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.

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.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/16/ed-miliband-doomed-net-zero-dream-labour/

This section of the article is particularly relevant:

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.”

 

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The whole article, which goes on to look at the lack of trained labour and the logistical problems of Miliband’s targets, is well worth a read. (Just switch off you Java-Script to get past the paywall!)