Electrifying the world is expensive, Tony
Tony Blair and Tony Guterres want to electrify everything.
The last post here was about London Climate Week. I’ve more to say about the heatwave, but I thought I’d follow up straight away with another comment on the Blobfest.
I’ve been noticing that there has been increasing talk in blob literature about ‘electrification’ recently. It stuck out because I thought that ‘electrification’ was an agenda that was decided (in Britain) in the 1920s and completed by the early 1970s. Why would everyone suddenly be talking about it again, half a century later, as though it was a new idea?
Net Zero has always required the “electrification of everything”. But emphasis on accelerating this part of the agenda seems to be an attempt to reconciling the schisms that are opening up under its improbable weight.
For example, as has been talked about here recently, Tony Blair and his army of wonks have sent many salvos of warning shots across Ed Miliband’s bow. The Secretary of State is carrying on with his Clean Power 2030 agenda as though the climate debate is stuck in 2005, and the government’s parliamentary majority is equivalent to popular support. “Electrification” is nonetheless central to the Blairites’ proposals for rescuing Britain from its economic torpor and industrial collapse — and save the longer term Net Zero 2050 target.
“Electrification” has been decoupled from the broader green agenda, and given status as a Good Thing in its own right. It is quite possibly an easier sell than Net Zero. But as I discuss in the below article, electrification is not all that straightforward. There may be good reasons to prefer hydrocarbons to electrons as energy sources.
One of the things that concerns me is price of course. And this, like Labour governments, can only get worse. In the past, different energy sources had different applications. Coal, though retired from domestic heating by the arrival of gas in towns and heating oil, provided baseload power. Gas dominated heating and provided a means to better manage short-term differences between supply and demand in electricity generation. Uranium, too, provided baseload. Oil, in several grades of refined product, provided the fuels for aircraft, cars, larger vehicles, and ships. Anyway, though these applications weren’t strictly demarked, they created a diversity of energy supplies, which meant that heating wasn’t in competition with power generation and transport. As everything is converted to the single commodity, so there is competition between these things, and so prices can only rise.
Electricity is the most expensive form of energy in any case, precisely because it isn’t an energy source. Energy sources — whether sun or coal — must be converted into electrical power, and that process requires machines. So electrification must mean higher prices.
Electricity may turn out to be the form that all energy we use takes. But that rests on many unknowns. It’s far too soon to call electrification a Good Thing in and of itself. Conversely, the cooperation between hydrogen and carbon may turn out to be such a Good Thing that combustible fuels are never made completely obsolete, even if we produce them synthetically.
Rebranding Net Zero as “Electrification” Won’t Save It
Every now and then, the Blob cannot help but reveal itself through the agencies it has captured. At London Climate Action Week this week, UN Secretary General António Guterres proclaimed that: “The age of electrification will require a massive expansion of grids, storage and system flexibility.” The memo has gone out, instructing its recipients to use this new buzzword: electrification.
Also launching this week, Electrify Now is the initiative of the EU Commission which intends to increase global rates of electrification and close what it calls the “electrification gap”, which is holding back “clean power expansion into real-economy decarbonisation”.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) reports to Parliament this week that the “Government needs a more ambitious plan to electrify the UK”, and that its “plan for electrification lacks ambition”. And by “ambition”, the CCC means laws that force us to buy EVs and install heat pumps whether we want them or not, because “the slow pace of electrification is putting the UK’s climate targets at risk”. Oh no! Not the climate targets!
