This week sees the first public hearing of the new Energy Security and Net Zero select committee. This was set up after the government was rearranged to create the new department of the same name, and the job of the committee is to scrutinise the work of that department. It is a fascinating area and I am delighted to be one of the members of that committee and the vice chair.
Energy is everything. Without it we have very little. Since stone age man gathered around a fire to keep warm, humans have relied on energy for everything we do. Without it, our economy will crash.
It has been front of news recently because of soaring household energy bills, driven by global gas prices rising from the war in Ukraine. But behind that is a tension between those who understandably and rightly want to cut CO2 emissions, and a need to have energy on tap whenever it is needed, at an affordable price.
As I write this, the UK electricity grid is using over 30GW of energy. One third of that comes from gas, 3/10ths from wind, 15% from nuclear, 7% from solar, 5% from biomass, and around 9% imported from Holland, Belgium, France and Norway. If the wind drops, and it is night, we import more electricity from the continent, or we up the production from gas. Of course, production on the continent might come from coal or gas, so we cannot be confident that it meets our net zero target.
This is the problem. Right now, we want to make sure we meet our net zero targets. But we can’t guarantee a permanent supply of energy when green energy drops off at night and on still days. With surplus energy supplies from wind and solar, we can potentially store energy in batteries or convert it to hydrogen, but we would need an enormous wind and solar farm to guarantee enough green supplies to meet all demand.
These are big problems for the future. But right now, I am keen to understand how the energy market works, why prices rise like a rocket and fall like a feather. It’s not straightforward as providing a guaranteed supply of energy comes, at the moment, with a climate cost that many find unacceptable at any price. It will be interesting to properly get under the hood of energy.