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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Is it worth reading in full?
First, it’s about Wendyball, therefore inherently uninteresting to adults.
Second, it’s just another example of the New Normal. Ever changing rules, random prohibitions on activities, we’re all in it together (well, you peasants are), just another few days/weeks/months/years.
I have no interest in football – hadn’t even clocked that Ingerland had won yesterday.
… but if people don’t grasp the stupidity of this – matching the pub sanction of the virus flying above 5 feet and inhabiting pissoirs – then they are truly thick.
I have mo interest in football either. However, this is the perfect opportunity for those notoriously feisty footie fans to show some courage. It will be infectious and we at home will fully support them. This Government is showing their Bolshevik game. If we do not grow some backbone and fight these ridiculous rules, we will be laughed at, abused and suppressed for the foreseeable future.
Quite. If the marching morons don’t wake up NOW, they never will.
Cheer loud enough they hear us in Rome?
But I thought cheering and singing spread Covid?
Whoops……reverse ferret shortly.
Terrefying.
Brava!
Football singing is apparently fine. It’s just choirs that aren’t allowed to sing instead.
Obviously it depends what you sing, England fans at the Germany match have been called out by the woke media for innapropriate singing. Not sure what they were singing, but “2 world wars and one world cup” used to be a favourite, along with humming the theme tune to damn busters or the great escape.
Mostly it was ‘Sweet Caroline’ the other night.
Ten German bombers maybe? A great favourite.
I am very angry that the football officials and G7 can waltz over here without any restrictions but we are forced to adhere to their rules. This cannot go on and it is totally unacceptable!
Oh but, oh but they are rich and make significant economic contributions to U.K. plc. We little people don’t have a say and just provide all the taxes for them to spend!!!! Yes, we should all be very, very angry.
…and they think they are important people so the rules don’t apply to them, only the unwashed plebs.
Oh, I think you’ll accept it. What are you doing to do about it?
“This cannot go on and it is totally unacceptable!”
I sense a stiff letter to The Times coming on
The players don’t need to quarantine, neither do the match officials, any of the travelling circus; including FA officials, coaches, no doubt the TV people are exempt too.
The only people required to quarantine are the supporters.
Remind me why people are watching this? I gave up watching all sport last year because it exemplifies the exact hypocrisy we are living under; everyone involved in it can carry on as normal, travel the world, no restrictions etc, but for everyone else it’s sit there, don’t move, stay still, don’t even think about questioning it blah blah blah.
Stop watching sport if you want your freedoms back or at least if you want to protest this New Normal BS.
I stopped following football when it became a religion.
I went to one of the few schools where football and not rugby was the default. In consequence, I hate the wretched game with a vengeance.
I think it’s shown on the BBC with that self-regarding, overpaid prat Lineker (who got cross with my old alma mater when his son didn’t get enough A-levels for uni), and I don’t watch anything “Beeb”; least of all, football.
Wow, a school that awarded A Levles on ability, not reflected fame? Those were the days!
Also a nice reflection that even if you’re a BBC drone, being paid millions of pounds of licence fee money and thus able to afford the school fees which I think were about £25k p.a., there are still some people and institutions who will not kowtow to you, even when you stamp your expensive foot.
Yep Lineker is a vastly overrated and overpaid twat.
Great, now I know there are more than me. Time BBC employers started looking for new jobs. Their present employment is finished
You can go back to football now. The new religion is Covidianism.
Which one requires human sacrifices?
We now have a clash between the football religion and the covid cult. No fan of football but, in this case, I do hope it comes out on top in this unholy war.
I stopped supporting England when they started “taking the knee” frankly I hope they lose and rot in Hell. Tossers.
Inner party members are better than the proles.
Look out for the black overalls.
‘Proles are not human beings,’ said Syme, casually.
It’s because it’s a tribal activity. You gotta support the Reds, right, only wankas and puffs don’t buy the strips.
England play in white.
No, I won’t read this horseshit in full.
When uefa officials, g7 leaders, a shit uk statistician, a (shit) uk gov adviser, our own sodding health minister, various US states, several countries etc etc – when they all know that covidworld is one big lie – then who gives a toss what some meretricious govt wonk says?
Anyone supporting the Kneelers is supporting getting politically lectured by idiots, under the guise of watching sport.
Get politics out of sport.
…and exactly in what clown-riding-a-rainbow-unicorn world are respiratory viruses even a thing in summer!?
If the oiks cannot see through the SCAM as a result of all these dual rules we are truly fucked.
England Fans Told Not to Travel to Rome for Quarter-Final Match*
*ᴺᵒᵗ ᵃᵖᵖˡᶦᶜᵃᵇˡᵉ ᵗᵒ ᵁᴱᶠᴬ ᴼᶠᶠᶦᶜᶦᵃˡˢ ᵒʳ ᴳᵒᵛᵉʳⁿᵐᵉⁿᵗ ᴹᶦⁿᶦˢᵗᵉʳˢ, ʷʰᵒ ᵃʳᵉ ᶦᵐᵐᵘⁿᵉ ᵗᵒ ᶜᴼⱽᴵᴰ-¹⁹, ᵇᵘᵗ ᵒⁿˡʸ ᵈᵘʳᶦⁿᵍ ᴱᵘʳᵒᵖᵉᵃⁿ ᶜʰᵃᵐᵖᶦᵒⁿˢʰᶦᵖ ᵍᵃᵐᵉˢ.
Great reset.
Rules for the many, not the few.
When we annexe the Ukraine on Saturday and their fans are all sad I’ll be like “yeah, crimea river”
Groan…
Some people on here are elitists, and demonstrate all the contempt for mass culture we see from our political leaders. . If you want to build a coalition against lockdown then start pointing out exactly how mass sports like football are controlled and constrained as far as crowds go yet tennis is allowed cheek by jowl crowds . Let’s stop thinking that everyone who hates the lockdown is a Tory Brexiteer. We are a diverse group of sceptics some left libertarians like me others on the right mso let’s be less sectarian. I say that as a Scot who regularly sees anti Scottish bile on here. Plenty of us Scots are scunnered by Sturgeon and her lockdown loving dentist of doom Jason Leitch, and the cast of behavioural grifters and limelight huggers who support them. I will be supporting England now they won’t be playing Sweden, and hope the fans turn up en masse.
Well said! Ironic it is that those pushing ‘diversity’ will allow nothing of the sort in their own little world.
Far, far worse, the MCC are insisting on vaccine passports to get into the pavilion at Lord’s for the England/Pakistan match…….
Marmalade all over the place……
Wimbledon on the box, the unmasked cheek by jowl. Do they also have vaccine passes?
What about Ascot the other week?
I think even the masses at least look at these gatherings. Are the howls of rage just not being reported or are the public too stupid to care?
Erm…..well……at the MCC…….tumbleweed……….
How bloody patronising. But of course she’s a politician and we’re the proles so it goes without saying
The Pig Dictator and his dad and girlfriend’s Klaus project will start to unravel.. for the simplest of reasons… the mess and inconsistency.. oh what a tangled crappy web we weave when we practise to deceive…
Those wonderfully awkward fans need to show their metal and go down to Italy. Do not bother to isolate and cheer our team on. They cannot arrest a few thousand fans. If they do they will create martyrs and we can support them from UK. It is time we took back control.
Personally loathe feetball. However I hope many many fans go to Rome and then turn their phones off when they get back so as to ignore the pestering harassment from T&T. Unfortunately the negative flip side of this is that it continues to fill the already burgeoning coffers of the owners of the PCR testing businesses.
“already burgeoning coffers of the owners of the PCR testing businesses.”
How about the next protest be outside the homes of these owners?
If you’re a fan you should absolutely go and support your team. F**k the government and their BS rules.
Non-compliance is the only way forward.
It’s embarrassing how stupid some Government ministers can sound when they are answering a question upon which they have no interest and no knowledge. Her answer translated means ‘F*ck off and leave me alone, I am busy’
These awful people who are running the world are sucking the joy out of life. How can we get rid of them? Genuine question
We can’t. Simple as that. We’ve allowed them to suck the joy out of life bit by bit for at least the last 50 years, so they’re not about to stop now. It’s been mentioned by me and others a few times- once you accept that the government can tell you what to do or not do ‘for your own good’, then you are no longer free. So for example- not allowing shops to display tobacco products may seem trivial, but if you accept this, (that a shop owner can’t display what they likes in their own premises and that you are too feeble minded to make a rational decision so can’t be allowed to see such things), you can’t argue with anything else that they deem necessary. Most people born this century would surely struggle with true freedom and responsibility- it just isn’t part of life anymore.
Waste of time getting vaccinated then wasn’t it!!!
Yes.
are they still kneeling to Marxism?–i don’t have a telly so cannot watch them:-(
Yep- same with F1. Utter madness and anyone with any backbone and a shred of self respect would tell them to do one.
Unreal- they’re not even pretending ‘we’re all in it together’ now are they? It’s just a case of we can do what we like you diseased, racist peasant- now shut up and go away. I can’t watch my son’s sports day, ( for reasons that still haven’t been made clear to me- it’s outside for goodness sake), but UEFA top brass can come and go as they please. Why do they need to come, out of interest? If businesses can hold meetings via Zoom, etc., then surely these overpaid windbags can too? What is it they do that is so critical it means that they just have to be here?