suggest the UK will have to spend the equivalent of the original cost of HS2 on electricity storage each and every year in perpetuity.
The analysis concluded that the amount of storage required is around 1,000 times more than is currently provided by pumped hydro – where water is pumped up to a reservoir and then discharged when needed to drive a turbine – and “far more than could be provided cost-effectively by batteries”, according to the Royal Society.
This is why, according to one climate scientist, “hydrogen is the only game in town” for storing surplus electricity. Electricity from renewable sources can be used to extract hydrogen from water. The hydrogen is then stored and used to fuel a power station when the wind drops.
However, it’s currently pretty inefficient, with something like two-thirds of the electricity wasted during the process. Energy experts also expect much of the low-carbon hydrogen produced in the coming years to be snapped up by energy-intensive industries – such as fertiliser manufacture or steelmaking – which have precious few other options when it comes to cutting their emissions.
A lot now rests on making lithium batteries or hydrogen energy storage a lot more efficient very quickly. “We’re betting the economy on the hope that someone will come up with a viable storage solution,” says Montford. “It’s like jumping out of a plane and hoping someone will invent a parachute on the way down.”
Shortage of materials and engineers
Miliband has said that the UK will meet his 2030 target by doubling onshore wind, trebling solar and quadrupling off-shore wind. This will involve the rolling out of offshore wind farms at a pace “far exceeding previous records” and “prioritising pace over perfection”, according to a new report by the National Energy System Operator, the UK’s energy system operator.
The Sophia offshore wind farm, currently under construction on the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, will when operational comprise 100 252-metre tall turbines, covering 600 square kilometres and producing 1,400 megawatts of electricity. The UK currently produces around 15 gigawatts of operational offshore wind power. Quadrupling this capacity will therefore require the building of the equivalent of 30 Sophias in less than six years.
John Constable, director of the UK charity Renewable Energy Foundation, has estimated that each Sophia turbine – including the blades, tower, foundations and nadelle (the box containing the generator at the top of the tower) – weighs roughly 3,000 tonnes. That means the entire wind farm will account for about 300,000 tonnes of steel and industrial equipment (which is roughly four and a half times more than a Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier).
The amount needed to build out the necessary capacity of offshore wind to hit the Government’s target therefore equates to about nine million tonnes. Just securing sufficient material to make the turbines will be difficult. There’s also growing evidence that the larger turbines now being installed wear out faster than smaller turbines because the stresses on them are so much bigger.
In April, a “readiness study” commissioned by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) stated that Britain lacks the ships needed to build offshore wind turbines and even if that were solved, would be unable to connect them to the shore because it cannot produce enough high voltage cables. The UK was also incapable of supplying enough switchgear and transformers, as well as cables, for solar farms, the report warned.
But, as has been pointed out by Michael Kelly, the emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Cambridge, finding the people to make them could be harder still. He argues that it’s not clear that the UK could create the capacity to train all the electrical engineers it will need to build the wind farms and update the grid in time to meet its net zero targets, let alone actually train them.
‘Significant risk’ due to lack of nuclear
In a recent interview, Fintan Slye, the head of Britain’s grid operator Neso, admitted that the Government’s “clean power 2030” mission lacks a definition of “clean power”.
“So at the moment, the working definition that we’re using for this analysis is to reach 95 per cent clean power,” Slye said last month. “The remaining five per cent will come from unabated gas. That’s our definition.”
That would appear sensible. Analysis by the Climate Change Committee found that the already eye-watering cost of decarbonisation becomes extreme when you start getting into the last few percentage points towards 100 per cent clean power. But it means the UK will effectively be keeping and maintaining a fleet of gas-fired power plants “just in case”. The OBR’s most recent economic and fiscal outlook, which accompanies the Budget, forecast that subsidies to the gas-fired providers will have to quadruple.
And, of course, relying on gas will make it harder to hit net zero. This is where nuclear power should come in. From cradle to grave, it is the lowest carbon electricity source in existence. It also requires fewer materials and much less land than any other green option. Solar, for example, requires 17 times as much material and 46 times as much land to produce as much energy as nuclear.
This used to be a technology in which the UK led the world. In the 1990s, the country’s nuclear fleet supplied over a quarter of the country’s electricity capacity. But now the country only has five remaining nuclear power plants: Hartlepool in Durham, Heysham 1 and Heysham 2 in Lancashire, Torness in East Lothian and Sizewell B in Suffolk.
Four of these are slated for closure in the next five years, resulting in the UK losing five gigawatts of clean and reliable base load generation. Only Sizewell B is scheduled to stay open. The Climate Change Committee warned last year that the UK’s lack of new nuclear capacity poses a “significant risk” to its ability to hit its net zero goals.
The Hinkley Point C in Somerset is currently under construction. The latest estimate is that it will be open between 2029 and 2031 (fingers crossed). But the chances are that when Sizewell B shuts for maintenance in 2029, the UK will be nuclear free for the first time in over seven decades.
Miliband is reportedly reviewing plans to develop a large-scale nuclear power plant at the Wylfa site in North Wales. Meanwhile the deadlines for the UK’s Small Modular Reactor programme to develop so-called “mini-nukes” keep being missed.
The nuclear industry has privately started to question whether, having previously been quite cool to their technology, Miliband’s recent warm words about nuclear energy were genuine or mere lip service. They want to know whether his department prioritised nuclear in their conversations with the Treasury ahead of the upcoming spending review or whether the government’s own tight deadlines have led it to conclude there’s not enough time to build nukes.
“Ed Miliband’s obsession with a 2030 target is going to send electricity prices through the roof and he’s deprioritising technology that could make energy cheap which comes online after 2030, like nuclear and small modular reactors,” says Coutinho.
Resistance to lifestyle changes
In Baku, Starmer pledged to cut the UK’s carbon emissions by at least 81 per cent (compared to 1990 levels) by 2035 while also insisting that Brits won’t have to change anything about their lifestyles in order to hit a target that even Greenpeace described as “relatively ambitious”.
The target is based on recommendations in a report published in 2020 by the Climate Change Committee. That report said that 10 per cent of the reduction in emissions would have to come from “changes that reduce demand for carbon-intensive activity”. The report singled out a change in diets from meat and dairy products, reduction in travel (and slower growth in flights) and measures to reduce waste.
However, Starmer seemed to dismiss this part of the plan while still embracing the overall target: “I made a commitment during the election and shortly after the election that we’d be a government that trod lightly on people’s lives. I’m not now going to go around telling people how to live their lives.”
It’s not hard to see why he made this commitment. Ipsos polling conducted earlier this year found that, while a majority of Brits are in favour of most net zero policies, support is weakening. The proportion of the population that agrees with creating low traffic neighbourhoods, for example, is down seven percentage points in the last two years, and support for higher taxes on red meat and dairy products and electric vehicle subsidies have fallen by six percentage points.
A similar picture is painted by a recent report from the Tony Blair Institute based on YouGov polling. It found that support for net zero remains high across the UK and the EU, with 69 per cent of respondents expressing concern about climate change and 61 per cent supporting net zero targets. However, the survey also found that it isn’t the main priority of most people, many of whom are more concerned about the cost of living and health care.
“The public is concerned about climate, but it is a second-order priority,” says Tone Langengen, a senior climate and energy policy advisor at the Tony Blair Institute. “This impacts public willingness to make significant personal sacrifices as a result of climate policy, especially anything that erodes already declining incomes.”
The direction of travel in public opinion seems clear. The question is whether it will accelerate if the holes in the Government’s net zero plan become more glaringly obvious. “If you ask people emotive questions about climate change and net zero you get one set of answers but if you ask practical questions about the costs involved you get quite a different response,” says Montford.
U-Turns ahead?
Constable argues that all the problems with the UK’s net zero plans are functions of a more deep-seated issue: “The basic problem with net zero is physics. Wind and solar are high entropy and low ‘free energy’ sources of power. This means that they are hard to harness. It requires physically enormous structures. And those structures need massive capital investment to build. That means it is and always will be expensive.
“Indeed, the costs of net zero are so gigantic that they will inevitably result in a non-trivial hit to the standard of living in the UK. When people realise what is going on it will lead to a distressed policy correction, which could well mean a return to coal-fired power stations. If you are serious about climate change (I personally believe it makes sense for mankind to reduce carbon emissions), you should be concerned about these net zero targets.
“Some Greens intuit this. But they believe that humans have become greedy and just consume too much energy. That’s a morally normative point of view. But if you believe it, you should be prepared to make your case and persuade others. Don’t smuggle it in under the cover of net zero.”
Many environmentalists believe that the downside of not reducing emissions and allowing global warming to exceed 1.5 per cent above pre-industrial levels far outweighs the potential costs of tackling the problem. One interpretation of Miliband’s hugely ambitious net zero moon shot is that he is aiming for the stars in the hopes of clearing the trees.
The risk, however, is that he over-promises and under-delivers in spectacular fashion and this further erodes trust in both politicians and climate change policies. Could Miliband end up being his cause’s own worst enemy?
