Making the North Sea great again

The North Sea spans 570,000 square kilometers, with shallow waters rarely more than 90 meters in depth. It has provided bounties and dangers in equal measure. Its stock of fish has been a source of energy from food for centuries, but the shipwrecks and hymn books testify to the financial costs and lost lives. More recently, the North Sea oil and gas industry has yielded new energy possibilities but brought its own human and financial risks.

Now a new storm is gathering with the ‘petro to electro’ shift across the UK economy. Yet once more, the North Sea obliges with opportunities and risks.

Its breezes make it one of the best global locations for offshore wind electricity generation. This leverages our existing marine expertise and provides employment to coastal communities. To complement it, we have onshore wind, hydro, and solar. The energy source for all these technologies is the sun - directly for solar PV, indirectly for hydro (the water cycle) and wind (temperature differences in the atmosphere).

But any transformation towards a dominant supplier, even the sun, comes with risks.

Consecutive dark winter days and nights without wind (so-called ‘dunkelflauten’) present challenges. Even more serious are longer-term sabbaticals and changes in nature’s rhythms. Overall, nature can bring an unexpected sting in the tail, as the dinosaurs found out.

Thankfully, the North Sea offers more than the solar-driven winds - helping us to diversify and defy the evolutionary odds.

In the eighth century, the Venerable Bede, a Saxon monk from Jarrow, documented “the harmony of the moon and the sea” along the northeastern coast. Implicitly, he had found an invisible hand that we can use to our energy advantage today - the North Sea is like an enormous tidal pool sitting on our shore.

Tides are driven by a gravitational dance - principally between the moon and earth – not solar radiation. Crests and troughs in the Atlantic send their regular pulse speeding around our coasts. In time, electricity generated from these tides could yield a natural diversification to today’s main renewable technologies.

So too could geothermal energy – the energy beneath our feet – which offers further diversification benefits. Available 24/7, it is impervious to sun and tides which helps to buffer system risks. Our European friends across the North Sea have been quicker than us to develop geothermal heat possibilities onshore, using offshore oil expertise, adding a whole new angle to “drill baby drill.”

And, of course, we have diversification options through other low-carbon technologies - the North Sea already cools part of our nuclear fleet and may do so with any new reactors. Another is the network of seabed cables that connects us to Europe’s low-carbon electricity.

Beyond all that, the fossil fuels still lying under the North Sea will remain essential to the UK for years to come, with or without carbon capture. Longer term, they might even form a strategic energy reserve in case an unanticipated Black Swan comes to visit.

So, we’re not short of options for our future energy needs - the North Sea offers many possibilities. All come with technological and environmental risks, and uncertain system costs, but the good news is we have options.

Arguably the greatest risk now lies in energy policy itself. There are difficult tradeoffs between the environment, energy security, community cohesion, income distribution, intergenerational fairness, and economic efficiency. Ultimately, such choices are made at the ballot box and in the marketplace.

A wise energy policy in these circumstances needs imagination. It can best help if it is holistic, adaptable, long-term, and broadly pro-competition - not siloed, brittle, myopic, and hostage to vested interests.

Given the system uncertainties and potential social costs, it should aim to avoid the worst outcomes by including reasonable diversification and utilising reserves.

More generally, it should encourage discovery - allowing investment options to thrive or wither in response to hard evidence. Deeper carbon and nature markets, and support for our research universities, can help this process.

Whatever course we set, there is no UK energy utopia in sight. However, that “old, old sea” as Conan Doyle referred to it - with its pulsating tides - will surely play an important role. We should treasure it as a foundational asset of nature. Cardiac arrest in our energy system is the last thing we need right now.