UK’s National Grid Admits It Doesn’t Have A Clue How To Reach Net Zero

Authored by David Turver via Eigen Values substack,

A few weeks ago, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and his Head of Mission Control, Chris Stark wrote a public letter to Fintan Slye of the National Grid ESO asking for practical advice on how to deliver a clean power grid by 2030.

The letter asked Slye to set out a range of pathways to enable a decarbonised power system by 2030. For each pathway they asked for the forecast energy generation and demand mix and the underlying assumptions that need to be met for these to be deliverable. They also asked for the key requirements for the transmission network and interconnectors and for a high-level assessment of the costs, benefits, opportunities, challenges and risks as well as the key actions to be taken by Government, NESO, Ofgem and industry to enable delivery of the pathways.

Recently, Fintan Slye took to X to announce his initial response. Strangely Slye’s letter is not addressed to Miliband or Stark, but takes the form of an open letter to industry.

Last week @energygovuk asked the ESO to develop advice on how to achieve a decarbonised power system by 2030. Read my open letter to learn how we’ll develop our plan, how it will interact with other energy reforms and how we’ll engage with industry 👉https://t.co/Vxo6TxI4aw

— Fintan Slye (@FintanSlye_eso) September 3, 2024

The letter starts off with warm words announcing the formation of a “cross-cutting delivery unit” that will report back to Government by the end of Autumn 2024, less than three months away. It says its plan will be:

A whole systems spatial view of what is required to deliver a clean, secure, operable electricity system by 2030. The plan will consider possible clean energy generation mixes and their associated network, market and operability requirements, referred to as pathways.

That sounds good as far as it goes.

However, the letter then goes on to say that all pathways will “meet clean power in 2030 against a definition to be agreed with U.K. Government.”

In other words, there is no agreed definition of what a zero-carbon grid by 2030 actually means. It does not know what the target is. It seems that Miliband and Labour have set the country on a journey without properly defining the destination. And the initial request from Miliband and Stark reveals they don’t know how to get there. It’s the blind leading the blind to an unknown destination.

Slye’s letter then states that ESO recognises that accelerating the decarbonisation of the electricity system presents a “significant opportunity”. To capture this opportunity, it will engage with “industry and those with wider expertise” through two stakeholder forums aimed at industry and societal delivery partners. Those societal delivery partners sound quite ominous – are they going to bring out the nudge unit to shame us all into compliance?

Even more worrying is what Slye’s letter misses out. He was asked to provide a high-level assessment of the costs, benefits, opportunities, challenges and risks of delivering a Net Zero grid by 2030. Slye’s letter makes no mention of costs, benefits or risks. He is only focused on the “opportunity”.

In other words, Fintan has slyly moved the goalposts.

The work of NESO will not inform the Government or the public about the costs and risks of delivering the as-yet undefined Net Zero grid by 2030. This is now the blind leading the blind to an unknown destination without knowing the price of the ticket. Fintan Slye is ducking his responsibility and we are going to be short-changed again.