The importance of having an alternative power supply came home to us last week when contractors laying a new electricity supply down our street cut through our gas supply pipe. But we were prepared for that kind of event as gas boilers frequently go wrong so we have a couple of electric fan heaters.
If they had cut through our electric supply or our internet/telephone connection we were prepared for that also. But this does demonstrate the folly of the Government wanting us to install electric heat pumps to replace gas boilers. With no electricity there would be no light nor heating. I would advise anyone who installs an electric heat pump boiler to ensure they have a traditional fireplace on which they can throw some logs in an emergency.
One of the big problems at present is that the Government has not taken reasonable steps to ensure that the country has alternative power supply sources whether it be coal, gas, nuclear, wind power, hydroelectric or from other sources. Clearly we have become over-reliant on natural gas from sources that have recently become very expensive. The potential for producing our own natural gas from fracking has also been missed due to political unwillingness to face up to the objectors.
The Government now seems committed to pushing ahead with a big new nuclear power station at Sizewell C and possibly other smaller nuclear reactors at other sites. See the recently published Government paper on its Net Zero Strategy (see reference 1 below).
That document is full of fine words but is the objective to totally decarbonise our economy really practical? Building nuclear power stations to generate electricity might enable the replacement of natural gas for heating and for the replacement of internal combustion engines in cars and vans, but will it actually be carbon free? It occurred to me that building a nuclear power station takes enormous amounts of concrete and steel, both of which currently require carbon-based energy sources to produce them.
A quick search of the internet produced a very good paper on this subject by the Ecologist (see reference 2 below). The author’s conclusion was that nuclear power is not low carbon if you take into account the “whole of life” emissions including those in the mining of uranium fuel and end of life remediation and storage.
In fact no alternative power sources are carbon free. Hydropower is one of the best but still generates 10 gCO2/kWh while solar PV and wind power might be considerably higher. There is no major power source that is carbon free so any objective to be “net zero” by 2050 is nonsense.
The projections also assume that future technology yet to be proven or even developed can produce steel and concrete with zero emissions and planes and HGVs can be powered by alternative sources.
Carbon emissions can be reduced to some extent no doubt by the use of selected generation systems with a focus on electrification and the planting of a lot more trees but nobody should be fooled that net zero is achievable by 2050. There is little discussion of the cost of rebuilding the economy in the way suggested and a lot of it will fall on the general public.
They have only just come to realise that the Government’s plans to stop the sale of gas boilers in new homes by 2025 and altogether by 2035 will mean massive costs to install electric pump boilers.
Of course 2050, or even 2035, are long in the future so promises and commitments can be made that are truly castles in the sky. But reality will sink in sooner or later.
As I have said before, the best and only truly effective way to cut carbon emissions is to reduce the number of people on this planet. At present the growth in world population and the industrialisation of lesser developed countries easily offsets the savings that might be made in carbon emissions by the UK or other western economies.
Reference 1: Government’s Net Zero Paper: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/net-zero-strategy
Reference 2: Ecologist paper on Nuclear Power: https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-power-not-low-carbon
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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