Broken Promises?
News-flow this week reveals how having a good idea is not good enough. We have to do something about it.
Labour’s £28 billion green investment pledge
This week, the UK’s Labour Party pulled the plug on a promise to spend £28 billion per annum on green investments. Asked to comment, I found that I just couldn’t wade into a wailing chorus of protest. The Guardian covered my point of view, which is that what we should be shouting about is the real problem – that the UK is losing much more money by depending on and patching up its old fashioned, expensive centralised energy system and needs to fix it urgently through decentralisation and efficiency.
I, for one, couldn’t ever get to the bottom of what the Labour money was meant to be spent on. And while it might seem a big deal, there’s a larger, ‘elephant-in-the-room’ sized deal in the shadows. Our energy system in the UK is ageing, broken and inefficient. For an island that depends on energy imports for its vital energy, economic, environmental, and national security interests, our energy policy is at sea. We need a new approach that doesn’t waste most of it.
It's important for me to explain what I mean. So, forgive a few moments of detail.
It is truly shocking but rarely discussed that the UK loses most of its energy, and that some 58% of the energy supplied for electricity is lost in conversion (mostly as waste heat), transmission and distribution. The UK government civil service (these days under the auspices of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero) publishes statistics every summer that break this down in its Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES) and its accompanying energy flow chart.
Meanwhile, for all the rightful focus on making ever more and cleaner electricity, gas remains the largest primary energy source to make it with. Meanwhile, most energy used in the UK is not, in fact, electricity. It is oil for transport. It is gas for homes. And gas again for industrial and commercial use. Electricity comes a close second place in UK industry, a distant second place in homes and despite the hopes and expectations, nearly nowhere yet in transport.
Electrifying everything is often touted as the answer. But building new electrical generation capacity and the enabling infrastructure will take several decades and tens, if not hundreds of billions to achieve in the UK, together with enormous amounts of metals, minerals, land, water, and other resources. It will require smart planning, a range of technologies to generate, store and despatch electricity round the clock, it will require grid upgrades, solutions to supply chain constraints, improved market structures, finance, public private partnerships, innovation and an increase in skills and capacity. All of this should, can and will be done in due course. But what do we do in the meantime, while most energy is being wasted?
Given that not everyone is tuned in to how much energy we waste and why, if I may, I will offer a quick guided tour of the journey from primary energy (i.e. the energy that enters the economy in its original form (such as oil, gas, coal, nuclear, renewables etc) to useful energy that allows us to do work and perform services (‘exergy’) and from which energy services result. The law of conservation of energy and the first law of thermodynamics both state that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can only change form one form to another, but I will try to explain where it goes. Even before it gets into and comes out of the ‘energy flow’ in the chart.
Before energy even gets to the point of generation, it gets lost in the extraction and conversion process. For example, around 15% of gasoline is lost in the refining process. And around 9% of methane produced is lost in leaks from wells, pipelines, and storage facilities.
Next, energy is lost in the generation process, mostly as heat, when electricity is generated from gas and nuclear plant. Thermodynamics dictates that half or more of the energy involved in the conversion process tends to be lost to heat. That’s the thick grey column right in the middle of the energy flow chart heading and plunging down as losses. Why lost rather than used? It’s hard to use it if its generated far from where it is needed. This is a fundamental problem for centralised, ‘utility scale’ power plants, where unused heat is lost to the atmosphere or space.
Then 5-10% plus of energy is lost getting it from the point of generation to the point of use, through the transmission and distribution process.
So far, this journey entails losses of 65-70%. Thanks to DUKES in the UK and United States’ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, this information is all hidden in plain sight. Whether or not politicians determine to read it or do anything about it is another matter.
But then more energy is lost at the point of use.
Commercial, industrial, and domestic buildings, together with transport infrastructure, use the substantial majority of the world’s energy, but typically waste 10-30% plus of the energy they use through sub-optimal mechanical and electrical equipment, like motors, building management systems and controls, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, refrigeration, lighting, insulation, and so on. In the transport sector, for example, internal combustion engines involve ‘well-to-wheel’ efficiencies (i.e. how much extracted oil turn the wheel of a car) of 15-30%, compared to electric vehicles that have efficiencies of 70-80% plus.
All of this adds up to a truly shocking conclusion: that about three quarters of the energy resources that are causing climate change and conflict (see my Substack ‘Pens and Swords’ and my book, ‘The Edge’) is wasted. But there are two big things that we can do about all of this.
The first is to generate decentralised energy locally, where it’s needed, to relieve pressure on the grid, to deliver higher levels of electrical and thermal efficiency than the grid, to be lower cost (given less waste) and more reliable (given the risk of outages) than the grid. And to be lower carbon than the grid, by using energy sources like renewable or recycled heat, solar and wind, and by avoiding conventional emissions from the grid. The second is to replace and upgrade the mechanical and electrical equipment to reduce demand at the point of use.
It wouldn’t entail as much investment, let alone cost as much, as you might think. Assuming £1-2 million per MW, which is reasonably conservative, a large proportion (maybe half or more) of the 50GW of electricity that the UK needs could be built quickly with well established technology – in months or years, not decades - as local energy generation, such as on-site micro grids, tri-generation, district energy, waste gas and heat recovery, roof-top and ‘private wire’ solar, wind and mini-hydro, renewable heat, and combined with electrical and thermal storage - sustainable infrastructure that would last up to 20 years. Combined with cutting demand by reducing waste at the point of use, this cleaner and more efficient infrastructure could probably be delivered for less than £50 billion in total, compared to the £28-50 billion per annum numbers being touted, no doubt with good intentions, by parties like Labour, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC).
This is why I don’t lose sleep over Labour’s £28 billion promise, because despite being effective as an eye-catching headline, it lacked clarity about what all that money was going to do, and it didn’t seem to address the biggest problems. Instead, it would be preferable to see decisive and concerted action to improve energy productivity, competitiveness, and security and rapid, cost effective, decarbonisation. The UK should do more with less, which means focussing on delivering decentralised, local energy that is cheaper, cleaner and more reliable than our ageing and expensive grid.
The UN, the EU, the USA and China are all prioritising energy efficiency and decentralised energy. This is because efficiency, doing the same or more with less, is the largest, fastest, cheapest and cleanest source of energy security and greenhouse gas emission reductions.
And rather than spending or wasting billions, there is a huge opportunity to save or make billions instead. Our greatest energy challenge in the UK, that we waste most of it, is also our greatest opportunity.
Other broken promises in the news this week …
The Paris Agreement’s 1.5C pledge
In 2015, 196 countries adopted a legally binding international treaty on climate change known as the ‘Paris Agreement’ at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Paris Agreement aimed to limit global warming to well below 2C, preferably to 1.5C, compared to pre-industrial levels. It aimed to increase countries' ability to deal with the impacts of climate change. It aimed to make finance flows consistent with a pathway towards lower greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development. And it included a mechanism to review progress on its implementation, and to increase ambition over time.
Last week, after the hottest January on record, the hottest eight-month streak on record, and the hottest year on record, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the Earth observation unit of the European Union’s space programme, announced that the 1.5C target had been breached for the first time over a 12-month period. While this doesn’t technically breach the Paris accord target, which is based on longer-term temperature increases over a decade, it’s a pretty loud alarm bell. Waiting a decade to see what happens is not an option, no more than ignoring a warning on a flight deck until after you had hit a mountain.
As I wrote in my Substack, ‘No time to waste’, the world is burning its ‘carbon budget’ fast. The carbon budget measures how much more greenhouse gas can be emitted than the Earth can absorb before the resulting temperature rises breach limits beyond which humans may have little or any influence or control over the future climate. To put some numbers on it, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) defined the remaining carbon budget to remain within a 1.5C implied temperature rise limit range at around 400 gigatonnes of Co2 equivalent (GtCO2e) at the beginning of this decade. Assuming a run rate of 40 GtCO2e, it is gone by 2030.
We have to do something about it, fast. Building renewable energy capacity will help over the medium to long term. At the same time, we need to put just as much effort into efficient and decentralised generation of energy (or what we call, ‘EDGE’). Given recent reports by the International Energy Agency, the World Economic Forum and the outcome of COP28 in the Dubai Agreement, so say all of us. Now we need to do something about it.
Putin’s pledge not to invade Ukraine
During a press conference with US President Joe Biden in December 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that ‘Russia has no plans to attack Ukraine’. As late as February 10th 2022, within a fortnight of the attack, Putin claimed that US and UK warnings about an imminent invasion were ‘hysteria’ and ‘propaganda’. When Putin attacked later that month, he framed it as a ‘special military operation’ to protect breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, rather than an invasion.
Two years later did he break his promises?
At the time of writing, Russia occupies over 15% of Ukraine’s territory. This includes a strip of land in eastern Ukraine, including parts of Kherson, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhya, and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (including the industrial area of the Donbas), heading down towards Crimea and Sevastapol, which Russia annexed in 2014. This territory comprises some of the world’s largest unexploited natural gas reserves, control over pipelines to Europe traversing Ukraine to Europe, control over Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizchzhya, huge deposits of metals and minerals (including Iron ore in Crimea, manganese, salt and lithium), export routes for grain and other commodities, and a large proportion of all of the coal deposits of the former USSR, all of which Putin would have known about from his time as a former KGB agent to the present day.
When I listened to Putin’s revisionist historiography of Russia in Tucker Carlson’s peculiar interview this week, one of the things that particularly jarred was Putin’s repeated use the phrase ‘for inexplicable reasons’. Carlson’s prologue online described Putin’s historical narrative as sincere. I would challenge whether or not Putin is in the business of doing anything for, let alone ascribing the events of the past to, ‘inexplicable reasons’.
For example, it is not inexplicable that against a background of growing tensions with NATO after waves of expansions eastwards from the 1990s, contrary to reassurances provided to Russia, that the 22nd February 2022 mothballing by Germany of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline (a joint venture between Russia’s Gazprom and a consortium of European energy companies given the go ahead by the United States in July 2021 through a waving of sanctions), designed to bypass Ukraine - and prospectively reducing transport fees to Ukraine equivalent to approximately 4% of its then GDP - was followed within two days by the attack.
Matthew Syed’s excellent article in the Sunday Times today generously cites my book, ‘The Edge’, to address the conflation offered by the Tucker Carlson interview and to de-mystify the ‘inexplicable’.
And if you would like to know why Europe’s energy policy is now described as “Energy Efficiency First”, you might look back to the 2014 annexation of Crimea to see that Europe’s energy commissioners, for the reasons I stated above, noted that every unit of natural gas we don’t use is 2.6 that we don’t need to buy from Russia.
Now that’s an energy policy that shows promise …
Picture credits: ChatGPT 4, UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero
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