Why we need "Net zero"

[Beelbeebub]

On 31/05/2026 at 09:38, LnP said:

Ms Savage didn't say that they've seen lower electricity contract prices, reduced spot price volatility, because of increased output from wind and battery generation during evening peaks. She said they've seen lower electricity contract prices, reduced spot price volatility, and increased output from wind and battery generation during evening peaks. I scanned the article you linked to and didn't see a claim that there's a causal link between the two issues.

This is clutching at straws a bit. In the actual report they call out that renewables have lowered the daytime price putting downward pressure on the cap and the quote was from the regulator itself so one would assume they are aware of the context.

 

But if we wear our steixlty logical hat - whilst we cannot say that a rise in renewables certainly lowers prices we can say that a rise in renewables does not invariably lead to a rise in prices. 

 

In fairness they do also say that the loss of revenue for thermal plants during the daylight hours means the costs have to be put into the price of thermal power when it is needed pushing that bit up.

 

They also note that a drop in the Lng prices in late 2025 helped lower wholesale costs, though that has now been reversed. 

 

They say that grid scale battery systems are starting to mitigate those fluctuations by providing a customer during daylight to recharge and providing cheaper than thermal power on the evenings further displacing thermal power. 

 

Bear in mind the displacement of thermal power during the day doesn't markedly increace the fixed (capital, depreciation etc) costs of thermal power it just concentrates them into a smaller output. So the overall cost of having a thermal plant on the grid is roughly the same regardless of it running or not, so it's not true to say the intermittency makes it more expensive (beyond some increace in maintance and fuel burns for start/stop running) overall. If it costs you £100m + fuel to keep a plant up and ready it is still cheaper to run it once and get low cost elec the rest of the time than to run it 365 days a year. 

 

On 31/05/2026 at 09:38, LnP said:

Australia's electricity is generated 100% from domestic sources - coal, natural gas, wind, solar.  64% from fossils. So it's no surprise that their domestic energy costs have not increased with the conflict in the Middle East.

Again, the report explicitly calls out the rise in the price of coal and gas on the international market as historical upward cost pressures and not the increace in renewable generation. 

 

Despite being a big exporter of coal and gas the thermal plants have to compete with international buyers so when coal jumps up the cost per Mwh from an Australian coal plant burning Australian coal also jumps up. 

 

On 31/05/2026 at 09:38, LnP said:

Btw, I strongly support decarbonisation. I just think we need to be a bit more clear eyed about how we get there.

There will be inevitable challanges and it will not be easy. But we need to get away from the narrative that there is a sensible choice between doing it and just staying as we are and lowering prices by drilling. 

 

 

 

[JohnMo]

On 21/05/2026 at 20:57, scottishjohn said:

I,ve heard of it and they will only take it when they want it and that will be from people where there is not an excess of wind energy for them to get 

so it will not happen for anyone in scotland --cos we export it every day

As a follow up we have now had 4 export events over a 4 week and a couple of days period. Overall with Axle and Octopus both paying me to export it added £20 to the bank account - not much but averaging over the year that's £240, for nothing, plus the £25 intro fee and they pay the GivEnergy Premium fee as well which is another £60 a year. So year one equivalent income £335. In winter I may have to top the battery up during cheap periods, but in summer it's all been PV generated electric.

[Nickfromwales]

57 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

As a follow up we have now had 4 export events over a 4 week and a couple of days period. Overall with Axle and Octopus both paying me to export it added £20 to the bank account - not much but averaging over the year that's £240, for nothing, plus the £25 intro fee and they pay the GivEnergy Premium fee as well which is another £60 a year. So year one equivalent income £335. In winter I may have to top the battery up during cheap periods, but in summer it's all been PV generated electric.

Less the cost of ‘wear and tear’; replacement of equipment over a 25 year period etc. 

 

Inverter will fail, batteries will degrade, solar panels will outlive you if you buy the right ones, so the maths need doing for sure to work out whether to invest in batteries or not.
 

The max revenue is relative to lifestyle / number of occupants / EV household or no EV / working or retired (or WFH), E/W split or due South array,  and more.

 

It would be sensible to take 10-15% of the ‘income’ and set it aside for these inevitable lifetime of ownership costs.

 

What’s the latest on V2G and V2H these days? 

[JohnMo]

1 hour ago, Nickfromwales said:

Less the cost of ‘wear and tear’;

But should be quite low, only taken from 90% to 50%

 

1 hour ago, Nickfromwales said:

Inverter will fail,

If it fails it because I always use, it's doing its thing 24/7 anyway as it's AC coupled battery system.

 

1 hour ago, Nickfromwales said:

max revenue is relative to lifestyle / number of occupants / EV household or no EV / working or retired (or WFH), E/W split or due South array,  and more.

The Axle VPP is none of those things. I was replying directly to a comment made by @scottishjohn on the scheme. It's a scheme to boost grid when available power can't keep up with demand, so pays £1/kWh plus you also get 12p from Octopus, so it pays a real £1.12 per kWh.

 

It's a scheme that sits above the normal maths you should do, prior to any PV or battery installation.

 

My normal import/export were costed and installed a long time prior to the Axle scheme coming along and it only helps boost the value of the battery.

[Beelbeebub]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/09/great-britain-grid-operator-issues-another-warning-over-power-supplies-in-heatwave

 

Interesting bit is how the French are having to curb the output of their nuclear stations due to the high temps. The same issue can also affect gas stations. 

 

And as the anti-renewable brigade never tire of mentioning, low wind conditions can coincide with heatwaves and drastically reduce the output of wind farms. 

 

Right now (1.30pm 9th July) wind is only producing 2.5Gw, about 10% of it's maximum and 1/3 the current gas plant output. 

 

Of course, there is one tech that correlates extremely well with heatwaves.... 

 

Solar, and that is currently pumping out 14Gw. 

 

My own array is powering my portable air con unit and the battery will continue to do that well into the night. Zero impact on the grid. 

 

In contrast to the challanges facing renewables in our winter peaks, solving for the likely summer peaks is much easier. 

 

Lots of PV, local and grid scale, lots of batteries, local and grid scale. 

[JohnMo]

18 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

Right now (1.30pm 9th July) wind is only producing 2.5Gw, about 10% of it's maximum and 1/3 the current gas plant output. 

Depends where you are our current mix from National Grid in NE Scotland is 80% wind and 20% solar at 2pm

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, JohnMo said:

Depends where you are our current mix from National Grid in NE Scotland is 80% wind and 20% solar at 2pm

Interesting - where can/did you get those figures?  80% of Scottish demand wouldn't be far off the 2.5GW of wind total? 

Edited July 9 by Beelbeebub

[JohnMo]

47 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

Interesting - where can/did you get those figures?  80% of Scottish demand wouldn't be far off the 2.5GW of wind total? 

National grid live feed in the battery app.

[SteamyTea]

Lots of data here.

 

https://www.ukgridlive.co.uk/

[Beelbeebub]

Great page! Bookmarked 

[Beelbeebub]

The Spain/Portugal blackout last year comes up as an example of why renewables are dangerous.quite often.

 

Nice explainer video of what happened.

 

TLDR:

1. The Spanish grid regulations did not use the capability of renewables to stabilise the grid. This made them reliant on fossil fuel plants for grid control

2. Earlier oscillations in the grid caused the grid operator to demand higher voltages to dampen them (as is normal practice)

3. One of the 10 fossil fuel plants had a fire and had to shut down leaving even less grid control.

4. Some of those fossil fuel plants didn't it comply with the procedures so the voltage rose more than desired but still below the threshold 

5. Some PV plants had been misconfigured to shutdown at a lower voltage than they should have and tripped out.

 

So the main takeaway was the Spanish grid was not well managed.

 

It also makes the point that the model the Spanish used (relying on fossil fuel plants for stability alone) is not followed in the UK where the renewables are configured to contribute to grid stability 

 

 

[sgt_woulds]

Will this change the FF conversation in any meaningful way:

 

As Europe swelters, Paris judges say consumers aren’t to blame — TotalEnergies is – EUobserver

 

I'm guessing usual people will jump on this straight away as a flawed decision or deepstate interference, and that the science (the OIL companies own commissioned research) it is based on is biased/wrong.

[SteamyTea]

I have just started reading this by Hannah Rictchie

 

 

 

 

_OceanofPDF.com_Clearing_the_Air_-_Hannah_Ritchie.pdf

[saveasteading]

Permission to scare you?

There's an article in the Independent today.

It says that there is a leaked report from the UK armed forces to govt, that there's no point in defending the country if there's nothing worth defending. Ie  food production/ water must be sorted urgently.

Meanwhile the rest of the world is worse and will want to come here regardless.

It's an opinion piece so it doesn't have to be verified. 

 

And.. relax.

[-rick-]

Even the Telegraph is having a 'Hang on lads! Maybe we've gone too far?' moment:

 

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/26/climate-change-real-right-needs-to-get-serious/

[saveasteading]

Interesting  When the Right start agreeing such things,  it's too late.

Telegraph is becoming more liberal these days isn't it?

 

"Its Scotlands Oil" was the slogan but perhaps now could extend to water and wind. Pipelines will surely follow the cables south?

 

I know that in Spain they have huge pipelines and pump stations that are turned on when rivers are in spate, taking it many kms to agricultural areas in the few hours it lasts... filth included.

 

I wonder if tanker ships could be used now? Loch Ness has more water than all other water in E & W. Taxed 1p/m3 at Inverness into the local exchequer?

 

[SteamyTea]

8 minutes ago, saveasteading said:

wonder if tanker ships could be used now

According to Wikipedia  2 billion tonnes of oil are moved each year.

If water, that would be about 2.2 bt.

If we take a conservative usage of 1 tonne/day.person to cover everything (includes agriculture, industry etc), the UK will need to ship 24 billion tonnes a year (65m people by 365 tonnes).

Don't think Captain Pugwash is up to it.

[-rick-]

52 minutes ago, saveasteading said:

Interesting  When the Right start agreeing such things,  it's too late.

Telegraph is becoming more liberal these days isn't it?

 

It's been bought by Axel-Springer the German publishing house. Known for having an opinionated right-wing leader who wants the publications he owns to reflect his POV.

 

Having said that they may be less right wing than the previous ownership. You're the first person I've seen saying the Telegraph has become more liberal recently (and I've seen a lot of fairly extreme articles linked to in that time including plenty of climate scepticism) but that's not to say it might be shifting tone somewhat.

[SteamyTea]

18 minutes ago, -rick- said:

including plenty of climate scepticism) but

I think they would be getting a telling off if they tried to deny it. There is only so much negative spin that is allowed.

I have a soft spot for the Telegraph as it was the daily paper at home, Sunday Times on Sunday.

Not bought either for over a decade now.

 

[-rick-]

5 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

I have a soft spot for the Telegraph as it was the daily paper at home, Sunday Times on Sunday.

 

They had some good stuff until they went batshit over brexit. Once they showed that they didn't care about facts I stopped looking.

[SteamyTea]

Environment

Earth is heating up faster than at any time in its history

To understand where climate change is heading, we have to look at the planet’s distant past and appreciate the disturbing uniqueness of our situation, says Bill McGuire

Bill Mcguire24 July 2026

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Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are trapping more heat

Bill Gozansky/Alamy

As Europe bakes in what could be its hottest and driest summer on record, the rapid transformation of our climate is harder than ever to ignore. But how much hotter will it get, and what will that mean for life on Earth?

To get a picture of our future, we can either use computer models or look to episodes of rapid climate change in the geological record. While models are invaluable in terms of tracking where our world may be heading, peering back into deep time provides unrivalled information about cause and effect; about how the climate has changed in the past and what the consequences were. There is no guesswork involved, as the evidence is all laid out for us in the sediments and rocks, in the ice sheets and in the remains of ancient life.

Looking back in time also helps us to put human-caused global heating in context by making comparisons with past episodes of rapid temperature increase, and when we do this, the news isn’t good. It isn’t so much the degree of heat that is the issue – our world has been much hotter than it is today for much of its 4.6-billion-year history – but the speed of change.

Perhaps barring the immediate aftermath of the dinosaur-obliterating asteroid impact 66 million years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have never risen as quickly as they have in the last couple of centuries. Even worse, nowhere in the geological record is there evidence for the average temperature of our world climbing as quickly as it is now. This means 10 times faster than during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which marked extreme hothouse conditions 56 million years ago, and at least 20 times faster than at the end of the last glacial period.

Judicious analysis of past climates also permits us to recognise potential analogues for where our world is heading in the decades and centuries to come. Over the last 50 million years or so, the planet’s climate has followed a broadly cooling trend, which we are now rapidly rewinding – a process, if you like, of prehistorification. Deciding how far back we will end up is still within our gift, but it is a given that our grandchildren will grow up in a climate different to any experienced during the tenure of human civilisation.

Modelling studies suggest that if – and it’s still a big if – emissions peak by 2040 and then fall quickly, we will rewind the climate clock 3 million years and bequeath to our descendants a Late Pliocene climate. Then, atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today, at 330 to 400 parts per million (ppm), but the temperature was between 2.5ºC and 4ºC above the pre-industrial average, and sea level 15 to 25 metres higher. Pliocene conditions could start to appear in the continental heartlands as soon as the 2030s and spread out from there.

If we fail to rein in emissions fast enough, or if natural feedback effects drive more heating than expected, then a further rewinding of the climate clock back to the Miocene becomes more likely; to a time 15 million to 17 million years ago, when CO2 concentrations, at 400 to 600 ppm, were a bit lower to moderately higher than they are today. At 6ºC to 8ºC above the 1800s, however, the temperature was far higher than expected for such CO2 levels, suggesting the involvement of other heating factors that we don’t yet fully understand. Sea level was maybe 50 metres higher than it is today.

But this may not be the end of it. The current high rate of heating documented by satellite observations and borne out by Earth’s rapidly escalating energy imbalance implies that rewinding the climate clock back fully 50 million years remains within the bounds of possibility, eventually reprising the blistering heat of the early Eocene hothouse. Such conditions would make most of our world uninhabitable for humans, and severely test the capacity of our species to prevail.

As the Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam observed almost 1000 years ago: “When I want to understand what is happening today, or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back.” They are words that serve us well as we contemplate our future climate, and that we ignore at our peril.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. His book, The Fate of the World: A history and future of the climate crisis, is published by HarperNorth.

 

 

 

 

Related

Environment

This El Niño will be the hottest by a huge margin

The super El Niño now developing in the tropical Pacific has a 90 per cent chance of becoming the strongest in 150 years, breaking global temperature records and unleashing extreme weather

Alec Luhn23 July 2026, updated 27 July 2026

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El Niño events are linked to dry weather in Australia, which can lead to devastating wildfires such as those in 2019

SAEED KHAN/AFP via Getty Images

The planet-warming super El Niño now developing will almost certainly be the strongest ever, breaking the record by an unprecedented margin.

Out of hundreds of simulations by 14 forecast models, 90 per cent predict the tropical Pacific will reach a sea-surface temperature anomaly that hasn’t been seen in 150 years of observations, according to the California non-profit organisation Berkeley Earth. It is expected to peak at 3.6°C above average, far above the 2.75°C record set in 2015-16.

Zeke Hausfather at Berkeley Earth says this is one of the few times a climate forecast has truly shocked him.

“Even the median of all the models expects we beat the record by 0.8°C,” he said at a media briefing on 23 July. “If this does end up occurring, it really would be record-shattering and unprecedented.”

El Niño happens when easterly winds weaken in the tropics, allowing water they’ve pushed into the Western Pacific Warm Pool to wash back towards the eastern Pacific. Rainfall shifts eastward, weakening easterly winds further in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Although it’s a natural cycle, it delivers a jolt of heat on top of 1.4°C of global warming, setting off extreme weather around the world, according to Berkeley Earth.

Already, this El Niño is revving up faster than any previous event. Sea-surface temperatures in the central-eastern Pacific have reached 2.1°C above average, vastly outpacing the 1.6°C increase seen at this time of year during the 1997-98 El Niño, the previous record-holder for speedy development.  

This “explosive onset” has already put the event in very strong or “super” El Niño territory, only a month after it started. And once you consider that El Niño doesn’t peak until late autumn or winter, it really does look like the world is facing a “Godzilla” El Niño, the name given to those that increase temperatures past a rise of 3°C.

Within a few months, the huge swathe of warm water across the Pacific will heat up the rest of the world. Global temperatures in 2027 are likely to reach 1.7°C above the pre-industrial average, smashing the record set in 2024, when temperatures were 1.5°C above the average. The El Niño is coming on so fast that there’s even a chance 2026 will break that global temperature record first, as some have predicted.

As a result, the 20-year temperature average will likely exceed 1.5°C by 2029, failing the goal set by the Paris Agreement, said Robert Rohde at Berkeley Earth in the briefing.

“We’re already over 1.4°C, so there’s very little margin left,” Rohde said.

Different regions will see different extreme weather. Densely populated southern China could experience heavy rainfall in the spring and summer, raising the risk of flooding on the Yangtze river, forecasters have warned. The 1997-98 super El Niño caused flooding on the Yangtze that killed more than 3000 people.

The north-eastern US tends to face drier conditions during El Niño, while the southern US gets wetter, which can unleash mudslides in places like California. Australia tends to dry out, raising the threat of bushfires like those seen during the “Black Summer” of 2018-19.

India, southern and central Africa and parts of Central and South America all face drought risks, which could push up the price of commodities like rice, coffee and chocolate even in less-exposed countries like the UK.

“We might get lucky and have smaller reduction in rainfall in Africa or India, but generally… the damages scale with the strength of the El Niño,” said Hausfather.

Strong El Niño events also cause harm to ecosystems, such as widespread coral bleaching, which is expected this year as well.

While some research suggests El Niño events are getting stronger, other studies disagree. What is clear is that the impacts will get worse as global warming accelerates.

“It’s something we need to start preparing for today and make sure we have systems in place to deal with drought conditions,” said Hausfather.