In the realm of science, few politicians are more powerful than Baroness Brown. As the chair of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, her remit is to consider the boundaries of Britain’s future: from AI to medicine, from biotechnology to climate change.
Of all these subjects, it is the latter that appears to interest Brown most. Indeed, not only does her work concern crafting Britain’s new energy strategy — she also stands to benefit from it.
There is no suggestion that Brown, a cross-bench peer known as Julia King before she was ennobled in 2015, has done anything unlawful, and in an email to UnHerd she stressed that her “integrity is critical”. Nevertheless, some of the entities now paying her may well come to benefit from the policies she has championed — including a decision by the new Labour government to invest at least £500 million in an unproven technology designed to store electricity.
In the middle of March, Brown’s committee published a report on “long-duration energy storage”. It took as read what some energy experts consider to be a controversial claim: that power generated by renewables such as wind farms and solar panels is cheaper than that from natural gas. The report’s main focus, however, was a large, unavoidable problem: what happens when there’s high demand for electricity, but the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?
The solution it offered was certainly a novel one: a process known as “green hydrogen”. This would use electricity to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which would then be stored underground in salt caverns or disused natural gas reservoirs; when demand increased, it could then be burnt in adapted power plants to generate more electricity.
Such a proposal may sound like futuristic genius, but it wasn’t without its critics. In his evidence to the committee, Michael Liebreich, one of Britain’s foremost experts on green energy finance and technology, pointed out that green hydrogen is much more expensive to handle than that made by other means, such as “blue hydrogen”, which uses natural gas. In fact, turning “overhyped” green hydrogen into electricity effectively triples the original energy’s cost, because the process of doing so needs so much power. Undaunted, the committee said the government must “engage and communicate” with the public to cure “misperceptions”, in order to “ensure support for vital hydrogen and electricity infrastructure”.
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