Prof Michael Kelly has a new GWPF paper out today on the problems facing the UK is it goes ahead with Net Zero.
It covers very succinctly all of the problems we have discussing in the last year, and asks the questions that nobody in authority wants to answer:
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2020/05/KellyDecarb.pdfElectrifying the UK and the Want of Engineering
Michael Kelly
Essay 11, The Global Warming Policy Foundation
The scale of the task
Consider Dinorwig Power Station, the biggest hydropower ener-gy-storage plant in the UK.1 If all UK cars were battery powered, the nine gigawatts of energy stored behind the dam would be ca-pable of recharging about 60,000 of them, or about 0.25% of the UK fleet. We are clearly going to need an extraordinary amount of electricity to convert all personal transport to batteries, even with-out considering the trucks and vans used in all the logistics that keep our supermarkets, high-streets, and industrial sites stocked.
Where will all this new clean green electricity come from? Something of the order of 70% of Britain’s entire existing electric-ity-supply capacity will be needed if we are to remain a mobile society. When we get coded messages from the Climate Change Committee, implying that we will have to rethink the extent to which we are going to be able to travel in future, it is the implausi-bility of meeting that vast gulf in energy sources that is motivating them to question our lifestyles.
And if we are to decarbonise the economy – so-called ‘net zero’ – we are also going to have to electrify the heating of build-ings too. At present, this is mostly done cheaply and efficiently with natural gas. Converting everyone to heat pumps is going to bring about another huge surge in electricity demand. To repeat the earlier question, where will all this new electricity come from?
More from link.
