The 'Plan'

After spending almost 2 years devoting my research efforts into our local Parish Council's Neighbourhood planning exercise (during which time Elements Green largely abandoned their plans to build solar in our Muskham Vale area) I'm getting back to my core interests again.

Waiting to see what will happen to Ed Miliband in Andy Burnham's new cabinet, will Miliband's excessive zeal for Net Zero be restrained or accelerated? 

Today I was reading a critique of the UK's current 'plan' by Richard Lyon's book "The State of Britain" in which he argues that our policy is presently being made by people who just don't understand the science and, promoting two related books, '“The Energy Trap” and “The Grid: A User’s Manual”, he says:-

"Whether this plan works — and what it costs — turns on a small number of questions that sound simple and are not:

• How much backup does a weather-driven system need, and of what kind: power stations held in reserve, stored energy, or cables to neighbouring countries?
• How much energy storage is enough? Enough for a calm evening, a still fortnight, or a poor decade?
• What happens in the worst weather this country actually experiences — not an average winter, but the coldest, stillest weeks in living memory, when heating demand is highest at exactly the moment wind supply is lowest?
• Does the grid remain stable, second by second, when the heavy spinning machinery that has steadied it for a century is retired?
• And what does each version of the future system cost, per unit of electricity actually delivered to the people paying for it?"