In October 2008, Parliament passed the Climate Change Act requiring the Government to ensure that by 2050 ‘the net UK carbon account’ was reduced to a level at least 80% lower than that of 1990; ‘carbon account’ refers to CO2 and ‘other targeted greenhouse gas emissions’. Only five MPs voted against it. Then in 2019, by secondary legislation and without serious debate, Parliament increased the 80% to 100%i, creating the Net Zero policy (i.e. any remaining emissions must be offset by equivalent removals from the atmosphere).
Unfortunately, it’s a policy that’s unachievable, potentially disastrous and in any case pointless. And that’s true whether or not humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to increased global temperatures.
1. It’s unachievable.
A modern, advanced economy depends on fossil fuels; something that’s unlikely to change globally until well after 2050.ii Examples fall into two categories: (i) vehicles and machines such as those used in agriculture, mining and quarrying, mineral processing, building, the transportation of heavy goods, commercial shipping, commercial aviation, the military and emergency services and (ii) products such as nitrogen fertilisers, cement and concrete, primary steel, plastics, insecticides, pharmaceuticals, anaesthetics, lubricants, solvents, paints, adhesives, insulation, tyres and asphalt. All the above require either the combustion of fossil fuels or are made from oil derivatives: easily deployable, commercially viable alternatives have yet to be developed.iii
Wind is our most effective source of renewable electricity – because of our latitude solar makes only a small contribution. Nonetheless wind has significant problems: (i) the substantial costs of subsidising, building, operating and maintaining the turbines needed for Net Zero – all exacerbated by high interest rates; (ii) the complex engineering and cost challenges of establishing, as required for renewables, an expanded, stable and reliable high voltage grid by 2030 as planned by the Government; (iii) the vast scale of what’s involved (a multitude of enormous wind turbines, immense amounts of space iv and large quantities of increasingly unavailable and expensive raw materials and components v); and (iv) the intermittency of renewable energy (see 2 below).vi This means that the UK may be unable to generate sufficient electricity for current needs by 2030 let alone for the mandated EVs and heat pumps and for the energy requirements of industry and the huge new data centres being developed to support for example the Government’s plans for the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI).vii
In any case, we don’t have enough skilled technical managers, electrical, heating and other engineers, electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics and other skilled tradespeople required to do the multitude of tasks essential to achieve Net Zero – a problem exacerbated by the Government’s plans for massively increased house building.viii
2. It would be socially and economically disastrous.
The Government aims for 95% renewable electricity by 2030 but has not yet published a fully costed engineering plan for the provision of comprehensive grid-scale back-up when there’s little or no wind or sun; a problem that’s complicated by the likely retirement of elderly nuclear and fossil fuel power plants. The Government has indicated that back-up may be provided by new gas-fired power plants ix and possibly by ‘green’ hydrogen. But it has yet to publish any detail about its plans for either. The former is obviously not a ‘clean’ solution and it seems the Government’s answer is to fit the power plants with carbon capture and underground storage (CCS) systems. But both green hydrogen and CCS are very expensive, controversial and commercially unproven at scale.x This issue is desperately important: without full back-up, electricity blackouts would be inevitable, potentially ruining many businesses and, as happened in Spain on 28th April, causing dreadful problems for millions of people – possibly including serious health consequences threatening everyone and in particular the poor and vulnerable.xi
Net Zero’s major problem however is its overall cost and the impact of that on the economy. Because there’s no comprehensive plan for the project’s delivery, it’s impossible to produce an accurate estimate of overall cost; but, with several trillion pounds a likely estimate, it could well be unaffordable.xii The borrowing and taxes required for costs at this scale would put a huge burden on millions of households and businesses and, particularly in view of the economy’s many current problemsxiii, could further jeopardise Britain’s vulnerable international credit standing and threaten its economic viability.
But Net Zero is already contributing to a serious economic problem: essentially because of the costs of renewables (e.g. subsidies and back-up to cope with intermittency), the UK has the highest industrial and amongst the highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world.xiv The additional costs referred to elsewhere in this essay – for example the costs of establishing a non-fossil grid and of fitting CCS systems to gas-fired power plants used as back-up – can only make this worse. And high energy costs are incompatible with the Government’s principal mission of increased economic growth.
Continuing to pursue Net Zero would have two other dire consequences:
(i) Our already dangerous reliance on other countries would worsen. For example, the closure of North Sea oil and gas means that the UK, already at risk from the potential sabotage of or attack on offshore wind turbines, is increasingly dependent on similarly vulnerable undersea cablesxv and on uncertain imports of natural gas. Moreover, our current damaging dependence on China is being exacerbated by its effective control of the supply of key materials, such as lithium, cobalt, aluminium, processed graphite, nickel, copper and so-called rare earths, without which renewables cannot be manufactured.xvi All this is putting our energy and overall national security at most serious risk.
(ii) The vast mining and mineral processing operations required for renewables are already causing appalling environmental damage and dreadful human suffering throughout the world, affecting in particular fragile, unspoilt ecosystems and many of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.xvii The continued pursuit of Net Zero would make all this far worse.
3. In any case it’s pointless.
For two reasons:
(i) It’s absurd to regard the closure of greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting activities here and their ‘export’ mainly to South East Asia (especially China), to plants commonly with poor environmental regulation and powered by coal-fired electricity – thereby increasing global emissions – as a positive step towards Net Zero. Yet, because of efforts to ‘decarbonise’ the UK, that’s what’s happening: it’s why our chemical and fertiliser industries face extinctionxviii and why the closure of our remaining blast furnaces would end our ability to produce commercially viable primary steel (see endnote 3). These concerns apply also to most of the machines and other products listed in the first paragraph of item 1 above.xix It means that Britain, instead of manufacturing or extracting key products and materials itself, is increasingly importing them in oil-powered ships from around the world. A related absurdity is our importing vast amounts of wood for the Drax power plant – a fuel that emits more carbon dioxide than coal.
(ii) The USAxx plus most major non-Western countries – together the source of over 80% of global GHG emissions and home to about 85% of humanity – don’t regard emission reduction as a priority and, either exempt (by international agreement) from or ignoring any obligation to reduce their emissions, are focused instead on economic and social development, poverty eradication and energy security.xxi As a result, global emissions are increasing (by 62% since 1990) and are set to continue to increase for the foreseeable future. As the UK is the source of only 0.7% of global emissions any further emission reduction it makes (even to zero) would make no perceptible difference to the global position.xxii
In other words, Net Zero means the UK is legally obliged to pursue an unachievable, potentially disastrous and pointless policy – a policy that could result in Britain’s economic destruction.
Robin GuenierApril 2025
Guenier is a retired, writer, speaker and business consultant. He has a law degree from Oxford, has qualified as a barrister and for twenty years was chief executive of various high-tech companies, including the Central Computing and Telecommunications Agency reporting to the UK Cabinet Office. A Freeman of the City of London, he was member of the Court of the IT Livery Company, Executive Director of Taskforce 2000, founder chair of the medical online research company MedixGlobal and a regular contributor to TV and radio.
End notes:
i http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/27/part/1/crossheading/the-target-for-2050
ii See Vaclav Smil’s important book, How the World Really Works: http://tiny.cc/xli9001
iii Regarding steel for example see the penultimate paragraph of this article and: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-blast-furnace-800-years-of-technology.
iv See Andrews & Jelley, “Energy Science”, 3rd ed., Oxford, page 16: http://tiny.cc/4jhezz
vi For a view of wind power’s many problems, see this: https://watt-logic.com/2023/06/14/wind-farm-costs/. This is also relevant: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/debunking-cheap-renewables-myth
vii https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/14/keir-starmer-ai-labour-green-energy-promise
viii A detailed Government report: http://tiny.cc/bgg5001 See also pages 10 and 11 of the Royal Academy of Engineering report (Note 6 below). Also see: http://tiny.cc/0mm9001
ix See this report by the Royal Academy of Engineering: http://tiny.cc/qlm9001 (Go to section 2.4.3 on page 22.) This interesting report contains a lot of valuable information.
x These reports on CCS are useful: http://tiny.cc/emi9001 and http://tiny.cc/1lm9001 Re hydrogen see this: https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-2-14-when-you-crunch-the-numbers-green-hydrogen-is-a-non-starter.
xi This article shows how more renewables could cause blackouts: http://tiny.cc/lnhezz
xii The National Grid (now the National Energy System Operator (NESO)) has said net zero will cost £3 trillion: https://www.current-news.co.uk/reaching-net-zero-to-cost-3bn-says-national-grid-eso/. And in this presentation Michael Kelly, Emeritus Professor of Technology at Cambridge, shows how the cost would amount to several trillion pounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkImqOxMqvU
xiii An interesting summary here: http://tiny.cc/nli9001
xiv For international price comparisons go to p. 22 here: http://tiny.cc/xan6001 Note that the UK’s industrial electricity prices are well above those of international competition – and that’s not because of gas prices which are about average (p. 23) and are in any case applicable to the competition. Note also how gas prices have fallen recently here: http://tiny.cc/gouf001
xv For examples of vulnerability concerns see these: http://tiny.cc/9ruf001 and http://tiny.cc/xau9001 Also this essay (‘Defence and the retreat from net zero’) by Dieter Helm (Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford) is relevant re vulnerability and many of the other issues referred to in this essay: http://tiny.cc/dtyf001
xvi http://tiny.cc/6nm9001 and https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/dependency-china-critical-minerals-dangerous
xvii See http://tiny.cc/gtazzz and http://tiny.cc/unx8001. And harrowing evidence is found in Siddharth Kara’s book Cobalt Red – about the horrors of cobalt mining in the Congo: http://tiny.cc/nmm9001. And for a more detailed view of minerals’ environmental and economic costs: http://tiny.cc/klz9001.
xviii As explained here: http://tiny.cc/chg5001
xix A current example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70zxjldqnxo
xx Note: Trump’s abandoning plans for renewables is not really such a huge change for the US as, despite his climate policies, the oil and gas industries flourished under Biden: http://tiny.cc/2ww1001
xxi This essay shows how developing countries have taken control of climate negotiations: https://ipccreport.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/the-west-vs-the-rest-2.1.1.pdf (Nothing that’s happened since 2020 changes the conclusion: for example see the ‘Dubai Stocktake’ agreed at COP28 in 2023 of which item 38 unambiguously confirms developing countries’ exemption from any emission reduction obligation.)
xxii This comprehensive analysis, based on an EU Commission database and updated annually, provides detailed information by country re global greenhouse gas (GHG) and CO2 emissions: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2024?vis=ghgtot#emissions_table
Climate Scepticism 
“Energy demands from AI datacentres to quadruple by 2030, says report
The IEA forecast indicates a sharp rise in the requirements of AI, but said threat to the climate was ‘overstated’”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/10/energy-demands-from-ai-datacentres-to-quadruple-by-2030-says-report
“threat to the climate was ‘overstated“….That must be a first!
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A tenth update! I’ve made several minor amendments to the text and tidied up and, I hope, improved the endnotes. I’ve made two major changes: to Items 2 (i) and 3 (i). The first of these was partly prompted by John R’s article ‘Offshore Wind Vulnerabilities‘ – thanks John; I believe the fact that the UK is becoming increasingly and dangerously vulnerable because of Net Zero is often overlooked and should be emphasised. The second change – to an extent related to the first – is designed to stress the absurdity of our pretending to be reducing emissions when what’s really happening is that we’re increasing them by ‘exporting’ them to countries in SE Asia and especially to China.
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The Government aims for 95% renewable electricity by 2030 but has not yet published a fully costed engineering plan for the provision of comprehensive grid-scale back-up when there’s little or no wind or sun; a problem that’s complicated by the likely retirement of elderly nuclear and fossil fuel power plants.
It’s no surprise that there isn’t a plan, since there’s no known technology capable of storing enough energy to keep the UK grid (currently ~33GW, likely to be ~50GW once we’ve all converted to EVs and heat pumps*) supplied during two weeks of dunkelflaute (we’ve just experienced two months of very limited output from solar and wind over much of Western Europe). If Net Zero is pursued, it isn’t just rolling blackouts that we need to worry about, it’s a complete collapse of the grid, requiring a ‘black restart’ which could mean more remote areas of the UK being without power for many days, most likely during winter.
* currently scheduled for the 12th of Never!
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Chris, the Government’s plan seems to be to maintain a substantial fleet of gas-fired power plants – supported by CCS – that will be able to come to the rescue when the wind drops. Sounds mad and ludicrously expensive to me – but what do I know?
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Excellent speech by Lord Offord on the unaffordability of Net Zero:
Unfortunately the link refuses to post. It can be found on the NZW “Samizdat” bulletin of this date.
The speech could have been scripted by Robin, bar a few minor inaccuracies, based on the points made in this thread.
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Thanks Mike. This might take readers to it:
https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/3c07f2a0-86ba-4d1f-953b-f038ed808087?in=15:57:38
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That old chestnut of AI data centres:
“OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that?
Practical matters like being 1 of most expensive energy regions in Europe focuses minds at AI Energy Council meeting”
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/10/uk_ai_energy_council_meets/
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A neat interview summarising the case against net zero fairly pithily:
“‘If we stopped using fossil fuels today, billions would die’
Bjorn Lomborg on Net Zero, nuclear energy and why polar bears aren’t going extinct.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/14/if-we-stopped-using-fossil-fuels-today-billions-would-die/
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Interesting article in the Guardian this morning. It tells us that:
Rightwing media falsely blame Ed Miliband for UK steel crisis, experts say
Net zero and clean energy can actually help save the steel industry, experts point out
An extract:
Yes it’s all the fault of those fluctuating gas prices – especially as they only really affect to Britain.
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I’ve just amended Item 3 (i) of the header article. I’ve done that so as to reflect the realities (dismissed by the Guardian – see above) exposed by the Scunthorpe debacle. What a mess the net zero cult has wrought: we have the developed world’s highest industrial energy prices and, despite abundant reliable domestic fuel, we’re not allowed to make use of it and, as a result, have to import it at great expense. And soon perhaps we’ll be the only ‘developed’ country unable to manufacture that staple of an industrial economy – primary steel.
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Aris Roussinos at UnHerd.
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Jit: the entire Net Zero malarky is beset with examples of madness.
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Robin, I agree that it is often madness when viewed from the viewpoint of the public good. However, it is more like a cunning plan worthy of Baldrick when viewed from the standpoint of those Net Zero zealots who, while “saving the world”, are shovelling money year after year from very much poorer people to very much richer people. There are, it seems yet again, none so blind as those who will not see. Regards, John C.
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“Middle class could face higher energy bills than poor to fund net zero
Ofgem considers using income to determine bills to ‘allocate costs more progressively’”
Don’t worry guys. The costs are trivial. Net Zero is the growth opportunity of the 21st century. We’re going to reduce your bills by £300.
Telegraph link.
It will never happen, but for Ofgem’s chief to even float it means that he should be handed his cards today.
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Matthew Lynn, also in the Telegraph, is on the same page as me:
Unfortunately, Lynn also advocates variable energy pricing to ration its use, because it’s the way economists say you should allocate scarce resources.
I’ve got a different idea: let’s not have scarce resources. Let’s have plenty of energy whenever we need it. Like a modern civilisation should.
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A splendid observation by Andrew Neil about an absurd comment from Mad One: https://x.com/afneil/status/1912056009704558936
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Speaking of Ed, is he rattled?
“Miliband accuses net zero opponents of ‘nonsense and lies'”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czjn0pn830ko
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has said the government will “double down” on its environmental agenda and accused opponents of the move to net zero of “making up nonsense and lies”.
Political opponents in the Conservatives and Reform UK – and some trade unions – have argued that his agenda is putting jobs in traditional industries at risk and have urged a change of course….
...On his opponents, he said there are “siren voices that want to knock us off course” and added “they will also make up any old nonsense and lies to pursue their ideological agenda”….
The sense of unreality is quite spectacular. I suggest he should take a long hard look in the mirror.
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Here’s the original piece if you wish to read how reality can, in the eyes of some people, be an inversion of the truth:
“Tories and Reform use the steel crisis to knock clean energy. They’re wrong: it will secure all our futures
The argument for a green power transition is not just one of climate breakdown but social justice and national security”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2025/apr/19/tories-reform-clean-energy-steel-crisis
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Yes Mark I’m sure he’s rattled. Here are some extracts from that Observer piece:
I suspect he may be panicking not just because of ‘siren voices’ in the Tory party and Reform but because of growing pressure for a softening of the Net Zero policy from some of his Cabinet colleagues – probably including Starmer.
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Miliband’s glorious essay deserves a snark post of its own in response, I think.
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Unfortunately Jit a such a post could only be regarded as a response to the Mad One if it were published somewhere where he (or his advisers) would be likely to see it. And I’m afraid Cliscep doesn’t come into that category.
Something that I find particularly interesting about his essay is that it’s regarded – at least by the Observer‘s Political Editor (see this item: Miliband in blistering attack on Farage’s UK net zero ‘nonsense and lies’) – as a key response to Reform’s attacks on Labour prior to the May elections, based on a belief – backed by ‘polling experts’ – that ‘attacks on net zero could backfire on Reform and the Tories because the policy is overwhelmingly supported by the public.’ But is that true? Well it’s certainly seems that polls indicate that most voters believe it’s necessary to do something about global warming. But, when compared with other concerns such as the economy, the NHS and immigration, it’s well down the priority list. Moreover several polls (from major polling organisations such as YouGov and Ipsos MORI) have indicated that, when asked if they were prepared to make a sacrifice in pursuit of emission reduction, the response was a clear ‘no’.
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Ross Clark has published just now what may amount to the ‘snark post’ Jit was hoping for. It’s in the Spectator – somewhere where the Mad One or his advisers may even see it. Headed Ed Miliband is talking nonsense about energy prices – again, here are two extracts from the article:
He concludes: ‘There is only one of us talking nonsense and lies – and it isn’t me.’ Worth reading.
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Well, such a response here would still be a response, even if Miliband didn’t see it. The gadfly may not have been aware that the horse’s speed was because of the whip of its driver, but it was still enjoying biting the nag’s ear.
Anyway, I’ve written a paragraph already, so I might write a few more, later. 😉
Regarding the cost of gas driving electricity prices, the new evolution of the argument, as you know, is that this is due to the bidding system. This is a subtlety that is easily answered, but not in a soundbite.
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Jit: I look forward to it!
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Energy security, anyone?
“Canada’s top candidates talk up fossil fuels as climate slips down agenda”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c87pev3jpyyo
As the threat posed by US President Donald Trump tops Canada’s federal election agenda, the issue of the country’s contribution to global warming has been largely overshadowed.
The two main contenders are pushing plans for new energy infrastructure as the country seeks to pivot away from its reliance on the US.
Mark Carney’s Liberals are promising to make Canada a global superpower in both conventional and green energy. The Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre want to invigorate the oil and gas sector and scrap the industrial carbon tax.
It’s a big shift from the 2021 election, when the environment topped the list of voter concerns….
...Carney, who became leader of the Liberals and prime minister in early March, has a long track record as an international champion of climate change.
As well as being a governor of the Bank of England, he was a UN Special Envoy on climate action and finance and was co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, one of the big outcomes of COP26.
However, his first action as prime minister was to repeal the consumer carbon levy….
Et tu, Carney? Interesting times.
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He knows Net Zero is unpopular. What he will do when elected, that’s another question.
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It one thing to swan around as a UN Special Envoy on climate action and finance and quite another to run a country that primarily relies on oil and gas for its prosperity. Carney is a pragmatist and as a shrewd economist understands the importance of fossil fuels to Canada revenues and the ties that bind the country together. When net zero was fashionable, Trudeau literally paid lip service to the concept. Trudeau expanded oil pipeline capacity for export to the west coast and approved huge offshore oil development in Newfoundland. A new gas pipeline was completed in northern BC and we are just about to start shipping LNG to Asia from our first Canadian LNG facility in British Columbia. Meanwhile China has stopped importing LNG from the Gulf of America much to the consternation of the Texans.
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potentilla – all that’s true. It’s the astounding level of hypocrisy that I struggle with. Even as net zero is dying, they’ll still insist both that it isn’t and that it’s worthwhile.
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I need some urgent help. I’m debating the reason why Britain has the highest industrial energy price in the developed world. Although, after some discussion, my opponent accepts that our gas prices are average, he insists nonetheless that ‘high-priced gas does dictate our electricity costs more than other countries‘ and that therefore he (and Miliband) are right. I’ve no idea what he means by this and I’ve asked him to elucidate.
But he seems he may have got me on one issue. I’ve argued that the reason for our huge energy cost is the vast cost (e.g. huge subsidies) of the recent hugely increased contribution of solar and wind to our electricity generation – at 35% one of the highest in Europe. He’s responded that, not only is Portugal’s wind and solar share greater (40%), but its industrial energy price is considerably lower. I think the reason may be connected with the substantial contribution of hydropower (25%) to Portugal’s electricity generation. But I’m uncertain about this.
Help please.
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I suspect it’s too complicated to allow of an easy answer, e.g.:
https://www.energymonitor.ai/market-design/the-iberian-exception-a-success-story/
However, I also suspect that large-scale hydro does have a significant impact on the price.
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Robin, apologies if I am telling you what you know already – I’m sure I am. Sorry! – but I thought I would set down what I know (or think I know) about the UK market; the electricity market in Portugal is unknown to me and so any difference could be at the root of the discrepancy:-
The design of the market can greatly affect the price paid by consumers.
Renewables (which require despatchable back-up) do not pay for that balancing, nor for the grid expansion required to accommodate their distance from the consumers. Those costs are loaded on to bills.
The market mechanism (via those lovely subsidies) favours renewables to enter the market at low bidding prices since they have low marginal (variable) costs. If there are not enough renewables (at the price offered) for the load then, for example, gas-turbines enter the market at higher prices. The G-Ts have only a short window (before prices fall again) in which to recoup their fixed and variable costs and so they have had to bid high. The stop-go operating regime of the G-Ts therefore increases their maintenance costs (e.g. low cycle fatigue) and has thus increased their bid price to even higher levels.
By a peculiarity (obscenity?) of the UK market, all generators receive payment at the price demanded by the highest bidder. So renewables get paid more than they demanded – kerching! And it is all paid for by the consumer.
Constraint payments to renewables which want to generate but are not allowed to do so (because the demand is too low) also increase the cost to us consumers.
Montford analyses the reasons for the change in costs from 2015 to 2025 here in Figure 2:-
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/why-electricity-prices-will-keep-rising
This (below), also from Montford, shows that prices rise as the penetration of renewables increases. Part of the graph shows that, at the highest gas prices and low renewables penetration, costs fall as renewables increase their market share:-
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/does-wind-power-save-money
The work above by Montford is based upon the UK’s electricity market. A similar analysis of the Portuguese market might come to very different conclusions if the designs of the two markets are different. Your interlocutor needs to set out in a ‘compare and contrast’ manner the two market mechanisms; that would allow a more informed debate.
Paul Homewood is good at digging out UK subsidies data e.g. https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/04/20/the-impact-of-the-ukraine-war-on-uk-energy-costs/#more-86528
This may also be useful:-https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/04/20/mad-miliband-resorts-to-lies-to-defend-net-zero-agenda/
Because of EROEI we know that CURRENT renewables can never be cheap without subsidies because they waste energy compared to fossil fuel generators; it is just that a lot of that energy is wasted outside the UK and therefore does not appear on our books. This point suggests that any relative cheapness in Portugal arises from the way the market is organised (and the way [hidden?] subsidies are dispensed).
It just occurred to me that, as Mark has mentioned, the Portuguese (or the Norwegians etc.) may have a lot of hydro which can harness the unreliability of renewables at low cost. The unreliables can pump water up behind their dams in any erratic manner as dictated by wind/solar. But the release of water from the dams is done in a very controlled manner just as the grid requires. Thus the huge lake of water behind the dam acts as a natural buffer against the vagaries of those renewables; the lake is in effect a “water battery”. This needs checking.
In great haste, John C.
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He’ll get ear ache from the wife – Diana Fox Carney – Wikipedia
“Specializing in developing nations, she is active in various environmental and social justice causes. She has published research and has collaborated with multiple international think tanks. She has been described as a “widely respected expert on global climate and energy policy”,[2][3][4] serving as a board member for numerous not-for-profit organisations. In 2012 she was referred to as an “eco-warrior” by The Daily Telegraph.”
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John you are correct. Wind and solar work very well with a system that is dominated by hydroelectric power from dams with large reservoirs. This does not apply to run-of-river power generation. When the wind blows, power generation releases from the dams can be curtailed thus saving water in the reservoirs. The hydropower reservoirs do indeed work like batteries.
Even without wind and solar the power generation releases can be fine-tuned. For example, BC Hydro buys power from the US when prices are low even though it has plenty of reservoir capacity. The utility then generates and sells power when prices are high. The principle is essentially the same as pumped storage schemes that are being constructed around Loch Ness to store wind power when there is a surplus. Except of course there is a significant efficiency loss with pumped storage schemes.
According to Chat GPT, Portugal’s energy mix in 2024 was as follows:
Hydropower: 28%
Wind: 27%
Solar: 10%
Biomass: 6%
Thermal (fossil fuels): 10%
Imports: 20%
The hydropower in Portugal is backed by large reservoirs so that would make wind and solar much more efficient than in the UK. This would significantly lower overall energy costs in Portugal.
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As a further clarification, when working with a hydropower reservoir (not pumped storage) the wind power does not need to pump water up into the reservoir when wind power is available. The power generation flow releases just have to be reduced to allow the wind power to take over the load. Thus water is saved in the reservoir for release when wind power is not available. A very efficient battery!
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If you look at a map of Scotland the number of lochs and reservoirs is huge and one would presume there is a plentiful supply of hydro based electricity. Take the Ochil hills as an example, there are 6 dam reservoirs all used for drinking water for Fife. The actual small supply volume from streams and hill run off needs this number of dams to keep the main water processing reservoir full. The supply volume for hydro i.e. the Tummel / Faskally system has a huge catchment system to keep it going especially during a long dry spell. Pump storage systems i.e. Glascarnoch just above Ullapool sits at 3/4 full or less most of the year, the dam can only hold that volume now. Unless the volumes are enormous i.e Cruachan its not quite as easy as build a dam and away you go !
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Well, it’s complicated, and you can arrive at the bottom line in a variety of ways. Looking at Portugal’s electricity generation, the latest EU country spreadsheet (published last year, latest data 2022) shows that Portugal generated a higher proportion of its leccy from gas (in 2022) than we did in 2024. In that year, our prices spiked, but theirs did not. Questions: are PT’s renewables subsidised? If so, is this via bills or general taxation? Is consumption subsidised? Etc, etc. That’s why I caveat my periodic figure showing that more wind power leads to higher bills: it is difficult to compare different countries.
PT: total generated: 48.81 TWh
Generated by gas: 17.39 TWh
Proportion of generation by gas: 0.36
UK: total generated: 284.95 TWh
Generated by gas: 86.3 TWh
Proportion of generation by gas: 0.30
In the interests of Feynmannian bending over backwards, the gas share in the UK in 2022 was 0.39.
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Thank you everyone for the useful and interesting comments responding to my plea for help. I’ve decided that my best course is to sideline the Portugal issue as it’s not really relevant to the exchange and I want to avoid getting bogged down by it. Here’s my planned response:
I haven’t posted this yet and any comments, criticisms or suggestions would be welcome.
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We are less reliant on gas for our electricity generation than we have been for many years. As our reliance on gas has decreased, the cost of electricity has gone up.
Those are two facts that are indisputable. If your correspondent believes that this is due to a distorted market, then rather than advocate for less gas, he or she should be advocating for market reform. A rational reform would not benefit renewables in the manner the enthusiasts believe. Of course they can offer low prices in auctions, knowing that they have a tidy subsidy top up later. Suppose we had a system where the offers under which generators were appointed included their total remuneration for each joule supplied. Wind would no longer look as cheap.
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Does not Paul Homewood at NALOPKT repeatedly tell us that the wholesale price of electricity when generated solely from gas has a long-term average of roughly £50/MWh or 5p/kWh ?
However, because the UK market gives preference to “renewables” we have to maintain essentially two generation systems, both of which have to be paid for: one very subsidised system based on unreliable “renewables” that crowds out the second system based upon dispatchable generators such as gas – and the gas is taxed because its combustion products contain that very naughty molecule CO2.
So, in short, we consumers pay several times over when once would have been sufficient in my view. Oh! Joy! Regards, John C.
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I’ve posted a reply to my interlocutor along the lines of the above draft. It’ll be interesting to see how he/she replies.
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Andrew Montford agrees with me that there is currently a coordinated mass media and establishment propaganda campaign to convince the British public (wrongly) that gas is responsible for our high electricity prices.
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I’ve had a reply and, as it’s very relevant to current concerns and is hard to summarise, I thought I’d post it in full. Two notes: (1) When he/she mentions Table 6 it’s a reference to Figure 6 in ‘The Role of Natural Gas in Electricity Prices in Europe’ – https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/sites/bartlett/files/the_role_of_natural_gas_in_electricity_prices_in_europe_updated_may_2023.pdf (Page 17). (2) Re the PS, I added a note along the lines of Jit’s ‘As our reliance on gas has decreased, the cost of electricity has gone up‘. OK – here it is:
I thought that at least it was interesting. Comments?
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Your correspondent may have a point re: gas usage. As an absolute value, the UK’s gas generation has gone down markedly: last year, 86.4 out of 284.95 TWh, whereas in some years in the past, it has been twice that. (2008: 176.22 out of 388.92 TWh.) However, the proportion generated by gas is not much lower than some previous years, even today. (Note though that the quantity of electricity generated in total has plummeted.)
Now might not be the time to remind ourselves that coal has rapidly been removed from the system: from over 100 TWh in 2014 to under 2 TWh last year.
I think we need an authoritative breakdown of the costs of a leccy bill! Speaking of which, Jaime, I cannot find an up-to-date breakdown of a leccy bill at ofgem, only a breakdown of a dual-fuel bill. Do you have a link? You mention a particular proportion for the wholesale costs.
Here’s where I was looking.
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According to iamkate, wind and solar generated 34.6% of the UK’s electricity in the last 12 months. If they generate 37% of Portugal’s electricity, then that cannot be what explains the difference in price. It’s down to hydro and/or a different market model/different ways of showing the subsidies.
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Robin, I find your correspondent’s answer to be almost dishonest when s/he writes, “But what causes costs is not a mystery; we know it’s gas, because we know that electricity costs in the UK are almost exclusively determined by gas.”
While at first sight this is true, we know that is simply because the market has been designed that way i.e with the “renewables” getting first dibs – but please correct me if I am wrong. If, for example, gas-turbines were allowed to complete on a level playing field then they would sweep all before them and capture most of the market (as per my comment on their costs at 2.14 pm today [see Note 1 below]); “renewables” would not get a look in because they are just so expensive with their subsidies, exogenous costs, and their unreliability (which, typically, gas-turbines have to make up for so as to ensure that power supplied and power demanded are in balance at each instant). But please correct me if I am wrong.
As others have said (and as I have, I hope, demonstrated) the design of the market makes a huge impact on outcomes for consumers. Thus it is difficult to compare the UK to, say, Portugal without listing and quantifying in £-s-d the various market design features. For the discussion with your correspondent it is probably easier and much more germane to stick to the UK.
Note 1. If memory serves, the UK electricity system was evolving towards a predominantly nuclear + gas-turbine grid in the early 21st century when it was hugely disturbed by various “green” pressures which (i) brought coal to a premature close and (ii) instituted a subsidy regime that allowed “renewables” to enter the market but without paying for the market distortions (exogenous costs) that came with them as standard. But please correct me if I am wrong.
I feel that you are not being argued with fairly; is it perhaps another academic from The Conversation that you are in discussion with?
Regards, John C.
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Robin, I wish to quote Paul Homewood of NALOPKT, “And as we know, most of the increase in electricity prices in the last few years is due to increasing environmental levies, not wholesale costs. In short, Miliband’s claim that his green transition would have saved consumers money is pure bunkum.” https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/04/20/the-impact-of-the-ukraine-war-on-uk-energy-costs/#more-86528
The link above is useful too for its table “3.8 Environmental Levies” which (from following Paul several years ago) I recognise as coming from the government’s own data sheet. Going forward we see that these Levies fall in the range from £17 billion p.a. to £20 billion p.a for each of the next 5 years.
Perhaps, Robin, your interlocutor can explain away these subsidies and how they have, or have not, influenced electricity prices.
Regards, John C.
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Thanks again to everyone who’s helped me with this. I’ve thought about it overnight and have decided to change tack. Here a very first draft of a partial response:
Partial because I’m going out for a family lunch. Later this afternoon I plan to complete it with specific examples of renewable costs.
Any comments?
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Specific costs associated with renewables are the obvious ones – constraints payments; CfD payments; the cost of running gas generation inefficiently to ramp up and down to deal with the intermittency of renewables; the massive cost of the extra pylons and cables to get the power generated by renewables to the population centres where the demand is; the capital costs of the renewables themselves, given that they are replacing an existing system that works well; sundry other historic (but ongoing) subsidy schemes; the artificial carbon cost plucked out of the air and loaded onto the cost of gas to make it appear a relatively expensive option.
Separately there is the environmental cost of renewables.
Then – a separate but related issue – there are the other costs of net zero. The cost and subsidies relating to heat pumps and to EVs, to house insulation schemes, the £22 billion being wasted on CCS, the cost of decarbonising universities, the NHS etc, and even the latest news about the £millions the government is wasting on geoengineering, and the cost of upgrading the increasingly fragile and unreliable. (thanks to renewables) grid and associated infrastructure to cope with the extra demand arising from using electricity alone to cook, to heat our homes and to power our cars.
That probably barely scratches the surface, but I am confident it will (if it proceeds as currently planned) on average cost every household in the country £4,000 per annum every year for the next quarter of a century.
All to reduce global emissions by less than the annual increase in emissions across the rest of the world.
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I’m not so sure you should concede that gas sets the electricity price. It’s something that is narrowly true: it sets the wholesale price. Of course, renewables can afford to come in at low prices because those on CfDs will get the same cash per unit whatever the auction outcome. There can be no way under the present system that the last generator coming in can be anything other than something that can ramp up and down at will.
If the North Sea is covered in turbines in a decade from now, and it was moderately blowy, we could have a situation where the wholesale price of electricity was nothing, but bill-payers would still be on the hook for the CfD rate for every unit delivered.
Regarding the price of gas itself, glancing at Trading Economics shows that in 2015, UK gas was ~30% higher in cost than US. Fast forward to 2025, and we now pay ~2.7 X what US buyers do. There is a lot of blather about the UK being a “price taker” rather than a “price maker.” It seems only logical to me that exploitation of domestic gas resources would ameliorate this problem.
Final point. There are two destinations ahead of us. Gas is a bridging fuel to both of them. Ultimately, we will either have nuclear power, or weather-dependent power. I know which I would rather bequeath to the next generation!
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Robin,
This simple overview at least demonstrates that there is no single factor:
Industrial electricity: why are costs so high?… | Resolve Energy
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Here’s my planned final comment:
I plan to post this within the next hour or so. Any comments/suggestions in the meantime would be welcome.
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No additional comments, Robin – looks good to me.
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Posted.
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Robin, good post! Well put together. I particularly liked your inclusion of the annual costs of many of the subsidies and exogenous costs; these hit home and make the case that, among their many other failings, renewables are not cheap and are not going to be cheap for years to come (if ever).
To bring home these cost figures even more, and especially for the non-specialist readers outside our own circle, I think it is useful as Mark H indicated, to express some of these figures on “an annual cost per household” basis; this allows the non-specialist to appreciate the enormity of the negative impact that Net Zero is having on their household (energy) budget. Regards, John C.
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“Renewables Falling Short of CP2030 Targets
Despite renewables capacity increasing in 2024, rate of deployment is falling well short of Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 plan.”
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/renewables-falling-short-cp2030-targets
…According to NESO, to deliver the CP2030 plan, we need 50.7GW of offshore wind, 29GW of onshore wind and 48.4GW of solar installed capacity by 2030. Offshore wind is supposed to generate 187TWh of the total 289TWh of electricity due to come from wind and solar power, so the plan is highly sensitive to shortfalls in offshore wind delivery. If we compare the long-term trend of offshore wind delivery to the requirements of CP2030 as in Figure 2, we can see a significant shortfall is already appearing.
The offshore installed capacity in 2024 was just 1.61GW, meaning that 2024 was more than 3.7GW short of the 19.9GW required to be on track for 2030. Subsequent years will have to deliver an extra 0.6GW per year to catch up this shortfall. If the trend established from 2009 to 2024 continues to 2030, there will be a “Reality Gap” of some 29.6GW between the trend and CP2030. The gap is more than half the 50.7GW the total CP2030 requirement. This might explain why Ed Miliband is chucking the kitchen sink at renewables Allocation Round 7, by considering extending the subsidy term from 15 years to 20 years and even offering contracts to projects without planning permission.
The actual installations of onshore wind and solar are both well behind the target for 2024. Solar is some 3GW short and onshore wind 1.1GW short. This is quite remarkable given the CP2030 plan was published in November 2024, so it should have been obvious that actual capacity would be well below what the plan was calling for. The recent rate of delivery has been below trend and well below the rate of delivery required to meet CP2030. Extrapolating the trend for solar shows a shortfall of 21.9GW in 2030 compared to the 48.5GW requirement. If you have concerns about the amount of prime farmland being carpeted in solar panels now, just think what 2030 will be like if they deliver this mad plan.…
…Even though offshore wind capacity increased by nearly 1.4GW in 2024, the total output fell by 733GWh. As a result, the offshore wind load factor fell to 36.3%, the lowest since 2016. It now looks like a downtrend in offshore wind load factor has been established since 2020. The offshore wind load factor fell in 2024 even though the load factor for onshore wind went up slightly from 24.6% to 25.3%. This suggests that curtailment – when wind farms are turned off because either the grid cannot take their output or because demand is not high enough – is becoming a bigger problem.
This matters because the various plans such as CP2030, the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) Seventh Carbon Budget and the Government’s Generation Cost estimates all rely on generally higher load factors than have been achieved of late…
…Less than six months have elapsed since CP2030 was published and it is already behind schedule and the underlying assumptions are optimistic at best. It is time to put this project out of its misery before more damage is done.
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Kathryn Porter also has an excellent post this morning – Net zero realism is growing with the UK Government increasingly isolated
Its opening paragraph:
Both David Turver’s article (see above) and Kathryn Porter’s, are important and worth reading in full.
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With Mark’s help, I’ve made two amendments to the last two sentences of Item 3 (i) of the header article. I probably should have mentioned Drax before.
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STOP PRESS: what IS happening in Spain, Portugal and France? And why?
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According to the BBC:
‘The Portuguese electricity operator says the outage was caused by a “rare” atmospheric phenomenon, related to variations in temperatures‘
Ah – so it’s all down to climate change. We need more wind turbines and solar panels.
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The Telegraph however has another perspective:
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Kathryn Porter’s view:
Sounds sensible. But what do I know?
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What it boils down to is the British goverment didn’t dim the sun enough in Spain, so the grid became unstable because of the overcapacity of solar generation.
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Robin, I would have worded it slightly differently, namely “The growing reliance on solar has reduced inertia on the grid to the point where it does become more difficult to respond quickly enough to disruptions such as significant transmission faults. However, if the blackouts are the result of cyber attacks on multiple parts of the grid, more inertia would not have helped.”
But in general I agree with Kathryn’s comments. Indeed. her comments concur with those I have made recently to a UK energy authority on similar matters. Regards, John.
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Now the BBC has a new headline:
Huge power cut in Spain and Portugal doesn’t seem to be caused by cyber attack, say officials
The reality it seems is that they haven’t got a clue.
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Just posted on the Telegraph thread:
‘I live in Spain ,as soon as the power went off, I could see all the wind generators stopped turning as well, even though it was a breezy day. If the grid shuts down , everything does ...’
Does that make sense?
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Meanwhile, almost incredibly for this time of day on a late spring afternoon, in the UK we are relying on gas for 48% of our electricity, which is more than is being generated by solar and wind combined, and the price is pennies below £100 per MWh. The plan definitely isn’t working.
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The current BBC headline:
‘Cause of power cut still unknown, Spanish PM says, as Portugal struggles with traffic chaos‘
At least it’s now confirmed that they haven’t got a clue!
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Even the Guardian has this:
“Spain and Portugal power outage: what caused it, and was there a cyber-attack?”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-portugal-power-outage-cause-cyber-attack-electricity
...Spain is on its way to being a green energy leader: it has abundant sun and wind. Last year was a record period for renewable power generation, which accounted for 56% of all electricity used. By 2030 that proportion will rise to 81%.
That shift will help Spain end its reliance on energy imports, but it also brings its own challenges. Every national grid in the world will need to spend heavily to upgrade distribution systems to connect scattered renewable generation and ensure it is balanced.
The grid needs constant management to ensure it is not overloaded by too much generation, or left short by too little. Power stations will shut down automatically if the frequency breaks out of normal range. To restart they must then be reconnected to users.
Balancing has been important as long as there has been a grid, but there is more focus on the issue because of the rapid switch to renewables like solar and wind, which are intermittent.
Spinning gas turbines have been the standard technology for managing the frequency for decades, but renewables will need investment in other options such as flywheels or advanced power electronics.
“You cannot ignore it,” Zachmann said. “You need the tools to keep the system running.”...
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Robin, you ask whether it makes sense that the wind turbines stopped rotating. Yes, it does make sense because the turbines’ frequency-wild AC output is usually rectified to DC and then inverted to AC when and where it is injected into the grid. However, in most grid inverters, the frequency at which the DC is inverted to AC is determined by the grid itself (in the UK and Europe this will be very APPROXIMATELY 50 hertz (or cycles per second) at any instant).
Hence, if the inverter loses the AC frequency signal from the grid (as will occur in a blackout) then the safe thing for the turbines to do is to put their brakes on and come to a halt. Let’s hope that the turbine bearings are designed for an extended non-rotational load. Regards, John C.
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But Mark, the Guardian tells us that for Spain – ‘a green energy leader’ – by 2030 ‘all electricity used … will rise to 81%‘. Only 81%? Yet Ed says ours will be 95%. And surely he’s got it right, so we will be the green energy leader?
John C: interesting – thanks.
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If WordPress doesn’t swallow my text this time, I would like to ponder the musings of the expert on Channel 4’s 7pm news regarding the Iberian widespread power failure. He suggested that “galloping conductors” of one phase touched the “galloping conductors” of another phase. There are usually 3 phases in a grid system, with each phase being (at every instant) at a different voltage from that of the other phases. Hence if two uninsulated phases (as per overhead lines) touch each other there will be a short-circuit fault.
The system’s protection will then open a breaker (i.e. in domestic terms, open a switch, albeit a very large one) on both sides of the fault thereby isolating the faulted section from the rest of the grid. Many breakers are programmed to auto-reclose after a short period in the anticipation that the fault has cleared. However, with “galloping conductors” there is likely to be another short-circuit fault shortly after the first one and so the breakers will operate (i.e. open) again.
The breakers are, IIRC, programmed to auto-reclose only a very few times before remaining open permanently because, clearly, the fault is still there. In such an instance, the grid now has a section (containing in-feeds from wind or solar farms perhaps) which has been permanently disconnected from the rest of the network. The loss of power from these farms has to be replaced by other generators very quickly (or load has to be shed, i.e. disconnected, pronto) if the grid frequency is not to fall outside the specified range, which would be very serious, perhaps leading to cascade failure around the grid.
But. But. But. Were the conductors galloping? I thought (I’m no expert) such events were very rare (in the UK, at least) and were associated with high winds from the wrong direction over suitably shaped terrain on which the pylons are standing – there is an old video (UK in 1980s?) somewhere on the web showing this strange effect. I tried to find quickly a synoptic wind chart for Iberia but failed. However, the Telegraph’s commentator suggested it was “breezy” so perhaps “galloping” was involved. For myself, I think Jaime (https://cliscep.com/2019/12/10/smart-energy-national-grid-goes-full-retard/#comment-159899) has her finger on the pulse:-
Solar plus wind = 72%
Combined cycle = 3.4%
i.e. too little high-inertia fast-acting generating plant on the system to prevent a very large frequency excursion when the event (whatever it was) struck. If so then there is a very large lesson for us all. But are our (UK) grid masters in listening mode?
Regards, John C.
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In the UK gas is now supplying 58.1% of our electricity, renewables are down to 9.8%, and the interconnectors are providing a net 10.2%. The price is £107.47 per MWh.
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John C; the table on the other thread which shows the breakdown of the power supply includes nuclear at 11.6%. My understanding is shaky but wouldn’t those big generators have provided inertia alongside the combined cycle units?
You say: “Let’s hope that the turbine bearings are designed for an extended non-rotational load.” If power is not re-established quickly we may well see a new word finding its way into news reports: brinelling!!
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At 7:05 this morning wind was contributing only 5% to our electricity demand, sun 4% and gas 46%, nuclear and biomass 11% each and interconnectors 20%. And the price was £107.90/MWh.
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From the Telegraph this morning:
Net zero blamed for blackout chaos
Experts say a reliance on solar and wind power left Spain and Portugal vulnerable
Three extracts:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/28/blackout-risk-made-worse-by-net-zero/
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MikeH, yes, BRINELLING is exactly the word that I had in mind. Let’s hope that the wind turbines are designed to be sufficiently robust against such threats.
And, yes, the nuclear will provide lots of inertia against the initial transient of the fault (whatever it was). The nukes will therefore stop the frequency from deviating too much from 50 hertz in the very short term. However, once the initial fault has been removed from the grid by tripping out the faulted line (along, it seems, with lots of wind and solar generation supplying that line) the grid system will be short of generators (i.e. instantaneous power generated will no longer equal instantaneous power demanded).
Typically, nuclear plant (specifically the nuclear and hence thermal or steam-raising side rather than the electrical machines side) is very slow to respond to changes in load. So, in the longer term (which may be as short as only a few electrical cycles) the nuclear plant will not stop the frequency from falling outside the required limit (49.5Hz in UK) and in consequence equipment may trip itself off line as a safety measure. I hope this makes sense. Regards, John C.
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The Telegraph also has an interesting and strong leading article this morning:
The Iberian outage is a warning to the UK
Over-reliance on renewables means a less resilient grid
Its opening paragraph:
And its conclusion:
Good points
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Paul Homewood has an interesting article on the Iberian blackout HERE. I particularly liked this observation:
‘Such power cuts are now much more serious affairs than merely “the lights going off”, which I remember well from my younger days in the 1960s!‘
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Today’s Telegraph is taking a lot of interest in actual and potential power outages. For example it’s just published this article by Jonathan Leake:
Britain’s grid operator investigates unusual activity hours before Spain blackouts
Cause for shifts in power frequency during the early morning and evening of Sunday remains unknown
It’s opening paragraphs:
There’s currently no suggestion that these problems were linked to the massive outages in Spain. But, as Leake says, ‘The unexpected outages in Britain on Sunday were of a much smaller magnitude but have still spooked officials’.
Some may find this article interesting – and possibly relevant to yesterday’s events in Iberia.
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There’s an article today in the Spectator by a resident in Spain. Here’s his concluding paragraph:
It is unsettling – but does it bother Ed?
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The Guardian has finally joined the speculation regarding the role played by renewables in the Iberian blackout:
What caused the blackout in Spain and Portugal and did renewable energy play a part?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/29/what-caused-the-blackout-in-spain-and-portugal-and-did-renewable-energy-play-a-part
It’s a masterclass in saying yes whilst appearing to say no. It starts with the promise of a rebuttal:
And sure enough, this is followed by lots of distraction from the real issue, e.g.:
And:
Before we finally get to the point:
So that would be a ‘yes’ then!
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PM just mentioned a new paper from Tony Blair’s Institute. There was some surprise at the tone Tone took in the forward to the paper. I’ve just downloaded it from here.
Excerpt:
And
[Edit: the comment mysteriously posted itself before I had finished it!
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And
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Also reported in the Telegraph. Significant enough in their eyes to be the top news item. Not reported yet on the BBC website, at least not the front page of the news.
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Meanwhile, the BBC seems determined to tell us that it couldn’t possibly be anything to do with renewables:
“Spain rules out cyber attack – but what could have caused power cut?”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c209yrl3258o
...Was the power cut caused by renewable energy?
Sánchez on Monday evening said 15GW of power – the equivalent to 60% of demand at that time – was “suddenly lost from the system… in just five seconds“.
Mr Prieto said during a news conference on Tuesday that there were two “disconnection events” barely a second apart in the south-west of Spain, where there is substantial solar power generation.
One issue that the Spanish grid operator may have been referring to was when power companies identify a mismatch of supply and demand for electricity that could lead to instability, and disconnect temporarily in order to protect their systems.
However, Sánchez later said the power cut was “not a problem of excessive renewables”. He said there was not a failure of coverage – meaning supply – and there was a relatively low demand for electricity that was quite normal in the days running up to the crisis.
So what exactly happened? It is unclear, especially as many systems fail in electricity supply quite frequently, not only renewables, and outages on this scale happen somewhere in the world around once a year on average.
The mismatch between supply and demand of electricity can change the frequency of the electricity grid, which is 50Hz in Europe and the UK.
If that frequency changes out of a narrow range, it could lead to damage to equipment.
“When a big company detects that the frequency is moving out of their tolerance, they can go offline to protect their equipment,” said Prof Hannah Christensen at the University of Oxford.
If lots of companies do that in quick succession, it can have “cascading effects” and lead to a black-out, she added.
But when it comes to renewables, operators have very accurate short-term weather forecasts to predict when there will be a surplus of wind of solar power, so they adjust power supply accordingly, Prof Christensen said.
Renewable power has different challenges to fossil fuel energy “because of its intermittency”, she said, but it is a well-known issue that is planned for.
“It is a little perplexing that this wouldn’t have been predicted,” she said.
Prof Keith Bell, at the University of Strathclyde, added that “if a system is relying on solar and wind, they design a system to reflect that,” suggesting that the additional supply of energy from renewables will not have been a surprise to the grid.
“Spain has a lot of experience of wind and solar, and a long-standing system of forecasting weather and its impacts,” he said.
“All sorts of systems fail,” he added. “Things can and do go wrong, whether that is from renewables, fossil fuels or nuclear power. This could be the Swiss cheese model, where the holes in the system have happened to align.”...
No mention of low inertia, despite lots of other people talking about it, including engineers and other experts who know quite a lot about these things. Where’s BBC Verify when you need them?!!
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I would add that BBC Radio 4’s PM programme (at least, the little bit of it I caught this evening) seemed to double down on climate crisis propaganda, as if it felt the need to remind us that we can’t back away from renewables and net zero now. Evan Davis made a point of telling us that the weather in the UK was “unseasonably warm – scarily warm” and the next slot was a puff piece about flooding and how climate change is going to make it worse. It’s relentless.
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A useful summary of the varying positions adopted by different parts of the MSM to the Iberian power outage:
“Solar Farms Failure Behind Spain Blackouts, Grid Operator Confirms – as Tony Blair Turns on Net Zero”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/04/29/solar-farms-failure-behind-spain-blackouts-grid-operator-confirms-as-tony-blair-turns-on-net-zero/
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Another interesting article here:
“Spain and Portugal’s Blackout Reveals the Achilles’ Heel of Electricity Grids Dominated by Wind and Solar”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/04/29/spains-blackout-reveals-the-achilles-heel-of-electricity-grids-dominated-by-wind-and-solar/
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Thanks Mark. I thought the opening paragraph of that Daily Sceptic article summarised the situation well:
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And here:
“Spain’s blackouts are a disaster made by Net Zero
Renewables have made our energy grids dangerously unreliable.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/29/spains-blackouts-are-a-disaster-made-by-net-zero/
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Meanwhile (daylight heading towards dusk on a warm spring evening), gas is generating 61.6% of the UK’s electricity needs; solar 1.7%; wind 10.6%; interconnectors (unusually just 3.6%, but that’s probably because of high pressure and low winds over western Europe). The price is £104.20 per MWh. The plan still isn’t working….
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Jit, I have been taking a glance at Tony Blair’s “Climate Paradox” report. It seems, at first reading, to be a mixture of fact and fantasy, or as Blair himself puts it (and you quote), “Political leaders by and large know that the debate has become irrational.”
“Irrational” is a good word in this context. As is “panic”, which we have seen powerfully deployed during the Covid event also.
Blair speaks of, “… worsening climate impacts demand urgent action, yet political momentum is fading.” Could the fading momentum be due, in part, to the failure of truly exceptional weather events to materialise despite the panic fomented by the alarmists and their allies? Perhaps Blair should have read HH Lamb on a warmer climate being a more genial climate.
On the other hand, I partly agree with Blair when he writes, “The worst of all worlds for any country is to invest heavily in domestic decarbonisation but also be faced with the high costs of adapting to climate impacts due to the failure of others to similarly decarbonise.” Could he, perchance, be referring to the UK and giving our friends Ed and Keir a bit of a hint from an old political hand?
Blair also writes, “Clean energy is cheaper and healthier”. Cleaner and cheaper for whom and for what, I wonder. Do birds, bats and insects count in the Blairite calculus?
I will probably read some more, although I am far from impressed thus far. Like the curate’s egg it is good in some parts … but probably wiser not to start from there. Regards, John C.
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John C:
On the other hand, I partly agree with Blair when he writes, “The worst of all worlds for any country is to invest heavily in domestic decarbonisation but also be faced with the high costs of adapting to climate impacts due to the failure of others to similarly decarbonise.”
That’s the conclusion to be drawn from the Impact Assessment within the Climate Change Act itself:
https://cliscep.com/2023/05/05/read-it-and-weep/
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John C, as for being unimpressed by the Tony Blair Institute, certainly the second line of the Guardian headline, if it reports on the TBI claims correctly, is distinctly unimpressive:
“Climate plan based on phasing out fossil fuels doomed to fail, says Tony Blair
Former PM claims net zero policies losing public support and says there should be greater focus on carbon capture”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/29/phasing-out-fossil-fuels-doomed-to-fail-tony-blair-climate
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Found this comment & link from Ossqss over on Chiefio interesting. Not sure what John C or others think it adds to the ongoing blackouts discussion.
“There is a very detailed and logical explanation of this event at the bottom of this article.
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/power-restored-spain-portugal-net-zero-becomes-headache-brussels
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John C: after partly diagnosing the problem, The Institute propose 7 actions that are frankly delusional. They got their noses into the news with Blair’s criticism of the status quo, but that looks like a cynical ploy – my pro tem conclusion having only read the executive summary. In order, the 7 medicines are:
1: Carbon capture
2: AI
3: Fusion, etc
4: Nature-based solutions (= planting a few trees, etc)
5: Adaptation (the only one of the 7 that has merit)
6: Simplifying global action
7: Rethinking finance
Quite hopeless overall, though I will read the rest.
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The BBC now has a report on Blair’s paper. Worth reading to see how hysterical those who disagree are. Also that the paper’s author confirms that it is in favour of Net Zero by 2050. So all the sound and fury is in the foreword. Still, it has got certain babies bawling.
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Jit,
It’s the damage that the headline might cause that makes me happy.
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Thanks to the BBC’s front pages section, I can tell you that Blair’s intervention is front page news on the Telegraph, Times and i. The latter is the most surprising; the Guardian, for instance, says nothing on the topic on its front page.
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On the Spanish blackout, I’ve seen in the UK & French press:
Portugal blaming freak weather in Spain, Spain blaming a failure of the French interconnector, and France blaming Spain for not obeying EU rules on quantity of interconnexion.
One thing that everyone’s ruling out is a cyberattack, which is odd, since the system is vulnerable to some part of it “sending the wrong signal” about changes in current or voltage, and Russia has been a useful scapegoat in such cases. But Spain has no particular beef with Russia. It does have tension with Israel however, over a decision 2 days previously to ban the export of munitions.
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The Daily Sceptic article which Mark referenced above had this addendum when I read it this morning:
“Stop Press: The power cuts across Spain and Portugal were likely caused by failures at solar farms, the grid operator REE has said. It has identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in the country’s south-west, which caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.”
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John C; thanks for that explanation of the factors potentially behind the failure – I’m on thin ice with this stuff!
It now appears that the nukes tripped offline in response to the frequency excursion which – if correct – must have exacerbated the situation by depriving the grid of their inertia at a critical moment.
I’ve not seen any mention of “spinning reserve” so far but, per your comment, that must have been seriously lacking, thus limiting the system’s ability to recover. Aiui, Spain has quite a lot of hydro which is ideal when a very rapid increase in output is required: it will be interesting when we learn more to see how it was deployed. Even if the nukes had stayed online, they were probably running at high load anyway and, being old units (30+ years), would be slow to repond – as you say. This is an area which has seen major improvement in recent years, led by the French, of course. Their later plants can ramp at about the same rate as CCGT.
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The BBC has just published an article on its website by its Chief Political Correspondent headed Labour defends net-zero policies after Blair criticism. But, as reported, it’s a remarkably feeble defence. For example ‘Labour ministers insist the drive to net zero will not involve any financial sacrifices and have minimal impact on people’s lives‘ and ‘this government is moving to clean energy because it’s best for Britain… It’s more energy security for Britain‘ are unimpressive.
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Mike, the hydro probably can compensate for increasing load quite quickly, but gas turbines automagically respond instantly to frequency changes.
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Currently wind is contributing only 3% to electricity generation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it quite so low. Solar however is contributing 36%. Just as well it isn’t the winter. Or that we become subject to whatever triggered the Iberian incident (when solar was making such a huge contribution to generation).
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Tom Slater, editor of Spiked has published a perceptive article about Blair’s intervention:
Greenism is the road to ruin – and revolt
Tony Blair is running scared of a populist backlash that he himself stoked.
He starts by mentioning some of the ‘uncomfortable truths – or really, statements of the bleedin’ obvious’ listed by Blair. But he quickly gets to the nub of his argument, noting that, despite the implied criticism of current Labour policies, Blair’s Institute Report ‘is by no means a disavowal of elite environmentalism and all its attendant delusions’.
Slater notes that, although Blair has noticed that ‘decades of deranged, impoverishing policies being quietly agreed to and implemented, in conference rooms far away from the demos, establishment greenism is now colliding with economic reality and ordinary people, … he still doesn’t get it’:
He goes on to make some excellent points. Worth reading in full.
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BBC Radio 4’s PM programme this evening had a discussion about Tony Blair’s intervention and the implications for the next zero debate. For one brief moment I thought there might be balance, but no, they had on a net zero advocate (whose name I didn’t catch) from what sounded like a “green” pressure group, plus Theresa Villiers. That Theresa Villiers:
“The Conservatives should stick with net zero targets”
https://www.theresavilliers.co.uk/news/conservatives-should-stick-net-zero-targets
Kemi’s policy commission should consider the cost of climate change, not just the cost of net zero. Her speech expressed understandable concern about the cost of decarbonisation, but this needs to be weighed against the huge financial damage that will be caused if global heating continues unchecked. Flooding, for example, already costs the UK £2.2 billion a year. The Labour government strained in the Spring Statement to increase the defence budget this exact amount. Growing crops in the Global South will become more difficult in many areas as a result of desertification. Britain should expect increased flows of illegal migration.
Meanwhile, the shift to net zero also provides genuine opportunities, with the net zero economy growing three times faster than the overall economy last year….
...Kemi was right to highlight concerns about high energy costs, but we don’t need to abandon our commitment to net zero to tackle this. In the longer term, renewables will deliver lower prices than fossil fuels controlled by petro-states and dictators. For more immediate help keeping prices down, green levies inherited from the Blair era could be reduced. Market-based incremental reforms to remove distortions and expose generators to more revenue risk could be made to modernise the ‘contracts for difference’ system. There is also a case for carefully thought through changes to the marginal pricing mechanism which currently means high gas prices often dictate the cost of other forms of energy in the UK.
Polls repeatedly show support for green policies. Whatever might be the case across the Atlantic, there remains in this country a strong backing for action to protect nature and the climate….
There’s the confused thinking on display again, conflating climate change policies with environmental policies, when the two are often in direct conflict. As for the BBC – so much for balance!
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Tony Blair (one of my least favourite politicians) has definitely put the cat among the pigeons. The Guardian and its usual talking heads aren’t at all happy:
“Climate experts and politicians round on Tony Blair for ‘wrong message’
Former Labour PM accused of ‘handing talking points’ to Tories and Reform after saying net zero strategy faltering”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/30/tony-blair-risks-sending-absolutely-wrong-message-says-climate-expert
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Aye, the Guardian’s full on anti-TBI:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/30/the-guardian-view-on-labour-and-net-zero-politics-lean-in-and-ignore-bad-advice
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/30/tony-blair-anti-net-zero-anti-woke-corporate
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The other voice was Shaun Spears of the Green Alliance, who was allowed to get away with spouting a load of horse apples without challenge. Among other things, he said:
I’m sorry to admit that I was shouting at the radio.
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Mark, Downing Street refused to deny that they put in a call to Blair after his statement blew up.
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MikeH & Jit mention Hydro in comments above. Partial quote from link I gave at 29 Apr 25 at 7:25 pm –
“To ignite a completely dead network again, one essential thing is needed: plants that can start in black, that is, without receiving energy from anywhere else. Spain has identified five large hydroelectric jumps capable of doing this. However, and here is one of the great negligences that are coming to light, three of those five groups were stopped in scheduled maintenance, by business decision supervised by the administration. Only two were operational. That made the recovery much slower and weaker than it should be in a normal contingency plan.
The result is that, after almost 10 hours, only 35% to 40% of the national supply has been recovered, and there are still large areas in the dark or under scheduled cuts.“
The Phrase “the best laid plans of mice and men can still go wrong” springs to mind, or as In the original poem ‘to a mouse’ by Burns –
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men. Gang aft a-gley.”
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Jit – your 1st quote in that list credited to Shaun Spears of the Green Alliance make me laugh –
“The public are not being asked to make financial sacrifices for Net Zero”
Wonder where he thinks the billions needed will come from? Grok to Andy West ?
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dfhunter, thank you for the link to the Zero Hedge article. I found it very interesting and informative (albeit for an early estimate of causation). However, perhaps the most pertinent comment came at the end and relates to the West’s dominant political mindset:-
“Great job, Western liberals, on the deranged march to net-zero, culminating in the implosion of part of Europe’s power grid. Meanwhile, China is adding record amounts of coal and nuclear power capacity. It’s almost as if the entire green movement is about de-growth — and, in some cases, seems like sabotage fueled by sheer stupidity.”
Sabotage driven by stupidity (coupled with a good dose of cupidity?) sounds right on the money to me. Regards, John C.
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Jit; wrt to hydro generation, surely a Pelton wheel , or similar, driving a generator has inertia characteristics much like a gas turbine-driven one?
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A short but pertinent technical point regarding the much talked about concept of “inertia”. In the context of an electricity grid, “inertia” is simple the kinetic energy of rotating shafts, turbine discs, and electrical machine rotors, etc.
Rotating mass (such as in electrical generators and the gas- or steam-turbines that drive them) provides inertia to the electrical system in an entirely PASSIVE manner. So when a fault occurs (e.g. a lightning strike), the inertia has the intrinsic capability of being able to ride through the torque (i.e. force) disturbance. Nobody in the control room has to do anything because the brute force of the inertia does it for them. Thus robustness is built into the system from the outset.
By contrast, IIRC most other methods of electrical frequency control depend upon ACTIVE control systems (albeit automatically coming into action upon detection of that fault) to take action that will achieve fault ride-through.
It is easy to see that an ACTIVE system has a number of potential weaknesses, such as (i) failure to detect the fault, (ii) failure to trigger a response, and (iii) failure to trigger the correct response (to, for example, a novel type of fault).
As a conservative engineer (are there any other type, unless they are politicians masquerading as engineers?) I naturally favour passive fault tolerance. Simples! Regards, John C.
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“Greenism is the road to ruin – and revolt
Tony Blair is running scared of a populist backlash that he himself stoked.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/30/greenism-is-the-road-to-ruin-and-revolt/
…After decades of deranged, impoverishing policies being quietly agreed to and implemented, in conference rooms far away from the demos, establishment greenism is now colliding with economic reality and ordinary people. These past few years of war, pestilence and inflation have only underscored what has been clear for some time: that environmentalism is a luxury the West can no longer afford and a fantasy the developing world can see right through. Cheap and reliable energy is the foundation of prosperity and so-called renewables are neither cheap nor reliable. Crackdowns on air travel and consumption look like the elites pulling the ladder up from under them, making a taste of the good life prohibitively expensive for the masses. Meanwhile, eco-friendly measures are devastating agriculture in various countries. No wonder a backlash against these policies is fuelling uprisings – some ballot-box, some literal – from America to the Netherlands to Sri Lanka.
Blair has clearly noticed all this, but he still doesn’t get it. His institute’s report insists that we ‘depoliticise the climate debate’, even though that is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place – with a disastrous ‘consensus’ hashed out among global leaders with more private jets than sense. Indeed, it is only because the ‘populists’ – who get a disparaging namecheck, natch – have tapped into public fury with eco-austerity that Blair and his wonks have been forced to reassess. His aim here seems to be to save elite environmentalism from its worst excesses, to focus on ‘what works’ rather than double down on failed strategies and bitter medicine, whereas what we really need is to junk it altogether.…
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In order to ‘junk it all together’, what needs to happen is that the Settled Science is comprehensively, convincingly, scientifically debunked in the peer reviewed scientific literature. I think we’re beginning to see the first signs of that happening, largely thanks to Trump, I might add.
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John C; this paper rather lost me in a soup of acronyms but it supports your point about passive versus reactive means of controlling frequency:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352484723009551?via%3Dihub
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The Conversation has an article today headed: Tony Blair opposes phasing out fossil fuels. These academics disagree
That’s hardly an accurate summary of Blair’s position – but it does go on to say:
That’s rather more accurate I suppose. The objective of TC’s article however is this:
And TC goes on to do just that, speaking to such luminaries as Steve Pye, an associate professor of energy at UCL, Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, Mark Maslin, earth system scientist at UCL and Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at Oxford University.
Reading all this is instructive: it demonstrates plainly the absurdity of the position and lack of practical understanding of these people. Have a look at it – it’s quite interesting. And, in any case, what they’re all missing is that Blair would almost certainly agree with them. For example, Ben Pile has an interesting piece in today’s Daily Sceptic in which inter alia he shows how Blair is not really opposed to the ‘green agenda’. It was a point made yesterday, and in my view more eloquently, by Tom Slater, the editor of Spiked – see my post yesterday and Mark’s this morning.
Unsurprisingly, The Conversation doesn’t allow comments on this article.
.
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Why would something called the Conversation not allow comments? Unless they are interested only in proselytising, and not in discussion…
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The Conversation (which initially always allowed – even encouraged – comments) sometimes does allow comments. But hardly ever on articles such as today’s where comments could contribute to a healthy and interesting debate. What happened I think was that academics (don’t forget it’s an academics’ website) were genuinely surprised at the weight of opposition they were getting to their established viewpoint.
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Also, the input from orcs is usually portrayed as an attempt to shout down intellectual conversation. TC is supposed to be for the right-thinking only; they don’t want the airwaves filled with ‘nonsense’ from the ‘usual suspects’.
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MikeH –
Thanks for that link to –
“2022 The 3rd International Conference on Power and Electrical Engineering (ICPEE 2022) 29–31 December, Singapore – Fast frequency response services in low inertia power systems—A review”
Partial quote from the “Introduction” –
“To have a stable power system, the power system frequency has to be kept within the acceptable limits by maintaining a balance between power generation and load consumption at all times [1]. One of the most important system parameters for a synchronised operation of power systems is system inertia [1]. In traditional power systems, the kinetic energy stored in the rotating parts of the synchronous generators (SGs) is a vital property where the contribution of inertia is a built-in and imperative feature [2]. The rotating mass of the SGs injects/absorbs kinetic energy to/from the grid based on the system frequency variations in order to slowing down the system dynamics and maintain the frequency stability [2]. Which means that under any power imbalance event in the system, the SGs alter the rotational speed based on the rotor inertia and controller actions which helps to keep the system synchronism.
However, the increased displacement of SGs by inverter-based generation sources e.g. wind turbines, and solar photovoltaics systems has led to a total reduction in the system inertia and consequently increase the chance of having a larger Rate of Change of Frequency (RoCoF) and frequency deviation (these generation sources are not electromechanically coupled to the utility grid and thus, do not contribute to the system inertia). In power systems, keeping the RoCoF and frequency deviation as small as possible is highly desirable by system operators as the extreme increase in their values could lead to cascading system failures or even a complete system shutdown similar to that of the South Australia blackout event occurred in 2016 [3].”
Wonder how many UK/EU/Spanish, Power and Electrical Engineers were at that Conference in 2022 & wondered, only a matter of time (Diesel Generator on the shopping list).
Having said “Diesel Generator”, I take it all petrol stations where also affected 😦
Anyway some light relief – Bing Videos
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Dumb and dumber?
“Miliband and Rayner join forces to save net zero
Gas boiler ban in new homes to be fast-tracked as pair push ahead with radical reforms for housebuilders”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/05/01/ed-miliband-angela-rayner-join-forces-net-zero-housing-uk/
Gas boilers in new homes will be banned as soon as next year under plans being spearheaded by Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner.
The energy and housing secretaries have joined forces on new rules for housebuilders, which will require newbuilds to have heat pumps and solar panels.
The Telegraph understands the new rules will be announced by Ms Rayner this summer, and are likely to be in force by next year….
…The Cabinet ministers have been working together on net zero requirements in the Future Homes Standard, a change to building regulations first proposed by the Conservatives in 2019.
Insiders said the pair had opted for the most “ambitious” version of the new rules, which would ban gas boilers as fast as possible in new homes by increasing the energy efficiency requirements on developers.
But housebuilders have warned that onerous new net zero requirements could increase costs, making it less likely that Ms Rayner will meet her target of building 1.5 million homes by the end of Labour’s first term.
Industry sources said the boiler ban had been expected to come into force in 2027, after a 12-month period for the legislation to take effect and a further year to implement the changes.
Government sources now say the rules could take effect as soon as early 2026, giving the industry as little as six months to prepare.
Mr Miliband and Ms Rayner’s new rules will also require solar panels on almost all newbuilds, adding up to £4,000 to the cost of the properties….
I wonder where the massive number of solar panels will come from? Let me think? China? Uighur slave labour? We could end up with the appalling irony of hundreds of thousands of new homes rushed through to meet a housing crisis, destroying nature along the way, and made expensive to buy and run with the result that they remain unsold. If the plan is to provide affordable housing to help the poorest in society to get onto the housing ladder, why go out of your way to make them more expensive?
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“National Grid chief raised alarm over speed of net zero
Oil and gas will play a crucial role in UK energy system for decades, warned Zoë Yujnovich”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/01/national-grid-chief-raised-alarm-over-speed-of-net-zero/
The incoming boss of National Grid has raised concerns about the pace of net zero and said that oil will be needed for decades.
Zoë Yujnovich, who will take up the role of National Grid chief executive in November, previously warned that the journey to net zero “must be achieved whilst providing a stable and reliable supply of energy”.
Speaking in 2023 on The Energy Podcast, produced by Shell, Ms Yujnovich said: “It’s certainly going to be critical that we don’t dismantle the current energy system faster than we can build the clean energy system of the future.
“Oil and gas will continue to play a crucial role in the energy system for decades to come, but of course we will see that demand reducing gradually over time.
“Today’s energy system is still overwhelmingly comprised of fossil energy and whilst recognising the need to continue to decarbonise that energy, many of the oil and gas reserves have a natural decline.
“So we have to continue to invest to essentially ensure that we can have that stable production over time.”
The comments come to light at a time when doubts are growing about the speed and nature of the shift to a carbon-free energy system.
Blackouts that hit Spain, Portugal and France at the start of the week have been linked to a heavy reliance on solar energy...
By the way, the front page of the FT today seems to blame the Iberian blackouts on too much solar power, which the grid couldn’t cope with, but that’s behind a paywall.
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There’s something in this Guardian article for everyone:
“‘Blackouts can happen anywhere’: how power systems worldwide can collapse
After Europe’s biggest blackout in over 20 years, experts warn that while such incidents are rare, no grid is infallible”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/may/02/blackouts-energy-outage-risks-europe-worldwide-spain-portugal-france
There’s this for the deniers of renewables’ problematic nature:
...Yet energy experts have warned that although wide-scale blackouts may be rare, no grid is infallible. Prof Jianzhong Wu, the head of the school of engineering at Cardiff University, told the Guardian blackouts “can happen anywhere”.
“Despite today’s high standards of reliability, low-probability but high-impact blackout events can still happen. These networks are not designed to be completely blackout-free because achieving such a level of reliability would require investment far beyond what is economically feasible,” he said.
Charmalee Jayamaha, a senior manager at the UK government-backed Energy Systems Catapult, said: “No system can be 100% resilient,” so risks “need to be balanced with our willingness to pay to reduce them”....
There’s this for Guardianistas who ignore those dangers and seek to focus on the “climate crisis”:
‘Hand of God’
The risk of these events is on the rise as the climate crisis increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather events.
There’s this for the realists who warn that rushing to power a grid solely (or almost solely) by renewables is the taking of a dangerous risk bordering on madness:
...A key concern to emerge after Spain’s blackout is the role that renewable energy may have played in the system collapse. Without a clear explanation for the outage it is too soon to comment, experts have said.
What we know so far is that Spain’s electricity system suffered two major generation losses in the solar-rich south-west of the country within seconds, which may have destabilised the grid connection between Spain and France, and ultimately led to a full loss of power across the energy system. The initial trigger remains under investigation.
It is true that a renewables-rich grid is more difficult to run than one powered by fossil fuels. This is because the grid was originally designed with big coal, gas and nuclear power plants in mind. These plants feature spinning turbines that create inertia on the system, which helps to maintain the grid’s frequency at about 50Hz. Wind and solar farms do not create inertia on the grid, meaning that at times of high renewables output it can be more difficult to keep the frequency steady if there is a sudden loss of power. A significant fluctuation in frequency can cause generators to automatically disconnect, leading to a collapse of the system.
Jayamaha said the shift to renewables would require grid companies to invest in grid-stabilising technologies. “The electricity grid is undergoing unprecedented change as we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and move to solutions that are cheaper, better, and cleaner. This creates different resilience challenges that need to be managed,” she said.
“Resilience is no longer just about having enough spare megawatts you can simply switch on – but about the right mix of technologies and system capabilities to operate a grid with a lot more renewables.”…
And there’s this for John Ridgway:
…‘Black swan’ event
In many cases, the risk factors outlined above can coincide, meaning relatively common or innocuous events can compound to create a cascading failure that leads to catastrophe. These “black swan” events are nearly impossible to anticipate – meaning grid operators are under pressure to prepare for the unexpected.
In August 2019 the UK suffered its biggest blackout in over a decade, leaving almost 1 million people in England and Wales without electricity and hundreds of people stuck on trains for up to nine hours.
The blackout occurred after a lightning strike hit a transmission circuit north of London and managed to cause two electricity generators more than 100 miles apart to trip off the system within seconds of each other. It was described as an “extremely rare and unexpected event” by the energy system operator.
Lightning strikes on energy infrastructure are relatively common, as are power plant outages, but the impact of the large double-outage on the grid’s stability was severe enough to cause scores of small generators and batteries using incorrect safety settings to trip off the system and make it impossible for the operator to avoid a loss of power.
No single element in the event would cause a large-scale blackout on its own, but the combination proved devastating….
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Mark,
Needless to say, blackout events are not black swans since they are to be expected. Just because any single event requires a rare combination of circumstances doesn’t make it a black swan. You might as well say that every time the lottery is won there has been a black swan. It is not predictability that matters; it is conceivability. This is ignorant nonsense used to excuse a failure to ensure resilience.
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Jayamaha said the shift to renewables would require grid companies to invest in grid-stabilising technologies. “The electricity grid is undergoing unprecedented change as we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and move to solutions that are cheaper, better, and cleaner. This creates different resilience challenges that need to be managed,” she said.
So we need to spend money on things the grid didn’t need before, but it will end up being cheaper.
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Regarding inertia, this page has an interesting presentation on how inertia has declined in the UK grid. Its last data is from 2019, and no doubt things have only gone south since.
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Excellent article by Capell Aris in the Telegraph on the Iberian outage which wasn’t paywalled on a link from the Daily Sceptic:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/01/power-engineer-iberia-grid-collapse-renewables-green/
He should know his onions: “Dr Capell Aris PhD spent his career in the electricity generation sector. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology“.
His concluding paras are worrying, to say the least:
“After nearly 50 years of operation, Dinorwig Power Station is currently shut down for major repairs and there has been no information on when it will re-open. Over the next five years all of our nuclear stations, bar Sizewell, will be closed. Over the same period our combined cycle gas generator fleet will halve from 30 GW to 15 GW. (It takes 5 years to build a new CCGT even using an existing site. The new ones are 66 per cent efficient and cost less than £1 billion to build a 1 GW plant – one third the cost of an offshore windmill.)
We will lose huge amounts of grid inertia. Low-inertia operation will become routine. It is hard to imagine that we won’t start to suffer complete national blackouts like the Iberian one.
One last piece of doom: the recovery of Spain’s grid in just one day is impressive. This speed is certainly due to the assistance of a large, stable grid reconnecting into the Iberian system thus allowing recovery in a series of stable steps as each grid area is recovered. We will not have that facility in the UK with our asynchronous interconnectors.”
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Ray Sanders posted an interesting perspective re Spain’s impressive grid recovery on Paul Homewood’s site yesterday:
It’s all extremely worrying.
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This article by Gordon Hughes – Living with electricity grid instability – is interesting and comprehensive.
His conclusion:
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Thanks Robin ,
Gordon Hughes’ piece strikes me as very fair and balanced and is well worth a read.
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“How the political consensus on climate change has shattered”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx20znjejw1o
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My favourite result of the local elections was at Doncaster – Doncaster of course being Mad Ed’s constituency. Here’s what happened: Reform gained control with 37 council seats, having previously had none. Labour lost control having previously had a strong overall majority, losing 28 seats and retaining 12. The Tories lost 5 and gained 6.
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Robin,
There’s also a huge irony about what went on at Doncaster. I’ve read quite a lot in the media this morning suggesting that the only reason Labour hung on to the mayoralty there was because the re-opening of Doncaster airport was very popular, and the Labour Mayor campaigned actively for it:
“PM supports airport reopening with £30m investment”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwynne050exo
Whither net zero now?
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An interesting tour d’horizon by David Turver:
“Politics is Downstream of Energy
The politics of energy austerity will soon get very ugly”
I thought this was quite impoerant:
…The very same people who would have us believe a bloke in a dress with a Gender Recognition Certificate is a woman, also try to kid us that a wind turbine with a Renewables Obligation Certificate is a dispatchable power station. In the name of saving the planet, we are being forced to give up on concentrated, reliable energy and energy supply is dwindling as shown by the orange line in Figure 3 below. We are being forced to move backwards to high-entropy, diffuse sources of energy like wind, solar and wood pellets so societal EROI is falling.
Energy prices have risen as supply has fallen through a combination of taxes on hydrocarbons, subsidising expensive renewables and incurring the extra costs of intermittency and remote connections. As a result, energy consumption is falling and the economy is stagnating…
…The economy grew steadily from 1990 to 2006 and energy consumption was relatively constant at about 44,000kWh per person per year. Gains in efficiency allowed the economy to grow even though energy consumption was stable. However, since then the economy has grown much more slowly, as energy consumption has fallen by around 35%. This has created a “wealth gap” so we are about $18,300 worse off per person and the economy would be 36% larger if we had continued growing at the same trend rate as from 1990 to 2006.
We should be under no illusion that there will not be significant political impacts from this energy austerity. …
…The impact of reduced energy consumption will be slow at first as the assets and wealth accumulated over the 200 years of the industrial revolution take time to dissipate or be sold off. But as energy becomes scarcer and the disorder in the low-EROEI energy system rises, the fruits of the energy revolution and society itself begin to decay and we might expect disorder in society to rise too. A stagnant or contracting economic cake likely means civil unrest will rise and crime will become more widespread. In effect societal entropy increases as energy consumption falls.…
...This is particularly important at a time of growing global tensions. The UK and EU have committed to rearming by increasing defence spending. However, as our steel industry collapses we will not have the capability to make armoured vehicles. Without chemicals we cannot make explosives for munitions or fertilisers to feed ourselves. Neither the UK nor the EU have committed to increasing energy supply. As Doomberg has pointed out, a bomb is nothing more than stored potential energy unleashed in a concentrated form upon an enemy. To produce a bomb, you need to either create that primary energy or pay for it in exchange for equally valuable services. Or you can print funny money for a short period of time and trick people into thinking that your IOUs are money good. The latter is what the EU is currently doing.
This is not sustainable and governments will soon find that you cannot print energy. We should not under-estimate the scale of societal disruption that will occur as our energy supply declines. Unless we rapidly change course we are heading for a monetary and energy system reset.
As we saw above, cheap, abundant energy, transformed society, delivering unprecedented prosperity and positive political change. We have moved into an era of energy scarcity and devalued money. If we continue down this Net Zero path, we will soon find that political change from energy austerity gets very ugly, very quickly. The recent countrywide blackouts in Spain and Portugal are an important warning of where we are heading. Thankfully, the Reform Party has already ditched Net Zero and there are signs that the Conservative Party has abandoned Net Zero targets. Even Tony Blair has cottoned on that Net Zero policies are “doomed to fail”. We can only hope the Labour Government reverses course before it is too late. Both politics and culture are downstream of energy.
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Link for the David Turver article:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/politics-downstream-of-energy
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“Tory MP Esther McVey Thinks Net Zero is a “Dud” Having Spent Years Inflicting it On the British Public”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/04/tory-mp-esther-mcvey-thinks-net-zero-is-a-dud-having-spent-years-inflicting-it-on-the-british-public/
…Current events are making a mockery of every UK politician in the ‘Uniparty’ that supported the crazy hard Left New Zero fantasy over the last 20 years. The electricity blackout across Iberia last Monday, which experts have blamed on unreliable wind and solar energy, sent shock waves through the political class. The problem of fluctuating frequency gets worse the more renewable power is loaded onto the system and will not go away. Almost certain blackouts are on the way for any grid that follows the potentially catastrophic renewable policy. Now Conservative politicians like McVey are running for the hills since they suspect, rightly, that any UK blackouts will be blamed on them….
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Behind a Daily Telegraph pay wall, unfortunately, but potentially another significant moment, as the mood definitely shifts:
“Lord Blunkett: Net zero push risks making Labour toxic to voters
Former home secretary says Government needs to heed lessons of past week and be flexible in drive to meet green targets”
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Mark – just noticed your 02 May 25 at 7:08 pm comment & read your BBC link.
As usual, so many quotes I could take from that Helen Catt (Political correspondent) article. But this end quote from a “Former Labour advisor” takes the biscuit –
“Former Labour advisor John McTernan believes that keeping the clean power commitment is also key to the government’s political survival beyond the next election. “Labour has to be solid on it because it’s a manifesto commitment and because it is a point of distinction with the parties on the right. “If you’re going to be picking up voters from the centre-left pool, you’ve got to have a proposition for them to vote for.”
He says the party won a big majority by promising “big, difficult things”.
“It would be a dereliction of duty for the Labour party to win a landslide on difficult things and then go, ‘do you know what, it’s too difficult’.”
No wonder Reform UK are attracting voters.
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dfhunter,
I don’t know whether Labour spokespeople are whistling in the dark to keep their supporters’ spirits up, or whether they are actually sufficiently deluded to believe that their manifesto policies have a popular mandate. They don’t – they have a constitutional mandate and a big majority in the House of Commons, but neither they nor their policies are popular. They benefited from a huge anti-Tory vote, and still managed to get only one in three votes cast and persuaded only one in five of the electorate to vote for them. The surge in support for Reform should let them realise that people are fed up with the Uniparty – which very definitely includes Labour.
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Link to the Blunkett article in the Telegraph:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/05/04/lord-blunkett-net-zero-push-risks-labour-toxic-voters/
These people are still committed to net zero, even as they start to notice the harm it’s causing to the country, but that’s not what seems to bother them – it’s the threat to Labour votes that’s of concern. Still, I suppose it’s a welcome development that they are starting to understand that it is unpopular.
...The peer denounced Nigel Farage’s pledge to abandon net zero altogether as “insane” as Reform prepares to block its new councils from installing solar farms or pylons.
But he went on to argue that green policies introduced by successive governments – all of which have been backed by Labour – have made both industry and households poorer.
Lord Blunkett said: “In years to come we will need to have protected ourselves from the vagaries of those world events which lead to fluctuations in both the availability and price of oil and gas, never mind the impact on the environment.
“But the politics of this are genuinely tricky. So far, the moves that have been made – and yes, we as a country have made substantial moves towards net zero – have been at a heavy cost to both industry and domestic users.
“Getting energy prices down quickly is a political imperative if the necessary changes aren’t to become electorally toxic.”…
…“It is absolutely true that we can accelerate growth by investment in renewables and away from dependence on carbon fuels, but it’s also true that the price of energy for our industrial base is a major drag on growth and on our competitiveness. We have to square that circle.”
The Blairite grandee concluded that Sir Keir had to present environmentally friendly [sic] policies to voters as “a promise not a punishment” if he was to sustain public support for net zero.
“Yes, we need targets, we need the ambition and momentum set by deadlines,” Lord Blunkett said.
“But we need the flexibility to ensure that the drive for a cleaner, pleasanter and safer planet is not undermined by the political victories of those who would reverse all that has been achieved so far.
“In a democracy, you have to persuade, not command, people to contribute in their own lives to bringing about change.
“You must ensure that what you’re offering is a promise not a punishment, and, above all, you have to listen to them. That is the lesson of the last few weeks.”…
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It seems that these are worrying times for the Guardian. This is quite a hit job:
“Is Tony Blair a ‘serious threat’ to climate policy – or out of touch?
Before his call for a net zero ‘reset’, there has been criticism of ex-PM’s lucrative links with fossil fuel nations”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/05/tony-blair-serious-threat-climate-policy-out-of-touch
A bit ironic for the Guardian to be asking if others are out of touch…
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An extract from that Guardian hit job:
Hmm – are they and is it?
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The view from south Wales:
“Tilting at windmills”
https://oldgrumpy.co.uk/2025/5387/tilting-at-windmills/
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“Drill oil if you want growth, City grandee urges Labour”
So much so obvious.
Telegraph link.
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At present interconnectors are providing more than twice the electricity (20%) that wind is generating (9%). I wonder if Ed has noticed?
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“Orsted Cancels Hornsea Four and Kills CP2030
Orsted’s announcement means it is time for Miliband to admit his Clean Power 2030 plan is dead.”
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/orsted-cancels-hornsea-four-and-kills
Today, Orsted has announced that it is pulling out of its flagship 2.4GW Hornsea Project Four that was granted a contract only last year in AR6. They said:
“After careful consideration, we’ve decided to discontinue the development of our Hornsea 4 project in its current form, well ahead of the planned FID later this year. The combination of increased supply chain costs, higher interest rates, and increased execution risk have deteriorated the expected value creation of the project.”…
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Turver’s closing comment:
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Hi everyone, I am currently looking to challenge via JR our local Council on their EIA opinion for a 49.9MW solar Farm. This is being proposed by Quintas Energy UK ltd. The LPA appear have agreed that the developer does not need to undertake an EIA and have accepted the argument that the project timescale of 40 years means that use of BMV grade 2 farmland is only temporary and after 40years it will be returned to farmland. To counter this argument we understand there is a case albeit i can’t find it, of a solar farm being decommission and the LPA declaring the land brown field as a result of contamination from the solar panels / supporting infrastructure. Does anyone have a link to such a case either in the UK or abroad ?
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The Guardian has reported on the Ofsted/Hornsea 4 story here:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/may/07/danish-firm-shelves-huge-uk-windfarm-project-over-rising-costs
Not a word about the implications for Miliband’s plans.
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Terence, I just asked an AI, which was unaware of such a case.
You should ensure that the developer has considered the impact on protected species including bats and birds (collision risks) and terrestrial mammals (habitat fragmentation thanks to the need for industrial-grade fencing).
There is also a requirement for “biodiversity net gain”, but if the panels are being erected on farmland, this is likely to be relatively straightforward.
Regarding the contamination risk, you could ask that they have considered damage potential e.g. via hailstones.
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The BBC headline is more realistic than the Guardian version:
“Blow to clean energy drive as major windfarm ditched”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce848g8l8vro
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“Miliband’s green energy plan is collapsing. We could face rationing soon”
Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph on the cancellation.
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It’s been a bad day for Miliband, but still reality won’t intrude into his delusional policies:
“Major hydro power plant expansion put on hold”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yly4x3gedo
The operator of an underground power station at Scotland’s “Hollow Mountain” has put on hold its plans for a major expansion of the site.
Renewables developer Drax had proposed building a new hydro-electric facility next to its existing complex inside Ben Cruachan, near Dalmally in Argyll.
But it said the costs of the project had risen and it would not be bidding for UK government support at this time….
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The Guardian article about Hornsea 4’s cancellation may have chosen to ignore the implications for Miliband’s plans, but Nils Pratley, one of the Guardian’s better journalists, understands the implications:
“Ill winds are blowing for Labour’s 2030 deadline for clean energy
Loss of the vast Hornsea 4 offshore wind project is bad news but it reveals a big flaw in setting a deadline”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2025/may/07/ill-winds-are-blowing-for-labours-2030-deadline-for-clean-energy
“Immensely challenging” and pushing the limits “of what is feasibly deliverable”. That was the state-owned National Energy System Operator’s description of its own proposals on how to decarbonise electricity generation in Great Britain by 2030. In short, it thought clean power by that date, a key Labour manifesto pledge, was “credible” and “achievable” as long as little went wrong along the way.
Neso’s £200bn plan, detailing a rapid rollout of offshore wind, onshore wind, solar farms plus a major upgrade of the electricity grid, was adopted virtually unchanged by the government at the end of last year.
Now something has gone wrong. Ørsted, the Danish developer, has stopped work on one of the world’s biggest offshore wind projects, Hornsea 4 off the Yorkshire coast. It can’t make the numbers add up. It would rather write off £400m-plus in impairments and the cost of cancelling orders with suppliers.
One windfarm alone, you might think, cannot put a serious dent in the overall 2030 project. Up to a point, that’s true. There is time to catch up and Neso’s report spoke about “some flexibilities at the margin” when it came to technologies – extra solar could substitute for a shortfall in wind. In any case, the precise 2030 target for installed offshore wind capacity hasn’t yet been nailed down; it is between 43 and 51 gigawatts depending on how many carbon capture sites and green hydrogen plants end up being built.
Yet the basic point remains: Hornsea 4 is a bad one to lose. It is a 2.4GW project – vast, in other words – and, whatever fiddles can be made around the edges, Neso was always clear that offshore wind would be “the bedrock” of a cleaned-up system, providing more than half of Great Britain’s generation. If the government already needed to secure 20GW of offshore wind in the next couple of years, which is roughly how the blurry maths works out, the requirement has gone up by 10% overnight. A demanding deadline has become even more demanding….
…Whatever happens at Hornsea 4, the timing of Ørsted’s move sends a bad price signal (from the point of view of the government and consumers) for AR7, the renewables auction due this summer. The background noise is already complaints from companies about ministerial dithering over whether to switch to a zonal pricing system for electricity; and, if zonal is rejected, what does the alternative of a reformed national market look like? The information is critical to anybody planning to invest billions in generating capacity....
…Now Ørsted has created a catch-up problem, while advertising worries over costs. Energy analysts reckon the government will be lucky to contain inflation in offshore wind contracts to 10%. It could be higher.
Therein lies one problem with setting a rigid 2030 deadline. You can end up paying extra to get the job done on time, or renegotiating major projects from a position of weakness. We’ll reserve judgment until we see the actual prices in the AR7 auction. But 2030, which many energy executives never thought was do-able anyway, already looks too tight for comfort.
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By the by, here we are now in the lightest quarter of the year on what has been a rather breezy day where I live. How are renewables performing right now? Not terribly well. Electricity at the moment is being generated as to 52.2% by gas; 5.7% by solar; 13.1% by wind; with a net 6.4% coming from interconnectors. The price is £117.10 per MWh.
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Jit, thanks for the link to the Matthew Lynn article in the Telegraph. For those who can’t access it, here are its concluding paragraphs:
As we keeping saying, it’s all utterly pointless – and quite mad.
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Robin, you don’t understand – it’s all Trump’s fault:
“Trump blows a hole in Ed Miliband’s wind farm plan
The cancellation of a major UK offshore wind project was a ripple effect of the US President’s attacks on green energy, Government sources said”
https://inews.co.uk/news/trump-blows-hole-ed-milibands-wind-farm-3681087
…The UK Government has been left scrambling to save its clean energy plans after developers pulled out of a major offshore wind project, with Government insiders blaming Donald Trump’s attack on green energy.…
...Government insiders said Orsted’s decision came after Trump cancelled a major offshore wind scheme off the coast of New York halfway through its construction.
Last month the US President stunned the offshore wind industry by halting construction of the project by Norway’s state energy company, Equinor, which has a 10 per cent stake in Orsted.
Orsted’s shares slumped nearly 10 per cent in the immediate aftermath of the decision. The firm has also said its US projects are being threatened by Trump’s tariffs.
The move is understood to have forced the world’s largest offshore wind developer to rethink its portfolio, leading it to cancel its plans for Hornsea....
...Government sources insisted that the decision would not derail Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s plans to deliver a near net zero energy grid by 2030, stating that the Government has enough projects in the pipeline to reach the 43GW of offshore energy production needed to meet the target.
However, Adam Berman, director of policy and advocacy at Energy UK, whose members include Orsted, said there was “going to be a hell of a lot of capacity to make up for” if the Hornsea project did not go ahead.
“When it comes to offshore wind you can’t just magic up a project. Projects often take 10-13 years from the inception of the project right through to it producing its first electrons,” he said.
According to Berman, options on the table now include Orsted altering the project in some way, selling it onto another developer or agreeing a new price with the Government.
In any scenario, he said he would “imagine a minimum of a two-to-three year delay”…
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The Daily Sceptic has an article this morning by Chris Morrison that refers to an increasingly serious problem that’s been recognised for some time, although not by me and I suggest not by many other Net Zero critics. Titled ‘EXCLUSIVE: Britain Forced to Spend £1.5 Billion to Mitigate Wind Turbine Corruptions to Vital Air Defence Radar’, here’s its opening paragraph:
Another extract:
In other words, this indicates that continuing to pursue Net Zero is completely and unforgivably irresponsible. As Morrison says: ‘The money is a complete waste of course and only necessary because politicians are clinging to an increasing discredited Net Zero fantasy’.
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My daughter worked on a project early 2000 looking at turbine interference from onshore sites for Glasgow and Edinburgh airport radars. I recently asked her if anything developed from the project, she never heard anything more after their conclusions were submitted. At the time the probability of interference would rise if there was greater density of turbines. Has it happened ??
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Speaking of the Daily Sceptic:
“Sun-Dimming Quango has £800 Million of Taxpayer Money to Blow – and a CEO on £450k”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/08/sun-dimming-quango-has-800-million-of-taxpayer-money-to-blow-and-a-ceo-on-450k/
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At 7.00 this morning wind is contributing only 10% to our electricity needs and interconnectors (mainly France) 16%. The price is £133.31/MWh.
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Fifteen minutes later the price remained the same, but net imports via the interconnectors were 23%. At the same time, Keir Starmer announces that “A fleet of Russian oil tankers which have been used to avoid existing sanctions on oil and gas exports are set to be hit with new restrictions” because “the UK will do everything in its power to “destroy” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “shadow fleet operation, starve his war machine of oil revenues and protect the subsea infrastructure“.…”:
[my emphasis].
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04e9gwqzyeo
The hubris is immense. Sadly, the reliance on undersea cables could yet prove his nemesis. This is not what energy security looks like.
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This morning Kathryn Porter has published a long, detailed, quite technical and very interesting commentary on the recent Iberian blackout. Titled The Iberian blackout shows the dangers of operating power grids with low inertia it can be found HERE. One thing I hadn’t seen reported before is that eight people died.
Her conclusion:
Although designed for the layman, some of it was well beyond my rather limited technical understanding. Nonetheless it’s well worth reading. I’d be interested to see for example John Cullen’s view.
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“Major British chemical plant faces closure as energy prices soar”
Telegraph link.
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And on the Telegraph opinion page, Net Zero is quite abundant. For years it seemed to be absent. Now it is everywhere.
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Robin,
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Thanks John, I look forward to your comment on Kathryn’s article.
You might be able to help me with something else. I’m engaged in a discussion with someone (who calls him/herself ‘The Observer’) on the Spectator blog. He/she has just posted this interesting comment:
What do you make of that? The article can be found HERE – mine is the most upvoted comment (scroll down for comments).
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Robin, I’m afraid I can’t get into the Speccy article or its comments (even if I toggle Javascript off). However, I do know that from the start of comments on the Iberian blackout it was evident that not all the solar power was PV (i.e. beware red herring argument). I will try to find the quantity of PV; I think there is a graph in Kathryn’s article (and possibly elsewhere). It may take me some time as I am variously involved this evening. Regards, John C.
P.S. What speed are the aforementioned steam turbines running at? Is it constant speed? i.e. synchronised to 50Hz grid directly (which would provide inertia) or, alternatively, is their output rectified to DC and then (crudely?) inverted to 50Hz AC? The latter option would not provide inertia.
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Robin, that was quick! Kathryn’s first graph (https://watt-logic.com/2025/05/09/the-iberian-blackout-shows-the-dangers-of-operating-power-grids-with-low-inertia/) seems to show (i.e. if I am reading the colours correctly) that solar PV was about ten times larger than solar thermal in the immediate pre-fault period. Thus PV was by far the dominant solar contributor if I read the graph correctly – please check.
Anyway, it seems from Kathryn’s graph that the solar thermal argument is largely a red herring (although if it tripped out early in the fault event then it will have contributed to the general confusion [i.e. confusing all those fast-acting electronic controllers, each of which will have been trying to quell the disturbance (but, perhaps, through their interaction, amplifying it instead!)] on the grid at the start of the fault period).
In haste. Regards, John C.
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Thanks John, it seems you’re right – although I’m finding it quite difficult to read the graph!
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John, I thought you might be amused to see my popular comment on the Speccie article. The latter was titled How to bring down Britain’s power grid and I said:
For those who can access it the article can be found HERE.
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John, an interesting reply from my interlocutor at the Speccie:
What do you make of that?
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Hello Robin, I have a few points to make in regard to your interlocutor’s short somewhat ‘hand wavy’ reply:-
1. The turbines may be standard technology, but what speed(s) do they run at? If they are not constant speed then they will need converter (= rectifier + inverter) technology to provide the 50 Hz AC. Equally, if they are running at more than 3,000 rpm then will be producing frequency above 50 Hz and, once again, will require converters.
2. “It” MAY be doable one day. However, as Kathryn’s article makes plain, it is a technology that is being developed; it is NOT yet a mature technology. And so it should be developed on low power parts of the grid; in that way any failure on its part will not collapse the whole grid. [In a sense this is the whole problem with renewables; they have been allowed to spread throughout the grid before all their peculiarities (economic and technical) had been understood and mastered – hence our current array of energy issues.]
3. Converter electronics is indeed faster to respond than mechanical systems such as turbine governors and turbine inertia. That is both a future advantage and a present disadvantage for the electronics. Hence, until the electronics issues in 2 above are completely mastered I hold that brute inertia is what the grid needs to provide robustness during and immediately after a fault.
4. Your interlocutor suggests that collectively DC link capacitance may provide more inertia than do the turbines. I do not understand this claim because the capacitance is on the DC side of the converter rather than on the AC side i.e. the energy stored in the DC capacitance has to be injected correctly into the AC side in order to help stabilise the grid; this requires, at a minimum, the inverter to be operating correctly, which may NOT be the case during and after a fault.
Hope this helps. In great haste. Regards, John C.
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Thanks John, very helpful. The comment that surprised me was this: ‘People make too much of this inertia issue‘. Do they?
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Robin, yes, that comment struck me too. In my understanding the people who run the grids HAVE NOT made enough of the inertia issue, which is (in part) how we got ourselves into our current scrape.
When I come to comment on Kathryn’s article I think the current need for inertia will probably be among my main points. Regards, John C.
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John C: re his comment that ‘People make too much of this inertia issue‘, I replied by suggesting that he might read Kathryn Porter’s article citing its title – ”The Iberian blackout shows the dangers of operating power grids with low inertia’ – and suggesting that would seem to emphasise the importance of inertia (as did the article itself).
He replied saying that he had read the article and spelled out his view in considerable detail. It’s too long to quote here, but here are two short extracts:
What do you think?
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I’m no engineer , and defer to the experts, but your interlocutor sounds like another net zero zealot who won’t allow reality to get in the way of the dream.
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Robin, as your correspondent says, “… work needs to be done.” He is admitting that it is CURRENTLY a problem, which is why it should never have been allowed to spread so far into the grid before its problems had been solved.
However, we are where we are and so the best short term fix is twofold (i) do NOT reduce the grid inertia any further, (ii) start to add inertia at every possible opportunity. For example, in the UK it is agreed that we need some 30GW of new gas-turbines irrespective of the future of renewables and so those turbines should be ordered soonest!
See NALOPKT where, it seems (but I’m only partly through this article), Capell Aris is saying much the same as me:-
In haste. Regards, John C.
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Capell Aris (see my comment just above) is saying, “It takes 5 years to build a new CCGT even using an existing site. The new ones are 66 per cent efficient and cost less than £1 billion to build a 1 GW plant – one third the cost of an offshore windmill.“
Procurement is not my thing, but if we bought OCGT then I think we could get them on line in less than 5 years, albeit at the cost of reduced efficiency (about 40% from memory compared to CCGT at 66% efficiency).
We need to move fast to avoid blackouts; the useful idiots of the Net Zero brigade have cost the country dear! Regards, John C.
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Jit; re your post of yesterday – “Major British chemical plant faces closure as energy prices soar”
As so often the article contains little hard info. I’m struggling to understand what is meant by a cracker “converting to gas”. Aiui, crackers break large hydrocarbon molecules from crude oil into smaller ones. Gas is already composed of small molecules so there is no need for cracking. When time allows I will have a sniff around for something more technical.
A point which did not get a direct mention is the potential impact on the whole processing complex. If the cracker goes, how many other plants will fall over like dominos?
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As will be clear to regular readers of my comments, there are some Guardian journalists for whom I have respect. Fiona Harvey isn’t one of them. I think I’ve spotted quite a lot of problems (arguably errors and/or misinformation) with this article. How many can you spot?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/may/11/will-labour-stick-with-or-abandon-net-zero
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John: thanks for the above and for your excellent comment on Paul Homewood’s blog – the latter can be accessed HERE.
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Hello Robin, I have just tried to make my (first) comment at Kathryn’s site on her Iberian blackout blog. However, it has not appeared, and I am receiving messages that I have already posted that comment; so perhaps it is held in quarantine.
Anyway, this (first) comment is about the many virtues of synchronous machines and their fault ride-through capabilities. I have other ideas I wish to post at Kathryn’s site on the Iberian fault … but I will wait and see what happens to my first blog before venturing to post further text there. Regards, John C.
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John: I just now posted this response on the Speccie thread:
As you see I used your phrasing. Thanks.
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John C, here’s his reply:
This is well beyond my very limited understanding. But he seems to think that the concerns expressed by experts such as Kathryn Porter and Capell Aris are exaggerated.
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After reading all the posts and comments on the Iberian power out I have been trying to have informative chats with friends and relatives on what could become a similar situation here. OMG, head in the sand, too technical for me, boring, just plain don’t want to know, not cool ! I have given up, even asking if they feel their electricity bill is high, it usually brings out a rather lukewarm yeah maybe. To crown it off the number of people now saying the companies they work for are looking at redundancies due high running costs, it’s creeping in everywhere.
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Robin, I suggest that we get back to fundamentals. The function of an electrical protection system is to protect. Firstly, to protect individual pieces of equipment, but ultimately to protect the system as a whole from total failure, namely from a whole system blackout. Clearly, the Iberian protection systems failed to prevent a blackout. In that sense they utterly failed in their primary role. They were, however, successful in their secondary role of protecting individual pieces of equipment.
For the reasons set out at Kathryn’s blog, the grid frequency is required to be maintained within tight frequency limits e.g. in the UK the legal operating range is 50Hz +/- 1% (i.e. within 0.5 Hz). This is a demanding requirement, and the fundamental physical parameter that opposes change of frequency (and which reduces the rate of change of frequency) is the kinetic energy (commonly called “inertia” in this context) of the spinning turbine generators. Even if all the system’s protection equipment failed, the might of the turbine generators’ inertia is the parameter that could maintain frequency within limits.
Inertia is an entirely passive quality; it requires no external detection system to trip it into action. In that sense it acts instantaneously – even faster than the fastest electronics!
And so if a system has lots of inertia, it has lots of inherent robustness against frequency excursions. Any system protection equipment that may be present will provide only secondary protection.
You can’t beat lots of inertia, in my mind.
I hope this helps with your gung-ho, hand-wavy interlocutor.
Regards, John C.
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John, I’ve changed tack with my friend at the Speccie:
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Anyone who claims that ‘too much is made of the inertia issue’ is playing down the importance of the historic development of national grids comprising basically synchronous AC generators and high voltage transmission lines distributing electrical energy to consumers. Because ‘inertia’ (more specifically rotational inertia) is not an isolated issue, it is a physical property which is integral to modern electrical grids and how they have evolved over many years to deliver power efficiently and safely to homes and businesses. Here’s why, in summary:
Traditionally, electrical power has been generated by synchronous generators consisting of a large rotating mass driven by the combustion of fossil fuels, whose output is an alternating electrical current which changes direction 50 times per second, varying smoothly from plus x number of amps to minus x number of amps in a highly regular sinusoidal wave-like pattern. The mechanical energy stored in the large rotating mass, which generates the AC current, is known as the ‘rotational inertia’ of that mass and basically is a measure of its resistance to change. It is a physical property of the rotating mass itself, so even if the fuel source driving the mass is cut off, the wheel will keep rotating and it will take a hell of a lot of force to stop it rotating or even slow it down. This is ‘grid inertia’ – basically a measure of how difficult it will be to stop all those massive flywheels from spinning.
Synchronous generators (so named because the frequency of the alternating current they produce matches exactly the frequency of the rotation of the flywheel) provide AC which can be very easily stepped up to higher or lower voltage as required and can be transmitted very efficiently, with minimum power loss, over long distance power lines. Not so with DC. 240V AC is the UK domestic power supply, which is stepped down at substations from the 400KV transmission voltage. DC (direct current, which does not oscillate like AC) is produced by wind turbines and solar panels and it must be transformed into AC for use by homes and businesses. Because ‘renewables’ supply DC electricity only to the grid, they contribute no mechanical rotational inertia. AC is also much safer than DC – try getting a shock from 240V 13A AC vs. 240V 13A DC!
When the power grid is subject to any instability due to faulty equipment, adverse weather, lightning strikes etc. the huge mechanical rotational energy stored in the synchronous generator rotating masses acts as a very efficient brake on the rate of change of the 50Hz AC current being transmitted across the grid, therefore inertia provides very valuable grid stability. It is extremely important and as I say, is integral to the way that national grids have – until recently – been managed and operated.
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Jaime is absolutely correct. The grid has, until recently, grown up with wound-field synchronous generators at its heart; they are integral to the grid’s correct functioning in both steady-state operation, fault operation, and (critically) post-fault recovery.
The recent addition of DC power sources to the grid, enabled by inverters to synthesize AC, means that, in effect, the grid is inertia deficient! Hence the present need to try to supply “synthetic inertia” to the grid when the inevitable faults occur.
Why have “synthetic inertia” when you can have the real thing? Regards, John C.
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John, he’s replied – with another long, technical-sounding comment. I cannot be bothered to quote it here except for this short extract:
He completely ignores my suggestion that he goes public with his views.
My reply:
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Robin, thank you for trying to smoke him out. If he has valid arguments then they would be interesting and important to understand. However, I am yet to be convinced that he really has any.
Good luck! Regards, John C.
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Further to our system protection discussions, there is an interesting development in Texas as reported at NALOPKT https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/05/13/new-texas-law-to-force-renewables-to-be-dispatchable/
If this law is implemented, what will be the system protection requirements, and who will be responsible for implementing them, and what sanctions will there be for serious failures of protection?
In haste. Regards, John C.
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Is it me or is much of the discussion about the Iberian blackout focussing on resilience, inertia, etc while relatively little attention is being given to the other major issue – recovery?
From what I have read, there is much that could be done to reduce our grid’s vulnerability but the risk of blackout cannot be completely nullified. Given that it is unlikely that much will actually be done, we should be looking at what it would take to re-start the system and how to minimise the damage and losses caused.
The Iberian grid was re-started in only a day or so due, aiui, to the availability of a synchronous connection to the French grid with its high inertia courtesy of all those nukes. Even so, 8 people died and losses in the billions of euros are mentioned.
We do not have the benefit of a suitable connection to another, strong grid. Dinorwig is meant to provide support for a black start but is undergoing maintenance for an unknown period. Further, all of our nukes, bar Sizewell, are running on borrowed time and will be shutdown by 2030, if not earlier.
So, if the UK were to experience a similar blackout, what would it take to re-start the grid and how much time would be required? Perhaps John C and others who understand this stuff could comment and/or provide links to informative sources?
A shutdown of a day or so is relatively survivable but I fear that it would take much longer in our case with catastrophic consequences.
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MikeH, yes, little has been mentioned of recovery, especially in the UK case. And it is the UK case that worries me most of all, because, as you say, we do not have any AC links to our neighbours that, if we had them!, could greatly assist with a blackstart recovery.
My particular concern is that our pumped storage blackstart resources may be inadequate (even of they are all available) and that in consequence a very slow and very painful system reboot from scratch will be required, but whether the relevant authorities have that possibility covered I do not know.
I have wondered whether one or more of the DC interconnector inverters at their UK end could be configured to make a passable AC wave shape that, with suitable filtering, could be used for blackstart purposes. However, I am not an HVDC specialist and am getting out of my depth – but I am trying to learn.
I suspect that the present electrical grid situation in the UK is as fragile as it has ever been in my professional lifetime (which goes back to the early 1970s). Is this the result of too much political interference in what should be driven primarily by conservative engineering judgement if a robust grid is the fundamental requirement?
Sorry that I cannot be more positive. Regards, John C.
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MikeH, the relatively good news is that it is mostly the control side of the inverter that needs adapting rather than the high power (=high voltage and high current) side.
In normal operation the on-off signals for the high power switches (e.g. IGBT) are timed by reference to the local AC voltage and AC current at the point of injection into the AC grid [Ref. 1]. Unfortunately, in a blackstart there are no local AC voltage and AC current to work from.
However, in principle, I do not see why the necessary AC voltage and AC current signals could not be derived from further away, namely from an adjacent section of the grid which has already been restarted. There will then, of course, be the usual requirements of joining two grid sections together (i.e. matching voltage, frequencies and phase sequences before the breakers are closed thereby connecting the two sections together) but that is very much standard fare for grid operators (provided they have at least a minimum of electrical power with which to work their system monitoring and control systems!).
Reference1. B.M. Weedy et al., “Electric Power Systems”, Wiley, 5th ed., 2012, near page 350 – 352 for control of HVDC systems.
Regards, John C.
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John C; thanks for those comments. Firstly, you confirm my concern – even fear – that recovery from a major blackout in the UK would be a long, troublesome process. Meanwhile, how will people cope without power for a prolonged period – very poorly, I suspect. Aside from all the practical difficulties, they will have no idea of what’s going on because how will the government communicate? A few may have battery-powered radios, but the vast majority will be completely in the dark – figuratively and literally. It’s a strong argument for mandating battery back-up for mobile phone towers.
Wrt to the practicalities of re-starting the grid – and its vulnerabilities to a blackout in the first place – I find the vague platitudes of ministers, Ofgem et al more unsettling than reassuring. If there are lots of resources and plans in place, I would expect them to say so – with details. The silence is damning.
Your concept for adapting a DC feed to simulate an AC interconnection is well above my paygrade! So this may be a dumb question: given that an AC connection can be simulated, surely it would not have the same characteristics as one fed by spinning generators? We are back to that inertia word again!
As for the fragility of the grid, Kathryn Porter’s article included a graph plotting the levels of inertia over recent years. It showed a marked decrease, confirming your comment.
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Robin; rather late I have caught up with your exchange with “Observer”. To these eyes the comments read like someone who has some technical background and has read up on the latest concepts. However they are not linked to any hard info, actual qualifications or real experience. Should the debate continue it would be worth asking about the basis/background for disagreeing with highly qualified and experienced engineers like Capell Aris: the world is awash with armchair experts!
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Mike H,
This is where we link in to John Ridgway’s concerns about the failure of things like the National Risk Register. Of all the risks facing the UK, it is my belief (of course I could be wrong) that a catastrophic collapse in the grid would be far worse than any risk we face from climate change (assuming we do face a risk from climate change). The determination of the government to rush on with grid decarbonisation, and with converting all sorts of fossil fuel uses to electrification, thereby both increasing reliance on, and pressures on, the grid, is deeply disturbing.
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MikeH, and among our emergency rations for the extended blackout we could include a clockwork radio too?
More later – I am going out for the day. Regards, John C.
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Reuters yesterday, via WUWT:
“Insight: Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar power inverters”
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Jit: that would seem to be another serious concern. I’ve added a link to the Reuters report to the China/security endnote of my developing (11th upgrade) version of TCANZ.
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Mark; I agree 100%. The climate has always changed over time and we have always adapted to it. Temps were much the same – or higher – in Roman times and they survived! In contrast a major blackout would be sudden and catastrophic. While Iberia recovered in a day or so, it would take much longer here. I’ve seen comments that it could take weeks, leading to……
John C; that does raise the question of what measures are worth considering which is possibly material for a separate thread.
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MikeH: yes I agree that my friend ‘Observer’ seems have a degree of understanding – far more than me. But I’d be more impressed if he were to break cover and let me know something about his qualifications and experience. His main argument is that too much is made of ‘inertia’. Maybe it is, but when I refer him to Kathryn Porter and Capell Aris, both of whom seem (to my untutored eye) to think it’s certainly is important, he says that he’s read their recent comments and agrees with their views. So we get nowhere.
Anyway our exchange has ended.
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There are none so blind as those who will not see:
“Ed Miliband criticises Reform’s Net Zero stance”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gew0nj285o
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband criticised Reform UK’s stance on Net Zero as he defended his decision to approve a large solar farm in East Yorkshire.
A proposal to build a 3,155 acre (1,277 hectares) site near Howden, despite objections by locals, was given the go-ahead last week.
Reform, which recently took control of Lincolnshire County Council as well as winning mayoral elections in East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, has campaigned on abandoning the government’s target to reach Net Zero by 2050.
Miliband said Reform’s view was “wrong” and added: “We’re going to have a debate with them about it.”...
I hope that we do have a debate about it. It would be nice to have one where real world statistics are used rather than bland and nonsensical claims about energy security and lower energy prices, when everything I see suggests that Miliband’s “plan” is undermining cheap and secure energy.
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Regarding Jit’s drawing our attention to the Reuters report, the Daily Sceptic has now printed an extract from a Telegraph report on the story:
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/15/chinese-kill-switches-found-in-us-solar-farms/
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Jo Nova has a nice piece on the same topic.
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Thanks Jit, this is developing into an important story. The Telegraph has another article about it today: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/16/ed-milibands-net-zero-fantasy-turning-into-nightmare/
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For some reason I’m not always a great fan of the GWPF’s output, but Andrew Montford’s latest piece – Admit it: Net Zero is fantasy – is excellent. An extract:
His conclusion:
Hear, hear.
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Thanks Robin.
Andrew nailed it with that one.
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It’s encouraging that voices other than the usual suspects are beginning to speak up against Net Zero. We knew that things would get tougher politically for the zealots as cuts in emissions stopped trimming fat and started to amputate limbs. But it has been a long time coming in the face of such obvious evidence of the stupidity of the project. What of the tragedy of the years the locust hath eaten? c.f. Churchill (and Joel).
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I believe the technical term for what we may be witnessing here is ‘preference cascade’:
What is a preference cascade? – Quora
It will be interesting to see whether a tipping point is reached or whether the cascade will prove to be a dribble.
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But both green hydrogen and CCS are very expensive, controversial and commercially unproven at scale
As fa as CCS goes, it’s by no means clear it can even capture more CO2 than is produced by it’s own construction and operation. Even if it does so the cost per unit of CO2 captured is ridiculous.
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Robin – you say “For some reason I’m not always a great fan of the GWPF’s output, but Andrew Montford’s is excellent”
Can I ask why your not a great fan?
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“Ed Miliband’s net zero crusade is adding billions to Britons’ energy bills
The Energy Secretary is accused of inflating households’ costs without proper scrutiny”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/89dfaf03e26565a1
...Matthew Chadwick, at Cornwall Insight, says: “The current structure is now increasingly out of step with our net zero ambitions.
“As we move to decarbonise the energy system, we’re asking people to switch to electricity, yet the current system means those who do so often face higher bills because they’re paying policy costs on both their heating and everyday electricity use.
“This penalises those who don’t have access to the gas grid and discourages the uptake of low-carbon technologies like heat pumps and electric vehicles.”
Constable, of REF, is more blunt: “The net zero undertaking is without doubt the single largest intervention in the British economy since the Second World War, and yet no one has even a glimmering of its total costs and opportunity costs.
“We are flying blind.”
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oldbrew, you say: ‘it’s by no means clear it [CCS] can even capture more CO2 than is produced by it’s own construction and operation’
In the current stage of ‘an eleventh upgrade’ I provide a link to an article providing evidence of exactly that: https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/
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dfhunter: you ask why I’m not always a great fan of the GWPF’s output.
A good question. I think it’s because I believe the overriding priority of climate sceptics in the UK is to get rid of the disastrous net zero policy. In that regard GWPF has a problem: it’s been thoroughly (and outrageously) demonised as a ‘climate denier’. The result is that much of its output (and it publishes some excellent material) is likely to be ignored – not helped by the fact that it’s often quite technical and/or complex and seemingly aimed at an audience of supporters rather than opponents. The Montford article in contrast is simple and based on easily verifiable facts – precisely the sort of thing that activists would find hard to combat.
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I think this is interesting:
“Portugal to demand EU put pressure on France over power connectors
Cross-border power links need to be beefed up, Lisbon says after huge blackout, calling it a Single Market issue.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-needs-eu-push-on-power-connectors-portugal-demands/
Portugal will demand that the European Commission push France for better electricity links to the Iberian Peninsula following last month’s crippling power outage, Portuguese Energy Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho said.
The low number of cross-border cables means there is less network capacity to balance out blackouts like the massive one that paralyzed Spain and Portugal in late April. Carvalho said she sees this a European Single Market issue.…
…”Having an interconnected system is good for everyone,” a senior EU official explained last month, adding that connections make it easier to manage dramatic power-supply changes.
The European Parliament last week voted in favor of a resolution calling for a major expansion of power connections across the bloc.
“The Iberian blackout shows painfully how vulnerable our grids still are,” Anna Stürgkh, the lead MEP on the file, told POLITICO.The Austrian liberal called on the Commission in Brussels to “act decisively to prioritize planning and coordination on grids and storage.” Otherwise, “we’ll keep lurching from one crisis to the next,” she said.
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But at least the Europeans have AC links which will help them to recover quickly from any blackouts. We on this sceptred isle set in a silver sea have only DC connectors, which may help a little with blackstart recovery, but I fear that for us such recovery will be much, much slower. Regards, John C.
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John C: what do you make of this?
https://notrickszone.com/2025/05/18/speaks-for-itself-pv-power-reduced-30-after-spain-blackout/
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Robin, I have looked at the temperature in Madrid during April and May as a crude proxy for the sunniness of the Iberian peninsula during that period:-
https://www.accuweather.com/en/es/espa%C3%B1a/2324544/april-weather/2324544?year=2025
https://www.accuweather.com/en/es/espa%C3%B1a/2324544/may-weather/2324544?year=2025
I note from the graphs included in the links above that (i) the max temperatures in late April (leading up to the blackout) were at or above the long term average, (ii) the max temperatures in the first half of May have, by contrast, been as much as 5 deg Celsius below the long term average.
So, I wonder whether the reduction in the % of Spanish solar generation from late April to now (mid-May) is due primarily to the weather becoming cloudier.
My observations above do not mean that the arguments about lack of integrating equipment are necessarily wrong, but rather that we need to look more fully and more carefully at the record before drawing conclusions. Regards, John C.
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Mark – thanks for the politico link, which in turn links a FT article, from which I found this comment under the article interesting WRT the UK. Had to truncate it, as FT flashed a warning against copyright –
The power outage in Spain was not a result of imbalances in supply – in fact output from solar at the time was very high and quite stable. The Spanish problem was a frequency mismatch in the Alternating Current grid. That can happen to anyone, solar or no solar. When the frequency mismatch became too big lots of generating plants tripped off the grid because their switchgear is set to do this avoid damage to the electrical equipment. Having a lot of spinning turbines helps to make the grid less vulnerable to frequency mismatches because the turbines themselves slow down or speed up to correct. Grids with fewer turbines add extra equipment to replicate this effect. The U.K. grid has several ongoing programmes to buy such services. The Spanish got policy wrong on this complex engineering issue. The cost of the extra equipment is a small fraction of the grid cost and is not a reason to stick with spinning turbines. Details of U.K. grid frequency stabilisation programmes here:- https://www.neso.energy/industry-information/balancing-services/frequency-response-services Once again; this was a frequency problem, not a problem with intermittent renewables.
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dfhunter, thank you for quoting from an interesting comment on an FT article. I find the comment’s language rather untechnical, but I think I understand it. The author is correct that a mismatch in frequency (i.e. the difference between the required frequency (50Hz) and the actual grid frequency) can occur on all types of AC grid.
However, the key point is (as the commenter makes clear) that those grids which contain lots of “inertia” (AKA spinning kinetic energy devices such as turbine generators) are much slower to respond to frequency disturbances and are thus less prone to large frequency excursions that cause equipment to trip off line; I am yet to be convinced that the equipment that simulates inertia is effective enough.
“Keep the inertia!” But as an electrical machines bloke, I would say that wouldn’t I. Regards, John C.
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John, I think it’s necessary to include a brief note on the Iberian blackout in my next update of The Case Against. Here’s my current draft. It is inserted after a comment about the likelihood and dangers of blackouts. For formatting reasons it cannot be much (if any) longer.
I include links to Kathryn Porter’s blog article and a report (in Spanish) about the deaths. Any comment?
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Robin, this is good. It is concise and includes the words “it seems” by way of caveat. I might add the word “currently”, but that is, perhaps, being over cautious.
The link to Kathryn’s blog is very useful. Regards, John C.
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dfhunter, the wording of the FT commentator seems similar to that of Robin’s ‘Spectator’ correspondent. I wonder whether they are one and the same person and also whether they work in the UK electricity industry. Regards, John.
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On Radio 4’s “Today” programme after 7am today, there was brief mention of electricity being part of the UK-EU agreement to be signed off today. But I have heard no more. Have you? Regards, John C.
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Thanks John.
BTW I had the same thought about the FT comment.
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Robin, thanks for the NoTricksZone link. I commented above on the reduction of solar % on the Iberian grid. However, there are technical issues in the link too. I suggest that one of the technical ideas, namely setting the frequency standard via satellite, is a security risk – satellite signals are too easily hobbled.
However, when I was last in a power station control room, years ago, there was a private (analogue) telephone system that connected all the key points of the grid. I suspect that it still exists, albeit in modern form. Could that system be used for propagating the frequency reference? Or would it too collapse when the rest of the grid collapses? Regards, John C.
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Sub-heading on the FT website:
“Can Britain’s neighbours help it keep the lights on? Greater interconnection should boost system’s resilience but also exposes electricity to political tensions”
The article itself is paywalled but that heading suggests the author is unaware of the fact that all of the UK’s interconnectors are DC and thus of no use for grid stability – “resilience” – as John C has commented. Disappointing.
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John C: the excellent Tilak Doshi has a detailed piece in this morning’s Daily Sceptic about how the UK/EU summit includes electricity. Titled The Folly of Starmer’s Surrender Summit – Not so Much ‘Ruthlessly Pragmatic’ as Cravenly Sycophantic he reports that the plan is that we should link our carbon market to the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS). His conclusion:
Worth reading in full. Access HERE.
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Robin, thank you for the link. Unfortunately I cannot read beyond the first couple of paragraphs. However, you quoted exactly what I feared, namely that the UK will hook itself to the EU ETS, which is, I understand, even more ruinously expensive than our own wretched scheme. How economically destructive is that? Bonkers in spades. Regards, John C.
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John C, here are two more extracts:
Why on earth are we interested in joining the ‘EU’s climate club’?
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Robin, this energy policy, equivalent to trying to make water flow uphill, is an economic tragedy for all those ordinary people who cannot avoid being caught in its web. It reduces their disposable income; it threatens the viability of the companies they work for; and it makes everything they buy unnecessarily more expensive. In addition it eats up huge swathes of countryside thereby taking some arable land out of production and adding to the pressure on food prices.
As a policy it has nothing to recommend it to ordinary people. However, for the political elites and those in the Green Blob, it is the gift that keeps on gouging. ‘Saudi Arabia of Stupidity’ or by far the greatest peacetime policy failure in modern history, anybody?
By turns I feel angry and then want to cry with frustration. Regards, John C.
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John: me too.
PS: I loved ‘the gift that keeps on gouging‘.
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MikeH – thanks for the FT link in above comment. For some reason I can view & copy bits from it?
Found this partial quote interesting –
France and Norway are particularly important to Europe’s electricity system, since their respective nuclear and hydropower supplies help protect against the risk of simultaneously low or high wind supplies across the north of the continent. Experts differ on the severity of that risk, although recent research by consultancy Wood Mackenzie pointed to a “wind drought” across northern Europe in March 2021, noting a “strong correlation” between onshore and offshore fleets in 2020 “across a broad geographic footprint”.
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Kathryn Porter has just published a remarkable and detailed report in which she tackles head-on those who insist that our high energy prices are caused by the international gas price: https://watt-logic.com/2025/05/19/new-report-the-true-affordability-of-net-zero/
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dfhunter, the 2021 wind drought was very real:
https://climate.copernicus.eu/esotc/2021/low-winds
Against the backdrop of that factual event, and the forecasts for wind speeds to drop:
https://illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/global-warming-may-be-making-europe-less-windy-study-suggests
it’s nonsense to go hell for leather towards wind as one of the main sources of the UK’s electricity supply.
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As I’d like to provide a link to Kathryn Porter’s latest report (see above) I’d be interested to know if anyone here cannot access it because they do not subscribe to Watt-Logic.
In case not here’s the Abstract from her full report:
A beautifully succinct summary!
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Robin,
Thanks for the link to the Kathryn Porter article. It’s extremely comprehensive, and it’s difficult to see how it can be argued against (though Miliband and his cohorts will continue with their “cheap energy” mantra while failing to address her comments head on). What really encourages me is the opening paragraph:
This evening my latest report: The true affordability of net zero, was launched at an event hosted by The Lord Offord of Garvel, Shadow Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero in the House of Lords. The event was attended by MPs, Peers and members of the energy community as well as the press. It’s the first time a report of mine has received quite so much attention. Ahead of the launch it was covered by UnHerd and the Telegraph.…
The MSM are now latching onto this in a big way. I think this is really going to be a major issue at the next general election (along, sadly, with the toxic issues of Brexit and immigration). All three issues will sink Labour, I have little doubt. I am increasingly of the view that their vote (which last year was much smaller than their overwhelming Parliamentary victory would suggest) will collapse, just as the Tory vote collapsed last time out. Neither of the major parties “get it”. Reform, which doesn’t have the answers but does understand some of the problems, knows how to feed off voter disenchantment, and I suspect the 2-party system may be broken at the next general election.
NB, I am not a Reform supporter. Assuming they put up a candidate in my constituency, I will vote SDP again.
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Robin,
I am a fan of Kathryn Porter, though I have never got around to subscribing to her blog. The report is fully accessible to me via the link you have posted.
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Robin, further to your NoTricksZone link of 18th May and my comment of 19th, I am concerned about disruption to the world’s electrical grids by space weather in general and not simply that caused by bad actors.
Carrington events (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event) have considerable potential to do huge damage, “A geomagnetic storm of this magnitude occurring today has the potential to cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts and damage to the electrical power grid.”
There is hugely more electrical and particularly electronic equipment around today than there was back in the time of the Carrington event of 1859. Furthermore, today’s transistors and integrated circuits are much more vulnerable to space weather and the actions of bad actors than the electrical valves that were very commonly used in radios and televisions etc. up until the 1960s.:-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Effects
How much of our critical infrastructure is hardened against such threats? I fear that, once again, we are not in a good place.
Regards, John C.
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I don’t want to return to the toxic Brexit wars, so wish to highlight just two paragraphs from this article:
“Starmer’s ‘Brexit reset’ is even worse than you thought
He has surrendered our sovereignty and betrayed democracy without getting anything meaningful in return.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/20/starmers-brexit-reset-is-even-worse-than-you-thought/
....Arguably the most consequential part of Starmer’s reset is that it puts the UK on the path towards ‘dynamic alignment’ – that dreaded phrase again – with the EU’s energy and climate policies. Although the UK’s industrial energy prices are currently the highest in the world, EU member states are not far behind. The Net Zero agenda, which has done so much damage to both British and European industries, could soon be enshrined for perpetuity via the EU.
One clear danger in Starmer’s deal is that it proposes that the UK rejoin the EU’s emissions-trading scheme (ETS). As I warned on spiked back in February, this will send Britain’s energy prices soaring. The ETS allows companies to buy credits for the amount of carbon they will emit each year. They can also trade these credits with other firms should they no longer need them. Since Brexit, the price of carbon credits in the UK has fallen significantly relative to those in the EU and there are plans to revamp the EU scheme to make carbon prices higher still. Signing up to the EU ETS can only hike the price of electricity (much of it still generated by gas), increase the cost of doing heavy industry and add to the price of petrol at the pump – all CO2-emitting activities that will be affected by the EU’s higher carbon prices. Yet this is something that Starmer’s team were reportedly eager to sign up to, believing it will ease certain exports to the EU and hasten the journey to Net Zero. This is an astonishing, wilful act of self-sabotage.…
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Unlike John C, I am not qualified to comment on what caused the blackout in Iberia, but if it wasn’t too much renewable power generation, what’s the reason for this?
“Spain Boosts Costlier Gas Power to Secure Grid After Blackout”
https://www.rigzone.com/news/wire/spain_boosts_costlier_gas_power_to_secure_grid_after_blackout-19-may-2025-180568-article/
Spain is boosting generation from costlier gas-fired power plants in the wake of a nationwide blackout that raised concerns about the grid’s ability to cope with an abundance of renewable energy.
The output of combined-cycle gas turbines, a more steady generation technology than solar, jumped 37% in the two weeks after the outage, compared with the two weeks prior, data from power grid operator Red Electrica show. Their average share of Spain’s power mix increased to 18% from about 12%...
Bloomberg seems to have produced the story, but their version is paywalled (or, at least, you have to subscribe in order to see it).
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MarkH, Robin raised the same issue the other day, albeit from a different source. And so I had a quick look at it here:-(https://cliscep.com/2025/04/10/the-case-against-net-zero-a-tenth-update/#comment-160373)
Specifically, I tried to estimate how the sunniness in Spain had changed in the period from just before their blackout up until recently; it seems to have moved from very sunny to duller weather. My provisional conclusion was, “So, I wonder whether the reduction in the % of Spanish solar generation from late April to now (mid-May) is due primarily to the weather becoming cloudier.”
I also commented that they could still have been using too much solar in the run up to the blackout! The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. For example, they may be operating their grid in a much more conservative manner now (i.e. using less solar than is available) compared to the run up to the blackout. I hope that time, and openness on the part of the Iberian authorities, will tell.
I trust this makes sense. Regards, John C.
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A bit of fun since we mention AC/DC on this thread a lot –
Highway To Hell – AC/DC Official Site
http://www.acdc.com/music/highway-to-hell/
The lyrics are just made for ED and his NZ madness.
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And then – “Renewable” Electricity Champion Denmark Now Looking into Nuclear – Watts Up With That?
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Published by TCW this morning – see THIS.
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Well done, Robin – we need to get the message out there.
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Another blow to Miliband’s mad plan:
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Ross Clark has a piece in today’s Speccie titled Miliband’s 2030 clean power target looks increasingly impossible
I liked his opening paragraph:
Exactly as has been noted here above. ‘Increasingly impossible’ looks rather optimistic.
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Spain’s blackout story is disintegrating
Partial quote –
“We can argue about the answer to longer-term renewable droughts and Dunkelflaute. I am relaxed about using unabated gas to plug the holes and get through deep winter, whether in Spain or the UK. What matters is maintaining broad public consent for decarbonisation, and if we only get to 90pc clean power by the mid-2030s that is still a success.”
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Extraordinary Grid statistics this morning: renewables 86% (mainly wind); interconnectors – 25%; and price £1.77/MWh
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Robin,
At first sight that seems like a remarkable success story for renewables. But is it? An energy source that can be all or nothing and which requires gas back-up to ramp up and down accordingly, is neither cheap nor efficient. How the people who have to run the grid are supposed to cope is a mystery to me. An even bigger mystery is why they purport to support this agenda instead of pointing out how problematic it is.
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Maybe so Mark. But I’m sure the Mad One is extremely happy: just one more push and we’ve made it – that clean energy super-power is almost here!
(In truth of course you’re quite right.)
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Found this interesting – Climate reporters today can just insert activist talking points into their articles
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“Are you ready for Net Zero rationing?
A renewables-powered grid will force the UK into self-imposed blackouts.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/27/are-you-ready-for-net-zero-rationing/
‘Can Britons be persuaded to switch off their electricity when the wind doesn’t blow?’ That was the question asked last week by the Financial Times’s ‘clean energy correspondent’, Rachel Millard. The idea being that, as the Labour government continues to push the UK towards decarbonisation by 2030, households and businesses will have to change their habits and reduce their energy usage to prevent overwhelming the grid when renewables cannot cope with demand.
The industry term for this is ‘demand side’ response. It involves nudging households and organisations to spread their use of power across the day and avoiding peak times. In other words, it amounts to energy rationing. This is bound to be necessary in order for energy secretary Ed Miliband to reach his target of 95 per cent of Britain’s electricity coming from renewables and nuclear power by 2030….
…To dedicate so much time and energy to ‘saving the planet’ by switching stuff off in the home or workplace is an affront to rationality. People pay taxes and extortionate energy bills in the belief that it is the responsibility of the government and energy companies to provide an adequate supply of power.…
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“Data centre blitz threatens Labour’s net zero hopes
Northumberland project to generate more greenhouse gas than Birmingham Airport”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/27/data-centre-blitz-threatens-labours-net-zero-hopes/
Sir Keir Starmer’s bid to boost the economy with a slew of data centres threatens to undermine Labour’s net zero goals, campaigners have warned……
So much so obvious. Why can’t politicians join the dots?
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I just now posted this comment on the Spiked article (see Mark’s note above):
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Mark,
Do you think the government is aware of the humungous energy demands that AI will make, or are they just relying upon the public not being aware? Or maybe they just don’t care.
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John, I really don’t know. It’s a blindingly obvious conflict between net zero and the aspirations to be an AI superpower (whatever that is). We keep re-visiting the issue around variants of the theme). Are they stupid, are they ignorant, are they malign, are they really capable of persuading themselves that mutually contradictory objectives are in harmony with each other? Who knows. I remain bemused.
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Just 60 hours ago Robin drew our attention to some astonishing grid statistics, with renewables generating electricity for all they were worth, the price being not much above zero, and the UK exporting around 25% of the power it needed, through the generators (dirt cheap, I assume).
Yet this evening, renewables have fallen back to 34% , gas is back over 25%, a net 18.6% is coming in through the interconnectors, and the price is just shy of £100 per MWh (so while we probably exported briefly at giveaway prices, I assume we are again paying top dollar for our substantial imports).
The BBC has joined the Guardian lately in using the absurd “climate whiplash” terminology. Energy whiplash might be more appropriate.
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I had a minor spat this morning with a commentator on a Speccie article who said that claims that China was the world’s biggest CO2 emitter were misleading in view of its vast population. I pointed out that China’s 9.24 tons per capita emissions are considerably greater than the EU’s and UK’s (5.66 and 4.42 respectively). I added a note that the UK figure was less even than the global average (4.86).
That reminded me of a suggestion made here a little while ago (by Jit?) that, re ‘climate action’, an excellent target for the UK might simply be to ensure that our CO2 emissions never exceeded the global average. How could anyone object to that? Yet its adoption would mean that we could halt the march of the renewables and get our energy policy back to something approximating common sense. A realist’s objection of course might be that, as a large modern economy, our emissions should really be considerably more (say 10%) than the global average.
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Robin,
I fail to understand people who insist that Britain must get to net zero asap, while at the same time being ferocious defenders of China. The lack of logic is off the scale.
In other developments, Ben Pile has another piece up at the Daily Sceptic, and this one isn’t paywalled:
“The Net Zero Agenda’s Continued Collapse Into Chaos”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/28/the-net-zero-agendas-continued-collapse-into-chaos/
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A cheering article by Harry Mount in The Oldie:
Record puffin numbers on Skomer
https://www.theoldie.co.uk/blog/skomer-treasured-island
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Robin,
I recently discussed the Skomer Island puffins here:
https://cliscep.com/2025/04/25/climate-change-ate-my-homework/#comment-160486
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“High wind and forecasting errors cause havoc on the GB grid”
https://watt-logic.com/2025/05/30/high-wind-and-forecasting-errors-cause-havoc-on-the-gb-grid/
Yesterday demonstrated some of the challenges of high wind generation on the GB system, with lots of activity in the Balancing Mechanism, particularly to curtail wind and CCGTa, as well as bringing up CCGTs, and some counter-intuitive interconnector activity. It also exposed issues with poor forecasting, which I have highlighted before.
Wind output was forecast to be above 14 GW for much of the day. This pushed GB power prices down, incentivising exports, however, due to grid constraints, it was impossible to deliver on these exports using wind. This resulted in significant swings on the interconnectors, significant curtailment of wind generation (up to 3 GW) and localised dispatch of CCGTs in the Balancing Mechanism (“BM”) to provide both inertia and generation to meet the export needs.
In effect, because the market does not have a means of pricing in the impact of grid constrains, some gas power stations had to run in order to export electricity to the Continent after high wind expectations depressed wholesale power prices.
While some with argue that this means we should move to locational pricing, the reality is that under a locational pricing model, wind would run even less and gas mode because suppliers with generation in the south-east where demand is most highly concentrated, will seek to procure electricity from the interconnectors and more proximate CCGTs than from Scottish windfarms whose deliverability is uncertain due to lack of transmission capacity….
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A long shot, but Gambling Act 2005 should expand it’s remit to UK energy.
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Now, because green electricity is so cheap, the cost of subsidising it may be added to gas bills.
“Miliband plots 15% net zero tax on gas bills”
Telegraph link.
Quoth Miliband,
We need to get rid of the levies, and if the blather he spouts is true, they ain’t needed. But of course we know they are needed; gas is cheaper than electricity, and heating with gas is obviously better; therefore we have to punish normal folks yet again by slapping another tax on it.
Miliband out, please.
[Our heating engineer lately serviced our gas boiler. He estimated that for most houses the cost of putting in a heat pump would be £20K.]
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I think the principled case for these levies not falling on electricity is clear.
If Miliband really thinks that, then I fear he is as stupid as I have recently concluded Starmer must be. It’s a moronic statement.
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“Tide is turning in Europe and beyond in favour of nuclear power
Spain’s recent blackout and AI datacentres’ energy needs are leading politicians to reach for the restart button”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/01/tide-turning-europe-beyond-favour-nuclear-power
When millions of people across the Iberian peninsula were left without power last month the political fallout ignited debate over Europe’s renewable energy agenda, and fuelled the rising interest in nuclear power.
Europe’s largest power blackout in decades, still largely unexplained, has raised questions about whether renewable energy can be relied on to provide a stable source of clean energy. It has also fuelled a renewed interest in the global nuclear power renaissance already under way.
Despite long-held environmental concerns about nuclear power generation, political leaders across the globe are increasingly looking to lift restrictions on nuclear reactors or invest billions in new projects to keep pace with the fast-rising demand for low-carbon energy, which is expected to accelerate as AI datacentres grow.
In Spain, the blackout has intensified an ongoing debate over the government’s plans to phase out the country’s remaining seven nuclear reactors by 2035. Support for the low-carbon energy source has re-emerged hand-in-hand with criticism of renewable energy, and its potential role in the outage.
Spain’s power grid relied on renewable energy for about 70% of its power at the time of the blackout, which experts believe may have made it more difficult for the energy system operator to keep the grid’s frequency stable.…
[My emphasis]. Is the Guardian changing tack? Is this the beginning of an acknowledgement that too great a reliance on renewables destabilises the grid?
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“High electricity bill taxes holding us back, say industry groups
Make UK tells government that prices threaten to derail industrial strategy as Energy UK calls for charges to be ‘rebalanced’”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jun/02/high-electricity-bill-taxes-holding-us-back-say-industry-groups
The UK government is being pressed to wipe billions from the energy costs facing households and heavy industry by reforming the high taxes levied on electricity bills.
These policy levies mean the UK pays some of the highest energy bills in the world, and are simultaneously disadvantaging British industry and stifling the efforts of households to transition to lower-carbon heating systems, according to industry trade groups.
Make UK has warned that the government’s long-awaited industrial policy is at risk of being derailed by the high energy prices charged to UK manufacturers, which the lobby group states make the sector’s energy bills 46% higher than the global average.
The trade organisation has called on the government to cut industrial energy costs as part of Labour’s long-awaited industrial strategy, which is due later this month, by reforming “the complex and unfair policy levies that make low-carbon energy more expensive than fossil fuels”.
Its plan includes the state underwriting a fixed energy price for manufacturers. Under the scheme, manufacturing firms would receive top-up payments from the government if energy wholesale costs rise beyond the set price – but they would repay the difference to the exchequer if the wholesale price falls below the agreed price.
Stephen Phipson, Make UK’s chief executive, said: “If we do not address the issue of high industrial energy costs in the UK as a priority, we risk the security of our country. We will fail to attract investment in the manufacturing sector and will rapidly enter a phase of renewed de-industrialisation.”
“UK manufacturers have faced energy prices far above those of European competitors for many years, undermining their ability to invest, grow, and compete globally,” Phipson said.
Another trade organisation, Energy UK, blamed the government’s levies, which predominantly fall on electricity bills, for making cleaner alternatives such heat pumps artificially expensive in comparison with gas….
This article contains a vital truth (that the UK’s high energy bills are destroying our economy and making our lives worse) with an egregious lie (told by those with a vested interest in persuading us to believe it), namely that government levies (i.e. the costs of net zero and renewables) make electricity artificially expensive compared with gas. Those levies wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the drive for renewables and net zero. Electricity isn’t artificially expensive compared to gas. Electricity generated increasingly by renewables is more expensive. It’s a feature of the system, not a bug.
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Mark – you ask “Is the Guardian changing tack”.
I think they have painted themselves into a corner by years of climate crisis doom reporting & green energy vs fossil fuel bias. For years they have derided/vilified anybody that dared to question the science/policy behind MMGW. But now reality has intruded on dreamworld & the back peddling begins (only joking:-)
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This may help anyone who needs to be cheered up:
https://x.com/DominicFrisby/status/1929833129797189999
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I have long said that the problem isn’t simply Miliband (though he most certainly is a problem): the real problem is that Starmer, behind his technocratic facade is a true believer in net zero. He is pushing this agenda, and Miliband will stay in place as his lightning conductor, the one who takes all the flak:
“Reeves forced to back down in net zero row with Miliband
Starmer sides with Energy Secretary after Chancellor seeks to cut key projects”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/04/reeves-forced-to-back-down-in-net-zero-row-with-miliband/
Ed Miliband has defeated an attempt by Rachel Reeves to raid one of his key net zero programs in next week’s spending review, The Telegraph understands.
The Treasury has for months been considering cuts to the £13.2 billion warm homes plan, which aims to insulate properties and make them more energy efficient.
But Mr Miliband, the Energy Security Secretary, and Ms Reeves, the Chancellor, are understood to have reached an agreement in the past few days after fraught negotiations and the scheme will remain largely unaffected.
The agreement is a boost for net zero supporters in government, chief among them Mr Miliband, who have warned against scaling back green plans.
It will also likely be regarded as a sign of the Chancellor’s waning influence as Downing Street seeks to placate backbenchers unhappy over spending cuts….
It may well be true that Reeves’ influence is waning (and not before time) but this isn’t a case of Miliband beating Reeves. This is a case of Reeves being forced to do the PM’s bidding.
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“The Net Zero Straitjacket is Locking In Higher Bills”
In The Net Zero Straitjacket, Wilkinson sets out five key arguments:
The cost of renewable energy has been underestimated. Published official analyses have not adequately accounted for variable weather patterns which mean there can be periods of entire wind drought years. This means that the quantity of electricity generation and storage required in 2050 has not been calculated correctly.
Electricity prices are likely to rise further, an outcome that the renewable industry appears to be betting on, and which is ‘built in’ by rising renewable energy subsidies and growing grid inefficiency.
Compulsory policies put Britain in a straitjacket and can only leave the public poorer. Mandating the use of EVs, heat pumps and overly strict environmental standards reduces consumer choice and leaves the public worse off. The Climate Change Act ties all future governments to these rigid requirements.
We will miss out on using the energy under our feet. The missed opportunities from our pursuit of Net Zero need to be recognised. Failing to extract our significant fossil fuel reserves means large sums of potential tax revenues go uncollected and many people miss out on high-skilled and high-paid jobs. Importing gas and oil means tax revenues, jobs and investments go abroad.
The benefits don’t stack up. The Government uses flawed ‘carbon values’ to claim large benefits for its climate policies. However, these are highly contestable and don’t represent real benefits for the British public from lower emissions.
In his own words, Harry Wilkinson warns: “The public has been misled about the costs and consequences of Net Zero. This report shines a light on the reality: a deeply authoritarian agenda that increases the cost of living for everyone.”
https://thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2025/06/The-Net-Zero-Straitjacket.pdf
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Useful arguments Mark. But what’s missing – and this so often happens – is the further argument that in any case net zero is utterly pointless because the UK contributes so little (0.7%) to global GHG emissions and major countries the source of about 80% refuse to prioritise emission reduction.
Of course you know all that. But it annoys me that this argument – fatal to net zero – isn’t emphasised nearly as often as it should be. It’s particularly disappointing that GWPF is the culprit.
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Remind me again why the current UK government doesn’t want to sanction use of UK gas?
“British Gas owner strikes £20bn gas deal with Norway’s state energy company
Centrica’s 10-year agreement with Equinor helps meet almost 10% of the UK’s needs – enough to supply 5m homes”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jun/05/british-gas-owner-strikes-20bn-gas-deal-with-norways-state-energy-company
The owner of British Gas has struck a £20bn deal with Norway’s state energy company to buy enough gas to meet nearly 10% of the UK’s needs for the next decade.
Under the agreement, Centrica will buy around 5bn cubic meters of gas from Equinor – enough to supply 5m UK homes – every year from this winter until 2035 at the prevailing market rate.
It is the latest long-term deal between the UK and Norway, which has been one of Britain’s largest sources of imported gas for the last 50 years. But in a nod to Britain’s net zero agenda, the latest agreement will include a clause that allows the UK to swap gas imports for emissions-free hydrogen from Equinor’s UK hydrogen plant.
Equinor is working with Centrica and the energy company SSE on multiple low carbon hydrogen projects on the north bank of the Humber. Equinor’s plans to develop a “pathfinder” hydrogen project at the existing Aldbrough gas storage facility in East Yorkshire alongside SSE could be operational by 2029.
Britain currently imports nearly two-thirds of its gas requirements from Norway…
Note that last sentence. Is Norway one of these fossil fuel dictatorships we have to free ourselves from?
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“Most new build homes must have solar panels – Miliband”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0j728gvp94o
…Asked if he worried developers would pass the cost of adding solar panels on to buyers, Miliband said he didn’t think there would be an effect on house prices.…
This is the problem, isn’t it? He, and many of his Cabinet colleagues, inhabit a fantasy world where real economics don’t penetrate. He also believes that adding more and more expensive renewables will lower prices.
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Robin’s article, as updated, has alluded to the nonsensical nature of this government’s plans to cut CO2 emissions while making a major play for AI. That being the case, this is interesting:
“New UK AI datacentre could cause five times emissions of Birmingham airport
Exclusive: emissions from power-hungry warehouses at Lincolnshire facility expected to be 850,000 tonnes a year”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/06/planned-ai-datacentre-in-england-could-cause-five-times-emissions-of-big-airport
A vast new datacentre to feed Britain’s rising demand for artificial intelligence could cause more greenhouse gas emissions than five international airports.…
…Documents estimate the datacentre would consume 3.7bn kWh of energy, with annual CO2 emissions of 857,254 tonnes when running at full tilt. This is based on the current mix of energy sources powering the National Grid.
The datacentre will also create so much excess heat that glasshouses are being proposed with capacity to produce more than 10 tonnes of tomatoes a day.…
…The developer has ruled out on-site renewables as impractical. If the system ran on biomass energy it would require the daily delivery of 100 large lorry loads of wood chips. Wind energy would require 10,000 20-metre wind turbines, while an area five times the size of the Glastonbury festival site would be needed if it were to be powered by photovoltaic panels.…
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Interesting Mark. And meanwhile in Texas:
What solar? What wind? Texas data centers build their own gas power plants
Data center operators are turning away from the grid to build their own power plants.
How things – especially priorities – are changing.
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Robin,
I suppose the Texas data centres are turning to gas, because it’s reliable. The Guardian article which explained why the Lincolnshire AI centre finds renewables to be impracticable because they take up absurd amounts of space, failed to make the obvious additional point – they’re unreliable, and something like AI (just like a modern economy) can’t be dependent on intermittent and unpredictable energy.
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“How a day of havoc unfolded on Britain’s electricity grid
Power stations were told to ramp up and ramp down, while energy was exported under the sea, amid inaccurate forecasts for wind power. The system needs renewing”
https://www.thetimes.com/article/93acbb75-9b20-443a-8125-387de3b4d16f
Imagine the scene at the end of May when control room staff working for the National Energy System Operator arrived at their offices in Wokingham, Berkshire, for the 7am start of their shift. As they sipped their morning lattes, they had no idea of the storm that awaited them: a day of havoc on the national grid resulting in a mad scramble to balance energy supply and prevent a blackout.
The grid required 24,742 balancing actions across that day, May 29 — thousands more than usual. In essence, these actions are orders from the control room to ramp power stations up or down to keep supply and demand finely balanced.
What caused the chaos?
Primarily it was down to high wind-power output and poor forecasting from the system operator. Wind output was forecast to be above 14GW for much of the day, reaching over 21GW in the morning peak. This pushed down British day-ahead power prices, providing an incentive to export energy via undersea cables, since cross-border trading allows electricity to flow from a lower-priced to a higher-priced market.
Unfortunately, the forecasts proved pretty inaccurate. As the sun rose and demand climbed to its daily peak, it was clear that the day-ahead wind forecasts were significantly off. Bizarrely, the same-day forecasts were even worse. Wind output was high, but not as high as forecast.
The level of discrepancy between what was forecast and what was generated was extremely difficult for the control room to manage that day…
...The software that underpins the balancing mechanism was written in the 1980s and is subject to frequent outages; had there been such an outage on May 29, the control room staff would have had to revert to manually instructing plants by phone, which is hard to do at a rate of 17 per minute. The grid could easily have collapsed, resulting in blackouts.
The operator’s likely response would be to revert to a more traditional grid — turning off the wind power and turning up the gas, and hoping this can be done quickly enough to maintain stability.
The control room staff do a heroic job with inadequate tools, but the heroism of individuals is no way to run a secure modern power system.
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Mark, Kathryn Porter has done some detailed analysis here https://watt-logic.com/2025/05/30/high-wind-and-forecasting-errors-cause-havoc-on-the-gb-grid/
However, the final line of your quote neatly summarises the wretched state of the UK’s electricity system, “… but the heroism of individuals is no way to run a secure modern power system.”
It is no comfort to us here in the UK, but matters are very dire across in New York state and city:-https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-6-4-can-anyone-save-new-york-from-its-coming-self-inflicted-climate-and-energy-disaster
If one of the dominos (California, New York, Germany, UK) falls then, perhaps, the others may pull back from the energy brink before they too succumb to huge self-inflicted harm. Fingers crossed – but this is no way to run what were once modern, vibrant economies.
Regards, John C.
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John: and yet New York mandates only 70% of renewable electricity generation by 2030.
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A couple of weeks ago I sent my TCANZ essay to the Tory ‘Policy Review Programme’. Here’s their reply:
I don’t suppose anything much is likely to come of it. And in any case the Tories would seem to be a busted flush. But you never know – it might have some impact.
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“Net Zero is a Far-Left Tyrannical Death Star
The Net Zero Death Star will eventually be destroyed by the forces of freedom and market economics.”
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/net-zero-far-left-tyrannical-death-star
...Starting with energy policy, we can see that there are Government mandated subsidies for renewables which cost a fortune. Plus, intermittent renewables can bid low into the market and be dispatched onto the grid despite the full cost of renewables being much higher than the market clearing price. Then there’s extra subsidies for the Capacity Market to provide backup to intermittent renewables. In addition, there are even more subsidies for industry to compensate them for the resulting high electricity prices. There are extra subsidies for biofuels, green gas, green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. On top of that, Miliband’s plan for Clean Power by 2030 sounds like a Soviet-era five-year plan for tractor production.
The Government and the Climate Change Committee are also intent on forcing landlords to install insulation measures, many of which have payback times measured in centuries. We also have subsidies for heat pumps and company EV drivers pay less tax than for petrol cars.
On the supply side, new drilling for both onshore and offshore oil and gas resources is effectively banned and the assets that remain are being taxed to oblivion with 78% marginal tax rates. Using gas to produce electricity attracts carbon taxes through the Emissions Trading Scheme amounting to about 20% of wholesale prices.
All of this takes energy policy as far away from free markets as it is possible to imagine. Net Zero is a far-left project that would not have been out of place in the USSR....
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You almost couldn’t make this stuff up:
“Reeves vows to shield UK from Israel-Iran price shock”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3080q893z3o
…She would not “take anything off the table” in response to the threat of rising energy costs, she told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme.…
I bet allowing new oil and gas exploration to secure supplies from UK resources will be off the table.
…“A lack of investment in our own domestic energy production has left us exposed,” she said.…
Well, quite!
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Mark – thanks for your “Net Zero is a Far-Left Tyrannical Death Star” link, which linked to “- “The Government-funded UKFIRES project” – Absolute Zero (produced by academics from leading universities including Cambridge, Oxford, Bath and Imperial College).
had to download a PDF to read it & it’s from 2019, so probably already covered by past posts/comments. From the “Executive Summary” bit long partial quote –
“We have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050: that’s what climate scientists tell us, it’s what social protesters are asking for and it’s now the law in the UK. But we aren’t on track. For twenty years we’ve been trying to solve the problem with new or breakthrough technologies
that supply energy and allow industry to keep growing, so we don’t have to change our lifestyles. But although some exciting new technology options are being developed, it will take a long time to deploy them, and they won’t be operating at scale within thirty years. Meanwhile, our cars are getting heavier, we’re flying more each year and we heat our homes to higher temperatures. We all know that this makes no sense, but it’s difficult to start discussing how we really want to address climate change while we keep hoping that new technologies will take the problem away.
In response, this report starts from today’s technologies: if we really want to reach zero emissions in thirty years time, what does that involve? Most of what we most enjoy – spending time together as families or communities, leisure, sport, creativity – can continue and grow unhindered.
We need to switch to using electricity as our only form of energy and if we continue today’s impressive rates of growth in non-emitting generation, we’ll only have to cut our use of energy to 60% of today’s levels. We can achieve this with incremental changes to the way we use energy: we can drive smaller cars and take the train when possible, use efficient electric heat-pumps to keep warm and buy buildings, vehicles and equipment that are better designed and last much longer.
The two big challenges we face with an all electric future are flying and shipping. Although there are lots of new ideas about electric planes, they won’t be operating at commercial scales within 30 years, so zero emissions means that for some period, we’ll all stop using aeroplanes.”
Got that far before thinking “academics from leading universities” have no clue how the real world works.
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I believe I commented, when UKFires was published, that its recommendations were so ridiculous that its authors must really be undercover sceptics highlighting the absurdity of net zero.
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TCW has published a short note of mine this morning: LINK
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“Solar Power to Blame for Spain’s Disastrous Blackout, Official Investigation Finds”
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/06/18/solar-power-to-blame-for-spains-disastrous-blackout-official-investigation-finds/
A Government report into Europe’s biggest power cut found that Spain’s solar farms were generating so much power on April 28th, a particularly sunny day, that prices became “negative” – meaning there were no profits to be made in operating them.
Plunging prices triggered a mass switch-off, which sent voltage and frequency fluctuations cascading across the national grids of both Spain and Portugal. Back-up systems meant to guard against such fluctuations were not in effect.
This caused blackouts that left more than 60 million people across the Iberian peninsula without power, the Spanish Government report concluded.
The power cut caused massive gridlock in cities and left thousands stranded on trains and in elevators across the Iberian peninsula. Several deaths were also linked to the incident.…
…The investigation’s findings will fuel concerns about Britain’s race to Net Zero, led by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary. Mr Miliband wants to make Britain’s energy system carbon free by 2030, a shift that will see the country rely almost entirely on renewable energy, such as wind, solar and nuclear to keep the lights on.…
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“Heatwaves ‘will trigger net zero meltdown’
Electric cars and heat pumps among technologies at risk of breaking down or exploding”
A slightly far-fetched report on a report at the Telegraph. Nevertheless, there are elements that seem realistic.
One thing that seems rather odd is the idea that solar panels could be turned off to cool them down.
But they get hotter when you turn them off, because they are no longer exporting energy.
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A handy summary from David Turver, which rolls together in one very effective article much of what we here have been saying for a long time:
“Net Zero for DummiesThe folly of Net Zero explained in eight charts”
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/net-zero-for-dummies
The arguments against Net Zero can be summarised as follows:
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I’ve had a couple of successes this morning:
‘It is actually something I have been thinking about for a while and you may have just fully persuaded me to do it!’
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