Does Ed Miliband Think He is God?

Without divine powers and a couple of miracles (or more) his clean grid plans will deliver darkness and ruin.

Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, spent Friday touring the media circus touting the lie that his plan for a zero emissions grid will provide price stability. (Becoming a Clean Energy Superpower is one of Starmer’s latest missions). Miliband claimed that the price of gas was set by despots and was therefore volatile. He stated that switching from gas to wind would remove this volatility, therefore making domestic electricity cheaper and saving households money.

The world’s top ten producers of natural gas includes Russia and Iran. It also includes the US, Canada, and Norway – which are democracies. Plus several Gulf States (allies) and Labour’s new friends in China. There is no cartel. While world events may occasionally disrupt supply, and therefore price, there is no dictator fixing the price and no one country could. .

The chart below, courtesy of Trading Economics, shows the spot price of Gas for the past 25 years. The biggest impact was caused by the invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the Baltic gas pipes and the subsequent Western scrabble for gas. Other than that the price has been pretty stable. The blips in the late mid to late 2000s were largely due to the rundown of British North Sea production and the UK’s chronic lack of gas storage (still not resolved), so the price trebled. When Putin invaded Ukraine the price went up ten times, but it’s come down substantially since.

Remember this is the spot price; most big gas users buy their gas forward which gives them a fixed price, regardless of the spot price. Clever users can also use the financial markets to hedge against price variations. The biggest peak was caused by Putin (in other words war), the biggest fall by the covid lockdowns. Aside from the impacts of the four horsemen, the spot price chard demonstrates that the laws of supply and demand work; if supply is tight prices go up until more gas is produced, when demand weakens the price comes down. It’s basic economics. Mr Milliband studied that at university.

The next chart is of the wind speed at Heathrow airport for 2023. (Data from Meteostat). It shows the vast variation in the wind speeds, both day to day and within the day. These are the daily averages, so there has already been a significant amount of smoothing in the chart and minute by minute variation has been excluded. The peak gust wind speed is on average 2.8 times the average wind speed; it’s extremely variable.

A wind turbine operates best at wind speeds in the range 5 to 15 metres per second. On 261 days in 2023 the average wind speed at Heathrow was under 5 m/s. On another 48 days it was over 15 m/s. While wind speeds are higher offshore they’re still only in this range for about 60% of the time which might or might not correlate with times of electricity demand. Offshore wind farms are also rendered useless by low wind days, as was the case in late November and the beginning of December. The UK was utterly dependent on gas to keep the lights on.

Unless Mr Miliband can guarantee that the wind blows harder when electricity demand rises it is arrant nonsense to suggest that a wind based grid will be more reliable than the current gas based one. Unless he is divine he can guarantee no such thing. Yet that is what he and his lackeys repeated in a shameful press release on Friday, which blithely stated

“The plan will provide the foundation for the UK to build an energy system that can bring down bills for households and businesses for good. The independent National Energy System Operator (NESO) set out pathways to a clean power system in 2030, and confirmed it was deliverable, more secure, and could see a lower cost of electricity, and lower bills.”

How can it be “more secure” if it only generates when the wind blows? (If you’re thinking storage that would require installing more batteries in one year than has been in the past decade and creating more pumped storage in five years than the UK has built in fifty. It’s baloney, and cripplingly expensive baloney at that.)

In any case, the NESO report said no such thing. It said it is possible to deliver a clean grid only if “Several elements deliver at the limit of what is feasible: a key challenge will be making sure all deliver simultaneously, in full and at maximum pace, in a way that does not overheat supply chains.” The report listed eight key requirements:

1. Harness the value of flexibility for households, businesses, suppliers and aggregators by unlocking markets, promoting engagement and removing wider barriers.

2. Contract as much offshore wind capacity in the coming one to two years as in the last six combined.

3. Deliver first-of-a-kind clean dispatchable technologies, such as carbon capture and storage and hydrogen to power.

4. Build all planned transmission network on time, which involves twice as much in the next five years as was built in total over the last decade.

5. Reform connection processes in 2025 to align with the clean power goal and future strategic plans.

6. Reform planning and consenting processes and improve community engagement. Key decisions on funding, awarding contracts, consenting and policy are needed within the next year to ensure construction of key projects starts as soon as possible.

7. Reform electricity markets while ensuring a stable and attractive investment environment, to secure over £40 billion of investment annually to 2030.

8. Consolidate isolated and siloed digitalisation initiatives into a unified sector-wide prioritised plan, with expedited data sharing and enhanced decision-making driven through rapid adoption of artificial intelligence.

Tripling wind capacity in two years (Point 2) and quadrupling the grid building rate (point 4) are barely credible, nor is commissioning first of a kind technologies at scale (point 3). The jargon of point 8 seems to imply that Artificial Intelligence will be the deus ex machina that makes it all work. The only certainty about AI is that it massively increases electricity demand.

Miliband also repeats the falsehood that his plan will reduce bills. Unsurprisingly there is no detail on that as he got caught out with outrageous assumptions about load factors last time round. Jeremy Pocklington, Mad Ed’s Permanent Secretary, seems more concerned about keeping his minister happy than keeping the lights on. I calculate that £200 billion capital expenditure alone will increase the electricity price by 5p a kilowatt hour. If that is kept off household bills it will simply go onto businesses.

Even if the self-appointed Zephyrus can keep the wind blowing and the turbines turning the UK economy will remain dependent on gas. A Mr Pocklington should have told Mr Miliband, less than 30% of the UK’s gas consumption is used to produce electricity (DUKES Table 4.2). The single biggest use of gas is heating houses, followed by powering industry. The UK uses almost three times as much gas to heat its houses as it uses electricity to light them. Switching electricity to wind power does not remove the UK householder’s exposure to the gas price.

Of course, Red Zephyrus has a deluded plan for domestic heating too; we must all buy electric heat pumps or switch to hydrogen. Both approaches mean that the UK will need even more electricity; Red Zephyrus will be huffing and puffing all year round. There just under 30 million homes in the UK . In 2023 about 35,000 heat pumps were installed; at that rate it will take 850 years to convert them all. Or a miracle.

Ed the deity might think that the miracle is hydrogen, which can be a substituted for natural gas. The public isn’t fond of it, but of course this draconian Labour government will happily overrule those individuals. Making hydrogen either uses the steam reformation of methane, which takes a lot of energy and lots of natural gas – Ed won’t like that. The alternative is to build an awful lot of (expensive) electrolysers and even more electricity generation; it would need to more than treble the generating capacity of the entire grid to produce enough hydrogen to replace gas. That’s six times the roll out that NESO says can’t be done by 2030.

What is the benefit of this lunacy? The removal of 38 million tons of CO₂ emissions. That’s a 0.08% reduction in global emissions – technically a rounding error. It might make Greta feel better but it won’t change the track of climate change. It will almost certainly cause blackouts UK and will definitely increase electricity prices for business, who already face some of the highest tariffs in the world.

Of course, technically ensuring UK energy security is straightforward, using proven resources and technologies. Rather than taxing North Sea oil and gas production into oblivion, a sensible government would encourage it. Rather than ban fracking, a responsible government would investigate it. If there really is an energy crisis a wise government would consider coal – an abundant energy source in the UK and the stuff that powered the industrial revolution and that is vital for making steel – not prohibit it.

As is increasingly clear across all policy areas, we do not have a sensible government. The disgrace is not that Ed’s net zero policy is undeliverable at – that was clear when I published my book in 2021 – it’s that none of the main stream media are challenging him or his lackeys.

There is one ray of hope. Reform UK’s Richard Tice MP is very well aware of the depth of Ed’s delusions and their likely costs and consequences. As it happens tomorrow ( December the 17^th) is Energy Questions. I’m sure Mr Tice will have some good ones.

Ed’s aides will no doubt remind him that unlike a dishonest press briefing, or even party manifesto, misleading Parliament is a very serious offence.

I’ll be listening.

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