National Energy System Operator released the Clean Power 2030 plan today (link below). I’ve had a brief look this morning and modelled the pathways in my Digital Twin of the GB Electricity Mix.
Here’s my 🔟 takeaways. What are yours?
TLDR- this is an exciting vision. Clean Power 2030 is achievable and my comments are not criticism. What matters most to me is the type of net zero we want. Homes need a much more central of a role in the thinking because of the direct benefits to us all.
1️⃣ Electricity demand is expected to be pretty low in 2030. That suggests a slow roll out of EVs and heat pumps in the modelling despite both having big carbon and energy security importance. Demand is roughly the same as it was in 2015.
2️⃣ Offshore wind, solar and onshore wind do the heavy lifting: increasing about 3x from todays levels. That’s a fast roll out so expect talk of new grid infrastructure to support them. As the report says “Sustained rollout of offshore wind is needed at over double the highest rate ever achieved in Great Britain.”
3️⃣ Very little direct mention of domestic solar despite this directly reducing energy bills, little land take and being able to support the grid edge. NESO need some strategic thinking here in my view
4️⃣ No acceleration of nuclear power with no SMRs until the mid 2030s. If I were in Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, I would be working with industry to see if SMR technology can be accelerated in the UK as it is globally.
5️⃣ Lots of talk about domestic supply chains. I’d hope for that to be a feature in next years discussions on CfDs and other market support mechanisms
6️⃣ It is very worrying to see biomass still part of the mix. There’s so much doubt about biomass and its true environmental impact. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/04/drax-will-keep-raising-carbon-emission-levels-until-2050s-study-says
7️⃣ My digital twin broadly agrees with the results, but there’s some other levers that we could be modelling
8️⃣ I think that the role of short and long duration energy storage is underestimated. I think we can dispatch even less gas than in the NESO scenario by leveraging storage of synthetic fuels. In my model, I look at storage with 50% efficiency and it still dispatches more gas than the NESO pathway and at a lower cost. It is important to be looking strategically at long duration storage and the impact it can have on energy security and net zero
9️⃣ We need independent modelling of the grid itself to ensure NESO is faily and properly challenged on the scenarios – and I would hope that DESNZ have that intellectual grunt. I will speak to Durham Energy Institute about whether it can provide that.
🔟 The mission looks very possible. Perhaps NESO are leaning on what we know we can do. My call is to ask ourselves “what else can we do to be a superpower”
Link to the doc here: https://www.neso.energy/document/346651/download
Images attached: select charts from the report + images from my digital twin
Suggest you read eigenvalues website by an electrical engineer who can add up. There is no way that the Neso report can work, given the money available
Neso is run by Ed Miliband’s ministry.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidturver/p/fintan-slye-outfoxes-mad-miliband-clean-power-2030?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=b9r3f
Just discovered your work and thank you for it. They key issue is like to see you address is the cost of the transition and the impact on electricity prices in the UK that maybe among he greenest in the world but stand out as the world’s most expensive by a huge margin rendering all energy intensive industry uncompetitive in a global context. Please ensure you include the costs of connecting and upgrading the network too. Thank you
Domestic solar is a tricky one – the government do address it in their report, but it is ambiguous how it is counted. Because it is behind the meter, the impact is essentially invisible. It is a bit like flexibility – you need to actively record and measure it to be sure that it is occurring, and to have any idea about the scale! The truth is that this is probably impossible, and so sampling should be done to get an idea of what sort of scale of domestic solar installations are going on. Updating building regulations to force solar panels to be installed on new buildings would be a decent starting point given the low cost of panels and the number of other (often counterproductive) building regulations there already are.
For me the bigger question has to be why are we doing this? Without explaining the complex scenario around this transformation of the electricity generation mix we are quickly building an anti-net-zero coalition exemplified by Stephen Redfern above. Like many successful campaigns, their arguments are based on a truth which is easy to hang on – that many are blindly following the net zero agenda without asking deeper questions. What good is decarbonising our electricity if we just offshore many of our emissions, or we emit other pollutants/destroy habitats and ecology in the process?
The truth is that there are many other things driving the current transition, some of which are less easy to explain both in terms of complexity and because of political sensitivities. Closing the UK’s coalmines over the past 40 years was inevitably going to lead to a closure of our coal power infrastructure, and this was driven by economics. We have had the oil and gas boom in the UK, and it peaked over 20 years ago now and is in a terminal decline, so we mainly reliant on imports to feed our gas and oil demands now, which also leads us to look for alternative local primary energy sources. Electricity is inherently more effective and efficient as an energy source for transport and heating, as well as ultimately flexible, and so these electrification trends feel inevitable. There are probably plenty of other non-net-zero reasons I haven’t put down, but (sadly in many ways) it is probably economic realities that are driving the transition as much if not more than ideology around climate change.