Britain Will Be Europe’s Energy Powerhouse, Says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. No, it Won't

Solar and wind are much too intermittent to ever be profitable

Last week the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was warning Kemi Badenoch not to scrap Net Zero. According to him, why would we need fossil fuels when we had all of that wonderful green energy.

Rightly, several experts who know what they are talking about told him to go back to the drawing board!

This week he has changed tack, claiming that the UK’s “winning mix of nuclear, oil, wind and solar” would make us Europe’s energy powerhouse.

Forget about Boris’s Saudi Arabia of wind! We’re going to be the new China, apparently.

He wrote in the Telegraph:

Cast forward five to 10 years and Britain will be the only major country in Europe with a flourishing energy system across the whole technology spectrum.

The prevailing – dated – narrative of this country as the energy sick man of Europe will be turned on its head. Britain will be able to meet its core internal needs for both power and fuel from its own territorial sources, with enough joules to spare for rising energy exports to the European market.

The National Energy System Operator (NESO) says the country will become “a net exporter of electricity across the year” by 2030, rapidly reversing the current large deficit.

Britain will be the electricity backbone of north-west Europe by 2035. Its domestic power prices will converge with those of France and substantially undercut Germany, Italy or Poland.

His volte-face on North Sea oil and gas is astonishing, following years of writing it off. Needless to say though, no matter how much we extract, we will not be a net exporter.

But it is his comments about electricity exports which show that he does not have a clue how our energy system works. He talks about “joules” as if you can stuff them in a barrel and put them on the back of a lorry!

As NESO explain, the reality is much different.

Wind and solar power is not only highly intermittent, it is also uncontrollable. In other words, you cannot simply switch it on or off. There will be many days when our grid cannot supply enough electricity to meet demand and we will be forced to import from Europe. But there will also be many other days when we have far too much wind power, solar power and often both.

Currently we pay wind farms to switch off, so-called constraint payments, because there is not enough transmission capacity to move wind power from Scotland to cities in England on windy days. OFGEM are currently spending tens of billions on grid upgrades to deal with this problem.

But in future there will be a much bigger problem, which no amount of grid infrastructure will solve. Under Ed Miliband’s plans, wind and solar power capacity will be tripled by 2030, though it appears this timetable will be pushed back a year or so.

It does not take a genius to work out what will happen when it is windy.

Take today, for instance – Wednesday. As I write, solar power is generating 28% of total electricity and wind a further 49%. Triple that and you have 147% – by which stage the power grid will long ago have blacked out.

Somehow, NESO will have to find a way to either curtail all of that surplus or export it.

But the problem with exporting is that Europe will be in exactly the same boat. When it is sunny or windy here, it will very probably be the same in North West Europe. If their grids are facing overload, why on earth would they want to pay to import our electricity?

At best, we will have to give our electricity away for next to nothing.

In its projections, NESO has assumed we can earn £40 per MWh from exports, (while paying £89 per MWh to import!) But on average, we pay £167 per MWh to wind and solar farms to supply power that we do not want, under the Contracts for Difference subsidy mechanism.

In other words, we will have to export at a loss of £127 per MWh.

NESO estimates that exports will amount to 61 TWh a year by 2030, about a fifth of Britain’s electricity output. That works out at an annual loss of £8 billion. That loss will be recouped via our energy bills.

It does not get any better when we look at nuclear power. The current strike price for Hinkley Point is £130.79 per MWh, a price which is index linked for inflation every year. Ironically, we pay this to the French state owned EDF but could end up exporting its electricity back to France for £40 per MWh!

Only in AEP’s dream world does this madness make any sense.