Why Britain simply cannot phase out fossil fuels by 2035 - Bill Carmichael

I looked at it intermittently throughout the day, and saw how demand increased substantially during the evening as people returned from work and school, switching on heating and lighting, cooking meals and turning on computers, TVs and games consoles and charging phones. No surprise there.

By mid evening the UK was using 42.8 gigawatts (GW) of energy. For those of you, like me, unfamiliar with these terms, a GW is, in light bulb terms that you might be familiar with, equal to a billion watts.

Another way of looking at it is that one GW is enough to power around 750,000 homes.

What was astonishing about the figures was how little power from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, contributed to keeping our homes warm and the lights on.

On a good day, when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, renewable energy can supply around 40 per cent of the UK’s needs.

But on cold, still, dark evenings, such as we’ve experienced this week, that figure drops dramatically. And it is on precisely those types of freezing nights that we need energy the most.

For example, on this particular night, wind was providing just 2.48 GW of energy, or just 5.8 per cent of total needs, and hydro 0.88 GW or 2.1 per cent. So the total contribution from renewable energy was less than 8 per cent of demand.

Of course it was dark, so solar power was producing nothing. So to be scrupulously fair I looked at solar’s contribution earlier in the day, when the sun was shining. It peaked at 2.34 GW (5.7 per cent) of total production, in the middle of the day.

The contrast with the contribution of fossil fuels was striking. For example, gas produced 23.6 GW (55.3 per cent) of total needs, and coal 0.96 GW (2.2 per cent) for a combined total of 57.5 per cent.

To add to the picture, nuclear power provided 4.71 GW (11.2 per cent) and imports amounted to 5.89 GW (13 per cent).

Yet the policy of the British government is to “decarbonise” energy production by removing all fossil fuels by 2035. And if Labour wins the next general election, as currently seems likely, they have set an even earlier target of 2030.

Is this realistic? Is there the remotest chance that we will be able to replace over half of our energy supplies in a little over 11 years (or six years if Labour get in)? Not a snowball’s chance in hell.

Bear in mind that we rely on electricity more than we have ever done, and if we are to use heat pumps in our homes and switch to electric vehicles, the demand for electricity is likely to skyrocket.

Plus the fact that, because of the short sighted thinking of successive governments, we have failed to plan to increase clean, low carbon nuclear power, and many of the current reactors are reaching the end of their useful lives.

So renewables will not only have to replace coal and gas, but a lot of nuclear generated power too.

How are we to achieve these, frankly impractical, targets? There is lots of fanciful talk about storing power we create on sunny and windy days in lithium batteries, but this technology has not been tested at scale and the costs are unknown - and time is running out.

The blunt truth is that renewables by their nature are unreliable and intermittent. They are incredibly useful as an additional source of power, but with current technology they cannot provide the 24/7/365 base load that we need. Only coal, gas and nuclear can do that.

If 20 years ago we had invested heavily in nuclear power we just might be in a position to decarbonise energy production today.

But instead in 2010 the then Deputy Prime Minister, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, blocked nuclear because it wouldn’t come on stream until 2021 or 2022. We are paying a heavy price for such idiotic short-term thinking.

Both the government’s and Labour’s current targets are little more than pie in the sky.

And, mark my words, if we carry on down the current path come a cold December’s evening in 2035 we will be sitting shivering in the dark, thanks to the green lobby and foolish politicians.