UK’s Daily Telegraph Falling For The Battery Myth
Another gormless article by Jonathan Leake, who for some reason is the Telegraph’s Energy Editor!
From the Telegraph:
It is Britain’s biggest ever energy investment: Ed Miliband’s £100bn expansion of our electricity grids has been sold to the public as vital to its future – a chance to both modernise and decarbonise its power networks.
“We need to move fast and build things to deliver the once-in-a-generation upgrade of our energy infrastructure,” Miliband said in his Clean Power 2030 manifesto, laid out in 2024.
Two years later, the costs of this are beginning to become clear – and they are huge.
National Grid’s “great grid upgrade” and similar plans set out by Scottish Power and SSE, which run the high-voltage networks in Scotland, will cost around £70bn.
The upgrades planned to the lower-voltage distribution network will add another £30bn.
The costs of all of this will be paid for by increases to our bills.
For Miliband, whose pledge to decarbonise the grid is the cause of all this spending, it is a legacy issue. When he exits his post as Energy Secretary, he hopes to leave behind a transformed power system, free of emissions.
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman said: “Upgrading our electricity networks after years of underinvestment is essential for our energy security and to bring bills down for good.”
But a rebellion is brewing at what some claim is really a “great grid cash grab”.
Britain’s households and businesses are facing some of the world’s highest power bills, and even the energy suppliers sending those bills are increasingly worried.
They point out that network charges are already surging. For the average household, so-called transmission costs to transport electricity from generators have risen from £31 in 2015 to £83 now while distribution costs, to deliver that energy to homes and local businesses, have risen from £84 to £117.
Balancing charges – the tweaks needed to match supply with demand – have also surged, rising from a negligible £7 a year in 2015 to £50 now. That is because the intermittency of renewables necessitates many more of these adjustments.
Altogether, these charges add a total of £250 to the average annual bill.
But what worries suppliers most is that network and subsidy charges are set to roughly double in the coming years – which would come on top of any rises in the cost of actual electricity.
Chris Norbury, the boss of Eon, now Britain’s biggest power supplier, says an urgent rethink is needed.
He warns that network charges and subsidy costs could soon far outweigh the cost of the power itself, arguing that while some grid upgrades are necessary, many are not.
Norbury claims that billions of pounds could be saved by relying on “flexibility”: installing solar panels, batteries and offering new tariffs that would turn Britain’s homes into miniature power plants.
Eon has already conducted trials in Glasgow and Coventry, where it has used these new technologies to bring down bills by an average of £255 a year.
Norbury says it could go further. “You can see the savings stack up as the flexible systems get more sophisticated. We’ve tested it and we are looking at bill savings between £300 and £800 a year. Plus we are delivering benefits in terms of the overall system and network cost.
Full story here.
His opening argument that grid upgrades will massively increase bills is, of course, spot on. It is a pity he did not realise this years ago, when the writing was already on the wall.
But then he falls for the Net Zero lobby’s pushing of batteries and smart tariffs. Putting solar panels on your roof, backed up by batteries is, of course, not cost free! And those “smart tariffs” simply mean you will pay more for electricity at times of low supply/high demand.
None of this in any event will address the £100 billion grid upgrades, which will soon be signed and sealed in stone anyway. We still need new transmission lines to carry wind power from Scotland and the North Sea to where the demand is.
And we still need grid upgrades to handle the doubling of demand projected. (Leake goes on to mention a £30bn upgrade for the local, low voltage distribution network, which will allow connection of embedded solar generation. He is apparently blissfully unaware that a lot more – maybe £200bn – will be required to double the capacity of this network as well as the high voltage transmission network.
Furthermore, far from stabilising the grid, domestic solar panels and batteries will make matters worse. In summer, there will surplus solar power generation anyway; reduced domestic demand, due to household solar, will exacerbate the problem.
Meanwhile, in winter these same houses will require nearly all of their electricity from the grid. At times like this, they and the rest of us will still need those £100bn upgrades.
And none of this addresses the other big issue – surplus supply of wind and solar power are at times. Constraint costs will balloon, when that inevitably occurs.
Let’s be clear.
Jonathan Leake should not only be aware of all this, he should also have been writing about it years ago.
It is the failure of most in the MSM to warn the public of these problems and the massive costs involved, which has left them in the dark about Net Zero.
Thanks to the failure of Leake and his chums, we are now sleepwalking into an energy nightmare, which will soon be irreversible if Miliband gets his way.
source notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com