Why the Renewable Energy Transition is Doomed to Fail

Every reader of this site knows the moment. You’re three sentences into a reasonable question about energy policy, the cost of it, the pace of it, whether anyone has actually done the sums, and someone says the word. Denier. The conversation is over. You have been moved from the category of people with an argument into the category of people with a condition.

The word works because the fight until now has been staged on climate science, and that’s ground the other side owns: the journals, the institutions, the broadcasters, the referee and his whistle. It doesn’t matter what you know about physics or engineering or just common sense. Question the models and you have diagnosed yourself.

Today Swift Press publishes my book The Energy Trap: Why the renewable energy transition can’t work – and what can. It begins by vacating the climate ground entirely. Concede the science for the sake of argument, all of it: every model, every tenth of a degree of warming. Grant the whole case, and then examine what has actually been demanded in its name. Net Zero is not a scientific proposition, but rather an engineering project, one of the largest ever attempted in peacetime. Unlike climate science, engineering projects don’t care who is morally right. They stand or fall on physics and engineering. On that ground there are no deniers. There are only people who have done the sums and people who have not.

So let’s do one together, from the book.

In 2023 the Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence and nobody’s idea of a den of deniers, asked what it would take to run Britain on wind and sun. It modelled 37 years of real British weather against projected demand, and found that wind output can sit persistently below its long-run median for two to three consecutive years. Not merely a windless week over Christmas. Years.

To carry the country through such a wind drought, the Royal Society found Britain would need 60,000 to 100,000 gigawatt-hours of stored electricity. How much does Britain have? About 37 gigawatt-hours — every pumped-hydro reservoir and every grid battery combined. Not even one part in 1,600 of what is needed. Build all 11 pumped-hydro schemes now planned across Scotland and Wales, a decade’s work each, and you reach 220: one part in 270, with the geography for hundreds more nowhere to be found. Do it with batteries and the bill is £10 to £25 trillion — three to eight times Britain’s entire annual GDP — for kit that wears out and must be bought again every 15 years or so.

The Royal Society’s own answer is hydrogen: make it with surplus wind, store it in salt caverns, and burn it back when the drought comes. But using hydrogen for energy in this way is 40% efficient, returning just two units in five. The rest is the developed world’s most expensive electricity, installed at your expense then thrown away. Britain has three such caverns. The report calls for up to 90 clusters of 10. And it notes, drily, that storage on this scale is “not currently foreseen by the government”.

A bright 15 year-old can follow that arithmetic. Nothing in it touches climate science. The project as legislated depends on a storage estate nobody is building. That is not my finding; it is the Royal Society’s. The Energy Trap runs the same exercise across the whole energy system: what energy is, why civilisation eats it in the quantities it does, what oil depletion is doing beneath the headlines, and what hydrogen, efficiency and decoupling look like when you run them on their own official numbers.

And the trap is wider than electricity. Half the world’s food is grown with fertiliser made from natural gas: the gas supplies both the hydrogen and the heat. Britain’s last ammonia plant, at Billingham, closed for good in 2023 — the owner blamed British gas prices and carbon costs, both made in Whitehall. We didn’t stop needing ammonia. We now import it, made from somebody else’s gas. The book explains why that keeps happening.

I wrote The Energy Trap for the kitchen table, because the reader I have in mind is the one that government and media systematically underestimate: intelligent, unspecialised and entirely capable of following a chain of arithmetic if someone will show him or her the links. He or she should be able to sit down with the book, three cups of tea and half a packet of chocolate hobnobs and get up able to move from ‘that can’t be right’, the gut feeling, to ‘that isn’t right, and here is why’, the next time an energy minister emits a whopper. Matt Ridley says it’s “the best book on energy you will ever read. Superbly written, thrillingly argued and utterly terrifying.” The terror is optional. The physics is not.

I didn’t write it to persuade the persuaded, and I didn’t write it to win a shouting match with the committed. I wrote it because the sceptical public has been arguing for 20 years with one hand tied behind its back: convinced that something is wrong, rarely equipped on the spot to show what. The book is a reference for that argument. The storage sum above is one of dozens, worked from official or academic sources and short enough to retell in a pub — footnoted, so that when somebody demands your source you have one and they do not.

Energy policy has been conducted on the assumption that ordinary people can’t follow it and therefore need not be consulted. Both are false. You don’t need a licence to do arithmetic, and you don’t need anyone’s permission either. None of this is opinion. And by pointing it out, you are not deniers of anything.

My goal? To put an accessible reference in your hand to help you cut through the spin, understand the facts and stakes, and challenge those currently in charge of energy policy.

And then, together: to demand an energy system that works for us and for our children. I hope you’ll join me.

The Energy Trap: Why the renewable energy transition can’t work – and what can is published today by Swift Press and is available from Amazon. Subscribe to his Substack page, the State of Britain.