Rishi's Dash for Gas is His Canute Moment

Rishi Sunak’s recent announcement of new gas power generators to ensure reliable energy supply on the path to Net Zero is his King Canute moment.

The story of King Canute and the tide used to be much more often mentioned than it is nowadays. The earliest account of the event comes from Henry of Huntingdon writing in the 12th century, a hundred years after Canute (Cnut if one prefers). In Huntingdon’s account, Canute was deliberately demonstrating to his fawning courtiers the difference between two different types of law: laws of the land and natural laws – what today would be called scientific laws. It’s a distinction that’s still important.

Politicians are fond of laws, at least when they pass them, though one senses that a Conservative Government might, in retrospect, prefer not to have been stuck with the Equality Act and the Climate Change Act, both of which its MPs voted for. But it continues, with assistance from devolved assemblies, to legislate to promote the ‘good’ and prevent the ‘bad’, bent on ‘defeating Covid’, a disease largely untroubled by human intervention, and issuing ‘legally binding targets’ on biodiversity, air quality, waste efficiency, child poverty, hate speech, gender and racial discrimination.

Canute’s demonstration with the tide had one purpose only – to demonstrate the vanity, the uselessness, of human laws. Ordering his chair to be set on the shore, he commanded the incoming tide not to rise and wet his clothes or body – and of course his command had no effect. As he said: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws.”

Whether one thinks what Canute referred to as eternal laws are of divine origin or not, they are of quite a different nature from laws of the land. Natural laws are not things that tell the natural universe how to behave; rather they are simply descriptions of how the universe does behave. The job of us petty men is to observe and put up with the world. Tides go up and down twice a day and there is nothing we can do about it.

So why is Rishi’s recent announcement of new gas power generators a Canute moment?

The “legally binding target” of the 2008 Climate Act, modified by the 2019 Order, commands that: “It is the duty of the Secretary of State to ensure that the net U.K. carbon account for the year 2050 is at least 100% lower than the 1990 baseline.”

The crucial concept, “ensure that the net U.K. carbon… for 2050… is at least 100% lower than 1990”, means that we must reduce by 100% the net amount of carbon dioxide we are producing: 100% lower than what it was is zero, hence the term Net Zero.

As is gradually becoming apparent, Net Zero is physically impossible to achieve. However much governments legislate, achieving Net Zero is as likely as the tide obeying a king’s command not to advance.

The scientific reasons for the impossibility of Net Zero are multifactorial. They start off with our need for energy. At 50th out of 200 countries, the U.K. is already very energy efficient, particularly considering how far north we are and how cold. We contain 70 million warm-blooded humans (23% more than in 1997) who need heated houses and food to be grown, imported, processed and distributed. We need places to work and transport to and from the workplace. We need manufactured goods, many of which are essential – houses, boilers (or heat pumps), lorries, buses and so on. Even if there was political support for energy austerity and we prohibited recreational transport, meat consumption and the keeping of pets, insulated every building and banned all consumer goods (from children’s toys to golf clubs), we would be unlikely to see a reduction in energy consumption by as much as a quarter.

As for our production of energy, for all the hype about renewables and all the obvious wind turbines and solar panels we see around us, renewables are actually still just hype. Of the 2,000 billion units of energy we consume each year, renewables provide only 100 billion units, a mere 5% of the total (4% wind, 0.6% solar and 0.4% hydroelectric). Forget the figures about renewables providing half our energy. That’s only the electricity from the grid, which is one seventh (14%) of our energy use. Nuclear power, along with renewables, provides 5% of our total energy used but the stark fact is that 90% of the U.K.’s energy comes from burning things – fossil fuels for the most part but also, shockingly, forests we are currently paying to have chopped down in the U.S. and Canada.

The fairytale plan was to increase our dependence on wind – to take it from 4% to 80% – 20 times as much. But there is an obvious problem with that: for half the time, on average, the wind isn’t blowing. What are we going to do about that?

The fairytale answer was to store surplus energy when the wind is blowing hard to give out when the wind stops blowing. But how does one store the energy in times of plenty?

Batteries were the obvious suggestion but that, it turns out, is another fairytale because they are environmentally terribly polluting to make, prone to bursting into flames, have a limited lifespan and need as much energy to make them as they store usefully over their lifetime.

The second suggestion for storage has been to use surplus wind to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then we can burn hydrogen when the wind stops blowing, use compressed hydrogen to power lorries and even pump hydrogen round the country in gas mains to power clean gas boilers. The hydrogen fairytale collapses because hydrogen doesn’t liquefy under pressure, so storage for vehicles is very difficult, plus the process of splitting water then compressing and storing the hydrogen wastes about three quarters of the energy from the wind. This means that we would need 80 times as many wind turbines as we have at the moment – prohibitively expensive even for a spendthrift Climate Change Committee.

So we come to the reason behind Rishi’s recent dash for gas, something that outrages advocates of Net Zero. The logic is simple and irrefutable. The only real renewable available in quantity is wind. Since our total energy needs are 2,000 billion units per year, let’s increase the number of wind turbines so that, at peak, they have a capacity of 2,000 billion units per year. Let’s also build gas turbine power plants which will generate 2,000 billion units per year. So when the wind is blowing at full strength, we use wind. When it is blowing at half strength, we use half wind and half gas, and when it is not blowing at all we use all gas. On average we will then be half wind and half fossil fuel – and paying a fortune for the privilege.

It’s simple arithmetic to see that this kicks out all notions of Net Zero. At best it’s Net 50%. As the Green Alliance think tank says, it “flies in the face” of Net Zero. It’s like Canute commanding the tides to hold back, while gradually backing up the beach so that his feet only get half wet. It’s a climb down. But that’s what happens when laws of the land conflict with natural law. It’s the former that have to give way.