Cold, hungry, stuck at home: Net Zero’s drastic lifestyle changes
30 Jan
David Turver
Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith (CLS) recently started a row by pointing out that the Climate Change Committee (CCC) made a mistake in its grid design calculations. We do not need to go into all the details of that argument, because it masks the fact all the main Net Zero players are agreed that we should be using much less energy in 2050.
The 570TWh of demand outlined in CLS’s Royal Society (RS) report is in the same ballpark as the National Grid ESO Future Energy Scenarios published in 2023 (FES23), which calculates 2050 end-user demand across Residential, Industrial and Commercial and Transport sectors of 601—810 TWh for its Net Zero compliant scenarios. The CCC estimates end-user demand of 610 TWh in 2050 in its Balanced Net Zero pathway. Their dispute is about the amount of storage that would be required to cope with weather-dependent electricity generation from renewables.
This is a distraction from what the real argument ought to be. We should be having a much deeper discussion about how much energy we will need in 2050. Broadly speaking, FES23, the RS report and the CCC are calling for final energy demand to halve between now and 2050.
This matters because a chart (See Figure 1) from Our World in Data shows that there are no rich countries with low energy consumption.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/storage-spats-mask-drastic-net-zero-lifestyle-changes
