Dunkelflaute: why Miliband and climate sceptics are both wrong
We’re in dunkelflaute, which means the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
This is not a good day to be Ed Miliband. Indeed, it hasn’t been for the past week. The reason is simple: we’re in dunkelflaute, a German expression which means something like “dark doldrums” or “dark wind lull”. In prosaic terms, it means the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. If you’re betting the house on renewable energy, you’re likely going to be feeling very queasy. Luckily, the UK national grid has a simple answer: burn gas and import power which is exactly what we have been doing.
Over the past week, we’ve been getting just 12% of power from renewable sources. The rest has come from gas, nuclear, biomass and has been imported, mostly from France. It’s not cheap either: we’ve been paying £100 per kilowatt/hour which is getting towards 50% of the long-term average. The good news is that the coming week looks a bit more positive.
This latest episode of dunkelfluate has produced a predictable reaction; across social media and in some newspaper columns, the usual suspects are spouting the usual stuff about renewables not looking so clever right now. And they have half a point – right now, renewable power does look a bit daft at 12% of a grid that Miliband says he’s going to decarbonise by 2030.
In this week’s Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson has written about how blackouts caused by this decarbonisation drive could sink the Labour government at the next election. Lawson, in line with other columnists, also mentioned a report by the National Electricity System Operator published this week that has some very heroic assumptions about how the grid can be decarbonised by 2030 and argued that Miliband and the government are taking voters for fools. Well, maybe.
Unfortunately this is a dialogue of the deaf. The sceptics are right about the inconvenience caused to renewables during dunkleflaute but they never, ever write articles that praise renewable energy when the wind blows for weeks on end either. By the same token, Miliband never acknowledges that the national grid is completely reliant on gas power stations for backup and says, again and again, that we will meet his 2030 target which involves doubling onshore wind, trebling solar and quadrupling offshore wind in less than six years.
It cannot be said too often that this not going to happen: we can’t install enough turbines or solar panels in time; indeed, we likely can’t source enough turbines and solar panels in time; battery technology is not advanced enough to be able to deal with weeks of dunkelflaute; and we wouldn’t be able to install enough battery storage to deal with weeks of the weather we’re currently experiencing. So, whatever anyone says, in 10 years’ time, the UK will still be burning lots of gas to keep the lights on. The economic and electoral costs of failing to do so are too high.
Ed Miliband is an intelligent man, and he must know this to be true - so why is he sticking to a plan that he knows is going to fail? First, he must think that, even if his mission fails, it’s worth it for the progress that we will make along the way. Second, he wants to make sure that anything he does is irreversible. Third, he clearly thinks the mission is so critical that he has to emphasise urgency at all times. Fourth, he’s already been a political failure during his time as Labour leader, so is likely inured to future failure in this role too. In some ways, it’s admirable. If you believe in man-made climate change, then this is the right policy response.
And yet there’s more that the Labour government could do especially around demand and, believe me, demand is something we’re going to hear a lot about in the future. With Electric Vehicles (EVs) becoming more popular and with datacentres required to support our wholly digital life, it’s time for all of us to think about how and when we use power. This is about managing a system that is going to get hungrier and hungrier for electricity and how all of us need to be more flexible in our use of energy. Miliband wants to revolutionise our national grid through renewables, but this is a revolution that’s going to happen anyway as demand soars.
We currently have peak capacity of around 45 GWs. The forecast for 2030 suggests something in the region of 150 GWs of capacity split across gas, onshore and offshore wind and solar. So get used to seeing cables, pylons, transmission lines, batteries, wind turbines, solar farms and small nuclear reactors everywhere across our green and pleasant land. Dunkelflaute or no dunkelflaute, it is Ed Miliband making space for this revolution in infrastructure that will make him a consequential politician at last.
Catastrophic deindustrialization and economic collapse are far likelier outcomes of NZ policy on electricity prices than saving us from the trivial costs of a few degrees of warming.
Hi Giga Watt - I do think you should disclose whether or not you have interests in the wind (or any other similar) sector. Fair enough to stay anonymous, but if we can't research who you are, how do we know if you are an independent commentator?
You state "The sceptics are right about the inconvenience caused to renewables during dunkleflaute but they never, ever write articles that praise renewable energy when the wind blows for weeks on end either". Well, actually, there is a big problem when you have a surfeit of one sort of renewable power - electricity drops in price (and costs you even more because you have to pay people to stop providing). Look what happens in Germany during a hot summer - the German grid behaves like a parasite on the overall European grid, flooding neighbours with electricity and then - at night when the sun doesn't shin - ramping up demand again. Lots of people have written about this (I need not provide links as a simple search will yield plenty of articles on this subject).
To blame sceptics for being one-side of a dialogue of the deaf is an unreasonable 'on the one hand, and on the other'-ing of what is a very reasonable point by the sceptics, and - conversely - paints the eco-zealots in a far too flattering light. Balanced reporting on an argument between centrists and extremists should not result in a semi-extremist conclusion.
Your paragraph about Miliband is deeply troubling: "Second, he wants to make sure that anything he does is irreversible. Third, he clearly thinks the mission is so critical that he has to emphasise urgency at all times. Fourth, he’s already been a political failure during his time as Labour leader, so is likely inured to future failure in this role too. In some ways, it’s admirable. If you believe in man-made climate change, then this is the right policy response".
You have essentially admitted that we have a zealot in this role who wants to burn the boats so that we are committed to his plan. This is not right, and it is absolutely out of order to put our children's future at risk just because a zealot wants to get his way.
And that's even before we come to the point that "man-made climate change" is hardly the bogeyman that it is made out to be. The IPCC relies on models that are predicting a modest warming by 2100. But these models - by the modellers' own admission - are flawed: Consider the conclusions of two highly respected establishment scientists at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, USA, in a recent paper published in Climate & Atmospheric Science, a Nature Journals Publication: “virtually all global climate models (GCMs) have had difficulty simulating sea surface temperature trend patterns over the past four decades”… these “models are not perfect and contain biases when evaluated against observations”. Overall, the authors conclude that they expect to see “substantially less global mean warming due to stronger negative feedback and lower climate sensitivity” and they point at other results that show “a prominent model bias in all the periods [from 1958 to 2017] with the later ending years showing larger biases”. (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00681-7).
Enough with this zealotry. Can we bring some common sense back - let's invest in British modular nukes, build some new gas and coal-fired power stations and let wind & solar run riot... but without subsidies and with those generators bearing the cost of the load-shedding / storage such that they are compared "like-for-like" with dispatchable power. This will make "net zero" difference to the world's CO2 output - UK has already hamstrung itself enough, and we can review in 10-20 years whether or not anything further need be done (spoiler: I suspect we will find that things are just fine).