'What We Need To Do Now" critique

What We Need To Do Now - For a Zero Carbon Future is a enlightening 2020 book by the British author and businessman Chris Goodall. At 195 pages (hardback edition) for the core content, it is fairly short in length, but it doesn't hang about or waste words. Goodall writes with elan and succintness that few other books on the subject can match.

I enjoyed reading the book, and would recommend to others. It really got me thinking and questioning previous opinions that I held quite dear. Though I have to query some of the claims and conclusions that Chris arrives at. Here are the main ones (page numbers are from the 2020 hardback edition).

"Successful attempts have already been made in the UK to establish locally owned electricity and gas companies of this type" (p54)

The type of company that Chris alludes to is a municipally-owned utility, like the Stadwerke München (Munich) example that he cites earlier in this chapter. Such a firm owns the distrbution - and often generation - of electricity in a local or regional area, and bills the end consumer. Some even operate biogas sites and local gas grids. Such a firm sounds great in principle, and many state-owned firms like Germany's Stadwerke and the locally owned co-operative utilities common in North America often have good reputations.

Though Chris's claims about "successful attempts" to establish such locally-owned firms in the UK are simply baseless. The example that he holds up is Robin Hood Energy (RHE), a firm wholly owned by Nottingham Council.

Firstly, RHE is solely involved in the billing of energy to end consumers. It owns neither grids nor substancial generation assets. Its main task is calculating and issuing bills, and answering the related queries from consumers. So it isn't a genuine 'utility'. 

Secondly, it is far from successful, as evidenced by the warnings of its auditor that it isn't a solid going concern. Recently, the local taxpayers suffering a £24m writeoff due to its mounting losses. Such concerns about RHE predate the publication of the book, however. In 2019, RHE was chastised by the regulator, who threatened to revoke its licence for failing to pass on £9.5m of green levy cash collected from customers - a common 'canary' sign of a supplier having serious cash concerns. Similarly, Bristol Energy, owned by Bristol Council, has lost over £30m of taxpayer money and like with Portsmouth Council's shuttered Victory Energy, the council is considering cutting its losses. Co-op Energy, another bill-only energy supplier, owned by the members of the Midcounties consumer co-operative, was another stakeholder owned failure. After a disastrous introduction of a billing system that put them at the top of the regulator's customer complaint league tables, Midcounties sold it to a privately owned competitor, having racking up huge losses.

Don't get me wrong, state or stakeholder-owned businesses can be succesful, and there are successful overseas examples in the energy space. It is just that the developing failure of the UK examples that I mention above were widely reported before Chris wrote his book, and the UK example that he cites (RHE) is one of the biggest and widely publicised failures. I suspect the confirmation bias of Chris's political views, which I have no doubt are sincere, have clouded his assessment of the financial facts.

Given that locally-owned utilties are typically monopolies, I should question whether I would want one to undertake the crucial job of managing the energy supply to my home. Locally-owned infrastructure monopolies are of course already in existence in the UK: councils are the sole supplier and maintainer of the UK's roads and streetlights (bar for motorways). Though when I look at the hugely pothole-strewn roads in my area, typically lit by streetlamps that either don't come on at night or burn 24/7, I have my doubts. My council frequently takes 6-18 months to fix these issues even when alerted to them by local taxpayers, and even then the fix is often a short-lived bodge that shortly reoccurs. Some would suggest that this is due to being starved of cash by central government. Though as Private Eye regularly reports, local government bodies are frequently mismanaged by senior management. Based on their evident incompetence in operating local infrastructure, I wouldn't want my local public-sector body to extend themselves into the serious business of running energy grids and generation assets.

"Most road freight can be switched to electricity" (p80)

Like most of the book, this assertion isn't backed with a citation. At face value I can envisage local deliveries by van being powered by batteries, and indeed Nissan and others make light duty EV vans. It is the heavy duty goods vehicles (HGVs) that I question. I have to admit to not knowing what proportion of road freight travels in light versus heavy duty vehicles, but I would hazard it being heavily skewed toward the latter. Almost most goods travel in an HGV for the longest leg: between factory/farm/port and warehouses/depots/supermarkets.

Most things that I have read suggest that current batteries are simply too heavy and bulky to deliver the power required to carry HGV loads in addition to the cells themselves. So it is good that Chris adds that the largest vehicles would use hydrogen power cells. But even then, the energy density of hydrogen is such that you need to store it at very high pressures to keep the vehicle's cargo volume practicable. Even in the high-tech composite pressure vessels available today, the explosion risk would be substancially higher than with diesel vehicles (that are fitted with shock/puncture-resistant flexible tanks).

It would seem more practicable to manufacture liquid hydrocarbons (which petrol and diesel are) via the process that Chris describes elsewhere: combining hydrogen (made using renewable/nuclear power when supply exceeds demand), with CO2 (captured from the remaining gas/biomass power stations). Such liquids could be burnt in a wider variety of lightly-modified vehicles.

"the new electric London taxi..." (p86)

Others, including journalists for quality titles, have made this mistake previously. Whilst there are some taxi models out there that are purely powered by electricity, you won't yet find London's black cab drivers driving them. The model that Chris is most likely referrring to is the now-common LEVC TX, which is in fact not an 'electric vehicle' (EV) but a plug-in hybrid, similar to the Prius PHV models driven by many private hire drivers. Whilst its wheels are turned by electric motors run from a battery, you can't hide the fact that when the battery starts to run low after a manufacturer-claimed 80 miles, a 36 MPG petrol engine kicks in to keep the motor running. Don't get me wrong: they are a great improvement on the filthy diesel bangers which plied their trade on London streets for far too long. They've just not EVs, despite the TX drivers' mistaken belief that they have made a "switch from fossil fuels".