In the UK’s drive toward net zero carbon emissions, the island nation will need to rely heavily on wind power, which could lead to energy shortages and electricity rationing, according to an activist and author.
The UK plans to “completely decarbonize the economy,” which means replacing fossil fuels with technologies based on electricity, which will mainly be generated by wind farms, said Andrew Montford, director of the UK-based Net Zero Watch and author of “The Hockey Stick Illusion.”
In his view, the practically viable alternatives to fossil fuels are wind and nuclear power.
There is also no way of storing energy in reserve, he added. “It’s like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping that somebody invents one on the way down.”
Solar energy is not a practical option for the UK owing to its cloudy weather, especially in winter, and solar panels are not good for the environment, Mr. Montford said.
Nuclear energy could be a solution because it is generated with zero carbon emissions, but environmentalists vehemently oppose it, Mr. Montford asserted.
The UK has “two new nuclear power stations being built, but they are hugely over budget,” he said. A better option would be to build small nuclear reactors that are currently produced by just a few companies, he added.
Rolls-Royce in the UK plans to build small nuclear reactors in hopes of getting government approval by mid-2024, according to Proactive Investor.
“If we can get cheap, modular nuclear reactors, then that should be something that sensible environmentalists and skeptics, like myself, can both agree on, and that would be a way forward,” Mr. Montford said.
Societal Costs
The policies to fully decarbonize the economy started in the UK around 2003, Mr. Montford said.“[Since then,] up until the eve of the Ukraine war, electricity prices had doubled. So the pain was starting to be felt by consumers and was starting to be felt by industry,” Mr. Montford continued. “In that period, a huge amount of UK manufacturing had closed down; it had all gone to the Far East.”
Since the war in Ukraine broke out, “energy prices went completely through the roof,” Mr. Montford said. “At that point, people started to feel the pain really quite badly.”
Replacing fossil fuel-powered vehicles with electric, a policy currently pushed in America, “is going to grind to a halt” because “the distribution grid won’t take the amount of electricity that is needed to for everybody to be able to recharge their electric vehicles,” Mr. Montford said.
People are also supposed to replace their gas boilers with electric heat pumps, but “nobody wants to do that because it’s more expensive to run homes off heat pumps than with natural gas,” Mr. Montford said.
This is despite huge incentives offered by the British government to install heat pumps, Mr. Montford noted. People say that they will not recoup their investment even taking the subsidy into account, he added.
A heat pump is an electric appliance that can be used to heat and cool homes as well as to heat water.
They are one of the most energy-efficient ways to heat or cool a home, and also provide better air quality than traditional air-conditioners and gas furnaces, but their initial installation can be expensive, and they also require more maintenance.
Heat pumps may be less efficient in extremely cold weather when there is little extra heat in the air and the ground to bring it inside a home. People living in regions with extremely cold winters are generally encouraged to have a backup heating system.
Government Gains Control Over Personal Lives
The government’s plans to rely mostly on wind-generated energy may lead to energy shortages, Mr. Montford explained. A solution could be to purchase some energy from other countries through interconnectors, he said.However, chances are that when the wind does not blow in Britain, it will not be blowing anywhere in Western Europe, and as a result, countries will get into a bidding war for a very limited amount of electricity, which will lead to shutdowns, Mr. Montford said.
Mr. Montford recalled that during the winter of 2009–2010, there were three weeks when the temperature fell below freezing, and there was almost no wind anywhere in Western Europe.
When electricity shortages occur, the government can resort to switching off appliances and electric vehicle chargers in people’s homes using smart meters that are connected to a central governing body, Mr. Montford said.
“If you were relying on an electric heat pump for those three weeks, it really would be quite terrifying.”
“Energy is not just another commodity. It is absolutely central to having a civilization,” he said.
“Having personal transportation will be something that’s restricted to the rich.”
People probably will not have cars, so it will be “a major expedition” to visit parents who live 50 miles away, Mr. Montford predicted. “Maybe people will start to live in extended families.”
It is a sort of soft control, but methods like rationing electricity and switching off appliances are hard control forms, Mr. Montford said.
“It’s a totalitarian agenda,” he added.
Cost of Net Zero
The UK government estimates that the country needs to spend 2 percent of its GDP within a couple of years in order to achieve net zero carbon emissions, Mr. Montford said.Reaching net zero emissions means removing an equal amount of CO2 from the atmosphere as it is released into it.
Under the UK’s Freedom of Information law, Mr. Montford’s organization was able to obtain the calculations leading to the estimated cost of achieving the net-zero goal and they found it is very low and unrealistic.
For example, the estimate assumed that an electric vehicle could be purchased at the price of about £11,000 ($14,190), but today it is not possible to buy one for under £25,000 ($32,250), Mr. Montford said.
“There are some of the big accountancy firms [that] have come up with estimates of the cost of net zero that are much, much higher now.”
Mr. Montford said that he started working on a cost-benefit analysis that compares the expenditures needed to decarbonize the UK’s electricity system against the cost of potential damage from global warming if no action is taken. The value of damage can also be considered a benefit if the measures taken will prevent the damage.
To determine the cost of potential damage caused by releasing a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Mr. Montford used the official U.S. government estimate.
Limitations of Science
Scientists use models to predict future climate changes, but the models have limitations, and the forecast may turn out to be incorrect, as happened in the case of the predictions of the death toll from COVID-19, Mr. Montford said.For example, “scientists have found the clouds are almost impossible to model [but] these are very important parts of the climate system,” he said.
Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of a paper on climate modeling published in 2020, said in a statement, “Cloud-aerosol interactions are on the bleeding edge of our comprehension of how the climate system works, and it’s a challenge to model what we don’t understand.”
“These modelers are pushing the boundaries of human understanding, and I am hopeful that this uncertainty will motivate new science,” Mr. Meehl added.
Mr. Montford cited the prognosis of COVID-19 deaths made by Professor Neil Ferguson in March 2020.
Climate models make predictions for 50 to 100 years in the future, and the effects of the mitigation policies implemented based on these predictions, such as geoengineering to modify the climate, are “much, much more serious” than the effects of lockdowns and can potentially be catastrophic, Mr. Montford said.
Reducing the amount of incoming solar radiation is “potentially a huge experiment with the climate system with potentially disastrous consequences,” Mr. Montford argued.
