Letter to the UK Secretary of State (Secretary of State for the Economic system, Vitality and Clear Development) – What’s up with this?

Dear Mr. Kwarteng,

As one of your constituents, I wrote to you in June 2019 asking for an analysis of how on earth we could become a carbon free society by 2050, or whenever, given the monumental impossibility of building enough wind turbines to accomplish this task. I have to say that I was not at all impressed by the quality of your response in creating a clear and accessible route map.

I should tell you that while I’m half tired now, I spent a career in the oil industry as a geoscientist – geology and geophysics and ended up being an international manager and co-founder and co-owner of a small oil company that has achieved the modest success in mining Gas and oil from Turkey at the rate of 1000 barrels of oil equivalent per day and employing 40 people. I am therefore very familiar with the source of energy and economic efficiency.

As a scientist, I remain convinced that the modest rise in global mean temperature observed in recent times is either unprecedented, dangerous, or even man-made and, despite my analytical research, there are still no observational results that would convince me of this.

This is not a fashionable view. They may be different and we may have a civilized discussion on the subject. However, this is not what I want to talk about today. I’m not a big protagonist of a fossil fuel future and would welcome an alternative that could take advantage of our abundant fossil fuels.

What worries me seriously is that our current attempts at decarbonization through unreliable renewable energies have no chance of replacing our current energy budget and inevitably lead to the total economic ruin of our nation

I note that you are now Minister of State (Minister for Economic Affairs, Energy and Clean Growth).

And in this capacity I have to draw your attention to the following.

I’ve pretty much worked out the UK’s current entire energy budget in a table, with answers on how we can go carbon free by 2050. This table can be found at the following Dropbox address.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/fv5qjhnjk3z2865yjz9ng/2021_01_06_AG_UK-energy.xlsx?dl=0&rlkey=bklgq9of6et8b2nuj3gqwdn6e

I urge you to download this and pass it on to your officials.

I have also created some appendix tables from this table that summarize some of my conclusions.

The following facts come from this table

1. In the UK we use 1295 TWhr (terawatt hours) of effective energy annually (total input energy of each type multiplied by the efficiency factor). This is the total energy budget in all areas of our society. Of this

158 TWhr (12%) come from renewable energies such as nuclear power, wind, sun, biomass and hydropower. The remainder of 1137 TWh (88%) comes from fossil fuels

78 TWHr of renewable energy currently comes from wind and sun (approx. 6% of our total energy demand)

• Let’s say we are replacing all of our fossil fuels with wind power. We need to build at least 32,000 Leviathan wind turbines with 10 MW nameplate that are believed to be offshore and wind is not blowing.

• Assuming we want to be there by 2050, from today we have to commission 3 Leviathans per day. This does not take into account the fact that the lifespan of these units is 20 years and we would have to double up to 6 units per day from 2040 to 2050.

It is planned to build an offshore wind farm with 4.5 GW by 2025. This equates to a total of 500 units and an installation rate of just 0.27 per day. That’s roughly 10% of the required deployment rate, so we’re off to a great start!

In addition, the annual energy these turbines provide when designed or built is roughly 7% of our current oil-fired energy

• We need 150 TWhr to power all of our cars. This is roughly 12% of our total energy budget. It is also roughly 100% of all renewable energy currently produced by wind-solar nuclear biomass and hydropower.

• Assuming all vehicle charging was done at one of our 8,000 current gas stations, we would need 115,000 chargers working around the clock. Therefore, each station requires 14 charging units that work with a total power requirement per filling station with 6 MW or around 1.5 dedicated turbines per charging station. Assuming 50% of all charges were done at home, we could cut that number in half, but would have to spend hundreds of billions on powering the grid
• When I fill up my car with diesel, the energy flow corresponds to the exclusive power of 4 wind turbines for 2.5 minutes. I suppose this means that diesel is a pretty inefficient way to power a car. Electric motors are more efficient, but the difficulty is getting the electricity from the wind turbine into the battery.

• Electric bikes are great and it would take the power of only 2000 wind turbines to keep all motorists in the UK moving with electric bikes 24/7. That’s the equivalent of 200 wind turbines so that we can run every 2 hours a day. It can be done.

It is evident that in the UK it is completely impossible to keep 40 million cars on the road using renewable electricity without the ability to supply enough lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements to do the job. That’s why it won’t happen.

I suppose the question that should be addressed is, “If you are going about your day-to-day business, is it really necessary to bring a ton of metal on wheels?” Most of our daily business could probably be done if we traded ownership of cars for ownership of bicycles. However, if this is the game plan of our political masters, we, the masses, should at least know. You also get the feeling that the gold-plated elite would still like their Teslas, tax-free of course because they’re green, you don’t know, and the carefree crowds would still pay to keep the roads up and running.

I look forward to a full answer to these questions and I am confident that this will happen quickly with your new army of dedicated officials.

I also expect one of these officials to point out flaws or logical flaws in my chart – if you can distract at least one of them from the undoubtedly more exciting task of counting Carrie’s gasping unicorns and would welcome such interaction.

I would also be happy to present my results to a Conservative Party constituency meeting if you wish to convene one – hopefully a real and not a Zoom issue.

In the face of a Corbyn threat, I actually voted for you in December 2019. This is a vote I now deeply regret as Boris and Carrie are well on their way to assisting Corbyning Corbyn in any awake government nonsense proposed by Jeremy.

I now realize that your party has allowed your voters to live in the north by banning coal mines from opening in Northumberland and Cumberland and instead importing the same amount of coal that those mines would have produced. Pointless signs of virtue that actually increase global CO2 emissions as the coal is now being imported – from our good friends in Russia. Mr Putin is said to be delighted, but he’s such a nice man.

Likewise, the inevitable demise of our energy-intensive industries as part of your decarbonization programs will plunge these voters further into unemployment. Your work is of course done more CO2-intensively elsewhere, so not much is done for the planet.

Our government has a plan to replace methane in household gas appliances. My God, your government has absolutely no idea that the only viable source of hydrogen is steam reforming methane – 75% efficiency if you are lucky. You may be able to convince me this is other than bullshit nonsense, but I doubt it.

Your,

Alastair Gray

[Here is a second location for the spreadsheet~cr]

Like this:

To like Loading…

connected