Introduction

Almost everyday I receive an email from DESNZ that lets me know what they are up to. Most of the time it is pretty innocuous stuff about granting planning permission for some pylon or other or even updates to privacy policies. But yesterday’s email was more significant than most and indicates that Red Ed is still hurtling headlong towards energy oblivion with Net Zero and his barking mad Clean Power by 2030 plan.

Greenhouse Gas Removals (GGRs)

DESNZ have noticed that they cannot hope to end hydrocarbon consumption by 2050, so they now need to work out how they can remove carbon dioxide from the air. They have appointed Dr Alan Whitehead CBE to head a review into Greenhouse Gas Removals (GGR). Up until July 2024, Whitehead was Shadow Energy Security Minister but did not stand in the last General Election.

They want him to look at how large-scale bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) can assist the UK in meeting our net zero targets, out to 2050. They want him to look at the potential scale of emissions savings, the opportunities for GGR deployment at scale, the barriers to deployment, the costs of GGRs and how to move away from public investment and attract private investment.

The trouble is, as we have discussed before, biomass is not very energy dense and a lot of the embedded energy in the wood is wasted in the pulping, drying and transportation processes that get it to a power station. This means that biomass on its own has an extremely low energy return on energy invested (EROEI). However, the position gets even worse when power plants are converted to BECCS because it takes even more energy to capture the CO₂ and pump it underground for long term storage. The Royal Society of Chemistry produced a report that suggested BECCS using willow pellets from Louisiana in America would have an EROI of less than one. This means we get less useful energy out than it takes to run the overall process making BECCS a net energy sink. We already pay massive subsidies to companies like Drax to burn trees. Adding CCS to this process will be very costly and cannot be achieved without even more subsidy. The only way private capital could be attracted to such a scheme is if they are awarded guaranteed prices that will fleece us, the customer.

They also want Whitehead to look at magic machines to suck carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. DACCS is a very energy intensive process and so will be very expensive too. Both of these hare-brained schemes are crimes against thermodynamics. We have already entered energy austerity, with energy consumption falling and per capita energy consumption is set to fall by half from 2023 levels by 2050.

We cannot afford to squander more energy and our money on daft ideas like BECCS and DACCS.

Hydrogen to Power Projects

DESNZ are also seeking views on the potential for “innovative hydrogen to power projects to accelerate deployment readiness.” They seem to want to understand how to deliver hydrogen to power (H2P) plants by 2030 “ahead of large scale enabling hydrogen infrastructure”. They believe that successful roll out of dispatchable power technologies will be vital to achieve clean power by 2030 and to accelerate to net zero. But the NESO plan for 2030 contained very little hydrogen-fired generation. And I hate to break it to them, but no innovation in the world can get a hydrogen power plant working without any hydrogen.

The response pages acknowledge that H2P plants will need what they euphemistically term a “market intervention”. They are beavering away on a “Hydrogen to Power Business Model (H2PBM) to de-risk investment” and they are looking to enable H2P projects to participate in the Capacity Market as soon as is practicable. This is all code to say that very generous subsidies will be on offer to anyone who commits to build a hydrogen power plant. Of course, without much hydrogen being produced, it will just be paid to stand idle through the capacity market and not save any emissions at all.

They also say that these plants must run on 100% low-carbon hydrogen. Now this type of hydrogen can be produced in one of two ways. The first is green hydrogen, produced by electrolysis using electricity from wind or solar power plants. The first green hydrogen projects awarded contracts in HAR1 had a strike price of £175/MWh in 2012 money or about £244/MWh at 2024 prices. If we generously assume that a hydrogen-fired power plant can operate at 50% efficiency, then electricity from such a plant would cost ~£500/MWh, more than 6-times today’s day ahead electricity price of ~£80/MWh. No wonder they are offering generous subsidies.

The second method of producing low-carbon hydrogen is from reforming methane and capturing the carbon dioxide emissions, so-called blue hydrogen. Estimates of the efficiency of this process vary from about 60-67%. At best, electricity generated from blue hydrogen will be ~50% more expensive than just burning the gas for electricity. It is impossible to overstate the thermodynamic stupidity of converting methane to hydrogen and then burning the hydrogen to produce electricity.

Conclusions

Sadly, the Net Zero mind virus is still rampaging through the Energy Department. They are busy cooking up schemes to add even more cost to our energy system. Crimes against thermodynamics maybe hidden behind bluster for a while, but in the end the penalty will be paid in our energy bills.

This article (Government Seeks Advice on Crimes Against Thermodynamics) was created and published by David Turver and is republished here under “Fair Use”

See Related Article Below

How the Green Energy Transition Makes You Poorer

Crony capitalism at work

MATT RIDLEY

A leaked government analysis has found that Net Zero could crash the economy, reducing GDP by a massive 10% by 2030. Yet the spectacular thing about this analysis is that it expects this to happen not if Net Zero fails—but if it succeeds. In effect, it is saying that if the government really does force us to give up petrol cars, gas boilers, foreign holidays, and beef, then there would be perfectly workable things left idle, such as cars, boilers, planes, and cows. Idling—or stranding—your assets in this way is an expensive economic disaster.

Even more intriguing was the government’s economically illiterate response to the leak. A spokesman said: “Net zero is the economic opportunity of the twenty-first century, and will deliver good jobs, economic growth and energy security as part of our Plan for Change.” Do they really think that economic growth is the same thing as spending money? Because it isn’t.

Imagine the government saying that it is going to require the entire population to throw out all their socks and buy new ones by next Thursday. Under the logic it espouses for Net Zero, this would result in a tremendous burst of economic growth. Think of all the jobs created in the sock industry and the shops! They would be better off. Ah, but you, the consumer, would be poorer. You would have as many socks as before but less money. This is the broken window fallacy, explained by Frédéric Bastiat nearly 200 years ago: going around breaking windows makes work for glaziers but does not create growth.

Net Zero is a project to replace an existing set of technologies with another set of technologies: power stations with wind farms, petrol cars with electric cars, gas boilers with heat pumps, plane trips in the sun with caravan trips in the rain, cows with lentils. The output from these technologies is intended to be the same: electricity, transport, holidays, food.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that these new technologies and activities require exactly as much money to build and run as the old ones. What have you gained? Less than nothing because you have retired existing devices early, losing the latter half of their lives. It would be like replacing all the socks in your drawers long before they needed replacing but with identical socks. Does that make you richer? No, poorer.

If the new technologies are more efficient than the old ones, fine. LED light bulbs use about 90% less electricity than incandescent bulbs did. So yes, it does make sense to throw out your old bulbs before they expire, stranding those assets, to save electricity and money. Is the same true of a wind farm or a heat pump? No, they are demonstrably more expensive and less reliable at producing the same electricity than the devices they are replacing. They are worse, not better.

That’s why they need subsidies. We have spent £100 billion so far subsidising “green” energy in the past few decades, money we could have spent on something else: tax cuts, for example. So, the green energy transition has made us poorer, not richer. It has given us the most expensive electricity in the entire developed world.

It has made some people richer, for sure. Dale Vince, an eco-tycoon, has made a fortune out of building unreliable energy. So have lots of fat cats in the City of London, lots of big landowners in the Highlands of Scotland, and lots of manufacturers in China. I have lost count of the number of times wealthy people have told me I am wrong to criticise the unreliable energy industry because “my son Torquil’s fund has done rather well.” Net Zero crony capitalism is efficient at one thing: transferring money from poor people to rich people.

This government has forgotten that its job is not to champion the interests of producers, but consumers. So did the last government, though Kemi Badenoch’s speech on Tuesday showed a welcome return to thinking about consumers. Electricity is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end, an essential input allowing us to do the one and only thing that does, really does, represent growth—achieving more output with less input. Right now, the Net Zero transition is doing the very opposite.

This article (How the Green Energy Transition Makes You Poorer) was created and published by Matt Ridley and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Featured image: habr.com

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