Is Ed Miliband's Hero Don Quixote?

He certainly has windmills on his mind. Now he's got flywheels too.... But he can't beat the laws of physics.

Ed Miliband’s war against physics continues. To the surprise of no-one but the mad Marxist himself and his eco-loon acolytes, replacing steam turbines with windmills is tricky.  The latest problem to come to the fore is inertia and frequency maintenance. Time for some physics. Relax and enjoy!

Alternating current electricity generators consist of spinning coils in a magnetic field. The amount of energy produced is a function of intensity of the magnetic field and the frequency of rotation. If the load demanded is greater than the generator can produce the coils spin slower and the frequency drops. Conversely, if the supply exceeds demand then the frequency will rise. The physics requires that the entire grid operates in synchronisation – if the frequency varied in one place bad, expensive and dangerous stuff would happen, as it would if the frequency of the gird electricity deviated from the range 49.5 Hertz to 50.5 Hertz.

The grid operator’s primary task is to match supply with demand, second by second, all day every day. If supply exceeds demand they must cut production or increase demand by using, say, a pumped storage system or battery charging. If demand exceeds supply they must fire up more power stations, covering the time that this takes with the spinning reserve (that is, generators that are running but are not connected to the grid) and stored electricity from the batteries or pumped storage. If they get it wrong the grid goes out of kilter causing blackouts, as happened on 9 August 2019 when one million UK users lost their power after a lightning strike unbalanced the grid.

The UK’s headlong rush to renewables has made keeping the frequency in limits much more challenging as production now varies too; a cloud passing over a solar array immediately reduces its output so the grid must immediately find electricity elsewhere. The spinning reserve of thermal power stations is being inexorably reduced, which makes the grid less stable.

Smoothing the difference between supply and demand requires storage, which is cripplingly expensive. Reproducing the 1980s built Dinorwig pumped storage hydro power plant would cost £4.7 billion today. It can deliver 1.7GW for six hours, a capital cost of £460 million per gigawatt hour. Most importantly, it can reach full power in 12 seconds from a standing start which is vital to maintain frequency –if the frequency is falling demand already exceeds supply; more electricity is required immediately to prevent load shedding and that amount could be substantial.

Batteries also provide near instant power – indeed that is what most of the grid scale battery installations are used for most of the time. Lithium Ion batteries cost around £1 billion per gigawatt hour and come with a substantial fire risk. Redox flow batteries, an emerging technology currently cost £300 million per gigawatt hour, which might reduce to £100 million if the technology matures. That’s not cheap.

As conventional power stations are decommissioned the mechanical inertia of the system is reduced so the frequency can change more quickly. Conventional power stations have thousands  of tons of spinning generators and steam turbines. Changing their speed (which is what happens when load varies) is not instantaneous, which creates time for stored electricity to be put on line. Solar farms have zero mechanical inertia and wind turbines only have a little (they’re designed to be light). This means that the frequencies will shift more quickly, leading to more rapid load shedding (industry speak for blackouts).

One potential solution is to build electro-mechanical flywheels, thereby returning mechanical inertia back in the system. At times of low demand the flywheels are powered up. They’re kept spinning at capacity by a small feed (sufficient to overcome the friction in their bearings). When demand surges they can deliver or remove electricity to or from the grid almost instantaneously. That  slows the rate of change, thereby keeping the frequency in limits and preventing the blackouts. This technology is not new; in 2022 £323 million worth of contracts to build five flywheels and other systems were awarded. But then re-announcing decisions is a standard political trick, even if they were made by a previous government.

Flywheels are not cheap. The capital cost of providing just 250kW for 15 minutes is around £250 million per GW capacity, twice the price of Dinorwig.  That’s some of the most expensive generation ever installed. What these flywheels don’t do is address the fundamental reality, which is that the UK has nothing like enough electricity storage capacity for net zero to work.

The UK’s average daily electricity consumption was just under 870 GWh, 33% of which came from wind. So on a calm day we either need 290 GWh of storage to fill in for the wind or 12GW of electricity being delivered by the interconnectors, an impossibility as we only have 9.4 GW of interconnector capacity.

The UK’s battery storage industry doesn’t explicitly state the amount of energy held in a battery – a distinction that still eludes most of the mainstream media. The quoted installed capacity is just 3.5 GW and that typically lasts for just four hours so equates to some 18 GWh, enough to power the UK for around half an hour on an average day. 

While battery developers are having a gold rush and making a fortune out of us, they are not solving the fundamental problem of net zero, which is that wind and solar power are neither reliable nor cheap. Wind may be free, but the capital costs of dealing with the periods when there is no wind are substantial, as I have shown, and unavoidable unless we’re going to be the only country in the world that can’t work if the wind doesn’t blow. Moreover a single 880 MW gas power plant costs around £500M. The Seagreen phase 1 offshore farm, which will struggle to deliver as much electricity, cost £3,000 M

Of course, Net Zero doesn’t end with the de-carbonisation of the electricity grid, but with the replacement of all UK energy with zero emissions fuel. In this context remember that electricity represents around 20% of energy consumption; the rest comes from oil and gas. That excludes the energy embedded in international transport and the overseas production of the goods, web-services and food that we consume. Full decarbonisation of the UK economy needs a Hinkley Point C a year for 30 years; it’s taken the UK almost that long to not build Hinkley Pint C. A full explanation can be found here.

The decarbonisation of the UK’s electricity grid is probably not possible by 2030, 2035 or even 2050. Even if it is it will be very, very expensive and will almost certainly result in a grid that is less reliable, producing electricity that is unaffordable. That is not a recipe for growth, or even political stability. Poor, cold and hungry people have a history of turning on the rulers who delivered them into such a desperate state, as Marie Antoinette found out. Back in the 1970s various strikes led power not being available and the three day week, which destroyed the Heath government which in turn led to the Trade Unions controlling the UK’s government through Harold Wilson.

All of which begs the question of why this government is implementing a policy that relies entirely upon the widespread success of unproven technologies, deployed at scale inside of four years. (The supplementary question of why the mainstream media has swallowed it hook, line and sinker will have to wait for another article). Quite when Ed Miliband came up with net zero isn’t clear or relevant, his first cabinet role (under Gordon Brown) in 2008 was as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, which was a newly created department. The actual policy was introduced by Theresa May by Statutory Instrument and without a vote, but that’s another scandal for another day.

Net Zero is underpinned by the delusion that wind energy is cheap and plentiful, exacerbated by the belief that switching to wind is simple. As I have shown, this is balderdash. Implementing even just net zero electricity generation is fraught with complexity, as any sensible investigation – the sort of thing Sir Humphreys are paid to conduct - would reveal. (Brazen plug: they should read my book).

Why then the obsession and delusion that wind is the answer? To be fair it’s not just Miliband, the Prince of Piffle and Wannabe World King Boris Johnson also fell for it - just like he fell for the need for lockdowns. Neither Johnson nor Miliband are scientists, or anything close to it. Miliband has a degree in PPE (natch!). Johnson’s is in Classics. May’s is in Geography. It’s entirely possible that none of them understand the science, the engineering or the risks. (The only Prime Ministers since Walpole with a science based degree were Margaret Thatcher (chemistry), Chamberlin (metallurgy), Baldwin (metallurgy), Salisbury (maths) and Gladstone (maths and classics), which might explain a lot.)

Rather than listen to Greta (also not a scientist) they could have been more sensible and asked a few penetrating questions of those in the industry. Maybe Miliband asked one of Labour’s biggest ever donors Dale Vince, who founded and runs Ecotricity, which claims to be the UK’s first green energy company. The former hippy was also a sometime funder of just stop oil. Ecotricity and Dale have donated over £5 million to the Labour party since 2020 .  While Dale’s soon-to-be-ex-wife alleges that Dale wanted a peerage for it, he’s on the record as stating that he wants to influence policy.

Forget Lord Alli’s parties and fashion tips, the power behind the Labour throne is an eco-warrior. Or is Dale a fake eco-warrior? Ecotricity is only green because it uses carbon credits to offset the emissions of the (fossil made) electricity that it buys. According to Open Democracy, those credits might not actually be current. If they’re not the pious green energy company is green washing – a polite term for fraud. ). Dale’s interest isn’t entirely philanthropic – “green” energy is what makes his money.

Even if it works, this government’s headlong rush to a decarbonised grid won’t deliver net zero. It won’t fix climate change and it won’t even identify the technologies that might. Why are we doing this?

Surely we’re not wrecking the economy to please a Labour donor? Do we have the energy policy that Dale bought?

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