Letter: Renewable Energy Does Work

Published on: 7 Nov, 2024
Updated on: 7 Nov, 2024

From Maddie Evans

The government and the National Energy System Operator NESO are agreed that we can have Zero Carbon electricity by 2030. If we accept it is possible, should we do it?

In 2023 wind and solar provided 33 per cent of our electricity needs. Up from 8.5 per cent in 2013. Fossil fuels fell from 64 per cent to 35 per cent over the same decade. The direction of travel is clear, we are moving to renewable energy. In that time the National Grid have integrated these new resources into the system, alongside new interconnectors and all the domestic solar, without suffering any related power cuts. Power cuts in the UK are overwhelmingly due to storms damaging our power lines.

If you use the Gridwatch site, or the prettier Iamkate site, you will see that the wholesale price of electricity is below £80 per MWh, or 8p per kWh when wind is part of the mix, but whenever we use the gas back-up stations, the wholesale price of electricity spikes, this week to over £200 per MWh. So, the renewables are also helping to bring wholesale prices down.

NESO has said that getting to 100 per cent zero carbon sources (including nuclear) by 2030 is achievable. We can be sure that they mean “achievable without power cuts”, because it’s their job to keep the lights on.

Meanwhile there are current applications for approximately three times the amount of renewable capacity needed to achieve this, already waiting to be connected to the grid. So now our renewables industry is maturing we have the luxury of not building ‘everything everywhere’, and some of these proposals will never happen.

Given that renewables are already integrated into our system and bring down prices, and reduce the amount of foreign gas we must buy, what do the people campaigning to stop new renewables really want?

Do they want us to demolish all the existing capacity ‘because it doesn’t work’? Do they have an opinion on what percentage is the ‘right’ proportion of renewables or zero carbon energy? Is it 60 per cent or 90 per cent? Is it none, putting us at the mercy of overseas gas producers? How much nuclear do they want? How much storage and what sort?

Change is happening, and the renewable contribution has increased from zero to 33 per cent, and will inevitably increase further as long as the economics say it will make electricity cheaper. Yet a future zero-carbon grid doesn’t require 100 per cent wind or solar, because we have plans to still have nuclear stations and hydro.

So what is the right answer? It can’t be true that all the existing renewables are OK but all the planned ones are terrible. Make your case for what we do next from where we are today. Feel free to say you do or don’t want a particular local development, clearly there is so much change that we need to be arguing for a land strategy that is fair to everyone, but don’t say renewables don’t work, and don’t reduce wholesale prices, when the evidence they do is published every day on Gridwatch.