The crippling problem of renewable green energy cannot be solved
Story by Michael Kelly, Telegraph, 10/31/23
In a Net Zero world, what will we do when the wind isn’t blowing? Environmentalists like to point out that we will have solar power as well, but of course the sun doesn’t shine at night, so windless nights are a big problem.
Next, it is suggested that we can store electricity. But in winter we frequently get long wind lulls, and with the sun low in the sky, there will be little or no solar power either. These so-called “dunkelflautes” mean little or no electricity supply from the renewables fleet.
A dunkelflaute can last for weeks. That means you need huge, unfeasible quantities of electricity storage. The Royal Society recently concluded we’d need enough to cover more than two months’ demand, and, whatever storage technology is adopted, this isn’t going to be affordable or probably even possible. The Royal Society’s numbers suggest we’d need to deliver a project equivalent in size to HS2 every year, forever. Worse, that number is likely to be hugely understated, because the report’s authors used extraordinarily optimistic projections of what might happen to costs and efficiencies in the next 25 years. Using assumptions grounded in the technologies and costs prevalent today, we’d conclude that we’d need six months’ storage, and would have to settle ongoing annual bills equivalent to five HS2 projects per year.
It’s a huge problem, which makes the idea of Net Zero a hard sell. One of the wheezes dreamt up by the greens to make the costs look a bit smaller is to assume that we will get a significant proportion of our electricity down the “interconnectors” – the big cables that connect the UK grid to our European neighbours, or which would stitch together the various grids of North America. There are already several international interconnections in operation – from the UK to Norway, France, Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands – as well as others bringing power from region to region. More are on the way.
However, as with so much of the energy “transition”, there is a lot of wishful thinking going on.
Firstly, it is glibly assumed that the electricity delivered down interconnectors is zero-emission. Remarkably, this is the case, no matter how many coal-fired power stations are in operation on the continental grid at the time. In other words, replacing an idle wind farm in the UK with a coal-fired power station in Belgium would be assumed to represent an emissions-reducing move.
Secondly, it is assumed (in equally glib fashion) that the continental grid will always have power to spare for the UK, and that there will always be power to spare somewhere in the USA. This is simply not the case. Firstly, if it is midnight in the UK, it is dark across the whole of Europe. If it is two AM in New York it is midnight in Los Angeles, so nobody is going to be generating any solar power.
Secondly, although we are frequently told that “the wind is always blowing somewhere”, weather systems are extremely large things and they frequently affect whole continents. As a result, wind speeds are highly correlated across any continent; if there’s no wind in the UK, the chances are high that it’s not windy anywhere nearby either.
Even if the continent is windy when it’s calm in the UK, or if it’s windy in Texas when it’s calm in California, the ability to send power where it’s needed depends on there being surplus generating capacity in the precise place where the wind is blowing.
If, say, it’s windy in Scandinavia but the rest of Europe is experiencing a lull, you need enough spare windfarms in the Baltic and Nordic seas to meet demand from almost half a billion people. That’s a huge amount of windfarms. Then again, the windy spot might be in the Atlantic, off the coast of Iberia. So you’d need to build the same enormous number windfarms again, this time off the coast of Portugal. The again, and again – basically every local neighbourhood would have to have enough capacity to supply the entire continent. Hopefully this shows that the idea is rather ridiculous.
The same arguments apply to the idea of getting power from further afield. There is a currently a proposal to build an interconnector to Morocco, where the stiff breezes found in the seas off the Atlantic seaboard and deserts full of solar panels will, it is claimed, deliver an electricity bonanza. Unfortunately, as I write, wind speeds are rather low across most of Europe, while off the Western seaboard of Morocco they are … even lower. It’s gusty off Portugal though.
A lack of generating capacity in the right place is only one of the problems with interconnectors. They also turn out to be rather unreliable. For example, the Western Link, one of the interconnectors from England to the South of Scotland has failed regularly in its short lifetime, going down for months at a time, causing nightmares for grid managers tasked with making up the difference. Similarly, the IFA1 interconnector to France was hit by a fire in 2021, losing half of its capacity for a period of more than a year. Of course, any part of the electricity grid can suffer an outage, but the loss of an interconnector can take out a significant proportion of supply for long periods.
Worse still, interconnectors represent a risk to security of supply in other ways. Those long cables, hidden deep beneath the waves, are an inviting target for hostile powers. Just last week, a small flotilla from the navies of several European nations was scrambled to an area adjacent to the East Anglia One windfarm, after a Russian vessel was seen to be hanging around the area. We can’t know if it was sizing up the windfarm’s grid connection or the adjacent gas pipeline, but the point is the same; it is very hard to protect subsea infrastructure from sabotage (and impossible when it is a thousand-mile cable from here to Morocco).
The problem of what to do when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining is all but insurmountable. In technological terms, the only feasible solution is a vast fleet of windfarms and a gigantic store of green hydrogen, along the lines envisaged by the Royal Society. However, barring a series of dramatic technological breakthroughs, the costs would make the recent energy price crisis look like nothing.
It’s high time to put a stop to the wishful thinking on Net Zero.
Michael Kelly is Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the Royal Society of New Zealand, of the Institute of Physics and of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, as well as Senior Member of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineering in the USA