National Energy Model

I'm adding where the UK's energy comes from into my Python-based national energy model.

Here you can see approximate sources of natural gas from around the world, with roughly 45% of our total gas supply from Norway. Of the overall gas burnt inside the UK, 68% is directly for heating and industrial processes, and the remaining 32% is burnt to produce electricity in gas power plants.

While our electricity grid is still currently supported heavily by natural gas (annually ~50%), electrification is what will get us to Net Zero and a future our children actually want to live in.

But an improved energy grid is actually only one of several benefits. Increase renewable energy, you improve energy security, reduce cost, and reduce the amount of shipping and piping needed to bring in the gas and other fossil fuels. Not only that, wind and photons do not change price because of a war.

Roughly 40% of all bulk shipping weight is of the transport of fossil fuels around the world. More solar panels and wind turbines, less shipping and associated emissions.

I've added Sankey diagrams to my Python-based national energy model. These show the UK's approximate energy flows from a system's generation capacity (MW) as well as energy efficiency losses.

Primary energy in petajoules (PJ) on the left side flows through the system and is split off into various parts, including efficiency losses (rejected heat mostly), before reaching the 'customer' as useful energy on the right.

Some people still claim fossil-fuel-derived primary energy requires direct replacement by renewable and low-carbon generation. This is false, and is typically used to continue their claims that renewables provide only a small percentage of the world's energy. In actual fact, because electrification is far more efficient, fossil-fuel-derived primary energy is not the metric that requires replacing. This is the primary energy fallacy.

You can see this in the example images. In 2013, approximately 2,285 PJ of primary energy enter the system, with almost 60% losses, mainly rejected heat from the coal and natural gas power plants. Zoom forwards to 2025 and the system requires far less primary energy (~1,473 PJ) to provide the same useful energy to the end users, where ~35% losses are experienced this time, mainly from natural gas.

I included the CCC's Seventh Carbon Budget Balanced Fleet scenario here. I have however used 2025 demand. This clearly does not consider the increased heating demand from heat pumps and electrical demand from BEV charging, but what it does show is that the majority of the losses come from curtailment (~35%), where wind and solar is turned off or down in periods of excess generation. All of this while providing a grid carbon intensity below 5 gCO₂e/kWh.

You may note the primary energy in this scenario has actually gone up, likely because of the high curtailment. In the future I'll be modelling future demand, and it should then provide a more accurate forecast while demonstrating we can indeed have a future energy grid with far lower fossil fuels.