Andrew Montford: Does the Climate Change Committee understand the energy storage problem?
JANUARY 25, 2024
tags: ccc
By Paul Homewood
Yesterday, I reported that four national institutions – the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the National Infrastructure Commission, National Grid, and the Royal Society – have got their energy system modelling wrong and have thus underestimated the cost of Net Zero.
Last night, the CCC’s Chief Executive, Chris Stark put out a long Twitter thread
addressing these issues. But while it’s dressed up as a rebuttal, it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, it’s a masterpiece of bureaucratic obfuscation.
Recall firstly that this blew up when the Sunday Telegraph reported Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith’s criticisms of the CCC’s energy system modelling: they had failed to look at the possibility of back-to-back low wind years. This meant that they underestimated the amount of hydrogen storage the system would need, and thus the costs involved.
There are 24 tweets in Stark’s thread. On number 10, we get this:
“We could certainly look further at a sequence of years. We are hoping we can do this in later work.”
Clearly then, Stark accepts Sir Christopher’s central point. He would have had to, of course, because he had already done so in correspondence with the Sunday Telegraph’s Ed Malnick, who reported in his article:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/01/25/andrew-montford-does-the-climate-change-committee-understand-the-energy-storage-problem/
