Could Britain go nuclear free?

You won’t have noticed it, but this week has been momentous for the electricity grid. Six out of nine UK nuclear power plants are offline at the moment, so nuclear power generation has dropped to a decades-long low of just 2.5GW. This compares to a norm of 4.7GW when all our plants are running normally. Nuclear generating just 2.5GW asks questions about just how valid the concept of a ‘baseload’ is, and if you need one at all, how substantial does it have to be? The fact is that if we can operate in the middle of winter, when demand is highest, on just 2.5GW, it would only take a few years to replace nuclear, either with battery storage or other forms of generation that mimic its constancy.

Pathways to phase out
In the last 15 years the growth of renewables has been pretty remarkable, up from 5% market share in 2008, to 45% market share in 2023. It’s likely that by 2030 the UK will be a renewables dominant country, up to 60 – 65% market share. To achieve this it only has to continue what it’s been doing for the last 15 years, add the same kinds of renewables – wind and solar – and add in some grid balancing measures such as battery storage and demand management.
Certainly with wind, which now has a 25% market share of UK electricity, there’s a sense we’ve only just got started. Five years ago the average capacity turbine was 3.5 megawatts, now the Dogger Bank wind farm is deploying 13 megawatt turbines. The Dept for Energy Security and Net Zero, those famous tree-hugging hippies, believes we’ll be using 20 megawatt turbines by 2040. It’s also the case that we’ve not even tapped into the areas where the best wind resource is – North of Northern Ireland and West of Scotland.

Tidal stream – constant, predictable and could be deployed all around the UK’s coast

In the past the long farm-to-shore cabling, deep water and long connections to population centres has held that back. Improvements in cabling tech and the development of floating wind farm designs means putting the biggest turbines where there is the most wind has become more likely. If not, we could still have multi-gigawatt farms out in the North Sea, Irish Sea and the South West approaches.
As a long term follower of clean tech, there is a long march to renewables dominance that is quite frankly irresistible – solar has seen a huge price drop in the last 20 years, the same goes for wind, for battery storage and for tidal stream. That’s backed up by studies that demonstrate the huge potential of certain renewables we haven’t started using yet, such as geothermal.
Last year the British Geological Survey mapped the geothermal potential of Carboniferous Limestone in detail for the first time, it estimates there is the potential to recover between 106 to 222 gigawatts of thermal heat from the rocks under the Midlands and the South. So that’s just one part of the country, and prior to that survey it was generally assumed that granite rock under Cornwall and Aberdeen had the best potential for geothermal power.

A map of Carboniferous Limestone deposits, suggests a huge untapped potential for geothermal

It’s a climate emergency, we don’t have the time
When it comes to nuclear fission, on the other hand, news of improvements are thin on the ground. Nuclear has always needed subsidy and the latest types of nuclear power plant are dogged by significant cost overruns and time delays. Hinkley Point C is expected to cost £32Bn, and Sizewell C, if it is ever built, is estimated at £30Bn.
Because plants are difficult and complex to build it takes time, and because some Brain of Britain decided it was a good idea to build particularly big nuclear power plants, they turned Hinkley and Sizewell into megaprojects – which are harder to manage and control. It will take 15 – 20 years to build these plants – for climate change purposes we simply don’t have 15 – 20 years. Renewables can be deployed as modular units which means it’s much quicker to install them and much easier to keep control of costs.

Nuclear – the flat grey block of 2.5GW at the bottom of the chart – hit a decades-long low this week

Why have governments around the world persisted with nuclear when it has been undercut by non-hydro renewables for some time now, and those forms of generation have gone from fringe to mainstream? Certain voices in the energy debate have given a lot of credit to the constancy of nuclear – essentially you turn a plant on and it produces the same amount of electricity for decades. This contrasts with the intermittency of wind, and solar only operating during daylight. The historical weaknesses of wind and solar are to an extent reduced by using bigger turbines and putting them in the best locations, and solar panel/battery combos, but it is true that output of wind and solar varies wildly.
Can other renewables counteract this? Biomass and biogas are on demand and can be fed into the same plants formerly used to burn coal (e.g. Drax), tidal and wave are predictable and constant, and geothermal can either be on demand via a twin borehole system, or constant with a closed loop.

Bloomberg suggests the low take up of heat pumps means it won’t put significant strain on the UK grid for many years to come

Coping with Net Zero demands
Replacing a relatively small amount of nuclear isn’t a problem if you weren’t attempting to reach the wider net zero goal, which involves decarbonising all road transport and heating. This will involve using electricity where oil and gas have been dominant for decades. A recent study by Hannah Ritchie shows that to electrify all road transport – cars, buses, trucks etc – you need to increase the grid by 40%. How would you do this?
The UK has the potential to tap into gigawatts more of wind, has a wave and tidal potential between 30 and 50 gigawatts, has the huge geothermal potential mentioned above and battery storage too. At the moment lithium-ion batteries are dominant, it’s expected in the next 15 – 20 years it’s possible we’ll see more cheap, low density sodium-ion batteries come onstream, these won’t need lithium, nickel or copper, and sodium is an abundant resource so the sky’s the limit in terms of battery storage capacity – could be hundreds of gigawatts if we’re committed to a big back up supply.
Other studies have shown that the electricity demand for heat pumps to replace natural gas central heating is more significant than for electric cars. While this is true, and the demand for electric vehicles and heat pumps would put a massive strain on the grid, the UK has 28 million homes and we’re installing heat pumps at a rate of only 60,000 a year.
Even if we hit the government target of 600,000 installations a year by the late 2020s, it would still take 47 years to replace every gas boiler. Either we’re going to come up with a radical plan for the 2030s and 2040s to decarbonise heat or it’s going to be a grindingly slow process going well into the mid century and beyond. That’s why Bloomberg believes heat pumps will only add 5% to the UK’s electricity demand by 2030.

A prototype of the General Electric 13MW wind turbine with 107 metre long blades – it’s now fully operational in the North Sea

Even so, we can’t be complacent about future demands being placed on the grid, we’ve decarbonised electricity hugely since 2008 by phasing out coal, that’s come in the context of falling usage since 2009 driven by improved efficiency of appliances. Can we increase the market share of renewables and increase overall production by 20 – 30 gigawatts a day?
The UK is lucky in that it can call on eight different forms of renewable power – wind, solar, hydro, wave, tidal, geothermal, biogas, and biomass – we’re uniquely well placed to go 100% renewable with a particularly strong wind and tidal resource. To do so, however, we need to prove that we’re a proper country given to long term commitments, which is what Net Zero requires. The recent decision to cancel HS2 suggests we’re not a serious country at the moment when it comes to infrastructure or Net Zero. Hopefully that will change with the election in a few months time.

Useful further reading:

Hannah Ritchie’s study into EV electricity demand:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/uk-ev-electricity-demand

UCL study into the electricity demand from heatpumps:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/energy/news/2022/feb/heat-pumps-uk-homes-how-will-they-be-powered

We’re on a road to Zero

Recently American magazine The Atlantic published a feature titled ‘How the U.S. Could Slash Climate Pollution by 2030’, it was an unusually unsatisfying piece for an otherwise high-brow publication, short on context or detail. It skirted over the when, the how, the why and the how much – the basic tenets of journalism. America has had one President after another that has been indifferent or hostile to the green agenda I guess it’s understandable their internal debate has not caught up with the rest of the industrial world yet. Joe Biden is the greenest President ever (by default), if the US ever wakes up it will probably own most low carbon intellectual property, until then the UK is ahead of the curve in terms of implementation and technology. Unlike America we’ve got a pretty good idea of how to decarbonise because we’ve been doing it for a decade or more. Let’s take a look at how we can push things forward.

Wind turbines in the North Sea – set to increase in capacity in the next decade

A Fossil Free future

Britain is on a path to net zero carbon emissions, there is a political consensus for that, the main debating points are how long it’s going to take us and how we’re going to do it. Sir Ed Davey recently stated that the Lib Dems policy is to have 80% of UK electricity generated by renewables by the year 2030. This is a stretch, but will be like moving from 4th gear to 5th gear in a car (I’ll get those combustion engine references in while people still understand them). Since 2010 renewables market share has moved from 6% to 40%, so the pace of change to get to 80% only has to increase slightly. It’s not quite as straightforward increasing the current forms of renewables to reach 80%, however, as the dominant form is wind – intermittent and unpredictable. As we phase out fossil fuels, all of which are ‘on demand’ and flexible, I.e. a thermal power plant can operate from 1% input to 100%, the reliance on electricity that is not constant – solar – or wind, which varies hugely, means we’ll have to deploy a lot of grid-balancing and storage infrastructure to keep the power flowing. Certain forms of renewable can be ‘on demand’ – biomass, biogas and geothermal, others such as wave and tidal can be constant – all of these are not deployed to scale in the UK yet but they all could be . . .

These charts show electricity usage over different timeframes, the one on the far right shows how we’ve switched from coal to renewables since 2012

Lightning strikes twice

Many people I’ve spoken to who were hold outs against the transition to renewables I believe were instinctively clinging onto a raft – Britain has been incredibly lucky in having ample coal, oil and gas resources, which we’ve exploited hugely since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Why not just keep on drilling? Aside from the climate change aspect of fossil fuels, their supporters overlook the emasculating geo-politics of hydrocarbons – there’s been four oil shocks in my lifetime, and we’re currently suffering a gas hike, all of these are down to events far beyond the UK’s control – the Yom Kippur War, the Iranian Revolution, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and growth of demand in China. This winter’s gas bills will be painful, but we can make it our last hydrocarbon shock if we want to.
Renewables offer good news for the world and for the UK. Instead of countries being rich in hydrocarbons or totally deficient, every country around the world, even landlocked ones will be able to tap into at least one form of renewable power. Mongolia, for example could use solar PV, heat pumps and concentrated solar power. Hopefully this will blunt the scramble for energy resources and lead to a more equal and peaceful world in the future. The UK won the lottery with fossil fuels, we also strike lucky with renewables – we can tap into all the major ones. Two forms, we’re especially rich in – wind and tidal – we’re the windiest country in Europe and have some of the strongest tides in the world in places such as the Pentland Firth. The potential is huge, but nothing is inevitable so I’ve modelled a few scenarios for 2030:

Bad case
The UK only progresses to 60% renewables, it’s still dependent on significant nuclear and gas generation. There has been increases in deployment of wind, solar and biomass but the rate of installation has slowed compared to the 2012 – 2020 period.

Average case
The UK reaches 70% renewables, nuclear and gas are reduced but still in the mix. As wind is taking up a bigger share significant grid-balancing and storage is in operation, the UK has made tentative steps to tap into new forms of renewables – biogas, wave and tidal make up a few %.

Hitting target
We took some risks, we pioneered a load of technology but we made it to 80%! As imports make up 10%, nuclear and gas are reduced to a small rump of the electricity market. Wind has been capped at around 50% of the market and the remaining 30% is made up of already established solar and biomass, but the newest forms – biogas, wave, geothermal and tidal already feed several gigawatts into the National Grid.

Hydropower was almost the exclusive form of renewable generation until 2000

For those who have got this far who are sceptical that this is possible or it’s a disruptive and costly change I would point out the following. If we had a conversation about electricity back in 2000, if you championed the existing forms of electricity and dismissed renewables it would be no surprise, aside from hydro no renewable had been deployed to scale around the world, the
rest all had to prove their worth. The increased commitment to renewables under the coalition government means that we’ve decarbonised our electricity by 67% between 2012 and 2021. The past nine years have shown that renewables can move from fringe to mainstream, they can do so very quickly and that there’s no significant increase in electricity bills by doing so. Going from 40% to 80% will be more difficult, it will cost more money. However, if you’re conservative you have to recognise the financial advisory maxim: ‘past performance is a good indicator of future outcomes’ – we can turn on the renewables tap and we can make it work, we know what that looks like. All of the forms of renewable power mentioned here are either available to deploy (wind, solar, biomass), have been proven to work in other countries (geothermal, tidal), or proof-of-concept has been shown and could be scaled up (biogas, wave, tidal). We’re not talking about end-of-the-rainbow tech like nuclear fusion.

R & D and economies of scale have taken the cost of mainstream renewables below gas and nuclear

In conjunction with COP26, the Think Tank Onward published a report ‘Thin Ice?’ This looks at changing attitudes in Britain to climate change and net zero policies. In an ideal world the UK public should have ‘got’ global warming the 1980s, climate science took a quantum leap thanks to the analysis of 140,000 years of ice core data which documented the long term carbon cycle and showed how temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution have gone off at a tangent (funnily enough this work was done by Soviet scientists at their Antarctic base before their oil drilling programme really took off). During the last decade, however, as we can see by the graph, acceptance of climate change has become a cultural norm.

Every age group now shows a strong majority concerned about climate change, finally!

Opinion varies slightly across the UK towards the concept of net zero, with heavily industrialised areas still less keen. What does this mean for the Lib Dems politically – pushing a strong green agenda in London and the South East is no problem, but what of our historic heartlands the South West and mid-Wales? If a selling job is possible then the potential for offshore wind, geothermal and tidal needs to be established for Cornwall and Devon, and biomass/biogas for mid-Wales. Overall I think the public has given the green light to clean energy and hope that future governments match the Lib Dems aspiration.

This map documents relative levels of support for net zero, green showing the most, purple the least

Liberals in the UK have made a huge contribution to the global environmental narrative – Lib Dems President Des Wilson’s push for cleaner air in the 1980s has prompted the worldwide eradication of lead from petrol. Sir Ed Davey’s policies in coalition have set a global template for decarbonisation in a major economy which is now being followed by the US, China and Japan, who have all set net zero policies in the last year. When the Chinese needed an expert to show them how to clean up their polluted cities they asked Sir Ed to appear on their version of Question Time – they know his work is globally significant. We are not the Green Party but we are part of the Green movement, and long may that continue.

Des Wilson – a hero to all Green Liberals

We’re on a road to zero

Recently American magazine The Atlantic published a feature titled ‘How the U.S. Could Slash Climate Pollution by 2030’, it was an unusually unsatisfying piece for an otherwise high-brow publication, short on context or detail. It skirted over the when, the how, the why and the how much – the basic tenets of journalism. America has had one President after another that has been indifferent or hostile to the green agenda I guess it’s understandable their internal debate has not caught up with the rest of the industrial world yet. Joe Biden is the greenest President ever (by default), if the US ever wakes up it will probably own most low carbon intellectual property, until then the UK is ahead of the curve in terms of implementation and technology. Unlike America we’ve got a pretty good idea of how to decarbonise because we’ve been doing it for a decade or more. Let’s take a look at how we can push things forward.

• 

Wind turbines in the North Sea – set to increase in capacity in the next decade

A fossil free future

Britain is on a path to net zero carbon emissions, there is a political consensus for that, the main debating points are how long it’s going to take us and how we’re going to do it. Sir Ed Davey recently stated that the Lib Dems policy is to have 80% of UK electricity generated by renewables by the year 2030. This is a stretch, but will be like moving from 4th gear to 5th gear in a car (I’ll get those combustion engine references in while people still understand them). Since 2010 renewables market share has moved from 6% to 40%, so the pace of change to get to 80% only has to increase slightly. It’s not quite as straightforward increasing the current forms of renewables to reach 80%, however, as the dominant form is wind – intermittent and unpredictable. As we phase out fossil fuels, all of which are ‘on demand’ and flexible, I.e. a thermal power plant can operate from 1% input to 100%, the reliance on electricity that is not constant – solar – or wind, which varies hugely, means we’ll have to deploy a lot of grid-balancing and storage infrastructure to keep the power flowing. Certain forms of renewable can be ‘on demand’ – biomass, biogas and geothermal, others such as wave and tidal can be constant – all of these are not deployed to scale in the UK yet but they all could be . . .

These charts show electricity usage over different timeframes, the one on the far right shows how we’ve switched from coal to renewables since 2012

Lightning strikes twice

Many people I’ve spoken to who were hold outs against the transition to renewables I believe were instinctively clinging onto a raft – Britain has been incredibly lucky in having ample coal, oil and gas resources, which we’ve exploited hugely since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Why not just keep on drilling? Aside from the climate change aspect of fossil fuels, their supporters overlook the emasculating geo-politics of hydrocarbons – there’s been four oil shocks in my lifetime, and we’re currently suffering a gas hike, all of these are down to events far beyond the UK’s control – the Yom Kippur War, the Iranian Revolution, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and growth of demand in China. This winter’s gas bills will be painful, but we can make it our last hydrocarbon shock if we want to.
Renewables offer good news for the world and for the UK. Instead of countries being rich in hydrocarbons or totally deficient, every country around the world, even landlocked ones will be able to tap into at least one form of renewable power. Mongolia, for example could use solar PV, heat pumps and concentrated solar power. Hopefully this will blunt the scramble for energy resources and lead to a more equal and peaceful world in the future. The UK won the lottery with fossil fuels, we also strike lucky with renewables – we can tap into all the major ones. Two forms, we’re especially rich in – wind and tidal – we’re the windiest country in Europe and have some of the strongest tides in the world in places such as the Pentland Firth. The potential is huge, but nothing is inevitable so I’ve modelled a few scenarios for 2030:

Bad case
The UK only progresses to 60% renewables, it’s still dependent on significant nuclear and gas generation. There has been increases in deployment of wind, solar and biomass but the rate of installation has slowed compared to the 2012 – 2020 period.

Average case
The UK reaches 70% renewables, nuclear and gas are reduced but still in the mix. As wind is taking up a bigger share significant grid-balancing and storage is in operation, the UK has made tentative steps to tap into new forms of renewables – biogas, wave and tidal make up a few %.

Hitting target
We took some risks, we pioneered a load of technology but we made it to 80%! As imports make up 10%, nuclear and gas are reduced to a small rump of the electricity market. Wind has been capped at around 50% of the market and the remaining 30% is made up of already established solar and biomass, but the newest forms – biogas, wave, geothermal and tidal already feed several gigawatts into the National Grid.

Hydropower was almost the exclusive form of renewable generation until 2000

For those who have got this far who are sceptical that this is possible or it’s a disruptive and costly change I would point out the following. If we had a conversation about electricity back in 2000, if you championed the existing forms of electricity and dismissed renewables it would be no surprise, aside from hydro no renewable had been deployed to scale around the world, the rest all had to prove their worth. The increased commitment to renewables under the coalition government means that we’ve decarbonised our electricity by 67% between 2012 and 2021. The past nine years have shown that renewables can move from fringe to mainstream, they can do so very quickly and that there’s no significant increase in electricity bills by doing so. Going from 40% to 80% will be more difficult, it will cost more money. However, if you’re conservative you have to recognise the financial advisory maxim: ‘past performance is a good indicator of future outcomes’ – we can turn on the renewables tap and we can make it work, we know what that looks like. All of the forms of renewable power mentioned here are either available to deploy (wind, solar, biomass), have been proven to work in other countries (geothermal, tidal), or proof-of-concept has been shown and could be scaled up (biogas, wave, tidal). We’re not talking about end-of-the-rainbow tech like nuclear fusion.

R & D and economies of scale have taken the cost of mainstream renewables below gas and nuclear

Public opinion latest

In conjunction with COP26, the Think Tank Onward published a report ‘Thin Ice?’ This looks at changing attitudes in Britain to climate change and net zero policies. In an ideal world the UK public should have ‘got’ global warming the 1980s, climate science took a quantum leap thanks to the analysis of 140,000 years of ice core data which documented the long term carbon cycle and showed how temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution have gone off at a tangent (funnily enough this work was done by Soviet scientists at their Antarctic base before their oil drilling programme really took off). During the last decade, however, as we can see by the graph, acceptance of climate change has become a cultural norm.

Every age group now shows a strong majority concerned about climate change, finally!

Opinion varies slightly across the UK towards the concept of net zero, with heavily industrialised areas still less keen. What does this mean for the Lib Dems politically – pushing a strong green agenda in London and the South East is no problem, but what of our historic heartlands the South West and mid-Wales? If a selling job is possible then the potential for offshore wind, geothermal and tidal needs to be established for Cornwall and Devon, and biomass/biogas for mid-Wales. Overall I think the public has given the green light to clean energy and hope that future governments match the Lib Dems aspiration.

This map documents relative levels of support for net zero, green showing the most, purple the least

Liberals in the UK have made a huge contribution to the global environmental narrative – Lib Dems President Des Wilson’s push for cleaner air in the 1980s has prompted the worldwide eradication of lead from petrol. Sir Ed Davey’s policies in coalition have set a global template for decarbonisation in a major economy which is now being followed by the US, China and Japan, who have all set net zero policies in the last year. When the Chinese needed an expert to show them how to clean up their polluted cities they asked Sir Ed to appear on their version of Question Time – they know his work is globally significant. We are not the Green Party but we are part of the Green movement, and long may that continue.

Des Wilson – a hero to all Green Liberals