2050: The never-ending nightmare of Net Zero

Classifying this as humour may not be appropriate, but we live in hope.
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IT IS the year 2050 and Britain, relentlessly driven by the governing Labour-Green coalition, has achieved Net Zero, imagines David Wright @ TCW (The Conservative Woman).

The nation is quite unrecognisable from the comfortable, well-fed country it was in the early part of the 21st century.

Massive wind turbines cover the landscape; the old ones built 25 years ago now knocked down and lying next to the new ones because it was uneconomic to remove them.

The whole country is covered in a dense spider’s web of power lines from the multitude of wind and solar farms miles from where the power is needed.

Offshore wind farms died ten years ago: it became impossible to maintain them because all the workboats were rusting in port with no fuel. Thousands of acres of formerly productive agricultural land are now solar farms with nothing but weeds growing beneath the panels.

Other forms of so-called zero carbon energy production failed to take off or were abandoned years ago. Drax power station’s last two biofuel units (which produced more CO2 than the coal-fired units, but were laughably classed as carbon neutral by the eco-zealots on the grounds that new trees would grow to replace the wood pellet fuel) were shut down when the United States government, led by President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, stopped cargo ships from using fossil fuels.

Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C nuclear power stations came onstream just in time as the last of Britain’s previous generation nuclear plants reached the end of their lives. Small modular reactors (SMRs) pioneered by Rolls-Royce and GE Hitachi were subject to endless bickering over cost in Parliament and only six were built.

Green hydrogen was long considered the answer to fuelling transport but a pilot project in Hull consumed so much renewable electricity to make such a small quantity that diverting the power from households and what was left of businesses could not be justified. This, coupled with the astronomical cost of compressing it, storing it, fitting high pressure tanks to vehicles and changing natural gas pipelines because hydrogen was more corrosive, resulted in the trial being ended after 18 months.

Eight giant so-called grid scale battery farms were built in the previous 20 years. They were effective at stabilising the grid but when used to supply power during winter wind droughts went flat after a few minutes and then took weeks to trickle charge using the small amount of power that could be spared from users.

So the nation is suffering strict rationing of small amounts of intermittent electricity from renewables. The £200billion HS2 white elephant stopped operating two years after its 2039 inauguration (ten years behind schedule) when not enough electricity was available to run it. The operator tried a two-carriage version run by solar panels on its roofs but it slowed to a crawl when clouds came over or it went into a tunnel.

Cars, for those who can afford them, can undertake only short journeys because although plenty of charging points are available and all the different connections were eventually standardised there is insufficient spare electricity at most times when people need to charge.

Full article here.