The economies of the European Union have centrally planned energy delivery strategies where the amount of electricity to be generated from a particular source by a particular time is planned in minute detail by legions of civil servants and academics.
This post summarises some of the scenarios for 2030 from The UK Committee on Climate Change and discusses the consequences for the grid, companies and consumers.
Dieter Helm’s recent independent review into the UK’s Cost of Energy (big pdf) provides a stark reminder of the scale of State intervention into the electricity generation sector. Figure 1 (Helm p40) summarises the various State sponsored organisations involved.
Figure 1 17 State-sponsored organisations involved in the centralised planning and delivery of UK electricity supplies.
Helm also reminds us of the Committee on Climate Change (COCC) plan for the UK 2030 (Figure 2) which forms the basis of the analysis presented in this post.
Figure 2 The plan for the fifth carbon budget ~ 2030 (Helm p11) showing scenarios for installed generation capacities.
With four scenarios offered, and 12 months/year to analyse, this presents a total range of 48 monthly scenarios to evaluate. In this post, I have reduced this to 4 monthly scenarios looking at the High Nuclear (High N) and High Renewables (High RE) scenarios for the months of January and July.
Notably the COCC has a low electricity demand scenario simultaneous with the policy of electrifying motor vehicle transport and heating.
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