In an era where governments worldwide are aggressively pursuing net-zero emissions, the push toward electrification—particularly through electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps—presents both opportunities and formidable challenges. A recent report by Kathryn Porter at Watt-Logic delves into whether the UK’s electricity grid can handle this transition, especially amid reliance on intermittent renewables like wind and solar. The analysis highlights stalling deployment due to high costs, grid constraints, and reliability issues, while drawing parallels to similar policies in the European Union and “blue” states in the United States. As energy podcast host Stuart Turley often emphasizes, understanding these dynamics is crucial for consumers bearing the financial brunt.
The Push for Electrification: EVs and Heat Pumps in Focus
The UK’s electrification strategy aims to shift heating, transport, and industry away from fossil fuels. Heat pumps, promoted as efficient alternatives to gas boilers, and EVs, touted for reducing transport emissions, are central to this. However, adoption lags far behind targets. In 2024, only 42,645 heat pumps were installed, missing ambitious goals. EVs face similar hurdles, with upfront premiums of £11,000–14,000 over internal combustion engine vehicles.
This mirrors EU efforts, where electrification is core to decarbonization, yet progress is slow—electricity comprises just 23% of final energy use. The EU’s Electrification Action Plan calls for a 35% target by 2030, emphasizing governance and incentives.
Demand from EVs alone could add 30–40 TWh annually (8–10% of total UK demand), with peak loads of 5–8 GW by 2030. Heat pumps exacerbate this, potentially increasing winter peaks from 57–58 GW to 108–119 GW by 2050.
Intermittent Energy Sources: A Reliability Roadblock
Wind and solar, key to the UK’s renewable mix, are inherently variable. Output can drop below 1 GW from 32 GW installed wind capacity during cold, still winters—precisely when demand peaks after sunset. Prolonged low-wind periods (up to 14 days every five years) coincide with high heating needs, creating firm capacity deficits of ~10 GW. With 17 GW of gas and nuclear set to retire by 2030, the risk of blackouts rises: 65–85% probability of regional rationing by 2030, and 5–10% chance of full blackouts.
Similar issues plague EU neighbors. Norway anticipates a 60% demand increase by 2040, with flexibility needs doubling amid wind variability.
Germany’s demand could exceed 950 TWh by 2035, strained by renewables bottlenecks. Intermittency not only risks supply but also grid stability, as inverter-based systems weaken inertia.
Mounting Costs for Consumers
Electrification’s financial toll is steep. Heat pumps cost £12,795 post-subsidy versus £3,818 for gas boilers with providers like Octopus Energy. EVs add premiums, and public charging runs 14p per mile versus 12–22p for petrol. Running costs remain uncertain, with electricity pricier per unit than gas.
Subsidies soften the blow but shift burdens: UK’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme offers £7,500 grants, while EV incentives range £1,500–£5,000. Distribution network upgrades for EVs and heat pumps could cost £37–50 billion from 2024–2050, excluding higher-voltage work. Smart flexibility might save 15% (£6.7–7.9 billion), but actual costs will likely exceed this due to resilience needs.
Curtailment payments—compensating wind and solar farms to reduce output during oversupply—add insult. In 2025, the UK paid £1.5 billion: £380 million directly to farms to curtail, and £1.08 billion to ramp up gas plants as replacements.
This wasted 8.3 TWh in 2024, jumping 91% year-on-year, with projections hitting £8 billion annually by 2030 if unaddressed.
Scotland, a wind powerhouse, bore 86% of Great Britain’s 4.6 TWh curtailed in H1 2025, costing £116 million.
The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), effective from 2026, introduces another layer. It levies charges on carbon-intensive imports, including electricity, to prevent leakage. For the UK, post-Brexit, CBAM could reduce exports to the EU by 50–85% by 2040, increasing EU-GB emissions by 1.5–2.4 MtCO2 annually initially.
This might raise consumer prices, with Ireland facing up to £130 million higher bills yearly (£45 per household in Northern Ireland).
While the short-term inflation impact is negligible (EUR 1–2 per ton CO2 in 2026–2027), it levels the playing field at consumers’ expense.
Overall, these costs—subsidies, upgrades, curtailments, and CBAM—could accelerate deindustrialization and inflate bills, with UK electricity prices already among the highest globally.
Parallels in U.S. Blue States
The UK’s plan echoes strategies in Democratic-leaning “blue” states like California and New York, where state-driven policies mirror EU ambitions. A coalition of 10 states—California, New York, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington—committed to heat pumps comprising 65% of residential heating/AC/water heating sales by 2030, rising to 90% by 2040.
New York mandates all-electric new buildings from December 2025, making heat pumps the default.
California leads EV adoption with zero-emission vehicle policies and incentives, achieving 4.3% market share from 2013–2018.
Utilities are pushed to electrify: Colorado’s clean-heat law led Xcel Energy to plan heat pumps for 200,000 homes by 2030.
Massachusetts offers winter electricity discounts, saving heat-pump owners $540 yearly.
Thirteen governors, including from Hawaii and Wisconsin, formed the Affordable Clean Cars Coalition to promote EVs and preserve Clean Air Act authority.
Similarities abound: Mandates, subsidies, and electrification targets akin to the UK’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme and the EU’s 35% goal. Yet, blue states face grid strains from intermittency, with California experiencing blackouts during heatwaves. Costs mirror UK issues—high upfronts offset by incentives—but consumer savings vary; in cold New York areas, heat pumps save $2,050 annually versus propane.
Without addressing intermittency and infrastructure, these states risk the UK’s pitfalls: rising bills and reliability woes.
Conclusion: Balancing Ambition with Reality
Porter’s report warns that without firm capacity additions and grid reinforcements, electrification risks widespread outages and escalating costs. The UK’s £1.5 billion curtailment tab in 2025 underscores intermittency’s price, compounded by CBAM’s trade impacts. Blue states’ aggressive policies offer a U.S. parallel, but success hinges on learning from transatlantic challenges. As Turley might say on Energy News Beat, it’s time for pragmatic solutions—bolstering grids, diversifying sources, and ensuring consumers aren’t left in the dark, literally or financially.
We just interviewed Kathryn Porter on the Energy Realities Podcast with Irina Slav, Tammy Nemeth, David Blackmon, and Stu Turley. It is a stark reminder that Climate and Energy Policies impact everyone, and mostly the poor, to keep them poor.
Sources: watt-logic.com, Energynewsbeat.co, X, Grok
Full Transcript:
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:00:11] Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Energy Realities Podcast, our weekly discussion of major energy issues impacting the globe. I’m here with my co-host, Dr. Tammy Nemeth, who is in the UK today. Stuart Turley, who is down in Abilene, Abiline. Yep, close enough. The loveliest place that I’ve ever seen. And we have with us today, special guest from the UK as well, Catherine Porter, noted energy expert. Katherine is an independent energy consultant. She holds a master’s degree in physics and an MBA, is associate member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Energy Studies Executive Council. She’s been with us twice before. And we are thrilled to have you with us again today. Katherine, how are you?
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:00:56] I’m very well, thank you. And it’s a pleasure to be back.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:00:59] Yes, back and in the great state of Texas, I must say, tell everyone where you are today.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:01:06] Well, today I’m in San Antonio. In the past week, I’ve also been in Houston and Austin. And then on Thursday, I’m heading to New York City before spending a couple of weeks in Canada.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:01:19] And you’re going all over the separate North Texas. You’re not up here in the Metroplex. I’m highly disappointed. You didn’t.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:01:24] No, Austin was as far north as I went this time.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:01:28] Well, that’s probably as far north as anybody really needs to be in Texas. Quite honestly, that is where I grew up, down in South Texas, God’s country as I like to call it. So I’m stuck up here in North Texas because that’s where my family is, but it’s not really home country for me up here, it’s a little cold. Stuart, how are you today?
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:01:52] Absolutely peachy. We’ve had a couple of bear sightings around my place up here in Oklahoma. And it’s kind of weird. Uh, you know, the home, I’m sorry. Uh, it’s a, uh, Hey, I traveled. I would have preferred to have met with Catherine in Texas, but I’ll tell you what, this is cool. I would’ve rather done an interview live with you, so that would’ve been fun. This is a fantastic report and I’m looking forward to this discussion.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:02:18] And Tammy, how is everything in the, you’re in the UK. Yes, that’s right. I’m in the U.K. Today. Keir Starmer’s Paradise today.
Dr. Tammy Nemeth, The Nemeth Report and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:02:28] Well, it’s just peachy.
Speaker 5 [00:02:35] Well, we’re just reading, spending a month over here.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:02:37] Howdy! Well, there’s a lot of cloudy days in England. In Texas, we haven’t had many clouds. We’re in a dab gum drought. I’m sick of it. Anyway, let’s stop with the preliminaries here. Let’s get going, because we’re here today to talk about a new study Katherine published, what, last week, right? It was really just last week. Electrification, can the grid cope? It is a very detailed report on the. The mess that’s being made of the power grid in the UK by the current administration there. And Catherine goes into detail about the causes and the likely effects and the consequences for the public between now and 2030 and beyond. And Catherine, tell us about why this report at this time? What was the motivation?
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:03:37] So this was commissioned by one of my clients, this is now the third report actually I’ve written for this particular client and they wanted me to explore what would be the impact on the British power grid of the government’s plans for electrification and then I also added in some commentary about AI data centers because they’ve been designated critical national infrastructure and so that I thought was a relevant thing too. Also consider when we’re looking at what sort of shape the grid might be in in the coming years. And so I set out the various policy background that we have across industry, transport and heating for decarbonisation, electrification is seen as the primary role now. We had a couple of hydrogen trials for domestic heating that got canceled last year because of public opposition. And I think that was a tipping point effectively against the use of hydrogen. So it’s been sort of downgraded in the official forecasts. So electrification is seen as the main road to decarbonization. And I believe that that would add about 77 to 10 gigawatts of demand by 2030. And then you could get another seven or so from AI data centers. To put that into context, our typical peak. Demand in the winter is 45. So, very exceptionally, we can go higher than that. We went actually to 51 a couple of weeks ago, but that was unexpected and higher than the system operator had predicted for the winter. 45 thereabouts is what we’d expect on a weekday evening in the Winter. So to gain an additional sort of 15 or so gigawatts is obviously quite significant in that context. The good news in my report is that it’s almost certainly not going to materialize. The actual driving narrative around demand at the moment is deindustrialization, which is causing demand destruction. And it’s my view that AI data centers will be built, but they will not connect to the power grid. They’ll connect to gas grid and build their generation behind the meter. And then the bad news is that even without additional demand. From electrification and data centers, we’re going to struggle to avoid rationing unless we deal with the firm power retirements that we’re likely to see. We’ve got five gigawatts of nuclear that we know will definitely leave the grid by March of 2032. At the moment, it’s March 2030, but I think we’ll see a bit of an extension there. We do have some new nuclear being built and an anticipation of maybe some open cycle gas being built. Which I think more or less will offset the nuclear closures. But the real risk that nobody’s talking about is within the gas fleet. A third of our power stations were built in the 1990s, another third in the 2000s. And they just don’t appear to have had the sort of upgrades that would allow those lives to be materially extended. In the report, I look at two Peterhead, which opened in 2000, and language which opened in 2010. And both have been having some quite significant reliability issues. And in fact, I’m looking for funding to do a follow-up report that will do a deeper dive into the at-risk assets and go through. So in Europe, we have something called Remit, which is a market transparency reporting. Everybody has to report when they’re going off on maintenance, whether that’s planned or unplanned. So you can get quite a lot of information about plant reliability from that. So that would be sort of the next step, would be to really dig into those data and be able to develop even more sophisticated conclusions around when we might start to see these assets coming off. And Peterhead’s particularly interesting because there are only two synchronous generators in Scotland, Peterhead and Torness, which is one of the nuclear power stations which we know is going to close. So I think Scotland’s going to be in big trouble. I struggle to see how they’re going to form the grid in Scotland. And the system operators got various plans for things like synchronous condensers and stack homes and so on to try and support the grid. But I do wonder if you don’t have anything forming the grid in the first place, how that’s going to work out. People are focusing very much on energy and saying, yes, well, there’s lots of wind in the North of Scotland so they’ll have enough energy. That’s not entirely true on low wind days, obviously they’ll to import from England. But I just wonder if… The further north you go into Scotland, the further away from the English border, where all the synchronous generation is, how are they going to keep that grid stable? They already have voltage oscillations that they’re struggling to damp.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:08:28] And that’s what caused the blackouts in Spain last year, right?
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:08:32] Well, and also, well, so it’s not just inertia, though. It’s voltage control, and that’s locational. So inertia is broadly the same everywhere across the grid. But voltage isn’t. And the Spanish grid operator came back a couple of months ago asking for emergency powers to control voltage in the south, because they’d let so many of their synchronous generators close and that they’re struggling to do that. And the trouble is, I have a bit of a hobby horse about this. There’s been a disconnect on the engineering side. And people have treated reactive power and VARs as if they have a physical reality and they can be commoditized. And therefore, any current bearing device can provide them. And this just isn’t true. Reactive power isn’t a real thing to start with. It’s just an abstraction of complex numbers. And really, we should bring everything back to current and voltage, because those are the two things that are actually real in the grid. So we should talk about currents that goes to power loads and current that goes support voltage. And if you think about what inverters can do, well, so synchronous generators do this for free, obviously, within limits. If you start pushing them to the limits of thermal capacity, then obviously, you can’t go past that. They do it for free because they’re both mechanically coupled to the grid and electromagnetically coupled to grid. So they will automatically respond to voltage variations that they see at the terminal without even having to have control equipment. It’s a natural feature, a little bit like Newton’s first law of motion, in fact. Something you force pushes against it, and you get an equal and opposite force. Inverters, you don’t get that with an inverter. If they want to support voltage, they have to divert current from powering loads. So not only do you then have quite an economic challenge, and this is what the span what the Australian grid operators have identified is that they haven’t quite squared the circle and how you deal with the economics of something that used to be for free and now isn’t. And it takes a lot of current as well, to support that voltage is not just marginal. And but also There are hard limits to what semiconductors can deliver. And if you had an inverter-dominated grid where all of your assets were programmed the same way because they had to comply with the grid code and then you have a voltage disturbance, you could then trigger a frequency excursion because they’re all taking currents away from powering loads to support the voltage, and then, you crash the grid that way. So there’s a huge amount of gaps here in the technology. And people who just… Say, oh, well, it’s fine because batteries will do it all. They just don’t get it. And it’s because we’ve fallen into this trap of thinking that reactive power is a commodity that anything can deliver, and it just isn’t.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:11:26] Do you think Ed Miliband understands all that?
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:11:30] Oh, no, no. And so I don’t think there’s more than around half a dozen people within the system operator that really understand that. And I’ve been going around, you know, whenever I meet people, I met somebody from Urquhart the other day. And I asked, I mean, I didn’t ask them in the context of, you know testing them. But so the guy I spoke to, he was very knowledgeable, he has an engineering background, and he got it straight away. And in fact it’s an area they’ve been working on so I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know but it’s amazing how many people you speak to. I’ve discussed this with senior people within our regulator and you know he said he was repeating some of the things his engineers were telling him and I was like this is just not that’s just not true in terms of how the engineering works, you know, things about reactive power. Is subject to heat losses and things like that. I mean, it just isn’t. I mean yes, a little bit at the margin, you have some eddy currents in the magnets and so on, but not in the same way that you get heat losses on active power when it’s going through loads. So it’s a real knowledge gap. And in Britain, we’ve made it way worse because we’ve actually separated everything. So the ownership of the grid and the operation of the grids are completely separate. So that was supposed to be. To remove conflicts of interest, but then you end up with this disconnect between the equipment and the people running the equipment, and that’s where stuff starts to fall through the gaps.
Dr. Tammy Nemeth, The Nemeth Report and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:13:05] I wanted to highlight something from your report that is connected to this because one of the things that happened last year that you also investigated was the need for these substations to be upgraded and that there’s these different infrastructure challenges like the low voltage networks. In your report you say 45 percent of substations will need to upgraded by 2035 and there’s been these delays and kind of dragging out. How long can we preserve substations and whatnot, but then there’s connection delays and then there’s how are you going to get these components and whatnot when there’s these long waiting lists and they keep I think one of the the important parts of your report is that you talk about how there’s all these aspirations and there’s, all these goals without real means of achieving things like in a realistic manner. So one of the things that you said was like, well, if we need these upgrades and there’s a waiting list to get stuff, why aren’t we in the queue? And I just wondered if you could shed a little bit of light about the state of substations and all these different issues in the UK.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:14:21] So the supply chain issue affects generation as well as network equipment. And the substation constraints has been known for some time. I was writing a couple of years ago about there being four year lead times for super transformers. And so here in the US, actually, I think Hitachi is just building a transformer factory because the… Know, the equipment shortage is so acute that it actually makes sense to go and build a factory to build the equipment rather than just wait for the existing supply chain to deliver it. We need to do the same in Britain, except we don’t really have any steel production left. So it’s, you know. Deindustrialization, right? Well, exactly. If we were smart, we’d also build a factory to build gas turbines. But again, we don t have the steel capacity capability. I’m on the, I worry quite a lot about asset life on the grid and I’ve discussed this a fair amount with Ofgem. So if you look at the latest price control that was just published before Christmas, they allocate, so our networks are regulated monopolies. So they’re subject to a price control and the regulator decides what their capex program will be over the next five years because that determines what their revenues will be and what they can recover from consumers. And they divide that into two categories, load which is new connections and non-load, which is legacy equipment. And then things like cyber security and so on fits within the non-loathe bucket. And so they consistently downgrade the amount of money allocated to the networks for non-Load capex. Each successive price control, they’ve done the same. And in the draft determination, it was radically cut. They then sort of add some back when they get to the final determination. But if you look at the way they’re treating the allocation for legacy assets, they basically rely on the end of life scores provided by the network operator. Now, national grid transmission has, so their end of life scores go from zero, which is this is brand new to 100, which this needs replacing now. The transformer that caught fire at North Hyde, which caused the outage at Heathrow Airports in March, that had been installed in, I think, 1968, and it had an end-of-life score of, I think it was 12 and a half, it was either 12 and half or 16 and a halve, but very low. Now, Ofgem’s only allocating capex for replacements if the end- of-life is 75 or over. So I think there’s a huge potential gap here. Between what the network operator says the end of life score is. And it seems to me to be completely indefensible to have an end of live score in the teens, you know, mid teens for an asset that was installed in 1968. And then, and if you do have assets of that age, you need to be really, really on top of the maintenance. And they had two outstanding maintenance issues at that substation. One of which was the failure that led to the whole incident. So, and then they lost two transformers because the one immediately adjacent to it got suffered from heat damage. And so that had to be replaced as well. So I think that we have a growing problem with the age of the assets on our grid. There was a big spike in investments in the 1970s and a huge proportion of what we have was installed pre 1980. And so it just inevitably is going to need replacing. The whole focus that Ofgem has is on connecting new stuff. And they say, well, we don’t tell everyone to ignore legacy. But it’s obvious if your regulator is focusing so strongly on connections, then you within the network company, you’ll put your best people on connections. That’s why you’ll devote your resources and your energy. And so you end up where the regulator complains that the business case for the legacy asset replacement and so on is inadequate. But then it’s probably because they’re not giving it the same focus because they know the regulator itself doesn’t have that focus, so I don’t think they’re really understanding the feedback loop there in terms of, you know, how their actions reinforce that, but I think actually the big challenge of the connections which everybody’s experiencing, this is not just in Britain, will work out well in Britain because we don’t want this stuff connecting to the grid because the more of it that connects the more problems it causes. We would be far, far better off just upgrading our gas power stations, upgrading the legacy grid infrastructure and leaving it at that. That would be the best deal for consumers.
Dr. Tammy Nemeth, The Nemeth Report and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:19:16] Yeah, instead, because you end up having these two parallel grids going, so you end up with double, but it doesn’t really account for double because half the time the other one doesn’t work, so it’s like this added expense.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:19:32] We’ve just had the new auction round for the wind subsidies announced last week. And they’ve cleared offshore wind at 94 pounds a megawatt hour. Now, the average price of generating electricity with gas in 2025 was 80 pounds per megawat hour. And that’s with about 28% of that now being carbon costs. Because carbon costs more than doubled over the course of 2025, because Keir Starmer wants to harmonize the UK carbon market with the EU carbon market. Ahead of the implementation of the carbon border adjustment mechanism. And so this is just crazy, crazy extra cost. Now they’ve now made these subsidies 20 years instead of 15 years previously. So if you actually worked out what that would have been on a 15-year basis, it would be something like 104, 105 pounds of megawatt hour. So significantly more expensive than the cost of generating electricity with gas. Now, yes, if you were going to have to build a new gas power station, that would cost you more, because we’re talking about depreciated assets now for that 80 pounds. But if you took away the carbon pricing, then that would be much, much lower. And so it’s not apples, it’s apples and oranges the way they look at this. But the other big thing is that that’s just the first order subsidy. Then they get a massive hidden subsidy because their connections get paid for. So if you want to drill a new oil or gas well in the North Sea, you have to build and pay for the pipeline that brings that oil and gas into the market. If you build a wind farm in the north sea, then the consumers will pay for their wires to bring that electricity to the market, so a huge hidden subsidy worth billions of pounds. Then you have the cost of backup, again, billions of pounds a year, and you have the cost in managing real-time intermittency. And then just in case that wasn’t enough, We keep building wind farms in places where there’s not enough grid infrastructure, and so we have to pay them to turn off as well. And that’s also billions of pounds a year. Sea green is the worst, worst example. Opened in October 23. In 2024, it got curtailed two thirds of the time. In 2025, that went up to three quarters of the times. It is a massive waste of money.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:21:54] Wow. I’m sitting here, I’ve got about 9,000 questions, Catherine, and this is a fabulous report. But I have several questions you’ve got. Let me go through the, let me kind of frame the network here. You’ve got the grid, the electrification of EVs and heat pumps at the forefront at the consumer level, trying to demand more electricity. Then you had the AI data centers that you just mentioned were going to behind the meter and using natural gas. And then you have the war on oil getting rid of all of the natural gas for UK oil companies in the North Sea. So you’re gonna be relying on Norway in order to get your natural gas, I see some real problems between that dichotomy of consumer electrification with using Japan’s electric cars. Uh, or you see the new world order that Kearney wants, uh, is going to be really kind of interesting. This is a mess.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:23:01] Oh, I mean, so it’s interesting that I’ve been in a number of meetings recently where people are saying outright saying that they think Ed Miliband is a Chinese agent because it’s so hard to actually develop some kind of a logic for his behavior because it is so destructive to the British economy that it only kind of makes sense if he’s acting on behalf of a hostile power. Now, I actually don’t think that’s the case. That’s for me. Taking these bits.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:23:32] Logically, Catherine, in the United States, I have that question of Governor Newsom. I have… Do what? John Kerry!
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:23:43] Al Gore.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:23:44] John, but the difference is the governor of a California state has single-handedly created a national security risk for the entire west coast by his war on oil. And you have to wonder, I’d ask, follow the money. Is he tied to China’s money? I don’t know that. I’m not accusing him, But it sure looks.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:24:08] Well, I’m more inclined to believe stuff is cock-up rather than conspiracy, but it’s just an interesting place to be where you’ve got policy makers whose policies are so destructive that people are openly speculating whether they’re traitors because you can’t actually think of a realistic, reasonable and rational…
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:24:31] Is it better to be corrupt or stupid?
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:24:37] Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I think it’s probably better to be corrupt, actually.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:24:42] Very Hobbesian choice there. Yeah, they get to make it for themselves.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:24:48] Um, Steve had a real question here that I wanted to go through. He had two comments. Uh, I don’t know that I understood this one, the 2022 NSESP Pathfinder two focused on inertia short circuit and specifically for Scotland. Two projects were grid formatting inverters and the rest synchronous condensers, and then a follow-up question from him was, wasn’t the issue in Spain, thermal generators didn’t have their run through voltage limits set correctly.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:25:17] Yeah, that was just one of many problems, but the biggest problem in Spain was the inverter based generation not meeting fault ride through requirements. So I’ll take the Spain one first. You had a grid fault that was caused by a malfunctioning inverter. Now, I think that’s, you get grid faults. In this particular case, it was caused by an inverter, but faults will happen all the time anyway. In response to that, voltage disturbance, you were supposed to have… Both synchronous generators and inverter-based generation were supposed to then provide voltage support. Neither did that properly. It wasn’t just thermal generation. It was wind and solar as well. There was widespread non-compliance by all types of generation. So then the grid operator did manage to be, they did a bunch of other stuff, stabilize the situation, but the grid was still pretty weak. And more or less at the same time, you had a large amount of distribution-connected solar disconnect for price reasons because prices went negative in the middle of the day. Now that caused a drop in frequency and because the grid was so weak, then a whole load of inverter-based generation tripped. Now this was the primary failure that brought down the Spanish grid. It was the inverter- based generation not meeting frequency fault ride through condition. Under the grid code. So they tripped off when frequency was still within the range at which they were supposed to ride through. Now all of those, primarily solar farms then tripping off, caused the frequency to fall outside the operational limits. And at that point, thermal started tripping off because, and that wasn’t a code violation, because the frequency had fallen by then too much for it to be expected to withstand and ride through, once you started getting those thermal generators tripping off. From a frequency fault, then that caused every that that’s what caused the cascade then happened from there on. So what brought down the Spanish grid was non-compliance with fault writer obligations of inverter based generation, not thermal generation. It’s really important that people understand that nobody complied properly with their voltage support requirements, but when that happens, the grid was then recovered, but it was still in a weakened state. The disconnection of the solar for price reasons, and that wasn’t a fault, that was just normal market stuff in the context of a weak grid, then to cause the drop in frequency and the inverters didn’t cope with that drop in the frequency. And so this was what brought down the grid. It was inverter-based generation not meeting their fault writing obligations. And there’s an awful lot of means out there that keep trying to muddy the waters on this. This is not, you know, it was because Have a happy day. Have a very nice day, everyone, and have a wonderful night. Have a fantastic day. Inverter-based generation. Inverters were the reason the Spanish grid.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:28:22] So that goes back to AC versus DC, then just the basic, so a plain old country boy can understand it asynchronous versus DC and you got that in there.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:28:34] Yeah, so then that brings to the second point and the path finders. Yes, the pathfinders are trying to come up with ways of managing this situation. But grid forming power electronics do not anywhere in the world form the grid. Yes, there are some installed in Australia, but they are not forming the grid trans grid rate reports in 2023 warning that there’s too little data. Around how grid forming electronics interact with protection relays on the grid. There is still a lot of where AMO has said well we can’t figure out the economic frameworks for this because anytime you want the investors to do something for grid support they need a load of money for it because they can only do it if they take currents away from powering loads. So yes you have these initiatives that’s true but doesn’t mean they’re delivering anything useful And I don’t know that even with synchronous condenses. Synchronous condensers provide you with grid support, but they don’t form the grid because they’re not generating electricity. So I don’t know whether you can operate the Scottish grid in the absence of Peterhead and Torness just with electronics and synchronous condensors. That might work to stabilize things in the south of Scotland, but the further north you go, the more difficult it’s going to be to control voltage.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:29:57] Um, and, uh, this is a great, uh Aslan pilot car, stupid versus corrupt determines the length of the sentence. I love that. That to me is a, a great one. And then we have MD bone here since leaving the EU, isn’t the UK free to make more sensible energy decisions. What’s the purpose of Brexit if fossil fuels and fertilizers are more unusable. I have a feeling that hair starmer is looking at moving back to brick and getting rid of Brexit and.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:30:32] He’s not officially trying to get rid of Brexit.
Speaker 5 [00:30:35] Damn, that was a fish, right?
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:30:36] What you’re trying to do is do it through the back door so you end up with the worst of both worlds where you get no democratic inputs whatsoever but you have to follow all the rules and make the payments. The sooner this Labor government is out of office the better because they are betraying the British people left right and center. They’ve already betrayed their historical constituency of blue collar workers. They’re just hammering them with unbelievable new taxes and new regulation. I mean they keep having to backtrack because it’s so like they came up with this new tax on farmers, you’ve got pubs closing at a rate of knots, the hospitality industry more broadly is being destroyed, then you’ve Got Miliband destroying an industry with high energy prices and every so often they sort of realize that like Grangemouth they’ve just decided to give some financial support to refinery, because it’s like, oh, yes, we know, actually, we just realized that. Yeah, ethylene is quite important. So maybe we should make sure we can still make some. And it’s just they they are. So nobody really in the cabinet has any business experience. They’re all either lawyers, trade unionists.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:31:52] It’s like the Obama administration in the United States, no business.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:31:55] And so they see business as this other that they can tax. It’s like a bottomless well of tax receipts. And they don’t understand that if they put up taxes, well, the well might run dry, or the owner of the well might just decide to pack it in and go move somewhere else, or just do something else. And we’re actually at a point now, if you look at welfare, that it’s broadly a one-for-one relationship between people in work. Paying taxes and people in receipt of state benefits, whether that’s a pension or some form of welfare. So this is not a sustainable situation. It’s why people like me are thinking about leaving the country. My husband isn’t very keen, which is why I haven’t done it yet. And that’s actually quite worrying because if you look at the migration statistics now we’re getting a lot of unskilled illegal immigrants entering the country and getting looked after better than disadvantaged British people and that’s why people are getting so upset about it. If you are a homeless single mother that you will get put in some temporary accommodation it it’d be very nice and that’s really it. And British people now, if they want to access medical care, they probably have to wait a month or so to see a family doctor. And it’s almost impossible to get state-funded dental care, even though notionally it’s supposed to be available. But these illegal immigrants, they get put in four-star hotels. They get given a nice native blue public jacket. They get a mobile phone. They get same-day access to free medical and dental care. And so people are like, these people are here illegally. And they get better stuff than everyone else. Why don’t I just hop over to France, rip up my passport and then come back on the boat and then I can get this nice stuff as well.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:33:44] Well, we’ve had that in the United States as well. Yeah. Same exact phenomenon.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:33:50] I’m not sure it’s quite so in your face though.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:33:54] Well, in certain cities, it has been.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:33:58] Nice access to the healthcare and the dental care as well. That’s quite a big deal. It’s an area that British people are struggling with normally, and so unless you can afford to go privately, it’s very difficult to get timely healthcare. So when you see illegal immigrants getting it same day.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:34:16] I think we’re about to find out how bad the United States was when we find out that Somalia, the billions of dollars that Tim Walz, that Obama let all the Somalis in into one area, and then the corruption that followed that, Governor Newsom in California said, Tim, I see your corruption, hold my beer, and we’re going to see about how bad California’s corruption is.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:34:43] Question about the gas grid. You’ve mentioned that… And this is happening in the U.S. Too, I think, to a large extent. The data centers are probably not going to get their power from the power grid. They’re going to be on the gas grid, right, in the UK. And I wonder, is the gas grid in the United Kingdom adequately supplied and modernized to handle this additional load from the data center?
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:35:12] Yes, because the impacts of deindustrialisation obviously hits the gas grid as well, so you’ll just get substitution. And there are actually some upgrades, significant upgrades to gas infrastructure in the pipeline, shall we say, if you’ll excuse the pun, because we started taking so much LNG and we have two big import terminals in the south of Wales, in Pembroke, South Hook and Pembroke next feature there. Then they’re building a new high pressure pipeline capacity to go west to east to bring that gas into England. So that’s already in progress. And what my report looks at in terms of the gas grid is actually the offshore pipeline networks because we have… All of the UK gas and a chunk of the Norwegian gas comes through a set of pipelines that are owned and operated by Britain and there are actually only two independent pipelines from Gasco into like the Norwegian pipeline system and onto the British beach. Those pipelines require a certain throughput to remain both physically and economically viable and as you decline North Sea production. Then the throughput on some of these pipelines starts to decline to a point where it’s not potentially viable anymore. And I have a chart in the report. It’s on page 61.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:36:42] I was looking for it. Thank you.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:36:45] I think it’s 20.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:36:47] Uh, 60… 60 what?
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:36:50] Yeah, 61.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:36:52] OK, great.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:36:53] This one at the bottom there. And so it’s showing the status, if you like, of the gas and liquids pipeline systems. Now, we’ve already had INEOS, which owns the 40s pipeline, that’s the big liquids pipeline system, saying that the volumes going through there are starting to look suspect, and they might have to shut it down. And then, of course, what happens This is it. So all of the official forecasts for North Sea output show this very smooth decline in the coming decades. But if you end up having pipeline systems closing, then any field that ties back into that system will be forced into decommissioning, whether it could continue to produce or not. So actually, you’ll start getting steps instead of the smooth curve. Now, NISO put out a system operator put out a report actually on the same day as the autumn budget. So it didn’t really get much attention, saying that… The coming years we might just not have enough gas on cold winter days. Now national gas which operates the high pressure transmission system has been saying that this risk could, so yeah there it is at the bottom of the pipes, the circles. So national gas has even been saying that this risks might manifest as early as next winter. I think that’s a bit soon. But it’s going to be something that comes in the next few years. If we don’t reverse the decline in the North Sea production. So for that, we need a more friendly fiscal regime and to reverse the ban on drilling. But otherwise, we would see shortages on cold winter days. So what does that look like? Ultimately, all of these things could potentially lead us into a system of rationing, which is what we experienced in the 1970s. To mitigate this risk, the only other thing you could do would be to put inflating we gas and the spare. Pipeline capacity at Easington and St. Fergus, but you still have to build all the ship handling and the storage tanks and all the rest of it. So it’s not straightforward. Yes, it can be done, and it can’t be done relatively quickly. I think Germany showed us that. But again, you can’t become complacent about it. And this is really, I think at the heart of my report is that there’s too much complacency around our legacy assets. And, you know, I identify 12 gigawatts of at-risk gas generation, and that’s also, let me give you the page number for that. Couple of pages before, that’s on page 53. And there’s a table there showing the power stations that I think are the most at risk of closure. We might not lose all 12 gigawatts, but we really can’t afford to lose more than, you know, two or three. So it’s not a case of, and I’m not claiming that all 12-gigawatts is going to close, I’m just saying that we have so many old power stations, and also the way they’re being used, so with utilization rates falling, that actually, combined cycle gas turbines are not designed to work on that basis. And so if you don’t run your CCGT sort of once a week, you’ll start getting into, you’ll starts experiencing issues with your boiler chemistry, for example, which will then lead to reliability concerns. So you’re taking very old assets and trying to push them into an operating regime that they were never designed for. And then you’re expecting that nothing’s gonna go wrong. It just doesn’t seem very sensible to me. So my report is really saying… Don’t be complacent that we have these risks, our legacy assets are not just in the sort of shape that you can just do what you like with them and expect everything to be fine.
Dr. Tammy Nemeth, The Nemeth Report and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:40:48] I want to just throw out there some of the critics, because whenever you have a report, there’s always these critics who come in and say stuff like, oh, well, flexibility measures like smart charging will mitigate the overload. And we can have these AI data centers that will actually be useful in helping with the rationing. Because there was this idea floated that they’ll read your meter every 30 minutes, and they’ll use dynamic pricing. To shift the the demand so that if you see that you’re getting charged 30p per kilowatt hour because you’re in a high demand period of 30 minutes you’ll shut stuff off and therefore the the load will will be managed by this AI that will be monitoring everybody’s meter every 30 minutes and adjusting depending on on demand so how would you respond to critics who say that this is the solution. That there’s this new tech that will help manage everything and help keep the grid from falling apart or having blackouts and stuff.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:41:55] I would say it’s deleted. Well, first of all, just under half of homes even have a smart meter to begin with. And about a tenth or so of the ones that do, the smart meter doesn’t work properly. So then you have an immediate issue of access to that technology. Secondly, the grid, utilities are supposed to serve consumers and not the other way around. So there’s a fundamental disconnect there between the purpose of the grid. And what you’re now suggesting that you’ll suggest essentially saying that people need to change the way they live their lives so the grid doesn’t fall over rather than just expanding the grid to assist people in the way they want to live their life. And the people who will be most harmed from harmed by that will be those on lower incomes because they’re going to be the who are motivated and In 2022, NISO introduced something called the Demand Flexibility Service. And at the time, they were actually offering a fair amount of money for it. Now it’s not really worth anything. But in time they were offering a very amount of money. So that people could get paid to reduce their consumption during these hours that have been identified. Now you had a whole load of really rich privileged people who figured out how they could game the system by boosting their consumption in the observation window where it was calibrated. And so they went and started eating up their swimming pools and charging their cars and doing everything they could to make their consumption higher so that when they actually got to the delivery window, they would even just normal consumption look like a big saving. So and they made loads of money on that. I was doing lots of radio phone ins at the time hearing heartbreaking stories of people going and sitting in their car for an hour sitting at home with every light turned off all the heating off everything literally sitting in bed with their phones for an our to try and huddle together to keep warm and you know, just do that for an hour and they were saving pennies. This was the heartbreaking thing, was that because these people were already disadvantaged and bills were high, they’d already cut their consumption. They couldn’t go in charge of a car and heat their swimming pool during the calibration period. And so they were experiencing real hardship for very little gain.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:44:17] So aren’t you really touching on right here, and this is gonna get into the conspiracy versus the stupidity argument, right? Isn’t this actually what you’re talking about here? The central objective, it always has been, of the global climate alarm movement to force people to live smaller, more compact lives and invoke this process of power rationing shortages all over the place. That inevitably is going to impact the poorest among us, the hardest, right? This has always been the central objective.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:44:54] Yeah, I mean, I don’t know that I…
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:44:55] That I really buy into that. It just seems… Come on, it obviously is. It obviously is, I mean Bill McKibben has written books about it.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:45:09] It doesn’t make it true, okay, those people who would be living those smaller lives, they’re not the people who consume all the energy to start. So, I don’t know, I don’t buy into that.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:45:25] It’s hard to believe Ed Miliband is so ignorant he doesn’t understand that. It’s really impossible for me to believe that.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:45:33] A very rigid thinker and that he’s got into a particular rut and cannot be diverted from that rut. And I suspect also that he has persuaded himself that anybody that doesn’t agree with him is themselves corrupt, that they’re being paid for by big oil and whatever. So I think when you come into something and it starts to acquire the characteristics characteristics of a religion. Then people will behave like religious fanatics. And I think that’s a more reasonable explanation for what’s happening here. And it’s also not the first time. If you think back to the European Protestant Reformation and the abuses that you saw with the Spanish Inquisition, for example, people believed very sincerely that if you didn’t profess what they deemed to be the true faith, You would burn for nothing in hell. And if you believe that, consider doing this about any horrible thing for them, to get them to say they believe in the true faith. So they went around torturing people. They subjected people to horrific abuses in the name of religion, because they thought they were saving their immortal soul. Now, you know, we obviously look back on that and think it’s crazy, but this was a state of belief, and so it’s entirely possible that human beings… In large numbers, persuade themselves of things that other groups of people, human beings will look at and go, that’s just nuts. And I think we’re more in that kind of territory with this, rather than a genuine conspiracy that’s deliberately setting out to harm people some sort of an economic or political objective, which I think is the whole make people poor model. I think what we’re seeing here. Is a type of religious fanaticism and we need to stop basically in the same way the Spanish Inquisition has stopped. I think we’ve actually passed peak, you know we’ve passed peak woke, we’ve past I think peak critical race theory, we passed peak net zero and I also think that a lot of the change that we’re going to see is going to be driven by economic reality. Because if you look at the post-war orthodoxy, we’ve seen massive expansion of the states across Western economies to try and do things nicely, to start paying more welfare, to hugely increase regulation, because we want to have equality, and we want look after the environment and all of these things. And what started out as reasonable adjustments at the end of the Cold War have become really Go to Actual Control. You take sort of gender discrimination as one example. Of course, we don’t want to see gender discrimination in business. We want women to have equal opportunities to get hired, to get promotion. That’s kind of a good thing, but we just had this, it’s some sort of an aspiration document published in Britain, which nuclear developers are supposed to sign up to, which says that they want to receive 50% female participation in nuclear supply chains. No, this is like, we’re not going to see 50 percent female participation in nuclear supply chains anytime soon. I would prefer to have zero women working in nuclear if we can get nuclear power stations built than zero nuclear power station but 50 percent women in the supply chain because the priority actually is to build the generation and we’ve lost sight of that, I think. But actually, we’re coming to the point where productivity has fallen so much, where debt and government borrowing has increased so much that this is going to have to change because it’s no longer affordable. And economists are talking about a credible risk that multiple Western economies will see sovereign debt crises in the coming years. I think France is probably at the top of that list. Britain’s not far behind. Even Germany is being spoken of in those terms. And so that combined with the fact that actually Boses have also run out of patience with this. And again, it’s not just in one country, it’s you’re seeing it in multiple countries where the traditional parties are falling out of favor. And in Britain, you’ve got reform that people talk about as being right wing. It’s actually not especially right wing when you look at their policies. They’re just kind of right wing on immigration and they’re kind of left wing on everything else. Then you’ve Got Jeremy Corbyn. Setting up his new thing on the left and the Greens as well, very strongly left-wing party. You’ve got AFD in Germany. So you’re seeing these, you’ve got the Farmers’ Party in the Netherlands again come out of nowhere really to be a not insignificant bloc within the Dutch Parliament. So you are seeing these changes in the political landscape and I think that combined with the fact that we’re all running out of money. Will be the sort of dominant theme in the coming years. And a lot of this stuff will happen, will just fall away because it won’t be affordable.
Dr. Tammy Nemeth, The Nemeth Report and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:50:57] I wanted to address a couple of things that were said in the questions and what Catherine’s been saying here as we kind of wind up. So with respect to Brexit, someone asked, you know, well, I thought UK could do their own policy now because of Brexit or whatever. But you know, when the Conservatives lost that vote and then they had the election and then Conservatives came in, Theresa May did everything she could to drag her to not do it. Then Boris came in saying, I promise I’ll do it, but then doubled down on net zero. So the conservatives were just as much to blame for setting up all this stuff that the labor had set up back in 2008-2009 with the climate change committee and then it morphed into net zero And, you know, Brexit, you’re right. It was supposed to have a rational energy policy that we no longer had to listen to what the EU was doing and all their crazy green taxes and everything. And they just doubled down on net zero. And so I think part of the frustration of people is that. They vote for parties that say they’re going to do something, and then the parties don’t do it. And then they’re like, well, why aren’t they listening to us? We need to set up something new, which is why you see the rise of reform, because every party says we’re going to handle immigration, never happens. Said they’re gonna do stuff with the grid to make it better, don’t it. And with respect to what Catherine says about this kind of religious idea around green and net zero and everything. I think part of the problem with someone like Ed Miliband, as Katherine accurately portrayed it, you know, he’s got this kind of one track mind that it’s going to work. And everybody around him says, this is going to, we’re not trying hard enough. Big Oil is sponsoring critics like Katherine, I wish, right? And it’s like, there are all these people who are just delay, delay, the transition. And if only they would stop putting these rational things forward the delay wouldn’t happen and we could actually do this stuff because they believe these people around Ed Miliband and so on they believe that somehow this will work if they just try harder and they ignore reality so I think there’s some people like Bill McKibben who push knit zero and there’s other people who really want people to live smaller lives and everything, and there’s lots of people in the climate change committee who believe that too. But it’s a competition between those who… I’m saying it’s not necessarily mutually exclusive. There’s people who seek to pursue that policy objective of having people live smaller lives because it’ll save the planet or whatever. And then other people who are like, no, I really think we can do the transition. And they’re in alignment with that direction though their motivations might be different.
Stu Turley, Energy News Beat and Energy Realities Podcast Host [00:53:58] So I think it’s going to live a smaller life by going to Brazil twice because he left his electric vehicle running in the, in the parking lot. The man is one step short of being a sock puppet. I mean, this is absolutely horrific. This is also a very good description as the United States is facing many of the same things. We have a unit party system. I used to be great points, Tammy, by the way. Uh, MD bone is pointing that out as well, too. We have a uni party. We have the same party. It’s just, there’s only about four, four politicians, uh, in, uh Washington that are honorable.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [00:54:41] So we’ve had a change in Britain that I think hasn’t really received the attention it deserved. So if you look at Brexit, the 2016 vote was very close. And the establishment didn’t believe the results. They basically thought that if they ran it again, it would be a different result. And it wasn’t until the 2019 election when the Conservatives came back with a big majority that that question was put to bed. But then two months later, you had COVID. I’d say. Was then no opportunity to enact a proper Brexit. So then everything went off the rails with COVID. And you also have to keep in mind that when the Conservatives came in in 2010, there was no money. I mean, the chief secretary to the Treasury, the outgoing Labor chief secretary to the treasury, actually left a note on his desk that said, sorry, there’s no money left. The Conservatives in a financial crisis, and they went out in another crisis. And when Boris was replaced with Sunak, and I never really liked Sunak and I really understood what he was for, but he did try and stop putting in change. So he appointed Clare Coutignoux into the energy ministry. And one of the first things that she did was ask officials to calculate the full system cost of all different types of generation instead of just looking at levelized costs. Now, they didn’t do it, and then Miliband canceled it when he came in. But the Conservatives had in 2023 realized that they did need to change. And so I think that was the start of it not being a uni party anymore, that Labor had been moving leftwards and yes, under Stalmer they were trying to come a little bit back from the fringes of Corbyn. But the conservatives genuinely started thinking that they needed to become conservatives again instead of liberals, which is kind of where they’d ended up. And so, I think under Kemi Badenhock, now the Conservatives are rediscovering there. Natural conservatism. And I think they’re right when they characterize reform as not being a right-wing party. Reform is seen as being right- wing because they are anti-immigration. But if you look at economic policies, they’re more socialist. And so I actually think the Conservatives win the next election because I think it all comes down to the economy. And people might not like voting for them, but I think I’ll vote for them in the sense of it being the least likely to mess everything up. And eventually the Conservatives will see. Safe when it comes to economic matters. But they’re doing the work as well. I mean, I work quite a lot with Claire and her team and they’ve gone back to first principles. They said, okay, what was happening before it didn’t? And the other thing is they were completely misled and lied to by officials. So their civil servants were giving them bad information. When they left office, that was when they really realized just how bad it was. And so you have a civil service, which is unaccountable. This goes to the point about deliveries, well the government doesn’t actually run the country because they’ve delegated so many powers to arm’s length bodies and this whole situation in Birmingham with the football match is really indicative of that. So you had a football match between a local team and an Israeli team and the police decided that they would ban the Israeli fans and they came up with all these arguments about how they were hooligans which they claimed had come from Dutch police intelligence. Then that turned out to be completely false. At the time the ban was announced, the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister said it was terrible and they didn’t agree with this and they didn’t want the ban to happen, but they had to admit that they didn t have operational control over the police and they couldn’t make them remove the ban. So the match went ahead, the Israeli football fans were excluded and then this Chief of Police has been brought in front of Parliament twice. Then it turns out he misled parliament because he was using AI to come up with his information and it was wrong. And then even then, but they couldn’t get rid of him. The home secretary wanted him to be fired, but she didn’t have the power to do it. So she stood up in parliament. She said, I’m gonna say something that no home secretary said in decades. I do not have confidence in this police chief, but she could not remove him. The only person who could remove him was the local police commissioner who was a left-wing Corbynist. Who didn’t want to and then eventually this guy got shamed into resigning but this illustrates the extent to which the government has lost control of the apparatus of state and so when people say oh well you know I voted for x and they didn’t deliver and I voted why and they didn’t delivery well this is because they can’t deliver because the system is now geared in a Ministers can’t buy our civil servants or hire them. So if a minister let Claire continue, so please calculate the full system cost of generation, they don’t do it, she can’t make them. So in order to actually get anything done, we’re going to need to have a wide scale reform of the apparatus of state and the governance that goes with that. And to restore accountability, you have to restore power. Because at the moment, you don’t have power. So you vote people in, they can’t really do anything. And even Labor’s admitted this. We have run out of time. The government doesn’t know the country. I’m afraid we’re out of. Yeah, but the bureaucracy’s in alignment with Labor, I think, more than Conservatives. Yeah, that’s true, but it’s still not exclusively.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [01:00:17] Am I muted? You’re not muted. We still hear you, and you still look terrible, so. We’re out of time. We’re at a time. Kathryn, I want you to tell everybody where they can find you in your report. I forgot to do that up front. So please, let everyone know where they could find you.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [01:00:33] Well, you could just Google my name. My business is called Watt Logic, Watt as in units of power. And the reports on my website is in the blog section. So it’s pretty easy to find.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [01:00:47] Yes. And it’s watt underline, no, watt dash logic. Hyphen, yeah. Hyphen logic, yes. And you’re on X, I know. I follow you on X. Yeah, Kauffman-Horst.
Kathryn Porter, Energy Consultant at Watt-Logic [01:00:56] Yeah, Kevin and Paul did 26 on both X and LinkedIn.
David Blackmon, Author, Energy Realities Podcast Host [01:01:01] Everyone, thank you all for joining us, all these wonderful questions and comments, appreciate it. I’m sorry, I got a little lost there at the end, but we’ll have you back soon to talk about the rest of what we’ve left out today, Kim. We’d be delighted. All right, thanks everybody. Have a wonderful week. Thanks, Catherine. Bye. Thank you, Catherine. You did great.
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