Three weeks into the new Labour government and it is already becoming clear where some of its weaknesses lie – none more so than Ed Miliband’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid, save consumers money and boost the economy with many thousands of ‘well-paid green jobs’. Today the Royal Academy of Engineering weighs in with its own assessment of Miliband’s chances. Its verdict? That even if the government wants to decarbonise the grid, Britain is going to have to invest in new gas plants – and ‘unabated’ ones (i.e. not fitted with carbon capture and storage CCS technology) at that.
Even in an optimistic scenario, the Academy thinks that in 2030 we will still need gas plants to be operating a quarter of the time. In order to fully decarbonise the grid we would need to invest in long-term energy storage, most likely using hydrogen stored in sub-sea caverns. But that is certainly not going to happen over the next six years, given that the technology to generate and store green hydrogen isn’t yet operational on a commercial scale anywhere.
The lack of viable and affordable energy storage is not likely to be the only problem standing in Miliband’s way. The grid itself needs a huge overhaul to cope with the different generation patterns of renewable energy. As the Academy puts it:
The value from energy generation comes from being able to use it – there are few benefits in rushing to build new generation without considering how and when it can be connected to the grid in a stable and resilient way.
Trouble is, there is already a queue of 700 gigawatts-worth of renewable energy waiting to be connected to the grid. Moreover, to build new transmission lines in Britain has in the past taken typically 14 years. Even if we were to emulate Sweden, where an acceleration in the planning system has brought it the build time down to between five and six years, we would still be struggling to reconfigure the grid by the end of this decade.
In other words, Miliband isn’t going to be hitting his target. But we might excuse him that if he managed to bring down bills by switching from gas to renewables. What chance of success there? The Academy doesn’t weigh in on that prospect, merely saying that it is impossible to predict gas prices many years ahead. Nor is it possible to predict the prices of the metals required to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels. Nor future interest rates, which are big drivers of the cost of renewable energy.
There is one guide to the cost of a renewables-heavy electricity grid, though. Denmark already generates 57 per cent of its electricity from wind, twice as much as Britain. But it also happens to have the highest domestic electricity prices in the world, at the equivalent of 42 pence per kilowatt-hour in 2022, compared with 30.7 pence in Britain.
What about the promise of green jobs? Forget it. Proponents of net zero like to describe it as a ‘race’, but the only race Britain is winning is the one to set legally binding targets to reduce emissions. The race that China, the US and others are more concerned about is the one to dominate the market in manufacturing wind turbines, solar panels and other kit which will be needed to decarbonise the grid. There are green jobs aplenty, but most are in China, which manufactures, for example, 80 percent of the world’s solar panels.
What chance Britain suddenly finding some way of catching up? Miliband has promised us a green revolution without, it seems, much idea of how to make it happen. As the Royal Academy of Engineering points out, the UK is producing just 3,500 graduates a year in electric and electronic engineering – and the number has halved since 2006.
Watch Lionel Shriver discuss Ed Miliband on SpectatorTV:
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