Having delivered his platitudes on climate change at Cop27, Rishi Sunak returns to a more pressing problem: how to keep Britain’s lights on this winter. Last week it was revealed that the government has been wargaming a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ in which blackouts last up to a week. Whether those fears prove unfounded or not, there is a huge and growing hole in the future of Britain’s electricity supply, with little to explain how it will be filled. The lights might not go out this winter, but there is a reckoning coming as Britain attempts to steer towards net zero.
Over the past decade the National Grid has succeeded in virtually ending coal power in Britain. The proportion of our electricity generated by coal fell from 29.5 per cent in 2011 to just 2.1 per cent in 2021. Most of the coal power has been replaced by wind and solar (up from 5.2 per cent in 2011 to 24.6 per cent in 2021) and by ‘thermal renewables’ – the filthy business of burning wood pellets made from trees in North America – which is up from 3.6 per cent in 2011 to 12.9 per cent in 2021.
What the electricity industry has not managed to do is to wean us off gas. We are pretty much where we were a decade ago, with gas accounting for 39.9 per cent of generation in 2021 compared with 39.8 per cent in 2011. This matters not just because it has exposed consumers to high wholesale gas prices in recent months, but because the government’s path to net zero involves eradicating all fossil fuels and ensuring a carbon-free electricity supply by 2035.
It costs three or four times more to store a unit of electricity than it does to generate it in the first place
Indeed, the price we are paying for gas-generated electricity is even higher than it need be at present because of the way we are now using it.
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