What Governments Got Wrong About The Global Energy Transition

The energy crisis in Europe exposed the complexity of a transition to green energy: it is not happening overnight, and it cannot be done successfully with the old tricks. Energy systems, markets, and grids globally need fundamental changes to legislation, regulation, and oversight in order to accommodate 100-percent zero-emission sources. And even in that case, power systems need flexibility and backups in order to avert similar crises down the road as many parts of the world commit to net-zero emissions by 2050 or 2060.

The current crisis in the UK is a cautionary tale about how not to rush to green energy, Rochelle Toplensky of The Wall Street Journal notes.

Net-zero electricity systems need an entirely new set of rules in all areas of the energy systems and power markets, as well as enough flexibility to offset environmental factors such as low wind speeds, which happened in the UK last month.

But its power systems are not yet as resilient to a major transition to low-carbon energy sources as to prevent concerns about its power supply, the Journal’s Toplensky argues.

The current energy crisis in the UK, the rest of Europe, and in major energy importers in Asia is a warning to policymakers that the transition cannot be rushed before new rules are set in place and backup battery storage is built en masse to support soaring new solar and wind capacity.

Boosting power grid resilience, building battery storage, and widespread use of the much-touted green hydrogen will require trillions of U.S. dollars of investment, government support, and much greater coordination and cooperation among industry and policymakers at the national and international level.

Everyone knew that the energy transition would not be cheap. The ongoing energy crisis shows that no one can put the cart before the horse in the transition – backups and flexibility are vital for any successful energy system.

Even the UK, which has pledged to phase out coal-fired power generation by October 2024, had to fire up an old coal plant last month in order to meet its electricity demand.

The country which kick-started the Industrial Revolution with coal saw the share of the fuel drop to a record-low in 2020 – coal generated just 1.8 percent of electricity, down from 28.2 percent in 2010, as per government data. Renewable generation, on the other hand, hit a record 43.1 percent in 2020, outpacing annual fossil fuel generation for the first time.

During many days in recent years, wind power generated the largest share of Britain’s electricity, surpassing natural gas. This is a commendable move toward clean energy but does not change the fact that wind power generation depends on…the speed of the wind. On those unfortunate days when the wind doesn’t blow, as it happened on most days in September, natural gas is used more in power generation, driving up gas and power prices and also increasing coal generation because of the sky-high prices of natural gas.

Although households face higher energy bills, they are protected to some extent because of the so-called Energy Price Cap in the UK. But it is this price cap – when power providers are unable to pass the full extent of surging costs onto consumers – that has already led to nine UK providers going out of business. Just last week, three suppliers said they were ceasing trade, and the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, Ofgem, had to choose new suppliers to take over the failed businesses.

The UK likely needs new regulations on how its domestic power market operates, which should take into account the net-zero commitment and increased green energy share in electricity generation, analysts say.

The European Union is also looking at potential changes to the way wholesale electricity markets operate, European Energy Commissioner, Kadri Simson, said this week.

The two oil price crashes in the past five years, as well as the increasingly louder calls for shunning investment in fossil fuels, have led to chronic underinvestment in new supplies of oil, gas, and coal, especially in developed economies aspiring to reach net-zero by 2050.

These days, however, those developed economies are scrambling for fossil fuel supplies to ensure they will keep the lights on. The surging price of coal and natural gas is leaving many energy-intensive businesses in Europe vulnerable to the price shock because the energy transition hasn’t reached the point where anything other than gas can efficiently power fertilizer or steel production.

However, investment from the fossil fuel industry has declined in recent years. Moreover, Wall Street investors have been shunning traditional energy because of poor returns, Jeff Currie, global head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs, told Bloomberg in an interview earlier this week.

“The new economy is over-invested and the old economy is starved,” he said. “Gas, coal, oil, metals, mining – you pick – the old economy, it is severely underinvested,” Currie noted.

Since the world continues to need a lot of fossil fuels despite the green push, supply shortages and price spikes are in the cards in the future, too.

“[I]t is important to recognise that the transition is, as its derivation suggests, a process of moving from one state to another, and if it is to be successful must involve the managed decline of the existing energy system as well as its transformation towards a future state,” James Henderson and Anupama Sen of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) wrote in a paper last month.

“Policymakers have set countries on this essential road, and technology is the key to accelerating the process, but many complex questions remain to be resolved if the world is to avoid the transition becoming a disorderly mess,” they say.

What is this madness for “zero-emissions” energy production? It is a chimera that can never be captured or tamed in any way, shape, form, or manner.

All forms of conversion of potential energy into a useful form that can be harnessed by clever engineers and handled by capable entrepreneurs are going to have some side issues that to a greater or lesser degree, negatively impact the immediate surrounding environment.

The extraction of whale oil, for instance, is remarkable for its extreme pressure put on the population of whales, as each whale can be harvested for its oil just once, and whales do not reproduce that rapidly.

So the conversion to the burning of mineral oil, such as kerosene, for purposes of lighting, was hailed as a great breakthrough. Whale populations are slowly recovering.

But kerosene smokes, and is messy to handle, and produces carbon monoxide, an odorless but highly toxic gas, if used in closed spaces. In fact, this disadvantage applies to most forms of liquid fuel extracted from petroleum.

Enter the age of conversion of heat energy to electric energy, by the wisdom of such visionaries as Tesla and Edison, by burning these fuels extracted from petroleum, and the refinement of various designs of engines that operate on the conversion of heat, as in the burning of these petroleum fuels, into reciprocating or rotary energy which be used to spin electrical generators, and you have a power plant.

Again because the petroleum products do not always completely combust, if burned in the mixture of atmospheric gas made up of some 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a number of minor constituents like argon, methane, water vapor, and a VERY SMALL quantity of carbon dioxide, about 400 parts per million, almost starvation level for plant life.

Side reactions to the burning of hydrocarbon fuels include the formation of particulate carbon, various oxides of nitrogen, and the aforementioned carbon monoxide. The main products of combustion are carbon dioxide and water vapor, which are normal constituents of the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide in low concentrations is NOT toxic to animal life, and is essential for plants to form carbohydrate material and free oxygen, an element that is actually highly corrosive and the second most active element in the universe, only exceeded by fluorine gas. Neither oxygen nor fluorine normally exist in a free state, each of these elements are bound up in some way with other compounds.

As hydrocarbons become smaller and less complex, the tendency for these compounds to burn with fewer and fewer side reactions, until you get down to the simplest one of all, methane, which has a single carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. When burned in the presence of oxygen, two molecules of water and one molecule of carbon dioxide are formed, with virtually none of the side reactions of more complex hydrocarbons. This makes methane, the major constituent of natural gas, the ideal fuel for burning to generate heat energy, used in turn to generate electricity.

Chances are, we are probably going to be using natural-gas powered electrical generation plants until well into the 22nd or 23rd centuries. Wind and solar power “renewable” sources are much too unreliable, are expensive to build, and have what is now a relatively limited life span, with power production highly variable, down to sometimes nothing at all for output. Use of flowing water to drive a turbine wheel is much more efficient, relatively low-cost, and has an acknowledged relatively long life span, but it is not very flexible in terms of placement.

We come at last to nuclear power to generate heat to drive the power generation plants, and it first of all, has many advantages. Relatively little fuel lasts a LONG time, it can be run at full output 24/7/365 until the system needs to be shut down for periodic servicing (mostly replacement of “spent” uranium fuel rods, which still contain a considerable amount of unused energy), and the fuel rods, still generating heat energy, have to be stored in some sort of facility where the excessive heat can be dispersed, and the radioactivity can slowly decrease, several thousands of years.

So a further development is the thorium-fueled molten salt reactor, which is a great deal more easily scaled up or down than the uranium-fueled light water plants now used for most nuclear power generation plants. Not only that, they are safe enough to be placed in close proximity with concentrated population centers, where the bulk of the power generated will be consumed. One of its greatest advantages, is that this process must have a small quantity of the “spent” uranium fuel to initiate the fission reaction in the thorium fuel, and so will eventually use up the huge quantity of the material in the “spent” uranium fuel rods.

“In 1972 and 1974, strikes shut down every coal mine in Britain, and a combination of solidarity strikes by the steel and railway unions and targeted picketing of coking works, ports and industrial sites brought the country to a standstill. This led to power cuts, the introduction of a three-day working week and the downfall of the Conservative government of Edward Heath.”

“Thatcher had taken note of the way the miners had brought down her predecessor and was determined the same thing would not happen to her premiership.”

“Thatcher had secretly stockpiled supplies of both coal and coke in strategic sites around the country; her government had also entered into agreements with non-unionised haulage firms to break the pickets and carry the coal from storage facilities and coking plants to power stations and factories. This meant that, unlike in 1972 and 1974, there would be no power cuts and no forcing the government’s hand to come to the negotiating table.”

https://www.history.co.uk/article/how-thatcher-broke-the-miners-strike-but-at-what-cost

“In 1984 there were 174 deep coal mines in the UK by 1994 – the year the industry was finally privatized – there were just 15 left.”

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