Suppose that Scotland’s CO2 emissions fell tomorrow to zero, i.e., that, at midnight, the country ceased to exist. Then according to the “Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change” (MAGICC), based on the latest IPCC climate models, the reduction in the Earth’s temperature in 2100 would be…undetectable.
Motivated by the moral necessity and urgency of this goal, the Scottish Government is proposing a novel energy policy – its “Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan”.
This article reviews its major themes and their implications, and considers briefly the probability of success of the Scottish Government implementing it.
In 2022, due to an insufficient quantity of wind and sun, Scotland’s current collection of wind and solar energy-scavenging devices failed to generate about 70% of their nameplate capacity. Recent exhaustive statistical and econometric analysis of wind generation in Scotland by Edinburgh University shows that it is uneconomic and destined for taxpayer bailout. Under the Scottish Government’s novel energy strategy, wind and solar energy-scavenging devices are to be greatly expanded.
Hydrogen, an energy carrier that squanders in waste-heat a gigawatt of power generation for every gigawatt it carries, is elevated in the Scottish Government’s understanding of energy to the category of a fuel, and also greatly expanded.
Hydrocarbon and nuclear – actual fuels – provide the energy to manufacture and endlessly replace wind turbines and solar panels. They also, in Scotland, provide the power sources that run under all conditions to ensure continuity of energy supply during Scotland’s frequent sunless and windless conditions. These are to be discontinued.
Like all advanced economies, Scotland cannot tolerate even a small measure of power supply fluctuation. Without firm dispatchable thermal standby generation capacity to smooth supply fluctuation, the eventual daily around 40GW amplitude power fluctuation resulting from the proposed expansion of weather-dependent electrical generation must be adapted for use in some other way. This will be provided by some form of 180-plus day, grid-scale electricity storage – a technical challenge for which no precedent exists, and therefore no cost estimate is available.
Grid scale battery storage technology doesn’t exist. The Scottish Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan imagines that it will be developed.
Converting surplus energy to hydrogen for storage and use at grid scale is unprecedented, and fraught with risk.
Fifty per cent of the proposed new intermittent generation capacity, installed at a capital cost of around £26 billion, is to be wasted in the conversion process.
Hydrogen embrittles pipework, renders conventional valves ineffective and, unlike domestic gas, self-ignites under catastrophic decompression. Quantifying the risks of transporting it in bulk on Scottish roads and deploying it as a substitute for domestic gas in Scotland’s densely populated housing estates might be an exciting 10-year research project at the U.K. Government’s Spadeadam industrial hazard testing facility (“the remoteness of the area is key to their operations” – Wikipedia).
But, informed by what the Scottish Government claims is the need for “the fastest possible” transition, it prefers to bypass thorough safety testing, and to impose live hydrogen trials on Scotland’s citizens. Hydrocarbon gas is to be phased out of Scottish homes from 2030.
Energy densities in energy storage sites located next to Scotland’s towns and cities required by the Scottish Government’s reckless abandonment of thermal standby generation capacity will be measured in millions of tonnes of TNT – a risk for which 12-foot thick reinforced concrete containment domes are installed around nuclear facilities to manage. These risks are entirely unrecognised by Scotland’s current planning processes (or citizens).
The cost of adaptive storage, the cost of the new transmission and distribution infrastructure required by dramatically increased electrification of Scotland’s relatively sparsely populated areas, and the cost of Carbon Capture, are not factored into current estimates of Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE). These are vast. Grid-scale battery storage, for example, has an implied cost measured in trillions of pounds, and drives LCOE from £50/MWh to over £600/MWh.
Apparently unaware of the role of nuclear and gas in maintaining continuity of supply, and the prohibitive cost of electricity storage as a substitute, the Scottish Government confidently demands that the U.K. Government “break the link between the price of electricity and the cost of gas to help realise the benefits of the low costs [sic] of renewable electricity”.
The policy proposal cites a number of other benefits that it thinks will accrue in addition to the negligible reduction in the Earth’s temperature.
Electric vehicles can’t plough snow or fields, harvest corn, empty buckets, excavate ore, raise wind-turbine masts, or perform any other economic task for which ‘grunt’ is required. Notwithstanding, from 2030, diesel and petrol engines will be prohibited. Car kilometers are to be “reduced” – possibly by fining us if we travel from our home more than a permitted distance.
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The Scottish Government will impose catastrophic environmental damage on the non-OECD countries where millions of tonnes of toxic water and ores are processed to manufacture the EV batteries it is mandating. It will overlook the human rights violations endemic to China’s ‘clean energy industry’. These will have the benefit of promoting what it calls “A Just Transition” – supposedly, a socialist framework for ensuring “a fairer, greener future for all”.
Our security of supply is to be further enhanced by transferring energy generation from domestically produced oil and gas to mechanically unreliable, weather-dependent energy-scavenging devices containing millions of points of failure that are contingent on the supply of rare resources controlled by China – which the U.S. states it will declare war on if it invades Taiwan.
These weather-dependent energy-scavenging devices require oil for, amongst many other things, the manufacture of their exotic advanced materials. A leading energy consultancy records the collapse in 2020 to an 80-year low of replacement oil discovery volumes, and estimates that Western oil firms now have around 15 years of remaining economic oil reserves. It is under these circumstances that the Scottish Government is further enhancing the security of Scotland’s energy supply by discontinuing onshore and offshore conventional and unconventional oil and gas exploration.
To reinforce this enhancement, noting “the damage done by the deindustrialisation of central belt communities in the 1980s”, the Scottish Government is irreversibly disbanding the North East’s oil and gas industry communities and, with them, their 50 years of institutional knowledge of oil and gas operations.
These will be replaced with communities based on livelihoods sustained by a “clean energy industry”. The growth of this imaginary industry has been funded with the imaginary capital (a.k.a. “quantitative easing”) excreted in the response – ironically – to the energy contraction that triggered the ongoing 2008 Great Financial Crash. During this time, U.K. national debt has risen from 60% to over 100% of Gross Domestic Product, exceeded only by the public sector pension deficit (a proxy for the replacement of real industries in the global economy by imaginary ones), which has risen to more than £2 trillion.
As evidence of the sustainability of the policy of funding imaginary industries through the indefinite expansion of imaginary capital (for which, like much of this policy, no precedent exists in human history), the Scottish Government informs us that it has already allocated £5 billion of its record budget deficit to what it refers to as “the Net Zero Economy”.
Winter excess death in the UK’s cold Northern European climate is already around 25,000 a year. Any prolonged interruption of winter energy supply created by the failure of this policy, or further escalation of cost, will plausibly result in the deaths of thousands more of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. The magnitude and uncertainty of the implied costs, coupled to the scale of the energy contraction that this policy deliberately seeks to accelerate, could trigger the collapse of our financial system.
Irreversible impairment of either our energy or financial systems would have a catastrophic impact on the welfare of Scotland’s citizens. Yet few have expressed any desire, much less informed consent, for risk on the scale proposed for such little benefit.
Yet the project, representing a scope of unprecedented scale, cost, pace and technical uncertainty, will be overseen by a Government that is currently struggling to procure two relatively modest ferries for less than the cost that other governments can procure 34 ferries – again, ironically due in large part to cost overruns associated with the attempt to employ novel technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. As evidence of the extent to which the Scottish Government and its advisers have become unmoored from physical reality by the climate catastrophe hypothesis, it’s a document that is fascinating to read, and alarming to contemplate.
After reflecting on it, you may care to offer your feedback, either to the department that compiled it, or your political representative, or on social media.
Richard Lyon is a former senior oil and gas operations manager with 35 years of international experience and academic qualifications in electrical engineering and power systems, petroleum engineering, and energy economics. He maintains the Substack newsletter the State of Britain and can be contacted via LinkedIn.
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If one wanted a plan to utterly decimate a nation then I can think of none better than Net-Zero. No need for expensive invading armies or weaponry, just turn off your own life blood of heat and energy. Still, the Scottish government has obviously thought this through carefully so that nobody will be inconvenienced. No conspiracy here – just another cock-up.
How about another co-word, corruption. Parlamentarist states (it’s wrong to call these democracies) are ruled by a self-regenerating caste of people unqualified for anything except the machinations of party politics. They understand what’s beneficial to their bank account balances and happily turn a blind eye to everything else.
Nobody ever mentions where the excess capacity to actually charge the magical storage is going to come from – there won’t be less use overnight if everyone is supposed to be running heatpumps and charging their toy cars.
Your comment on the use of Hydrogen as a energy carrier looks a bit optimistic, on the assumption that it can be as high as 50% efficient. Many other sources suggest that it can achieve around a third at best. E.g. commentary in Modern Railways by Roger Ford, related to the adoption of some hydrogen fuel based rolling stock on certain railways.
Who is voting for this fascist fish anyway?
The Scots!
Following on from my earlier comment on the poor efficiency of using H as a storage medium, I though it might be worthwhile jotting down some more notes.
I often have a look at this site:https://grid.iamkate.com/ which does include Scotland as part of the network.
When it comes to short term storage of surplus output from renewables – notably wind and solar – there is a small amount of existing hydroelectric storage, by virtue of reversing the water direction between a pair of reservoirs (pumped storage). I think there’s a bit of that in Scotland, and also in N Wales (Dinorwig). They are often used as a quick way of responding to temporary spikes in demand. Dinorwig can ramp up it’s output in less than a minute, e.g.
Another type of renewable generation is tidal flow. Quite controversial, some if it, with other groups that are opposed to potential damage to wildlife. E.g. the proposed Severn Barrage, or smaller projects like a Swansea lagoon, or a Cardiff equivalent, exploiting the Bristol Channel tide difference. So far, none of those has happened.
I guess that in Scotland, in the absence of coal, it’s mostly Gas, Solar, Wind, Hydroelectric, and nuclear at present.
“I’ll be charitable and say that the ‘useful idiots’ among them are just mad. My own MP [SNP Drew Hendry] probably falls into this category, brainwashed by his own party political propaganda and dogma. Against all logic, these retards really seem to believe that we can give up using all fossil fuels, and nuclear power as well according to green extremists, without the economy regressing back to pre-industrial revolution standards of living and that this will somehow tackle climate change™, which it won’t even if the global climate were controlled by the level of atmospheric CO2, which it isn’t, because the majority non-Western world is going to carry on with fossil fuel business as usual”.
For more in this vein and an explanation of what the climate change scam is really all about, go to Joel Smalley substack recent article “Why do so few of the general public smell a rat?”
“I’ll be charitable and say that the ‘useful idiots’ among them are just mad. My own MP [SNP Drew Hendry] probably falls into this category, brainwashed by his own party political propaganda and dogma. Against all logic, these retards really seem to believe that we can give up using all fossil fuels, and nuclear power as well according to green extremists, without the economy regressing back to pre-industrial revolution standards of living and that this will somehow tackle climate change™, which it won’t even if the global climate were controlled by the level of atmospheric CO2, which it isn’t, because the majority non-Western world is going to carry on with fossil fuel business as usual”.
For more in this vein and an explanation of what the climate change scam is really all about, go to Joel Smalley substack recent article “Why do so few of the general public smell a rat?”
10% of us are impractical twits
But they are very good at working together and taking control of the agenda
unless we – to pinch a phrase – Take back control
We are £ucked
Jim Ratcliffe should be bankrolling a political movement
Not playing subuteo
Well, if the Scots insist on voting in Sturgeon and the SNP, what can they expect.
Yes, AND the Greens …. who are now in coalition with the Fishwife’s Party.
Especially as she can negotiate so well as to get 2 ferries, maybe some time in the future, as opposed to 34
But what can you expect from this coalition of scum (SNP and Greens) that are asking 8-year-olds what gender they identify with. ———Scots are normally so vocal in opposing everything they think isn’t good for them, like the Poll Tax etc. They are not scared to shout the odds at perceived injustice, so why do they sit there and let this bunch of eco socialist toe rags take away their gas central heating, their cars, their ability to move freely around the country, and reduce their standard of living under false pretences about climate? Why do they let these pretend to save the planet parasites treble their electric bill but still insist the wind is FREE? The answer lies deep in the psyche of the anti-English, anti tory, dragged out of the EU mentality that is determined not to be oppressed, unless it’s their own government that does it to them.
“If Scotland were to cease to exist tomorrow”
If only!
Moaning whining snp freeloaders.
pay for your own upkeep without the hand outs from the British coffers and see how you get on! And btw, the British will take back all its North Sea oil infrastructure, oil rigs, gas rigs, land based infrastructure, pipelines etc! British money paid for that, the sea might be your property but the means to drill it was paid for by uk money.
Best of luck trying to freeload off Europe instead, with a 15% deficit on gdp, bet they can’t wait to take on another bankrupt country! you could always sell water and mountains! Just like Wales, with the pillock, golem prickford, that runs that place.
Coal, oil ,gas
Energy where you want it, when you need it!
Beat that!
All this crap about a gas that isn’t even a problem! Co2 is plant food and has NEVER caused any global problems!
It’s around 4% max of the earth’s atmosphere, it once was 11%! the dinosaurs didn’t seem to mind, the world was more lush and green than it had ever been!
So forested that it laid down all the coal, oil and gas that is here today!
Yes! And it helps plants grow in desert areas. The greenist bs about gw causing desertification is another nonsense. Increased CO2 is GREENING the planet! The utter nonsense spouted by these idiots is breathtaking
0.04%.
I stand corrected, thankyou Huxleypiggles
Seems I got my 4 in the wrong place
Wow! 0.04% , what on earth are these greeny idiots worried about?!
Absolute proof that the politicians deem themselves omniscient, if I say it will be done, it will be done.. Their arrogance and stupidity is priceless.
I live in Scotland and Devolution has been a DISASTER for Scotland, in my view.
I never vote for SNP and I am devastated at the damage Sturgeon is doing to Scotland.
In my view, Devolution in Scotland does not work.
I feel for you Great scot, I love the Scots,your a strong and proud people in a stunning country, but your gov is the pits!
I would sooner have the union than lose it.
I do lose my Wrag sometimes especially when Sturgeon keeps banging on about leaving as if all the Scots want to leave. The more I hear it the more I want to say “oh sod off then”
but I’m fully aware she is not representing a majority
A solution, if there is one, is for the ‘Green’ advocates to create their ‘Net Zero’ utopia first among themselves, and it’s actually that great the rest of us will voluntarily switch from fossil fuels.
Let the ‘Green’ advocates create their own ‘Net Zero’ society first without using fossil fuels, and not disturbing the environment.
The rest of us can watch.
When you fly in from Spain after your holiday you look down at a once beautiful country that now looks like a giant pincushion. The land intensive wind farms are everywhere, and all to provide about 30% (on average) of our electricity at unimaginable expense, that the planet savers say isn’t true because “wind is now cheaper than coal”—-Yep, if you subsidise yellow trousers 100% then it is obvious that yellow trousers will be cheaper than all other colour of trousers. On the absurd “Wind Day” in June last year only 2% of the UK electricity was generated by wind. — We keep hearing from the hand wringers about the “energy transition to renewables”, but renewables are part time energy. They are not ON DEMAND. So, you cannot “transition” to something that only works some of the time from something that works all of the time, and the only energy sources that work all of the time are Coal Gas and Nuclear. So, the phony planet savers will pretend to an unsuspecting public that all we need to do is get rid of Coal and Gas, and replace it all with wind and sun and everything will tick along just as before, and infact our energy will be cheaper because the wind is FREE. ———-No, it won’t. —— Renewables only generate electricity, and electricity is only one fifth of energy needs. I recall the head of the National Grid say about 10 years ago that “We are going to have to get used to using electricity as and when it is available”——————–What is he insane? Progress according to this absurd climate con game is only having electricity if the wind blows.? So, in effect what most governments all over the western world are saying is that, you will have to go without. ——In a football mad country can you imagine the power going off with 15 minutes left of a Rangers v Celtic match?———- All that wind does is destabilise the grid. You saw in Germany what effect relying on wind has. They depended so much on wind with more and more turbines, that because of the way wind interacts with the grid, they were forced to construct 14 new coal fired plants so as to have base load. Now I hear so called environmentalists say, “But we need to do this to fight climate change”. Except the UK is less than 1% of global CO2 emissions that are alleged to be changing the climate and Scotland is a fraction of that at 0.13% or so. ——-This eco socialism masquerading as planet saving is indeed a “fantasy”, with our impoverishment simply seen as collateral damage in the climate alarmists drive to pander to the UN rather than to the people who voted for them. The trouble is that the public were NEVER consulted on NET ZERO and every major political party is fully onboard with this absurdity. Which only goes to show that, as someone pointed out ——-“We are all socialists now”
>Then according to the “Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change” (MAGICC), based on the latest IPCC climate models, the reduction in the Earth’s temperature in 2100 would be…undetectable.
I’m glad you brought that one up.
We live in a planet with 8,000,000,000 individuals (roughly). The effect of the actions of any such individuals on the physical aspects of Earth, even the actions of the most powerful individuals, such as the leaders of the biggest countries, the CEOs of the biggest corporations, or the commanders-in-chief of the biggest militaries, should be undetectable.
Except that we don’t generally believe that’s the case. For example, we think that if the commander-in-chief of one of the main nuclear-capable nations decided to launch a massive nuclear attack on another nation, the physical effects on planet Earth would probably be detectable from Mars by year 2100. This is possible not because the commander-in-chief could physically do all that’s necessary for a massive nuclear attack, but because the commander-in-chief is a powerful individual that would be obeyed.
In order to say that the effect of Scotland going net-zero would be undetectable, you also need to claim that no other territory pays the slightest attention to what Scotland is doing in order to make their policy decisions. This might well be the case, maybe Scotland is pretty powerless in the grand scheme of things. But you haven’t argued the case that this is so.