A BRITISH historian, author, climate scientist and airline captain Ralph Ellis, has highlighted the shocking failure of reason and logic behind the UK government’s net zero crusade towards a total transition to so-called renewable energy
His essay titled Unrelliables, Net Zero and Loch Ness was recently posted on X.
Red Ed Millipede is on a crusade to change the UK electrical grid to Unreliables, to achieve his Net Zero passion (obsession?). But there is a massive fly in Red Ed’s Energy Soup, and that is the question of stored backup energy.
At present it is natural gas that takes up the slack, when these unreliable fantasy energy sources fail – but to achieve Net Zero Red Ed wants to close all our fossil-fuelled power stations. And what do we do then?
Unreliables can stop working for days on end, so if Red Ed gets rid of the UK’s gas fired power stations to meet Net Zero targets, we will need a reliable backup energy source. The longest recent wind outage was for 21 days in April 2021, when wind came down to between 10% and 20% of maximum output for 21 days.
So we need a lot of stored energy to fill that energy gap. In fact, we need 30,000 GWh of stored energy to power the fully electrified grid for just 10 days. (This should cover the UK for 20 days, if we still have a little bit of nuclear, wind, and bio sources still generating.)
There are several ways of storing electrical energy, but they all come with huge costs and severe limitations.
(a) Chemical batteries. These are an efficient form of electrical storage, but they are very limited in capacity and very expensive. The two recent Tesla batteries at Cottingham and Lakeside are huge, and cost £75 million each. But they only contain 0.2 GWh each, which would only keep a fully electric UK grid going for 6 seconds. A 30,000 GWh battery to maintain the UK for ten days would be the size of Greater London, and cost £11,500 billion.
b. Hydrogen ‘batteries’. Hydrogen is untested on these scales, and the Royal Society’s cost estimate of £100 billion to build a ‘hydrogen battery’ system is laughable. The system would need: … 200gW of electrolysis capacity for a 20-day recharge, which is 4 times the present electrical grid, and is off the scale in terms of electrolysis technology.
And remember that electrolysis is not very efficient. … 800 deep caverns 3,000 ft down in Yorkshire, containing hydrogen pressurised to 3,000 psi. Note that compressing hydrogen is very energy intensive. … 50 new 2gW CCGT (Rolls Royce jet engine) power stations in Yorkshire, to generate 100gW of backup-energy using hydrogen.
Note that CCGT power stations used as randomly cycling backup are only about 50% efficient. A new transmission grid centered on Yorkshire. and another 140gW of extra ‘recharge’ wind turbines, to allow for all the many ‘hydrogen battery’ inefficiencies.
(Note: a ‘hydrogen battery’ is only about 30% efficient overall. Thus this hydrogen ‘battery system’ would require 100,000 GWh at the electrolysers, giving 60,000 GWht of hydrogen, resulting in 30,000 GWhe of real electrical power. And all of this would cost about £1,850 billion.)
(c). Pumped water (PWS). Unlike hydrogen, pumped water electrical storage (or a ‘water battery’) is quite efficient. The problem being that it is still quite expensive, and the UK does not have enough upland areas.
The Dinorwig PWS system was the most expensive power station ever made, and only stores 10 GWh. The new (proposed) Coire Glas PWS system has larger ponds giving 30 GWh, yet we would require 1,000 Goire Glas systems to power the UK for 10 days.
Where would we build 1,000 PWS systems, and how long would that take? At the present construction rate, Red Ed could declare the UK fully Net Zero in 1,000 years time. The costs for Coire Glas have not been finalised, but it looks like a 30,000 GWh PWS storage system would cost £2,500 billion, if we could find enough locations to build them.
(d) Loch Ness. It is often assumed that Pumped Water Storage requires high elevations, to reduce the volume of water being pumped. More potential energy equals less mass and volume of water required, which increases the number of possible PWS locations, and reduces construction costs.
But what if we had an unlimited water volume, what possibilities does this bring? The answer to large scale PWS storage systems might be Loch Ness – a large inland body of water, with very little habitation on its shores.
So yes, Loch Ness is a very large lake that could form the upper pond of a low-level PWS system. Loch Ness has a 16m drop to the sea and Loch Ness area is 56 km2 610 billion m3 water required for 30,000 GWh (Grok).
This equates to a 12 meter water rise (Grok) Only two dams are required, plus 100gW of turbine generators plus 100gW of transmission lines to England. Cost £500 billion?
The main downside to this proposal, is that Loch Ness would have to become an inland salt sea, which would change its ecosystem. But since greenies love chopping down trees to place wind turbines on top of hills, and to power Drax power station, I am sure they will not mind Loch Ness becoming an inland salt-sea. Besides, Loch Ness does not have an ecosystem.
There was a research project in the 70s looking for Nessie (the monster), but as soon as they probed the waters of the lake, they realised there was no food chain. The waters of Ness are so turbid that phytoplankton cannot thrive, and so there is no foundation for a decent food chain.
Dr Winfield estimated that all the open water in Loch Ness could only provide 93 kg of fish a year, for a top predator like Nessie. So Loch Ness it pretty much dead, and may benefit considerably if it became an inland sea. (Note: the other problem for a Jurassic Nessie, is that the lake was frozen solid during the last ice age advance, just 20,000 years ago…!)
Conclusion. While a Loch Ness energy storage may seem like a mad day-dream, these are the sort of wild fantasies that Ed Millipede’s Unreliables Revolution will entail. We cannot base a wealthy technological society upon unreliable energy, because everything stops when there is no power. YES, EVERYTHING STOPS.
Red Ed says he will make the UK an Unreliables Energy Superpower, but all he will achieve is ruination and destitution for the people of Britain. Remember that all nations are only ever 10 meals away from civil war.
Those are the high stakes that Red Ed is playing with here, and yet Red Ed has no idea how energy generation and supply works. He thinks we can just build a couple of wind turbines, and they will provide energy 24/7.
A bit like the Albo, the Australian premiere, who said you can charge up your EV with solar power over night, ready for the morning drive to work. We are being led by brain-dead retards, and we let them indulge their absurd fantasies at our peril.
Don’t support these idiots. Don’t vote for them. Images: a. Map of Loch Ness. b. Google Street-view of Loch Ness. c. A 21-day wind drought (wind blue, solar yellow). d. Red Ed Millipede and his ukulele.
