As UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledges to go full steam ahead on Net Zero policy, the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) has admitted privately that its Net Zero recommendations to parliament were based on bad calculations about the potential of wind energy.
In comments to The Telegraph, Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of Oxford University said that the CCC has “conceded privately” that it was a “mistake” to rely on data from one single year in assessing the potential of wind energy to supply UK electricity.
Smith authored a paper, published by the Royal Society in October 2023, assessing the UK’s energy storage needs under a plan to reach net zero carbon emission by 2050. The main difference between the Royal Society study and the CCC’s is that Smith incorporated years of data while the CCC used data from one single year in calculating energy production variability and storage needs.
Based on that one year, the CCC concluded that there would be only seven days a year when wind turbines would produce less than 10% of their potential energy output, hence estimating a relatively low need for energy storage that could be met with the battery technology already in use. Smith painted a far-less optimistic picture, putting storage needs at a full one-third of energy production. To meet such storage levels would require more advanced battery systems of hydrogen and salt mine technology, his report said, and a massive effort by the government that needed to get underway immediately.
“Constructing the large number of hydrogen storage caverns that this report finds will be needed to complement high levels of wind and solar supply by 2050 will be challenging but appears possible,” Smith’s report states. “Construction of the large-scale hydrogen storage that will be needed should begin now.”
Smith said the committee was still claiming its conclusions don’t differ much from his calculations. To which he said, “Well , that’s not quite true.”
The CCC then told the newspaper that it had “nothing further to add.”
