The Germans have a word for it

 Of course the Germans have a word for it, they have lots of useful words. Like schadenfreude, who doesn't revel in a bit of that?

However, I'm not looking forward to taking pleasure in Ed Miliband's discomfort if (when?) we have very high energy prices, or even disruption, because of our vulnerability to world gas prices and supply. After all, the discomfort suffered by the population will be so much greater than thick-skinned Ed's. And, to be fair, the state of our energy systems owes more to 15 years of Conservative led governments and their Labour and Tory predecessors.

The problem is one of transition. The UK is half way along a journey to generate nearly all its electricity from renewables and nuclear. 

Wind power was seen as the most cost effective of the renewables in a major study of energy technologies published in 1986*.  Since then the UK has become a kind of world leader in wind power. Oh, not in making the turbines or anything like that of course, but in deploying technology and equipment from other countries. 

Solar power, viewed back then as having potential despite our climate but at that time very expensive, has made huge progress, as photovoltaics have benefited from the immense progress in silicon chip technology. 

The main issue with renewables is their intermittency, varying from over abundance to zilch. So we experience conditions when the wind is blowing but the wind power generating companies are paid to turn their machines off because there is nowhere for the power to be used. This is partly because the electricity grid is nowhere near completing the transformation necessary to funnel electricity in towards the centre of the country from offshore wind farms when it was set up for the flow to be in the other direction, out from the central spine of big coal fired plants at locations such as Drax, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Ferrybridge and Didcot.

But we also have to contend with dunkelflauten, the useful German word for those periods in winter when it's cold, cloudy and still. The word literally translates as "dark doldrums".

When dunkelflauten reigns we have to have other ways of generating our electricity. And as we progressively electrify to reduce reliance on fossil fuels that need becomes even greater: electricity use has started to go up after many years of decline. Achieving net zero, or anything like it, will require a lot more electricity.

Greater capacity to store electricity will help, through batteries or long duration energy storage methods (e.g. using surplus electricity to pump water up hill to a reservoir, running it back down again when the power is needed, or using it to make a clean fuel such as hydrogen). But these processes are inefficient: you can't buck the second law of thermodynamics, so you never get back what you've put in.

We have made great progress at deploying renewables, with around half of our electricity generated from renewables and nuclear. But we are still a long way from weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. Indeed our use of gas for generating electricity went up in 2025. The government's target is for 95% to come from renewables and nuclear by 2030. That's an interesting date as four of our remaining 5 nuclear power stations are due to close by then, having already operated for many years more than their original design lives. 2030 is also the date by which the first of the two units at Hinkley Point C is due to come on line, our first new nuclear power station since Sizewell B in 1995, nuclear power having been allowed to age and then wither after John Major's government foolishly put a moratorium on new nuclear in 1994. I would put a little more store in that 2030 commissioning date than the latest estimate for HS2 trains running, but not much.

The government's targets require us to go from 30 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity in 2023 to 50GW in 2030, for solar to increase from 14GW to 45GW, for battery capacity to be around 25GW in addition to the current 7GW and with another 5GW or so of long duration energy storage.  Only the last of these seems remotely likely to me to happen on that timescale.

So we are still some way from ending our deep reliance on imported fossil fuels and dealing with dunkelflauten.

Successive governments have allowed our generating system to become to dependent on imported fuels where the price is set by world markets. This was a risk easily foreseen in the wake of the 1970s oil crises but it had already been forgotten by the late 1980s. I can still hear Department of Energy officials, at what might be called the time of "peak Thatcher", saying "we can just buy it in" whether "it" was oil and gas as the North Sea resources became depleted or new nuclear power stations after we let our indigenous capability wither away. They were utterly confident in world markets and completely unmoved by the strategic risk of being reliant on imports.

Winston Churchill knew all this back in 1913 when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he switched the Royal Navy from relying on coal to oil. He noted the danger of relying too much on any one source, observing "safety and certainty lie in variety and variety alone". 

I am reasonably confident that there is an end point where we reach the sunlit upland nirvana of having an electricity generating system which is substantially free from imports with the associated risk of supply interruptions and price volatility. But I think we are a lot more than 5 years away from it.

Until then I worry about the supply pinch points like the Straits of Hormuz and the new word I've learned, dunkelflauten.

* Department of Energy, Energy technologies for the United Kingdom: 1986 appraisal of research, development and demonstration, Energy Paper Number 54 (London: HMSO, February 1987). I remember this doorstep size publication well as I made a very minor contribution towards it. The "paper" covered all the credible energy technologies including every conceivable type of renewable (hydro, wind - on and offshore, tidal, different wave energy technologies, various forms of solar), nuclear (fusion and fission - thermal and fast reactors) and fossil (including supposedly "clean" technologies) and made estimates of possible future electricity generating costs and the research, development and demonstration costs for bringing them to commercial deployment. Even then there was a lot of interest in what was known as the "greenhouse effect". The study has probably stood the test of time in many ways, in particular the viability of renewables: wind was seen as highly promising, wave pretty much a waste of time and tidal potentially attractive but limited in opportunity in the UK. Where it didn't stand any significant test of time was the failure to anticipate that governments would dash to gas to displace coal and oil, the nuclear platform we had established would be thrown away by John Major's government's nuclear moratorium in 1994 and we would not progress the opportunity of fast breeder reactors, which were seen as essential to avoid constraints in uranium supply if the world went strongly towards nuclear fission power after the oil price shocks of the 1970s. I contributed to the section on fast reactors which were expected to be increasingly deployed from 2000 onwards. Indeed, we did a lot of modelling to convince ourselves enough plutonium would be available given that fast breeder reactors work using fast neutrons but actually breed putonium quite slowly. By the end of the 80s it was already clear that there would be no shortage of plutonium and our stocks might be best deployed using mixed uranium/plutonium fuel in our thermal reactors. Until we decided not to bother building any more of them for the next 25 years. I always thought the idea that the UK would run short of plutonium before now seemed utterly fanciful, which probably marked me as a bit of an oddball in the economics and research teams and Harwell and Risley when I said so. But my colleagues in the Energy Technology Support Unit at Harwell pretty much nailed the outlook for renewables in the UK.

Clean power by 2030: UK's bold plan for renewables, jobs and energy security. Tim Mooney, Green Economy, 16 Dec 2024. https://www.greeneconomy.co.uk/news-and-resources/news/clean-power-by-2030-uk-s-bold-plan-for-renewables-jobs-and-energy-security/#:~:text=Expanding%20renewables,heart%20of%20renewable%20energy%20generation.