Ed Miliband, along with those who support his ambition to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030, has long had a favourite argument with which to try to put down people who say it can’t be done: why, if it is going to be so difficult to achieve, is the National Grid ESO – the company which manages the electricity network – not more worried? It is true the company has not been protesting openly about government policy, yet it transpires that in private it is another story. ESO executives, the Telegraph reports this morning, have warned that the South East could be facing blackouts by 2028 as a result of the switch towards intermittent and less predictable wind and solar.
Besides the intermittency issue, one problem is that a lot of the wind capacity being added to the grid is in the North Sea or the Scottish Highlands, a long way from where the demand for power is greatest. We have a grid which was designed around a cluster of large power stations in South Yorkshire and the East Midlands, which is going to need serious reconfiguration if it is to cope with a greater share of renewables. While ESO does have plans to invest in this work – hence Miliband’s efforts to head off protests against new pylons across East Anglia, which are opposed even by Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay – the work is lagging well behind where it needs to be.
Some wind farm developers have been told it will take years to connect their wind farms, while consumers are paying many millions in ‘constraint payments’ to wind farm owners to turn off their turbines at times when the grid cannot accept the energy they are able to produce. ESO has predicted that the bill for constraint payments could reach £2.5 billion by the middle of this decade as construction of wind and solar farms runs ahead of development of the grid.
ESO is reported to be looking into breaking the electricity market into zones, so that generators would be paid more for supplying power to the South East at times when electricity was scarce there. That is not likely to go down well with consumers. Moreover, it is likely to mean that Britain will end up importing even more power from the near-Continent via subsea cables. It is a little-reported consequence of the drive for renewables that we are importing even more of our power – around 10 per cent of our electricity is now imported, with the quantity doubling last year. Importing electricity may help Britain reach its net zero targets – as they only include territorial emissions – but it is hardly helping the planet. Belgium and the Netherlands still have significant amounts of electricity generated by coal.
ESO has this morning denied reports that the South East could face blackouts by 2028. That its public utterances are at odds with what its executives are saying in private is perhaps the most worrying aspect. It shows we are not having an open and honest debate about Miliband’s decarbonisation plan, nor about net zero targets in general.