What would a net-zero UK look like in 2050?
It is December 31, 2049, a crisp, windless night. In Westminster, crowds watch the hands of Big Ben approach midnight. In Loch Ness, a pumped storage scheme built precisely for when conditions are crisp and windless, provides the electricity to light its face.
In the well-insulated homes of those watching on TV, it also powers heat pumps that keep less adventurous revellers warm.
Some thought this impossible. Twenty-five years earlier, a largely forgotten former prime minister, Sir Tony Blair, claimed people were turning against climate policies. He was wrong.
Above Trafalgar Square, the fireworks begin. After the purchase of a carbon credit, a carbon sequestration fan is already locking up one fireworks display’s worth of sin.
As the bongs echo, the crowd cheers for a new year, and for a new era — an era of net zero. Against the odds, we did it. The former energy secretary of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, now 80 years old, eats a celebratory bacon sandwich — made from lab-synthesised meat, of course.
If this is our future — a future that a report from the Tony Blair Foundation this week said was looking increasingly hard to achieve — how will we get there?
Step 1: Make electricity green
Human progress has always been about energy. The agricultural revolution gave us abundant calories for powering ourselves. The Industrial Revolution gave us abundant calories for powering everything else. The electric revolution gave us a way of transmitting that abundance.
Now, in just a few years, we are trying to achieve something no less ambitious: to make all that electricity carbon-free. And we are doing so, this time, not because of economic push so much as political pull.
The scale of engineering is staggering. Every new house will have solar panels. Around Britain’s coastline, every shallow sandbank will have wind farms. Floating turbines are planned for where the sea is too deep.
Solar panels and wind farms have become a political issue, and the amount of engineering required is staggering
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Will it work? Advocates of renewable energy point, correctly, to how cheap it is. On windy or sunny days, in theory the wholesale cost of electricity could drop to zero. When sceptics ask why, even as our grid becomes greener, our bills have become the highest in the world, those advocates blame gas. The economics of the grid still mean that even if 1 per cent of the electricity is from gas, everyone is paid gas prices. All we have to do, they argue, is get off gas.
We have some way to go. There are days when the wind blows or the sun shines and most of the electrons flowing into the nation’s kettles are green. But there are cloudy days when the wind doesn’t blow, and, currently, we effectively maintain an entire shadow gas generation network ready to fill the gap.
This is where it gets more complicated. The true cost of wind is not only the cost in the instant of generation — it is also the cost to store it for when is it needed, to upgrade a more decentralised grid to get it where it is needed and to smooth the peaks and the troughs. While fluctuations in electricity price are indeed determined by the wholesale gas price, more than half of the overall price is fixed, made up of the operational costs of an increasingly complex grid.
This is a transition time. Ultimately, to endure the windless days, we need storage, and lots of it. There are plans for ten times as many batteries and treble the pumped hydro storage. We also need a reliable base load. Sir Keir Starmer wants small modular nuclear reactors across the country. In the Severn, for merely the sixth time in 40 years, a commission has recommended a tidal power plant. The moon, unlike wind, never stops. We will need ways to replicate what we have lost — the spinning wheels of the conventional plants that kept the grid running when something went wrong, the absence of which has been mooted as a cause of this week’s Iberian blackouts.
In this way, Miliband has promised to get us off the “rollercoaster” of fossil fuels by 2030. He will need to show results soon. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the chief executive of the chemical company Ineos, has said that high energy prices are killing industry — and he blames Miliband.
Advocates know that the best outcome from Britain going speedily in decarbonising electricity is to show the world it can be done. The worst is to become a cautionary tale.
Step 2: Electrify everything
Congratulations. All our electricity is green. That means we just have to deal with the other 80 per cent of the UK’s energy needs.
Imagine that transport will sort out itself. Thanks in no small part to Elon Musk, electric vehicles are cool, desirable and work, something that 25 years ago would have seemed absurd. Imagine too that our steel furnaces, perhaps under new and enlightened state ownership, can be electrified.
Electric cars are an essential part of the green future
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All that leaves, then, is to completely change the heating of almost every home in the country. In the next 25 years, we need to replumb 90 per cent of central heating systems. To make the new heat pumps work properly, we also ideally need to insulate millions of leaky Victorian homes.
The engineering is doable. The long-run economics, in theory, are plausible: heat pumps, snubbing their nose at the laws of thermodynamics, happily provide efficiencies that exceed 100 per cent. However, the task is daunting, and we will need a lot more wind farms.
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Step 3: You can’t electrify a cow
In fields across the country, there is a mooing, belching and flatulence annoyance to Miliband. About 20 per cent of global emissions come from agriculture. It gets worse. More than 10 per cent come from construction, much from the chemical reactions in the concrete for all those nice renewable schemes.
Building things and eating things is unavoidable so we need a lot of new technology: feeds that make cows less windy, chemistry that makes cement soak up carbon, rather than release it.
Step 4: Green energy needs to take flight
The problem with hydrocarbons is that they are amazing. A kilogram of petrol holds 100 times the energy of a kilogram of lithium ion battery. Even better, after using a kilogram of fuel you are a kilogram lighter. A kilogram of used battery, alas, stays with you. This is why we will never fly transatlantic on a battery.
What’s the solution? The government wants 10 per cent of all aviation fuel by 2030 to be “sustainable”, derived from converted waste, perhaps, or made by algae. One scheme looks at liquifying bin bags. You’ve heard of net zero, try jet zero.
Step 5: Carbon capture
Cows will always burp. Some chemical processes will always make CO₂. Sustainable aviation fuel will be hard to make economical. This is where the “net” bit of net zero comes in. Some emissions are unavoidable so we need to suck them back out again.
We already have ways, albeit not always economical ones. In Iceland, there is a company that uses geothermal power to pull carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into stone underground. Near Oxford, trials in “enhanced weathering” use rock dust to both fertilise fields and soak up carbon. In Liverpool Bay, there is a project to remove the gas directly from the chimneys of industry.
Other schemes are looking at a more traditional approach to decarbonising the atmosphere: trees. None are yet close to the scale we need.
Will it happen?
Like electricity pylons stretching towards the horizon, our path is narrow. Like the wind on a low-pressure day in winter, it is uncertain.
Maybe we will get lucky. Maybe next year a commercial nuclear fusion company will announce that humanity — and its investors — has a panacea. Maybe we will get unlucky. Maybe the demands of artificial intelligence data centres will make our future energy projections look laughable. Maybe we will get the storage and wind turbines synchronised so that it will indeed prove not only achievable but cheap.
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The UK Climate Change Committee estimates that getting to net zero by 2050 would cost us £4 billion to £5 billion a year. There are, though, many unknowns, and many who would dispute that. Blair this week cited concerns that “industries in many developed economies face rising costs and are losing competitive ground to countries like China”.
However, in a purely engineering sense, with what we know now, the path is difficult, but doable. We have already seen how fast the economics can change. A kilowatt hour of battery storage today costs a 20th of what it did in 2000. So too does the kilowatt hour of solar to charge it.
And in a political sense? This is a collective action problem, and if the collective isn’t acting then Britain on its own is useless. Last year, Blair pointed out, Chinese emissions rose by more than the total emissions of the UK. However, last year China also added more renewables than Britain’s total electricity output.
China too has pledged to go net zero, by 2060. It has also pledged to peak by 2030. That is the first test. If that doesn’t happen, maybe the fragile consensus will fall apart. If it does, then, with a fair wind, in more senses than one, the UK and humanity might just do it. But Miliband probably isn’t getting a statue.