https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-30-uk-trapped-in-the-green-energy-cul-de-sacUK Trapped In The Green Energy Cul-de-Sac30 Oct, 2022
Francis Menton
Often I have referred to the situation that the UK, Germany, California and others have set themselves up for as “hitting the green energy wall.” But now that the UK has actually gotten there and has begun to deal with the consequences, I’m not sure that “hitting the wall” is the best analogy. A better analogy might be “driving into the green energy cul-de-sac.” After all, when you hit a wall you can probably just pick yourself up and turn around and be on your way. In the cul-de-sac you are trapped with no evident way of getting out. You might be in there for a long time.
This is where the UK finds itself today. For well more than a decade, they have been aggressively and intentionally pursuing the green energy fantasy. The Net Zero emissions target was made mandatory by legislation in 2019. They have built hundreds of wind turbines and solar panels, while at the same time closing almost all of their coal mines and coal power plants. That has left them largely dependent on natural gas to back up the intermittent renewables. They have plenty of natural gas right under their feet in a large shale formation, but for years they dithered about allowing fracking to produce the gas, and then in 2019 they imposed a blanket moratorium on fracking. With production from their North Sea gas fields declining, they must buy gas on the European market. And although they don’t buy much gas directly from Russia, the European market has been driven to great heights by the cutoff of Russian supplies. Result: average annual residential energy bills in the UK, which were around £1000 as recently as earlier this year, went up to about £3000 this month, and have been projected to go as high as £5000 by this coming April absent some sort of government intervention.
And only now has it become apparent that there is no good exit strategy. That would be true even if everyone in the UK were on board with exiting from the green energy delusion, but of course that is not the case either. For years they have been prohibiting the things they have needed to do to maintain a low-cost energy system, and now they are facing years if not a decade or more to get back to where they were.
Consider some possibilities:
- Perhaps the most obvious first step to get back to energy sanity would be to lift the ban on domestic fracking. Prime-Minister-for-a-month Liz Truss did just that during her brief term in office. Then new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took office on October 25, and on October 26 — the very next day — he announced that he would reinstate the fracking ban. From Reuters, October 26:
Fracking will be banned in England under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, reversing a decision made by his predecessor Liz Truss, as the new British leader returned to a 2019 Conservative Party manifesto pledge.. . . . In parliament, Sunak was asked about fracking, and said he stood by a 2019 manifesto commitment on the issue.
In the best of circumstances, it would take several years after fracking is allowed before full-scale production can be up and running to alleviate the energy crisis. But with a regulatory environment that reverses by 180 degrees every few weeks, who exactly is going to put up millions of pounds to start big fracking projects? Even if they reversed course again and opened up fracking tomorrow, it would at a minimum be multiple years before large scale new production would come on line.
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