The terrible situation in Ukraine has highlighted that we cannot be dependent on Imports for our energy security. While we only import small amounts of Gas and Oil from Russia, others import far more, and as they look to other suppliers so the wholesale cost increases. This, environmentalists say, is the reason that it matters not how much Gas and Oil we produce ourselves, we are always at the mercy of global market rates and renewables are the ONLY answer. Now in the social cesspit that is twitter, I don’t have the time, inclination, or crayons to explain why that argument is non-sequitur, but in an article I’ll at least try and give it a go.
Energy is at a premium, and while many scramble around trying to inject their preferred solutions into play, it should be incumbent on us as a society to develop an energy policy that ensures security, prosperity and puts people first. There is no argument from this writer that cleaner is better, since the Human race first learnt how to use fire to cook and keep ourselves warm, there has been a constant drive towards cleaner and more efficient methods. However innovation takes time, and time is currently something we have little of when looking at the monumental energy bills that people are facing because of failed and ideological energy policy.
Despite the environmentalist line that wind and solar power is our route to some kind of utopia, every method of power generation has its drawbacks, even wind and solar. There is no perfect solution to power generation. While wind power is supposedly a CO2 free method of power generation, this is just an endlessly repeated lie. The fact is that it is unreliable, when the wind doesn’t blow, or blows too fast, wind power has to be backed up 100% by fossil fuel generation 100% of the time. But even before a wind farm generates anything it has racked up thousands of tons of CO2 emissions. With 45 tons of steel rebar and about 500m3 of concrete for the base alone, each wind turbine generates around 240 tons of CO2 to construct. Granted over the 20 year life span of a wind turbine that CO2 is paid back in comparison to burning coal and gas, but CO2 free it is not. There is then the impact on wildlife to consider which no one seems to acknowledge. Low frequency vibrations emitted by offshore wind play havoc with dolphin and whale populations, while onshore wind has a devastating effect of migratory birds, and bats are cruelly lured to the turbines like a moth to a flame.
Solar panels again need to be backed up 100% of the time by fossil fuels, as their electricity production is dependent on sunlight. In the UK, as many of us know, we can go weeks at a time without much sunshine, and so this technology is again unreliable. There is also the environmental impact of manufacturing panels. Silicon is the main component, but to refine this from readily available sand is an energy intensive process using very high temperatures in an arc furnace. Again over the expected lifespan of a solar panel, this manufacturing cost is paid back, however, to say solar is CO2 free power generation is as much a lie as it is with wind.
As mentioned the main drawback to both of these methods of generation is that they are not 100% reliable, and are at the mercy of the weather. So to have an energy policy based solely on wind and solar requires storage. Battery storage could be used, but then there is the environmental impact of mining resources such as lithium and cobalt to construct them. Not only that, but there is a human cost too. Many of the resources used in battery construction are mined in Africa, much using child slave labour. Pumped hydro could be used, but again comes with a large environmental impact in the amount of land required. To store the terawatts of power required would need massive reservoirs to be constructed, reshaping landscapes, using thousands of cubic meters of concrete and steel rebar, both of which have a high CO2 cost. If a dam is to fail, the human cost could also be very high, the most recent example the Town of Whaley Bridge had to be evacuated as the dam wall collapsed almost flooding the town.
There is then the cost to change our lifestyles to be able to use green energy in place of fossil fuels. Take home heating, heat pumps, despite the sales pitch, are expensive to run in comparison to gas boilers. While best case an air source heat pump is 3-4x more efficient than a gas boiler on a kW for kW basis, at today’s prices gas is 5x cheaper. As the weather gets colder the efficiency of an ASHP drops, at freezing point down to about 1.5x that of a gas boiler, which just happens to be when you need your heating the most.
There is then the cost to convert from a gas boiler to a heat pump. While government grants offer £5000 towards the cost, this can be on average around £20,000. The reason for this cost is the need in most cases to upgrade the entire heating system in a property. Heat pumps run at lower temperatures than gas boilers, and this makes all the difference. To understand this, it’s crucial to understand heating system design. Firstly heat loss of a property must be calculated, which involves working out the thermal loss through the different elements of a building. This tells you the total kW of power required to heat a property to your chosen target temperature. From there, you can calculate the size of radiators and pipework required to provide the heat to each room of a property. This is very much dependent on the operating temperature of the system. The lower the system temperature, the larger pipework, and radiators need to be to deliver the required amount of heat to overcome the heat loss of the building. Many systems in use today will have been designed to run at a temperature of around 70 degrees, and for those designed around condensing boilers should have a 20 degree differential between flow and return. To drop the heat source to 45 degrees, which heat pumps can provide, those same radiators and pipework can simply not provide enough heat to keep a space warm. Of course, those houses designed with wet underfloor heating are far more compatible with heat pumps as underfloor is designed around far lower temperatures than radiators, but this is not most properties, and the costs to install underfloor heating alone, i.e. not as part of a major renovation is very expensive.
Hot water provision is also an important consideration. Combination boilers have become very popular, heating water on demand, rather than storing water in a cylinder. This again presents a problem for converting to heat pumps. Firstly because of the need to reintroduce a cylinder to store the water and the space that requires. Most people who have made the switch to a combi, were very glad to gain the airing cupboard for extra space, and newer properties haven’t got provision to house a cylinder at all, meaning living space has to be sacrificed. The other issue is again one of temperature. Stored hot water must be maintained at a minimum of 65 degrees to prevent the likes of legionella growth. The lower the temperature of the heat source, the harder that is to achieve, so many heat pump systems rely on immersion heaters to get the temperature up to where it needs to be. This is a very expensive way of heating water, and adds to the running costs of a heat pump drastically.
Part of the cost of installing a heat pump is the additional insulation that properties require. Even as part of a major renovation the cost of insulation can run into thousands, to retrofit it can be even more expensive and problematic. Getting the insulation into the fabric of the building is not easy without exposing the fabric of the building, drastically adding to the scope of works by having to replace decoration or external finishes. There are also design considerations, with most older properties being designed to be well ventilated to avoid damp issues. If not done correctly, adding insulation haphazardly to a property can cause quite severe damage caused by moisture condensing in the wrong place. This is well demonstrated by the number of properties that now have damp problems caused by poorly installed cavity wall insulation.
So how will people afford all this one way or another? Many families do not have a spare £20,000 lying around in order to install a heat pump and then endure even higher heating bills. That is even if they have the space for a heat pump and hot water cylinder. It is an arrogant presumption on the environmentalists’ part to assume that people do, or that the taxpayer should pay for those that can’t. They aren’t even honest enough to admit that their way of saving the planet will force many people into poverty, and that their preferred way of generating power has its drawbacks too. They don’t even acknowledge that we will still need fossil fuels long after we stop burning them for power generation and heating for chemicals and pharmaceuticals to name just two uses.
Which leads us back to the question first posed, to frack or not to frack? Environmentalists argue that increasing our own gas production will not affect rising prices because companies will sell at the global wholesale price. They then argue that renewable energy is cheaper and therefore the way to reduce costs, except that argument does not hold water as energy regardless of its source are subject to wholesale prices, as anyone currently on a green energy tariff can attest too. The basic rules of supply and demand do indeed apply, so increasing production would indeed lower prices. The government could take further steps to control domestic prices by imposing further duty on energy exports making domestic sale more attractive or licensing production companies to ensure production is sold on the domestic market. Hydraulic fracturing is not the only way to remove shale gas either, other less environmentally damaging methods are being developed to remove it.
Back to the situation in Ukraine, all the Economic sanctions against Russia pale in comparison to what we could do with energy. With a real wartime effort to pull Gas and Oil out of the ground, we could end UK energy imports, AND, export some to our European neighbors, helping them to get off Russian Gas and Oil.
There will be a need for Natural Gas for a long time to come if we are to have an orderly transition to cleaner alternatives. To try and change all at once will be incredibly narcissistic and hurt those closest to the breadline most, and our economy as a whole even more. So it makes little sense to leave resources beneath our feet whilst buying them from corrupt countries all so we can signal our virtue through dishonest carbon counting. We have not scratched the surface of the shale gas available in terms of exploration, and there are still areas of the North Sea that are unexplored that could provide further resources.
It is long overdue to inject some honesty into the energy debate, all sides need to stop pushing agendas and start being pragmatic about the costs and benefits in any energy strategy we develop. Carbon counting cannot be the be all and end all of the discussion. Until such time that the technology can be developed to give us more efficient and cost effective energy solutions we cannot cut off our nose to spite our face. Quality of life matters, and while that is dependent on a clean environment, it is equally dependant on opportunity, one does not matter without the other in the grand scheme of things. To those that argue a simpler existence without cars and without modern comforts is the way to go, they need to realise that the genie is very much out of the bottle on that one. It is time that we had an energy policy that takes all factors into account and aims to strike some balance, but most importantly it is time we put people first.
You are going to have to stop talking common sense - the ideologists will never accept it! Germany has just discovered how bad it is to give away independence by relying on a dictatorship for energy. The elephant in the room is the world's dependence on China for manufacturing, another nasty authoritarian dictatorship! This is especially true for Germany as well who depend on china for much of its exports! A double whammy for them. We need to look hard at re-industrialisation and manufacturing in our own country as well as making ourselves more independent with energy. Being an ex nuclear submariner, I am excited by Rolls-Royce's Small Modular reactors, which are a design built on their 60 years of experience designing and building nuclear reactors for the Royal Navy. Great for energy and manufacturing in the UK!