The UK is going back to coal

When the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, we rely on so-called ‘firm capacity’ to step in and keep the lights on. In the UK, that means gas-fired and nuclear power stations and pretty much nothing else – the giant wood-burner at Drax is the only significant exception.

Unfortunately, both the gas-fired and nuclear fleets are now very old, and much of the capacity is nearing the end of its life. Regulators have granted extensions to some of the nuclear units, but after 2028 permanent closures are likely. Meanwhile, as much as a third of our gas-fired capacity is expected to retire over the next five years.

Unless these units can be replaced, or their lives extended, we face a capacity crunch by 2030 at the latest. At best that means sky-high prices, and at worst, brownouts – electricity rationing in other words. That is a horrific prospect. As the Spanish found out to their cost during the recent Iberian blackout, when the power supply goes down, people die.

However, replacement is currently looking unlikely. With so much wind and solar on the grid, nobody wants to put money into new power stations, either gas-fired or nuclear. The financial numbers simply don’t add up any longer, either for new units or for overhauls of existing ones.

In theory, we could subsidise our way out of this. Although little or no new capacity has emerged from the government’s capacity market auctions, if caps on prices were removed, in theory someone might take the risk.

However, in practice this won’t happen. That’s because a surge in power demand from new datacentres means that the lead time for a new gas turbine is now eight years. Lead times for nuclear are mostly even longer – the Koreans have delivered in as little as eight years, but everyone else takes much longer. And this is the United Kingdom, where building anything takes an eternity.

Either way, new gas turbines or nuclear will arrive too late to help the UK avoid a capacity crunch.

What options are there for delivery on the timescales necessary? Importantly, we might be able to get – whisper it – coal-fired units. This would be an extremely bitter pill for politicians to swallow, but it would still perhaps be an easier sell than explaining away the lights going out. This will sound outlandish to some ears, but it’s perhaps worth recalling that in Germany even the Greens had to accept the necessity for the black stuff when the chips were down.

Coal-fired units would probably require subsidy, and would probably still need guarantees that they would run, but would be cheaper than new nuclear for baseload operations. (The point about baseload is important, because coal-fired power stations have much higher capital costs than gas-fired ones. To the extent that they don’t run all the time, they will have to charge much higher unit prices.)

In theory, coal-fired units could be delivered in around three years. In practice that is probably hopelessly optimistic for the UK, with our bureaucratic and regulatory inertia and green activist sabotage to boot. But if we started now, we might just get something up and running in time to head off the capacity crunch.

But that would only happen if we could overcome another significant hurdle, namely that we have long since told anyone with expertise in the coal-fired energy field that they have no future in the UK. In other words, finding suitable engineers to deal with a construction project on this scale is going to be a hard nut to crack.

Is there anything else? One interesting option that has been little discussed is so-called aeroderivative gas turbines. These are essentially jet engines modified for use in power generation. They are very flexible, and thus suited to the kind of operations that our crazy renewables-dominate grid require. They are somewhat expensive to buy, although because they are small (say 100 MW), we’d need a lot of them, so we might well be able to negotiate better unit prices. And on the plus side, they can be essentially bought ‘off the shelf’ and almost plugged directly into the grid, so getting them online should be quick, and there would be a lesser requirement for engineering expertise.

If a return to coal and the mass adoption of jet engines seems a little desperate, you are not wrong. We are in a very bad place, and we now have very few options for keeping the lights on. Desperate measures are all we have left. Moreover, if they are to be in place in time to save us from disaster Ed Miliband needs to start taking action now.