BANNING gas boilers and installing unaffordable heat pumps is central to Net Zero plans. With a typical life of 15 to 20 years, no new gas boilers may be installed much after 2030, if all emissions of carbon dioxide are to be eliminated by 2050. (Our boiler, by the way, is 17 years old and still going strong.)
However engineers at Nottingham University have now concluded that we will not have enough electricity to power all those heat pumps with the decarbonised grid proposed. There are two separate problems:
- The intermittency of wind and solar means there will be many occasions in winter when there will not be enough power to meet current demand, never mind to cover EVs and heat pumps as well;
- The seasonality of demand for heat means that peak demand for electricity might be 70 per cent higher than now, even taking account of the efficiency of heat pumps.
Currently the latter is not a problem – we can simply turn on the gas when we need it. You cannot do the same with electricity because distribution networks would become overloaded, even if you had enough power stations. Households currently use four times as much gas in energy terms in winter than they do electricity, so the challenge of replacing gas boilers is clearly immense.
You also cannot simply turn windmills on and off to provide the power when you need it.
The Nottingham study, here, reckons we would need unbelievably large amounts of hydrogen storage, which would then be burnt in power stations to provide the flexibility needed. They talk of 175 TWh of such storage, which is a quarter of the UK’s annual natural gas consumption. For it to be emission-free, it would need to be made via electrolysis using wind power, for which we would need triple our existing wind generation.
Storage of the hydrogen in large salt caverns would be another problem. And to burn the wretched stuff to make electricity, we would need to build a whole new fleet of power stations, with more capacity than our existing gas fleet. (Some of our newer gas plants can be modified at great expense to burn hydrogen instead, but most of our fleet is far too old to adapt).
The cost of all of this would of course be astronomical. The government has already agreed contracts for bulk production of hydrogen at a price seven times that of natural gas. And that’s before you factor in storage and distribution, not to mention the cost of building power stations.
The whole thing is insane. Hydrogen is often referred to as a ‘superfuel’, something I saw again in the Telegraph this week. It is nothing of the sort. It is not even a fuel, merely an energy carrier. It needs lots of energy to produce it, much of which is wasted in the process. And there are all the inherent safety issues.
In any normal world, it would be regarded as a dead-end technology. Indeed it is now being reported that BP are likely to abandon their hydrogen producing project on Teesside, H2Teesside, because of lack of customer demand.
After all, who in their right mind would pay seven times the price?
West Nile virus blamed on – guess what?
The West Nile virus has arrived in Britain, and it’s all because of climate change, says the Standard.
For years we have been warned by climate scaremongers about all the tropical diseases heading our way, even though experts in these diseases rubbish such claims.
Like dengue and yellow fever, the West Nile virus is transmitted to humans by mosquitoes. According to the Standard, its arrival is due to climate change, with ‘experts’ saying warmer weather has made it possible for mosquitoes to spread farther north than in previous years.
But like dengue, such claims are baseless. Despite its exotic name, this virus has not made its way here from Egypt, and has nothing to do with that region at all, other than the fact that it was discovered in Uganda in 1937.
The virus is already widely established across all the 48 states in the contiguous United States and most of Europe – in other words, in places with much colder climates than here.
It can be transmitted by most mosquitoes, not just tropical ones.
Its life cycle passes from mosquitoes to birds, and back to other mosquitoes who bite the infected birds. These mosquitoes are part of the Culex genus, a very common type which thrives worldwide except for the extreme northern parts of the temperate zone.
The birds they infect are also extremely common and widespread, such as crows.
In short, the spread of the virus to Britain has nothing at all to do with global warming. Its spread worldwide since the mid-20th century has been due to urbanisation and the era of mass transportation – air travel etc – which provided the ideal mechanism to transport pathogens causing those diseases to new geographical areas.
It was inevitable sooner or later that an infected mosquito or bird would find its way across the English Channel or North Sea, probably among cargo or on a lorry.
Although the virus was discovered in 1937, it has undoubtedly existed for thousands of years. It almost certainly was endemic here in the past, alongside malaria.
And as with malaria, dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases, the solution was worked out decades ago – effective mosquito control, in particular wiping out breeding grounds, removing rubbish dumps where mosquitoes thrive, and draining swamps, along with disciplined public health practices. Sadly such remedial practices have been neglected in recent years because of complacency and apathy.
Professor Duane Gubler is one of the world’s leading experts in these diseases. It is worth reading his Journal of Travel Medicine article on the topic a few years ago, here, which discusses these issues.
