I took a course in my undergrad in physics on energy systems. It was basically a holistic look at the UKs primary energy sources, the grid, future sources of energy and some policy.
We briefly covered the elimination of coal. A graph showed a huge void in domestic energy at coal-plant closures, with other domestic sources planned in the future (renewables) to fill the void. These renewables sources have been much slower to come online and have been under resourced. The issue is now that we are enormous net-importers of energy, some of our demand is likely fulfilled by foreign coal burning. So none of this reporting is really that honest about how horrific it is to be a net energy importer, it would be another thing if we were at greater than 100% domestic energy generation and that these can now be taken offline (which many will take as the implication.)
OK, so that was the brief period when half the French nuclear reactor fleet had to be taken offline at the same time for crack inspections, but the other half of that - importing for 44 years - implies this is not a new situation nor a disaster. It is not "horrific" to be a net energy importer, nor is is particularly environmentally unfriendly when the French nuclear reactors are working.
The second most important link is importing energy from Norway, which is 99% (!) renewable.
The main delaying factor was the Conservative moratorium on building onshore wind in England, which I believe is ending, and the general reluctance to build new power lines to import more renewables from Scotland, Orkney etc.
Since someone complained, direct quote from article:
"So what happened?
Over the past year, French nuclear power stations had many maintenance problems which led to significant reductions in their output. In August, 57% of the country’s generation capacity was not being used. Despite a modest recovery, as of January 2023, 15 of its 56 reactors were closed for repairs. All this meant nuclear-reliant France had to import electricity from neighbouring countries.
This led to more electricity being generated in Britain than would otherwise have been the case, to satisfy the additional demand from France. So while Britain’s renewable generation was at a record level, its fossil fuel generation was also higher than in the previous year. Without the problems in France, 2022 could have been the first year that Britain’s wind, solar and hydro combined generated more electricity than its fossil fuels – a milestone that will happen anyway over the next couple of years."
One of Labour's more important policies is to repair the damage that the Tories did to the energy production system. The UK has a huge amount of potential wind energy just from off-shoring. Hopefully they'll start building onshore too and closing more of these ugly and polluting biomass plants.
Doesn't the UK have some of the highest electricity prices in the world? They're on trend to drop below the world average for energy availability per capita too according to ourworldindata.com [0] and are already behind the EU, US and China.
Horrific is in the eye of the beholder, but the UK's energy situation is unimpressive. I'd call it horrific, it looks like they've been in a state of acute crisis since around 2000.
I'm no expert in the UKs domestic energy, but at least looking at electricity mix charts it seems to me like growth of renewables after introduction (lets say 2005) from <5% to ~40% compensates the drop in electricity produced from coal (~33% to <2%) quite nicely. The huge drop in coal production starting ~2014 also doesn't seem to correspond to an increase in net electricity import, so I don't see what you're basing your claims on.
It's also news to me that the UK was ever self sufficient for energy in the last few decades. Most countries are at least roughly matching their electricity production, but almost all are huge energy importers for non-electric energy, so I don't quite see the issue (if e.g. most large oil producing countries were to suddenly stop exports, most of the world would be in huge trouble).
Why do you claim that this, which has been the reality for almost all countries over the last few decades, would be horrific?
This is what you want to look at. Really energy dependance is a complicated issue. You'd have to be living under a rock to not see how this dependance has rocked Europe (particularly
Germany) since the Ukraine war. Energy price instability is an enormous social problem.
I'm no expert either but I do know that we have been importing significant amounts of energy from France for quite some time. This suggests to me that France has a huge surplus rather than just matching their own need.
"""
Demand for electricity in 2023 was 29.6 GW on average (259 TWh over the year), supplied through 235 TWh of UK-based generation and 24 TWh of energy imports.[4]
"""
Hopefully this is paired with reduced coal burning in the places Britain relies on for power, and improvements in efficiency. The wastefulness of British houses is something to behold...
Of course, there's also the energy used to build things that Britain imports that used to be made domestically, not accounted for here.
"""
Although historically relatively self-sufficient in covering domestic energy demand, the United Kingdom’s dependency on imports has increased in the past few decades. With oil and gas fields on the continental shelf depleting and the government phasing out coal, the country has grown increasingly reliant on supplies from other countries. Energy dependency reached its peak in 2013, at nearly 48 percent. Thanks in large part to growing capacity additions of wind power and a decline in primary energy consumption, the dependency rate had fallen to some 35 percent since. This is notably lower than the European Union average.
"""
> The wastefulness of British houses is something to behold...
I'm reminded of how there was an "Insulate Britain" campaign group, using unpopular disruptive tactics; the outcome of that was the law changed and they got jailed for several years, and the British public could go back to not thinking about insulation again.
> some of our demand is likely fulfilled by foreign coal burning
Actually very little. Most is French nuclear power. The electricity that the UK imports has a lower carbon footprint than the UK's domestic electricity.
Does this mean the UK is basically completely reliant on import of power for a base load or does the nuclear reactors and whatever hydro there is cover the need to offset the intermittency of renewables?
> These renewables sources have been much slower to come online and have been under resourced.
It's far worse, then have been over-resourced using green taxes on fossil fuels and are still not coming to fruition. When they lose their green tax subsidies, the cost of renewable energy will sky-rocket.
> The issue is now that we are enormous net-importers of energy, some of our demand is likely fulfilled by foreign coal burning.
When the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, we have no other way to magic up energy. The thing that made the most sense was nuclear, but the UK also failed to invest in that too.
I think the UK is quickly heading towards energy insecurity, rolling black outs and high-priced foreign energy. This winter for example is already set to be overly expensive.
"Power" technically means more than mere electricity (or electric power). In the UK, the modern steam engine can trace its origins back to either 1764 or 1712 (depending on how you count). Even in the one in 1712 served to help lift coal out of a mine, a form of reliance. But even if we limit ourselves to steam trains and regular service, the Liverpool-Manchester railway from 1830 is also a form of reliance. In any case, Britain has been reliant on coal-fired power (in the broadest sense) for a lot longer than 140 years. And in the narrower sense, it took decades for electricity to be a bare necessity.
>The UK’s dependence on imported energy looks set to continue to increase in the future. This, alongside higher fuel prices and increased concern over the security of energy supply has increased the attention on energy imports and exports over the past decade.
I get the achievement here. But it sounds like a very significant net negative for the UK.
It’s not all bad. UK has a lot of onshore wind energy potential that was banned from development to placate the shires. That ban is no more.
UK is also a good place for nuclear power with an almost complete absence of risk factors, though with the price of renewables it’s too late to exploit it to the level France has done.
It's a crying shame that we didn't build out nuclear in the 1980s as we would have been in an excellent position had we done that. Instead we have the Chinese taking 30 years to build our new reactor.
I listen to a few podcasts on clean energy. Two of them are by Brits (Michael Liebreich's Cleaning up and Robert LLewellyn's Fully Charged podcast). So, the UK's energy market gets discussed a lot.
It's pretty interesting. Like many energy markets, the key challenges are actually legislation and policy related. The new government just removed a ban on new on-shore wind turbines. Which given that they are so cheap now is a sensible thing to do. The ban was madness to begin with of course. Offshore wind is of course also huge. And the UK has a lot of former offshore oil industry that is now adapting to doing offshore wind (a lot of overlap in tools and skills).
And while they are shutting down coal, they still have a huge former coal plant that is now burning biomass in London. That's a single plant that powers most of London.
Basically the way that works is that the Canadians and the British both subsidize this "green" and not so renewable power. The Canadians basically chop down what little proper ancient forests they still have on the west coast, which from an ecological point of view is criminally insane. The wood then gets shipped half way across the planet to the UK where it is burned. Shipping it of course involves burning a large amounts of nasty bunker fuel. There's nothing cheap, sustainable, clean, renewable, or green about this business. It's only economical because of the subsidies. And those subsidies exist because of fossil fuel industry lobbying and very willing politicians. That would be the same jerks that banned on shore wind in the UK.
Another key policy challenge in the UK is that energy prices are the same throughout the UK. Most of the cheap wind power is up north. Much of the demand is in the south. So they are firing up gas plants in the south at the same time they actually have a surplus in Scotland. And then prices in Scotland are high because the gas they use in the south is expensive. Even when they have more wind power than they can use and they rarely have a need for any gas power in Scotland. They are a net energy exporter most days of the year. And they are connected to the Norwegian grid which enables them to import hydro power from there.
Part of the solution is cables but installing those is expensive and challenging because it involves a lot of haggling with local councils and planning commissions. But the real solution is actually changing how this market works. This kind of change is much more challenging. Why move the power south when you can move the demand north? Variable pricing would cause that to happen.
Prices are also high in Scotland due to sparse population, the standing charge is higher.
A lot of the renewables up in Scotland also give incentives to the local population as a sweetener for the planning application, typically £5000 per annum per megawatt of installed capacity. This isn't really reflected in what people pay for energy, but it is a benefit of the energy transition for people living nearby.
>And while they are shutting down coal, they still have a huge former coal plant that is now burning biomass in London. That's a single plant that powers most of London.
Do you mean Drax? That's nowhere near London.
>And those subsidies exist because of fossil fuel industry lobbying and very willing politicians
Why would the fossil fuel industry lobby in favour of wood-chip biomass?
You've commented this several times, but it's actually quite misleading despite being technically accurate.
Yes, there hasn't technically been a universal ban since a few years ago, but until this year legislation basically allowed NIMBY's to veto any new onshore wind farms with no way for local authorities to force approval through, which is why less than ten new onshore wind projects were approved England in 2021-23 compared to hundreds in Scotland.
So sure, not officially a ban but it was effectively a ban.
Readit News
We briefly covered the elimination of coal. A graph showed a huge void in domestic energy at coal-plant closures, with other domestic sources planned in the future (renewables) to fill the void. These renewables sources have been much slower to come online and have been under resourced. The issue is now that we are enormous net-importers of energy, some of our demand is likely fulfilled by foreign coal burning. So none of this reporting is really that honest about how horrific it is to be a net energy importer, it would be another thing if we were at greater than 100% domestic energy generation and that these can now be taken offline (which many will take as the implication.)
OK, so that was the brief period when half the French nuclear reactor fleet had to be taken offline at the same time for crack inspections, but the other half of that - importing for 44 years - implies this is not a new situation nor a disaster. It is not "horrific" to be a net energy importer, nor is is particularly environmentally unfriendly when the French nuclear reactors are working.
The second most important link is importing energy from Norway, which is 99% (!) renewable.
The main delaying factor was the Conservative moratorium on building onshore wind in England, which I believe is ending, and the general reluctance to build new power lines to import more renewables from Scotland, Orkney etc.
Since someone complained, direct quote from article:
"So what happened?
Over the past year, French nuclear power stations had many maintenance problems which led to significant reductions in their output. In August, 57% of the country’s generation capacity was not being used. Despite a modest recovery, as of January 2023, 15 of its 56 reactors were closed for repairs. All this meant nuclear-reliant France had to import electricity from neighbouring countries.
This led to more electricity being generated in Britain than would otherwise have been the case, to satisfy the additional demand from France. So while Britain’s renewable generation was at a record level, its fossil fuel generation was also higher than in the previous year. Without the problems in France, 2022 could have been the first year that Britain’s wind, solar and hydro combined generated more electricity than its fossil fuels – a milestone that will happen anyway over the next couple of years."
Horrific is in the eye of the beholder, but the UK's energy situation is unimpressive. I'd call it horrific, it looks like they've been in a state of acute crisis since around 2000.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&facet=...
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It's also news to me that the UK was ever self sufficient for energy in the last few decades. Most countries are at least roughly matching their electricity production, but almost all are huge energy importers for non-electric energy, so I don't quite see the issue (if e.g. most large oil producing countries were to suddenly stop exports, most of the world would be in huge trouble).
Why do you claim that this, which has been the reality for almost all countries over the last few decades, would be horrific?
This is what you want to look at. Really energy dependance is a complicated issue. You'd have to be living under a rock to not see how this dependance has rocked Europe (particularly Germany) since the Ukraine war. Energy price instability is an enormous social problem.
""" Demand for electricity in 2023 was 29.6 GW on average (259 TWh over the year), supplied through 235 TWh of UK-based generation and 24 TWh of energy imports.[4] """
Hopefully this is paired with reduced coal burning in the places Britain relies on for power, and improvements in efficiency. The wastefulness of British houses is something to behold...
Of course, there's also the energy used to build things that Britain imports that used to be made domestically, not accounted for here.
Britain seems to be doing reasonably well w.r.t. energy imports though - https://www.statista.com/statistics/550304/electricity-impor...
From https://www.statista.com/topics/4938/energy-imports-in-the-u...
""" Although historically relatively self-sufficient in covering domestic energy demand, the United Kingdom’s dependency on imports has increased in the past few decades. With oil and gas fields on the continental shelf depleting and the government phasing out coal, the country has grown increasingly reliant on supplies from other countries. Energy dependency reached its peak in 2013, at nearly 48 percent. Thanks in large part to growing capacity additions of wind power and a decline in primary energy consumption, the dependency rate had fallen to some 35 percent since. This is notably lower than the European Union average. """
I'm reminded of how there was an "Insulate Britain" campaign group, using unpopular disruptive tactics; the outcome of that was the law changed and they got jailed for several years, and the British public could go back to not thinking about insulation again.
Actually very little. Most is French nuclear power. The electricity that the UK imports has a lower carbon footprint than the UK's domestic electricity.
It's far worse, then have been over-resourced using green taxes on fossil fuels and are still not coming to fruition. When they lose their green tax subsidies, the cost of renewable energy will sky-rocket.
> The issue is now that we are enormous net-importers of energy, some of our demand is likely fulfilled by foreign coal burning.
When the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, we have no other way to magic up energy. The thing that made the most sense was nuclear, but the UK also failed to invest in that too.
I think the UK is quickly heading towards energy insecurity, rolling black outs and high-priced foreign energy. This winter for example is already set to be overly expensive.
>The UK’s dependence on imported energy looks set to continue to increase in the future. This, alongside higher fuel prices and increased concern over the security of energy supply has increased the attention on energy imports and exports over the past decade.
I get the achievement here. But it sounds like a very significant net negative for the UK.
UK is also a good place for nuclear power with an almost complete absence of risk factors, though with the price of renewables it’s too late to exploit it to the level France has done.
there hasn't been a ban since 2021:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/biggest-ever-renewable-en...
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_King...
It's pretty interesting. Like many energy markets, the key challenges are actually legislation and policy related. The new government just removed a ban on new on-shore wind turbines. Which given that they are so cheap now is a sensible thing to do. The ban was madness to begin with of course. Offshore wind is of course also huge. And the UK has a lot of former offshore oil industry that is now adapting to doing offshore wind (a lot of overlap in tools and skills).
And while they are shutting down coal, they still have a huge former coal plant that is now burning biomass in London. That's a single plant that powers most of London.
Basically the way that works is that the Canadians and the British both subsidize this "green" and not so renewable power. The Canadians basically chop down what little proper ancient forests they still have on the west coast, which from an ecological point of view is criminally insane. The wood then gets shipped half way across the planet to the UK where it is burned. Shipping it of course involves burning a large amounts of nasty bunker fuel. There's nothing cheap, sustainable, clean, renewable, or green about this business. It's only economical because of the subsidies. And those subsidies exist because of fossil fuel industry lobbying and very willing politicians. That would be the same jerks that banned on shore wind in the UK.
Another key policy challenge in the UK is that energy prices are the same throughout the UK. Most of the cheap wind power is up north. Much of the demand is in the south. So they are firing up gas plants in the south at the same time they actually have a surplus in Scotland. And then prices in Scotland are high because the gas they use in the south is expensive. Even when they have more wind power than they can use and they rarely have a need for any gas power in Scotland. They are a net energy exporter most days of the year. And they are connected to the Norwegian grid which enables them to import hydro power from there.
Part of the solution is cables but installing those is expensive and challenging because it involves a lot of haggling with local councils and planning commissions. But the real solution is actually changing how this market works. This kind of change is much more challenging. Why move the power south when you can move the demand north? Variable pricing would cause that to happen.
A lot of the renewables up in Scotland also give incentives to the local population as a sweetener for the planning application, typically £5000 per annum per megawatt of installed capacity. This isn't really reflected in what people pay for energy, but it is a benefit of the energy transition for people living nearby.
Do you mean Drax? That's nowhere near London.
>And those subsidies exist because of fossil fuel industry lobbying and very willing politicians
Why would the fossil fuel industry lobby in favour of wood-chip biomass?
there hasn't been a ban on onshore wind since 2021:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/biggest-ever-renewable-en...
Yes, there hasn't technically been a universal ban since a few years ago, but until this year legislation basically allowed NIMBY's to veto any new onshore wind farms with no way for local authorities to force approval through, which is why less than ten new onshore wind projects were approved England in 2021-23 compared to hundreds in Scotland.
So sure, not officially a ban but it was effectively a ban.
And that's what the new government have fixed: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policy-statement-...