Net Zero: How Do You Measure Success?

Okay I have a couple of questions about Net Zero. 

The First is: How Do You Measure Success? Because if we are spending Billions of pounds on trying to attain Net Zero, there should be some tangible benefit, some monitoring, some measurement that proves the success of the plan. 

Otherwise we are just throwing money away.

Without the ability to monitor the effects of our privations, there's no point. If we go net zero and global CO2 keeps climbing then there's no point.

Virtue or salving the conscience of a minority is not a good enough. We need tangible results. 

Just saying but doing X we save Y amount of carbon is not good enough. I want to see monitoring, I want to see live data showing an actual benefit. Because by doing X and reducing carbon output in one area may actually increase carbon in another area.

For instance shutting down steel production here may reduce local carbon, but overall may increase it.

For instance steel production, which has now virtually ceased in the UK. It reduces carbon output locally, but now you are relying on third-world countries producing steel using inefficient technology, creating more CO2 to produce the steel. The steel then needs to be shipped to the UK, so unless you're using sailing ships, that actually adds to the carbon footprint of that steel.

It's like electric cars. They are only zero-emissions vehicles locally. The energy used to create the electricity still creates CO2 at the power station. It's just that the CO2 isn't produced by the vehicle.

That's a con. It's not reducing CO2, it's just moving production elsewhere.

If we were measuring the actual production of CO2 regarding the things we have done to reduce local CO2, the overall CO2 output would have risen. Because we are not making goods locally, we are making them half way round the world and shipping them to the UK. 

We are not burning the fuel directly in an internal combustion engine, we are instead burning fossil fuel in a power station to heat water to create steam which turns a turbine which turns a generator which produced electricity which is fed down wires at ultra high voltages and then stepped down through several transformers to mains voltage and then through a charger into the battery of the electric vehicle. At each step there are losses because no transfer or conversion of one type of energy to another is 100% efficient.  It's therefore not the most efficient use of the fossil fuel compared to burning it directly.

The people falling for all of this are really falling for marketing. Maybe extreme marketing, but marketing all the same. It's not science, otherwise we would be doing net zero a lot differently.

And we would be monitoring the results. Scientifically.

More Bad News For Renewables.

It's the hottest period during September for a while, so I thought I'd have a look at how Solar and wind are doing. The baking heat and blue skies should be providing plenty of solar, right? 

And with this well established high pressure system over the UK, it's a good indicator of how wind would provide power, after all the wind farm fans say that the wind is always blowing somewhere in the UK, so we'll always have wind power.

Here's the Gridwatch.co.uk graph from yesterday:

The yellow solar sliver is a lot fatter than normal, but of course as we start to see longer nights we only get about 12 hours of usable daylight.  Which means we get 12 hours without solar power.

How about the Turquoise line representing the wind output? Oh dear. You can just about see it. 

That big, Fat , Orange line? That's Gas. Our primary power producer. In summer. 

That constant grey band at the bottom of the graph? That's nuclear producing I would suggest it's maximum output in order to keep reduce the gas consumption.

Renewables? For all the massive offshore wind farms, the huge fields of solar panels, they're still only producing a fraction of the power we need. 

The Liquorice Allsort bands on the top of the others are the interconnects between us and Europe. We're getting German coal-produced and French Nuclear and Norwegian Hydro electrons shipped to us providing overall a fatter line and a bigger power output than all the energy supplied by our wind farms. 

We even turn the UK coal-fired taps on at a couple of points in the day, when demand is highest. Coal. In summer. 

We need to stop this madness. We need to become adults and stop fantasising about renewables. They are not delivering even in the best conditions. Back in the winter wind rarely beat gas as the main source of energy. 

Let's all grow up, put our big boy trousers on and start to plan a realistic and pragmatic power production plan. Our reliance on gas from outside the UK needs to be reduced, as does our reliance on interconnects from Europe. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not supplying cheap energy. They only get involved when the energy price rises enough so that syphoning energy off to supply another country makes economic sense.

Can't Afford Net Zero: It's Off To The Gulag For You!

 The Government's latest Net Zero efforts encompassed by the Latest Energy legislation show where things are going. 

The Government's latest Energy Bill proposes creating a number of new criminal offences. The first, where homeowners supply false information might seem fair, but what if they can't provide accurate information?

For instance if the government require you to provide information regarding the insulation properties of your house, or anything of a technical nature? How many BTUs does it take to heat your home to a certain temperature, or to maintain a certain temperature? Yeah, I've no idea either. Any law that relies on tripping you up because you don't know the answer, or the answer could be one of several options depending on how you measure is bad law. 

Are you going to be prosecuted for going over your yearly energy allowance? 

Without clarity - and I mean Laser focussed clarity where the options are unambiguous, where the results could be open to interpretation, then it should not be law.

Where the choice between using a wood burning stove to stave off hypothermia or going to jail are options, then that's bad law.

This needs to be nipped in the bud now.

The choice should not be between heating, hypothermia or jail.