This article was prompted by an article in The Economist issue of 17th May 2025 discussing the solar geo-engineering projects supported by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) - the UK government’s imitation of DARPA – which has the brief to fund “high risk, high reward” research.
It would make a lot of sense if Gordon Hughes, Kathryn Porter and David Turver, replaced the eco loons and grifters on the Climate Change Committee, Miliband is the basic cause of the decline of the UK's industry, all for a tiny increase in CO2. What is the point of racing to be first to destroy our economy, when China, India and now USA are carrying on as normal. Mitigation only works if every country does it. Adaption is our best policy if indeed climate change is actually real!
While I have an exceedingly low opinion of the CCC I am somewhat conflicted because several members of the Committee are former colleagues whom I knew well in the past. In the end the CCC are the messengers - the real problem lies with foolish and craven politicians who are unwilling to say that enough is enough but prefer to fall back on the kind of luxury beliefs that I discuss.
One major problem is that adaptation is unglamorous engineering stuff - whoever got much publicity for proper flood management. And why is no one willing to admit that growing decent grapes in Sussex might be a good thing rather than a disaster? The other thing is that you have to fire the management of the Met Office - and the BBC - to insist that their job is to be impartial and not to cultivate climate scares.
Thanks for this. As an engineer who has followed the evolution of UK policy and the damage caused and the opportunities squandered or missed for what is now almost thirty years, you have filled in many of the blanks.
Interesting that the policy choices that should have been adopted were clear to dispassionate, informed observers in the 90s and are still valid today. The difference being of course that we’ve since tried the alternatives and failed.
I believe that the incompetence with respect to nuclear power is indefensible. The problem 30 years ago - and today - is that it is very capital-intensive and involves long lead times. For power utilities gas will always have the advantage because projects have short lead times and are easily scalable. But that does not excuse governments that claim to be extremely concerned about climate problems 20+ years in the future.
I am ambivalent about renewables other than hydro. My colleagues were right to believe that costs would fall, though they exaggerated the speed and extent of the fall. The real problem was the dogmatic belief that renewables could largely displace controllable sources of power and heat. These were people who never built or managed anything.
There can be a (modest) role for renewables when conditions are favourable, but they are even more capital-intensive than nuclear after one adjusts for load factors.
I wholeheartedly agree; your comment about "people who never built or managed anything" struck a chord, unfortunately it seems to be particularly prevalent in the policy space.
Some thoughts ...
On nuclear it is clear just by comparing ourselves with the South Koreans and Chinese that we could and should do better. Unfortunately it would appear that all we intend do is tinker with planning (our latest policy wheeze). It will no doubt gain us some time and save a bit of cash in the early stages but as anyone who has ever seen a project S-curve will tell you the impact on outturn costs will be limited. The sheer scale of the reported design changes required by our regulators suggest we have a lot of other systemic problems. A proper, in-depth international benchmarking study would be a better place to start. I've no doubt many of the findings would also be applicable to other major infrastructure projects.
The stop-start nature of our approach doesn't help either; certainly if you want to embed lessons learned from one project to another. Even the gap between Hinckley and Sizewell is too long to avoid a lot of knowledge and experience being lost. It also means that we fail to realise any economies in the wider supply chain, each order is pretty much a one-off. We seem to have gone for a Saville Row approach when with established technology, which PWRs most certainly are, we should be aiming for M&S, maybe John Lewis at a push.
As you point out in the article I too am dumbfounded by our policymakers touching belief that best value is always secured through competition right from the off. Most of my career has been spent in major projects and yes competition can work well when you have a fairly standard development, a number of contractors with direct experience of the project at hand and well defined scopes (this usually means you have to complete at least the Front End Design). It doesn't work well on complex projects, that are effectively a first and the scope is yet to be developed and will keep changing through the project. Better to keep the IP, the engineering design, the procurement and construction management experience with a single organisation (preferably in-house or what used to be called 'owners engineer') and then split the equipment and materials supply and construction contracts up into suitable packages that you can competitively tender where possible; and provide a lot of oversight.
On renewables, again I concur hydro which of course is dispatchable is great, unfortunately we arent Norway. I do hold out a bit of hope for tidal but again, we're not France and I suspect that will be limited.
I do have experience of deploying small'ish scale wind and solar to power oil and gas installations. They work well when you have relatively low demand, you can manage this and the intermittency with batteries, and where there is little or no grid infrastructure and building it would be prohibitively expensive. Ideal in fact for developing nations or for remote or stranded households and communities. Not such a great idea for providing the majority of our baseload generation in a country like the UK. When you add in the short term storage, back-up for Dunkelflaute, network reinforcement and upgrades and the additional costs of providing ancillary services it doesn't take long to realise that we are well on the road to penury.
Some critics I see are promoting smart grids and distributed 'household' and 'community' generation but quite how they expect to run a modern developed, mixed economy with active demand management (interruptible supplies), an inherently less stable power system and satisfy the rising demand from electrification is beyond me.
Unfortunately we already have too much wind and solar in the mix and by 2030, unless there is a change of heart, a lot more. Too few realise that even if we do change tack we are now saddled with the physical and financial legacy of those poor policy choices for decades to come.
I had hoped that the lessons were reasonably clear. First, get serious about adaptation, especially in developing countries. Redirect money currently spent on mitigation to properly designed adaptation efforts. If there is a climate emergency - there isn't one - all logic tells us that this ought to be the first priority as effective adaptation can minimise the economic and human damage. This would buy plenty to manage a more gradual and less costly transition.
Second, don't waste money on renewables but commission a large increase in nuclear power. I have very mixed feelings about large nuclear plants because the nuclear industry has made such a mess of building them, but there is no doubt that the Koreans can build them relatively cheaply. Perhaps more important we should commit £20 to £30 billion to a competition to build a range of SMRs with a promise to commission many more for the ones that deliver in terms of construction time and operating performance. Most important - don't try to pick winners in advance (eg RR) and don't spend ages trying to elaborate subsidy mechanisms. Direct payment and simple incentives are what is needed.
I am not sure what you mean by "extremely disappointing". My view of the record is that it has performed well in countries that invested in building multiple reactors of the same design and in operating them properly. Like other forms of power generation you need scale to build up the core of skills and staff required for effective management and maintenance. US utilities operating significant portfolios of reactors can achieve load factors of 93-95%. That is why I was critical of the UK's not-invented-here syndrome. Sizewell B should not have been one of a kind but one of 8 or 10 similar reactors. Compare the performance of nuclear power in the UK with that in South Korea - chalk and cheese. It is not rocket science but it requires consistency and a commitment to progressive improvement.
Your comments on refusal to make adaptions struck a chord
See every council that has declared a "climate emergency" and hector us to expect more extreme weather. They will spend on a few token rain gardens or SUDS that make nice publicity pictures but won't proactively clear and maintain gullies in the street
A large proportion of what is claimed to be damage due to climate change and changes in extreme events is in reality due to failures to allow properly for pre-existing variability in weather. In one study I carried out a country had set building and infrastructure standards that were barely sufficient to cope with 1 in 5 year storms. When, inevitably, a stronger storm occurred the damage was all said to be due to climate change. But in economic terms they should have adopted standards based on 1 in 20 year or 1 in 50 year storms.
I plan to write more on adaptation. One of the huge problems is the number of people who understand risk analysis is small. We have journalists, the Met Office, etc who rely on shock-horror stories but whose knowledge of even basic probability is effectively zero. Countries get what they deserve. Those which give priority to ignorance and incompetence deserve to lose out to others that are not (or less) captured by cult-like dogmas.
I will think a little more on the issues but I am intrigued about writing an article on maintenance as adaptation.
"Any comparison between DARPA and ARIA highlights how fundamentally unserious the UK government is in its approach to developing and applying new technologies, since its projects are little more than an indulgence of academic and NGO whims"
Is there more behind what you've said than just the strangeness of the geo-engineering project and how much money it has received? I was also surprised by it, but frankly hoped that I was just being cynical and maybe there's a good rationale somewhere.
No I was not just reacting to the geo-engineering projects. My sense from reading through the ARIA website and project lists is that there is a huge difference between the DARPA mode of operation (certainly in the past) and ARIA. Maybe this will change but ARIA seems to fall into the classic UK model of partnerships between academics and companies who pay little attention to the projects and have almost nothing at stake. DARPA was/is much more focused on developing technologies that will be taken up rapidly if the projects come up with something useful. This may reflect the nature of US defence spending and companies.
As a pre-ARIA example, consider the huge quantity of money spent by the UK government on carbon capture with absolutely no practical results so far. I recall giving a talk at a meeting in Aberdeen in about 2016 at which the original Peterhead project was discussed. What has happened? Absolute zilch - and that is so typical of such R&D funding in the UK. Arguably ARIA is designed to correct this, but the endless indecision that is typical of UK R&D programs is not a good starting point. We need programs where there is a clear commitment to follow-up the successful projects with pilot and then full scale implementation.
I was peripherally involved in a CCS project about the same time, quite possibly the same competition that ended up with White Rose being awarded the contract (it then failed). My most notable memories are of the intransigence of the Treasury and its absolute unwillingness to accept risk with public funds — that for what, after all, was a process intended to encourage risk taking so as to move the technology forward. Quite bizarre that they would insist on every partner in a multi-partner project accepting joint and several liability for the whole. No board could accept that.
If we assume that Treasury officials are not totally dumb (they are not) this stance was just a constructive way of killing the exercise. In the case of CCS there was never much justification for amount of money wasted in the UK because it has always focused on minor sources. Peterhead was interesting because it was a large gas power plant and gas was the only important application in the UK, though I doubt whether it will ever be economic.
Another example: why has the British government not allocated a lot of money to getting projects based on NetPower's Allam cycle process off the ground. It works but no one is sure about the costs on a commercial scale. A classic opportunity for serious development funding, but none of the NGO & academic community are interested. All of these cases reinforce my view that the UK funding is just dilettante money for academics.
I always thought the Peterhead application should have been funded. It was the only pre-combustion CCS scheme and the industry scuttlebutt was that somebody needed to prove whether or not CCS was practical in the context of industrial hydrogen production.
Steam reformation of natural gas is the standard way of manufacturing hydrogen for industrial use (fertilisers etc.) and demand was (is?) predicted to rocket as a substitute for carbon in high temperature reduction processes (like making iron).
Nobody wanted to risk mucking up their current production plant by adding CCS and handling gaseous hydrogen is a pain in the neck (which is why it will never fly for transport). Trying it at Peterhead where what was effectively seen as a waste product could be burnt close by was seen as a good idea.
I wasn’t involved in that project, but I don’t think the major players ever thought that using hydrogen in a CCGT was ever the end play, it was being able to economically continue to manufacture industrial hydrogen, which even then was very clearly not going to be replaced by electrolysis in any meaningful manner.
Thank you Gordon: as a keen follower, I think this is my favourite of all your articles, perhaps because it is hard-hitting in all the right places.
I have been lamenting that this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the commencement of power generation of the most recent nuclear reactor to do so, Sizewell B in February 1995, and the waste and loss of direction of the intervening years.
A personal mantra of mine going some way back, is that if I've learned one thing from being an engineer, it is that everything involves trade-offs. It's a simple insight lost on most of the public and its political leaders. I believe that simply having this appreciation makes it harder to entertain luxury beliefs.
Oh, I wish there was a way of making political and bureaucratic policymakers accountable for their recommendations and decisions. Suppose the members and senior staff of the Climate Change Committee were subject to the same legal requirements about future-looking statements that the SEC imposes on companies, so they could be sued for misleading predictions. That would entirely change their behaviour.
It would make a lot of sense if Gordon Hughes, Kathryn Porter and David Turver, replaced the eco loons and grifters on the Climate Change Committee, Miliband is the basic cause of the decline of the UK's industry, all for a tiny increase in CO2. What is the point of racing to be first to destroy our economy, when China, India and now USA are carrying on as normal. Mitigation only works if every country does it. Adaption is our best policy if indeed climate change is actually real!
While I have an exceedingly low opinion of the CCC I am somewhat conflicted because several members of the Committee are former colleagues whom I knew well in the past. In the end the CCC are the messengers - the real problem lies with foolish and craven politicians who are unwilling to say that enough is enough but prefer to fall back on the kind of luxury beliefs that I discuss.
One major problem is that adaptation is unglamorous engineering stuff - whoever got much publicity for proper flood management. And why is no one willing to admit that growing decent grapes in Sussex might be a good thing rather than a disaster? The other thing is that you have to fire the management of the Met Office - and the BBC - to insist that their job is to be impartial and not to cultivate climate scares.
Thanks for this. As an engineer who has followed the evolution of UK policy and the damage caused and the opportunities squandered or missed for what is now almost thirty years, you have filled in many of the blanks.
Interesting that the policy choices that should have been adopted were clear to dispassionate, informed observers in the 90s and are still valid today. The difference being of course that we’ve since tried the alternatives and failed.
I believe that the incompetence with respect to nuclear power is indefensible. The problem 30 years ago - and today - is that it is very capital-intensive and involves long lead times. For power utilities gas will always have the advantage because projects have short lead times and are easily scalable. But that does not excuse governments that claim to be extremely concerned about climate problems 20+ years in the future.
I am ambivalent about renewables other than hydro. My colleagues were right to believe that costs would fall, though they exaggerated the speed and extent of the fall. The real problem was the dogmatic belief that renewables could largely displace controllable sources of power and heat. These were people who never built or managed anything.
There can be a (modest) role for renewables when conditions are favourable, but they are even more capital-intensive than nuclear after one adjusts for load factors.
I wholeheartedly agree; your comment about "people who never built or managed anything" struck a chord, unfortunately it seems to be particularly prevalent in the policy space.
Some thoughts ...
On nuclear it is clear just by comparing ourselves with the South Koreans and Chinese that we could and should do better. Unfortunately it would appear that all we intend do is tinker with planning (our latest policy wheeze). It will no doubt gain us some time and save a bit of cash in the early stages but as anyone who has ever seen a project S-curve will tell you the impact on outturn costs will be limited. The sheer scale of the reported design changes required by our regulators suggest we have a lot of other systemic problems. A proper, in-depth international benchmarking study would be a better place to start. I've no doubt many of the findings would also be applicable to other major infrastructure projects.
The stop-start nature of our approach doesn't help either; certainly if you want to embed lessons learned from one project to another. Even the gap between Hinckley and Sizewell is too long to avoid a lot of knowledge and experience being lost. It also means that we fail to realise any economies in the wider supply chain, each order is pretty much a one-off. We seem to have gone for a Saville Row approach when with established technology, which PWRs most certainly are, we should be aiming for M&S, maybe John Lewis at a push.
As you point out in the article I too am dumbfounded by our policymakers touching belief that best value is always secured through competition right from the off. Most of my career has been spent in major projects and yes competition can work well when you have a fairly standard development, a number of contractors with direct experience of the project at hand and well defined scopes (this usually means you have to complete at least the Front End Design). It doesn't work well on complex projects, that are effectively a first and the scope is yet to be developed and will keep changing through the project. Better to keep the IP, the engineering design, the procurement and construction management experience with a single organisation (preferably in-house or what used to be called 'owners engineer') and then split the equipment and materials supply and construction contracts up into suitable packages that you can competitively tender where possible; and provide a lot of oversight.
On renewables, again I concur hydro which of course is dispatchable is great, unfortunately we arent Norway. I do hold out a bit of hope for tidal but again, we're not France and I suspect that will be limited.
I do have experience of deploying small'ish scale wind and solar to power oil and gas installations. They work well when you have relatively low demand, you can manage this and the intermittency with batteries, and where there is little or no grid infrastructure and building it would be prohibitively expensive. Ideal in fact for developing nations or for remote or stranded households and communities. Not such a great idea for providing the majority of our baseload generation in a country like the UK. When you add in the short term storage, back-up for Dunkelflaute, network reinforcement and upgrades and the additional costs of providing ancillary services it doesn't take long to realise that we are well on the road to penury.
Some critics I see are promoting smart grids and distributed 'household' and 'community' generation but quite how they expect to run a modern developed, mixed economy with active demand management (interruptible supplies), an inherently less stable power system and satisfy the rising demand from electrification is beyond me.
Unfortunately we already have too much wind and solar in the mix and by 2030, unless there is a change of heart, a lot more. Too few realise that even if we do change tack we are now saddled with the physical and financial legacy of those poor policy choices for decades to come.
Interesting background and history, but what should we do, right now, in your opinion?
I had hoped that the lessons were reasonably clear. First, get serious about adaptation, especially in developing countries. Redirect money currently spent on mitigation to properly designed adaptation efforts. If there is a climate emergency - there isn't one - all logic tells us that this ought to be the first priority as effective adaptation can minimise the economic and human damage. This would buy plenty to manage a more gradual and less costly transition.
Second, don't waste money on renewables but commission a large increase in nuclear power. I have very mixed feelings about large nuclear plants because the nuclear industry has made such a mess of building them, but there is no doubt that the Koreans can build them relatively cheaply. Perhaps more important we should commit £20 to £30 billion to a competition to build a range of SMRs with a promise to commission many more for the ones that deliver in terms of construction time and operating performance. Most important - don't try to pick winners in advance (eg RR) and don't spend ages trying to elaborate subsidy mechanisms. Direct payment and simple incentives are what is needed.
Nuclear has been extremely disappointing considering the promise 50 years ago. At least now there is the flexibility to site them more sensibly
I am not sure what you mean by "extremely disappointing". My view of the record is that it has performed well in countries that invested in building multiple reactors of the same design and in operating them properly. Like other forms of power generation you need scale to build up the core of skills and staff required for effective management and maintenance. US utilities operating significant portfolios of reactors can achieve load factors of 93-95%. That is why I was critical of the UK's not-invented-here syndrome. Sizewell B should not have been one of a kind but one of 8 or 10 similar reactors. Compare the performance of nuclear power in the UK with that in South Korea - chalk and cheese. It is not rocket science but it requires consistency and a commitment to progressive improvement.
Disappointing for all the reasons you state, it’s not delivered what it could have
Great article
Your comments on refusal to make adaptions struck a chord
See every council that has declared a "climate emergency" and hector us to expect more extreme weather. They will spend on a few token rain gardens or SUDS that make nice publicity pictures but won't proactively clear and maintain gullies in the street
A large proportion of what is claimed to be damage due to climate change and changes in extreme events is in reality due to failures to allow properly for pre-existing variability in weather. In one study I carried out a country had set building and infrastructure standards that were barely sufficient to cope with 1 in 5 year storms. When, inevitably, a stronger storm occurred the damage was all said to be due to climate change. But in economic terms they should have adopted standards based on 1 in 20 year or 1 in 50 year storms.
I plan to write more on adaptation. One of the huge problems is the number of people who understand risk analysis is small. We have journalists, the Met Office, etc who rely on shock-horror stories but whose knowledge of even basic probability is effectively zero. Countries get what they deserve. Those which give priority to ignorance and incompetence deserve to lose out to others that are not (or less) captured by cult-like dogmas.
I will think a little more on the issues but I am intrigued about writing an article on maintenance as adaptation.
Interested in this comment at the start
"Any comparison between DARPA and ARIA highlights how fundamentally unserious the UK government is in its approach to developing and applying new technologies, since its projects are little more than an indulgence of academic and NGO whims"
Is there more behind what you've said than just the strangeness of the geo-engineering project and how much money it has received? I was also surprised by it, but frankly hoped that I was just being cynical and maybe there's a good rationale somewhere.
No I was not just reacting to the geo-engineering projects. My sense from reading through the ARIA website and project lists is that there is a huge difference between the DARPA mode of operation (certainly in the past) and ARIA. Maybe this will change but ARIA seems to fall into the classic UK model of partnerships between academics and companies who pay little attention to the projects and have almost nothing at stake. DARPA was/is much more focused on developing technologies that will be taken up rapidly if the projects come up with something useful. This may reflect the nature of US defence spending and companies.
As a pre-ARIA example, consider the huge quantity of money spent by the UK government on carbon capture with absolutely no practical results so far. I recall giving a talk at a meeting in Aberdeen in about 2016 at which the original Peterhead project was discussed. What has happened? Absolute zilch - and that is so typical of such R&D funding in the UK. Arguably ARIA is designed to correct this, but the endless indecision that is typical of UK R&D programs is not a good starting point. We need programs where there is a clear commitment to follow-up the successful projects with pilot and then full scale implementation.
I was peripherally involved in a CCS project about the same time, quite possibly the same competition that ended up with White Rose being awarded the contract (it then failed). My most notable memories are of the intransigence of the Treasury and its absolute unwillingness to accept risk with public funds — that for what, after all, was a process intended to encourage risk taking so as to move the technology forward. Quite bizarre that they would insist on every partner in a multi-partner project accepting joint and several liability for the whole. No board could accept that.
If we assume that Treasury officials are not totally dumb (they are not) this stance was just a constructive way of killing the exercise. In the case of CCS there was never much justification for amount of money wasted in the UK because it has always focused on minor sources. Peterhead was interesting because it was a large gas power plant and gas was the only important application in the UK, though I doubt whether it will ever be economic.
Another example: why has the British government not allocated a lot of money to getting projects based on NetPower's Allam cycle process off the ground. It works but no one is sure about the costs on a commercial scale. A classic opportunity for serious development funding, but none of the NGO & academic community are interested. All of these cases reinforce my view that the UK funding is just dilettante money for academics.
I always thought the Peterhead application should have been funded. It was the only pre-combustion CCS scheme and the industry scuttlebutt was that somebody needed to prove whether or not CCS was practical in the context of industrial hydrogen production.
Steam reformation of natural gas is the standard way of manufacturing hydrogen for industrial use (fertilisers etc.) and demand was (is?) predicted to rocket as a substitute for carbon in high temperature reduction processes (like making iron).
Nobody wanted to risk mucking up their current production plant by adding CCS and handling gaseous hydrogen is a pain in the neck (which is why it will never fly for transport). Trying it at Peterhead where what was effectively seen as a waste product could be burnt close by was seen as a good idea.
I wasn’t involved in that project, but I don’t think the major players ever thought that using hydrogen in a CCGT was ever the end play, it was being able to economically continue to manufacture industrial hydrogen, which even then was very clearly not going to be replaced by electrolysis in any meaningful manner.
Thank you Gordon: as a keen follower, I think this is my favourite of all your articles, perhaps because it is hard-hitting in all the right places.
I have been lamenting that this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the commencement of power generation of the most recent nuclear reactor to do so, Sizewell B in February 1995, and the waste and loss of direction of the intervening years.
A personal mantra of mine going some way back, is that if I've learned one thing from being an engineer, it is that everything involves trade-offs. It's a simple insight lost on most of the public and its political leaders. I believe that simply having this appreciation makes it harder to entertain luxury beliefs.
Please keep them coming.
On tradeoffs - the term "everythingism" was coined recently to mock the behaviour, there's a good essay on it if you google the term.
My view is that it stems from a lack of accountability ultimately.
Oh, I wish there was a way of making political and bureaucratic policymakers accountable for their recommendations and decisions. Suppose the members and senior staff of the Climate Change Committee were subject to the same legal requirements about future-looking statements that the SEC imposes on companies, so they could be sued for misleading predictions. That would entirely change their behaviour.