Net Zero failure costs more than inaction

MR Lyn Jenkins’ criticism on clean energy conveniently ignores the cost and impact of unabated climate change. He ignores the potential for cost savings. He ignores the rapid development of many types of energy storage. And most of all, he ignores the nature of transition.

He is right that, as things stand, we would need to rely on gas-fired power stations if there was an extended period of high pressure in winter. But he is wrong to conclude that this means that we can’t make rapid progress on further reducing our carbon emissions when you consider a full year’s needs. Such a reduction is vital because today’s unnecessary CO2 emissions will heat the earth for over a century.

Our most immediate actions should be to expand our clean energy sources and improve the grid infrastructure to move the electricity from where it’s best produced to where it’s needed. I’ve seen the grid working on less than 10% gas generation and we can do that more often with these changes.

Alongside this, it will be increasingly important to add to existing energy storage capacity. In the first place, the focus should be on providing short-term storage for the peaks in energy use.

Over time, we’ll need to develop long-term energy storage capacity and this is more challenging. But we have time to do this as long as we develop a strategy. Mr Jenkins would be proved right if, like the current government, we had no plan and relied purely on market forces. But there’s a way forward that we must take because the cost of failure on Net Zero will prove far higher than the cost of taking action.

Michael Carter

Exeter