Bryan Leyland is a distinguished Fellow of the Institution of Professional Engineers, New Zealand, with expertise in hydropower. On Friday, March 8, 2024, he delivered a PowerPoint presentation to the West Auckland Men’s Rebus Club, explaining why achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 or earlier is impossible due to numerous technical and practical reasons.
While his talk was summarised in the West Auckland Men’s Club’s April 2024 newsletter, the significance of the topic warranted a more comprehensive account than the space available in the newsletter.
On Sunday, August 24, 2025, a blog post titled “John Raine and Bryan Leyland: A Realistic Energy Feature” appeared on the popular Bassett, Brash & Hide website. This post generated considerable discussion, including comments from Stephen Becket, the Deputy Chair of Rebus New Zealand.
The blog post served as a catalyst for producing a more detailed account of Bryan Leyland’s presentation, which he titled “Net Zero: The Dream and The Reality.” Bryan Leyland has subsequently delivered this presentation to other organisations, including the Pakuranga Rotary Club in May 2025.
Net Zero: The Dream vs. Reality
Well, this presentation is all about net zero—the dream and the reality. The dream is windmills going around, and all the lights are on. The reality is that quite frequently the wind doesn’t blow, and you’re back to candles. Yes, that’s the reality.
The Impossible Math of Net Zero
To get to net zero, we must electrify transport and heating, backed by a dramatic expansion of wind and solar generation. That shift demands a leap in our electricity generation capacity—from today’s 9,000 MW, built up over more than a century, to around 26,000 MW. Why such a steep increase —far beyond average demand? Because renewables like wind and solar are intermittent: the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine.
Keeping the lights on all the time also requires approximately 4,000 MW of short- and long-term energy storage. No existing technology can deliver this scale of storage reliably and affordably.
So the questions remain: Can we triple our generation capacity and build the storage infrastructure needed for net zero? If so, what will it cost—and can we afford it?
The Climate Reality Check
If there’s one thing I want you to realise—and it’s something nobody gets told—New Zealand cannot affect the climate. Nothing that we do will affect our climate. And yet everything that you’re being told, and I mean everything, implies that if we mend our ways and stop burning coal, the climate will get better.
For the moment, the climate is not really bad. It’s always changing. We cannot affect the climate, and here’s why: There are coal-fired power plants and gas-fired power stations all over the world. You’d have to shut them down. What then is going to keep the world running? You can’t do it. There’s no certainty that shutting down coal-fired and gas-fired power stations will make any difference to the climate anyway.
Look at global energy consumption. Fossil fuels produce most of the world’s energy. Nuclear and hydro produce most of the rest. Wind and solar produce only a bit. That’s where the world’s energy comes from. You’re told we’re getting rid of fossil fuels by 2050. Wind power will go off when the wind stops. That doesn’t happen with fossil fuels.
New Zealand’s Energy Challenge
Most of New Zealand’s electricity—65%—comes from hydro. Geothermal provides 18%, which is really good; you could probably do with more. Gas, which we haven’t got enough of because Jacinda stopped exploration for more, provides 12%. Getting rid of gas (12%) and coal (4%) is a big job. Not as big as other countries face, but still big.
Before we had this crazy electricity market, the power planners were concentrating on one objective: How do I keep the lights on in a dry year? If they fulfilled that, everything else was okay. There were no problems. We’re currently short on generating capacity. Transpower has publicly warned that there’s a big chance of blackouts during peak demand periods if the wind’s not blowing. How did we get into this situation?
The Market Chaos
Let me show you a winter night—3 July 2023. Hydro’s running quite hard at 4,222 MW. We haven’t got much left. Wind’s quite good at 684 MW. Battery’s down here doing nothing: 0 MW. We’ve got 35 MW of the stupid things.
Now this is what happens to the price. The wind doesn’t blow, and the price on the spot market is 60 cents a kilowatt hour. You’re paying 30 cents at the meter. A few hours later, the price on the spot market is nothing. How can anyone manage a system or a generating plant or predict if the power station’s going to make money with a market like that?
The Flawed Commission Report
We have this dream from the Climate Commission. It followed a perfectly good report from the Interim Committee on Climate Change, which had engineering input. It said, forget about net zero power generation—you’re always going to need about 5% of fossil fuels for dry years. The government threw that report away and formed the Climate Commission, which had virtually no engineering expertise. The only engineer on it was useless—I know that. And they came up with this fantasy. They only went as far as 2035, but if you extend it out to 2050, they’ve got an additional 12,000 MW of wind and solar. They have virtually no increase in geothermal and no increase in hydro. Why they think geothermal won’t increase, I don’t know. But it’s impossible. By 2050, there’s a projected 24,000 MW of power installed, and there’s a peak of only 11,000 MW. And they haven’t got the storage we need to keep the lights on—there is no mention of storage in their report.
The Economic Destruction
Net zero is crazy beyond belief. It will cripple our economy. Electricity will become expensive and unreliable. How can you run a dairy factory threatened with a power cut halfway through milk production? How can you run a steel mill when there’s a power blackout? How can you run an aluminium smelter when the power goes off for 12 hours and all your pots freeze? It takes days, maybe weeks, to get back into production.
Agricultural income would decrease. All the dairy processing would be much more expensive. Forest processing industries would close down—they just couldn’t compete with overseas. It would be more and more logs being exported. Steel wouldn’t close down because they’re putting in this new arc furnace. However, it means they will need more power. And regardless of your belief in man-made global warming, it cannot make any difference to New Zealand’s climate. All of this money is being squandered—all of it, every single penny. It’s all virtue signalling with no reward.
Life Without Oil
But just consider life without oil. Forty-six per cent of oil goes to transport, but the rest goes to medicine, cosmetics, plastics, rubber, soaps, and asphalt. Can we do without all those things? If I said “go away, plastics” right now, most of you would be naked. If I said “go away, plastics” to your car, you’d be left with a tin box. Plastics are part of our life, and that’s it. We’ve got to manage them rather than pretend they’re so evil that we’ve got to get rid of them.
The Professor’s Analysis
Professor Kelly is a friend of mine and a very eminent New Zealand engineer. He went to Cambridge, and he’s a member of the Royal Society of Engineering. He did a careful analysis of what it would cost New Zealand to achieve net zero by 2050: five hundred and fifty billion dollars for nothing. For no change in climate. For now and forever. All that money squandered.
Net zero by 2050 would also require a doubling of the present number of electrical engineers—where are they going to come from? We’re short on engineers across the board. New Zealand would need 10% of the global annual production of lithium, cobalt, neodymium, and other materials. What are all the other countries going to do for those materials if little New Zealand is taking 10% of them?
The Storage Problem
In a 1-in-20 dry year, hydro generation drops about 50% over a four-month period. Dry years are quite short and quite intense. Wind power can drop to less than 15% for days on end, and this happens quite often. The Germans call it a Dunkelflaute—a wind drought. Solar power generation works for about six hours a day and drops to 25% on a cloudy day. During peak demand periods, it will be off. All our peak times are in the evening.
With wind and solar, we need to store energy to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing, the sun isn’t shining. There is no technology that will do the job of storing energy. What all the other countries will be doing is burning gas when the wind doesn’t blow. We haven’t got the gas, thanks to Jacinda, and it’s going to get worse.
A million tons of coal at Huntly will keep the lights on in a dry year. Capital cost: two or three hundred million dollars. It just sits there. In a dry year, we burn it and we replenish it. All Huntly’s coal is from Indonesia, but that’s the only way to procure it because it’s a fluctuating demand depending on the climate.
Lake Onslow pumped storage, which has now been abandoned, was ten years away and provided only 1,000 MW to 1,500 MW of generation capacity—nowhere near 4,000 MW. It was never designed to back up wind and solar anyway. It was designed only for dry years. Pumped storage has environmental implications, takes years to get approved, and is hugely expensive. You can build a nuclear power station for the same price, and you know it would generate electricity. Pumped storage wastes twenty-five per cent of the power input.
The Offshore Wind Delusion
Offshore wind power—they’re talking about that again. It’s hopeless. I was just looking at the subsidies provided in the UK for offshore wind power. Even when available, they were difficult to secure. Then there’s floating offshore wind power, which is even more expensive. What does the UK do? If you build floating offshore wind power, they give you an even bigger subsidy. Why should one form of power be more valuable than another?
There are huge operational maintenance costs with offshore wind power. When a storm hits, you need a massive ship that can steam out and jack itself up to remove the blades—which break every five years or so. Generating 900 MW requires 65 offshore windmills.
Each base requires a huge expanse of funnel-shaped concrete. Are they cheap? Can they generate cheap power? Not a bloody chance. Even if the wind turbines were on land, you’d still need hundreds of cubic meters of concrete per turbine. I don’t know why anyone is even considering offshore wind generation in New Zealand. I suspect they want government money to investigate it so they can pretend it’s feasible.
The Electric Car Myth
Here’s electric car economics: cost (electric car $60,000; diesel car $40,00), road user charges, charging, and depreciation. I calculated the depreciation at the same rate as for a conventional car, which is not true for an electric car—the result was $1.38 per kilometre. The biggest factor was depreciation. My diesel car, a Skoda station wagon that goes 60 miles to the gallon on a trip, costs 80 cents a kilometre.
An electric car is an expensive conventional car with a small fuel tank that takes 30 minutes to fill. That’s all right if you want to feel good and show off, but it’s not practical at all. If you go to Elon Musk’s electric ute, the weight goes up to three and a half tonnes. You’ve got to have a special driver’s license because it’s overweight. You’re carting around this huge weight of batteries and losing payload the whole time.
Look at the number of passenger vehicles in the world. Since 2005, it’s gone from about 600 million to 1,400 million. During that time, electric cars have gone from nothing to about eight million. How long will it take for the number of electric cars to go up to where 25% of the cars are electric?
The Nuclear Solution
If you want clean energy, nuclear is the answer. Twenty-odd years ago, I believed in global warming. Then I realised there were a lot of people who were pushing global warming and hated nuclear power. I thought, this doesn’t figure. I looked at it further and became a climate skeptic. The more I looked into it, the more shocking the arguments got.
In Leibstadt, Switzerland, there is a modern 1,200-megawatt reactor. It will produce reliable power for 40 to 60 years. To supply the same power from wind would require 240 wind turbines, each with a capacity of 5 MW. They would take up an area of 300 square kilometres and have a life of about 20 years.
Small, modular nuclear power reactors will soon be available. They can be mass-produced, are completely safe, can’t explode, and cannot melt down. The problem is that this technology is drowning in regulations. It will take NuScale, which has been working on a combined containment vessel and reactor system, far longer to get through the regulatory process than it will take to design and build the reactor.
My hydro scheme’s generating plant is 100 years old, and that’s going to keep going for plenty of years yet. Wind farms and batteries don’t last longer than 20 years and need much more maintenance than conventional plants.
The Radiation Reality
One of the big problems with nuclear is that everybody is being told that low levels of radiation are dangerous. Well, the evidence is not there. The evidence is that 5% of people who experience intense radiation later die of radiation-induced cancer. The death rate of the people who were exposed in Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb—post-1950—was only 5% higher than the rest of the population. And that’s within statistical uncertainty. Low levels of radiation are not dangerous.
Radiation that is less than about 2,000 mSv (milli-Sieverts) doesn’t do you any harm at all—there is no evidence of any harm at these levels. Nobody needed to be evacuated from Fukushima. It killed probably 1,500 people from the dislocation of moving. More people died in Tokyo because they shut down all the nuclear stations, had power shortages, and they died of heat exhaustion because there was no air-conditioning.
This “S” shaped curve is developed from radiating rats. The figures marked on it come from Chernobyl. So down here at about 1,000 mSV, which is about 1,000 times the so-called safe level, 140 people were exposed to this level of radiation and nobody died. Of the 55 people exposed to between 2000 mSv and 3,000 mSv, one died. Those exposed at a 5000 mSv, 7 out of 21 died. Up here at 8000 mSv, 20 out of 21 died. The reality is radiation overcomes your immune system and you die. And if it doesn’t overcome your immune system’s ability to cope, you live happily ever after. With high levels of radiation, you’re either dead in three weeks or you’re okay. And so we spend billions of dollars protecting people against levels of radiation that are quite safe.
The Gas Alternative
Why aren’t we going for gas to shut down coal? Gas has half the emissions of coal. Because of Jacinda. The USA has reduced atmospheric emissions by switching from coal to gas. New Zealand has banned further gas exploration. All over Europe, there are fields of shale gas. The gas is recovered through fracking. England has two shale gas wells ready to produce, but they’ve been capped because when they commenced fracking, they produced an earthquake, which was a bit over magnitude one. We get hundreds of them every day. We get magnitude two every day. We get magnitude three every few days—magnitudes you can’t even feel.
But the Russians funded environmental groups in Europe, the USA, and England to oppose fracking so they could continue selling natural gas to Europe. And they succeeded. Still, none of the countries are responding by saying, “Let’s exploit our shale gas.”
America has exploited its shale gas. As a result of their gas becoming available, they are able to export LNG to Europe. If Europe exploited its own shale gas, it wouldn’t need to import LNG.
Editor’s Note: Shale Gas in New Zealand
In 2011, L&M Energy identified significant potential for shale gas in the South Island of New Zealand, particularly in the Waiau Basin in western Southland and on the Canterbury Plains, applying for exploration permits across more than 26,000 km². The company believed these deposits could rival the productivity of some of the best US shale formations, with extraction dependent on the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) technique.
Net Zero is Doomed
Net zero is doomed. Just look at these newspaper headlines: “Europe’s consensus on climate change is crumbling” (New Statesman, 28 February 2024). “Politicians in the US across Europe backpedal on climate goals ahead of elections this year” (Bloomberg, 29 February 2024). “Net zero targets have hamstrung British prosperity” (The Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2024).
By pursuing net zero, you’re destroying industry when the evidence for man-made global warming is very weak. Scientifically acceptable evidence is hard to find. I’ve spent 25 years looking for it. When the Royal Society of New Zealand was asked to give us evidence of global warming based on real-world data, they said they were relying on consensus. When the Climate Commission was asked the same question, after a long correspondence, the Chief Executive, Jo Hendy, said, “We rely on the consensus of climate scientists.” We all say it, so it must be true. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also gave the same answer.
Consensus rules in politics, and evidence rules in science. Einstein said, “One paper can prove me wrong.”
The RCP 8.5 Scandal
The IPCC has a whole lot of emissions scenarios where they hypothesize how much coal, gas, and oil we’ll burn between now and 2100 and they feed this into climate programs, which tell us how much warmer the world will get. There’s one document called RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) 8.5, which was developed by a group of researchers in 2014 and meant to be a worst-case scenario. It assumed we would burn more and more coal because in those days, they didn’t know about shale—it hadn’t been developed. RCP 8.5 predicts burning more coal than exists in the world.
More recently, the IPCC has said this scenario is now totally unrealistic and should not be used for policy making. Every government department and organisation in New Zealand still uses predictions based on RCP 8.5. If they did nothing more than say, “Let’s go to RCP 4.5,” which everybody seems to think is the right one, the whole global climate emergency hysteria would just disappear overnight. RCP 4.5 says the climate might change a bit, but she’ll be right.
Editor’s Note: RCPs–Global warming effect and units used (W/ m²; E J)
RCP 8.5 is a “business-as-usual” high-emissions pathway where minimal action is taken to curb climate change. RCP 8.5 results in a global temperature increase of approximately 4–5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, based on current climate models and scientific consensus.
RCP 4.5 requires reductions in some forms of energy production, particularly in the use of coal, and increases in other forms of energy production, including gas and nuclear. RCP 4.5 is projected to limit warming to around 2–3°C above pre-industrial levels.
RCP 2.6 demands aggressive mitigation (including rapid decarbonisation) to keep warming below 2°C and aligns with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
RCP numbers, e.g. RCP 8.5, RCP 4.5 and RCP 2.6, are a measure of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. The units are watts per square metre (W/ m²) e.g. under RCP 8.5 the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases is 8.5 watts per square metre (W/ m²).
The vertical axis is graduated in exajoules (EJ). An exajoule is a vast unit of energy equivalent to 10¹⁸ joules—100 EJ is roughly the amount of energy the world currently uses in about two months.
The Failed Predictions
If we look at the predictions from climate models and the reality, according to all these climate models—which should all give the same result if they are any good—warming between 1973 and 2022 should have been somewhere between 0.3 degrees and 0.7 degrees. The actual increase was 0.28 degrees. None of them were right.
Realistic Alternatives
The government has to consider realistic options. If large-scale renewable electricity sources such as wind and solar are introduced, heavy industries will close down, and the economy will nosedive. But one thing you can be sure of, as I’ve said—the climate won’t change.
The government could consider replacing coal with more hydropower, geothermal, and gas. We’ve got the potential to add several thousand megawatts of hydropower. Who’s stopping it? The Greenies. They believe global warming will be stopped with renewable energy. They like hydro and think it’s really good if it meets their requirements. However, nothing meets their requirements.
We could have switched to modern, efficient conventional vehicles because there are new engines around—diesel and so on—with much less fuel consumption than conventional engines. My previous car did 25 miles per gallon on a trip. My current car gets 60 miles per gallon on a trip. In the last 20 years, there’s been a major change, and there are other, better engines in the pipeline. But nobody wants to invest money in internal combustion engines because they’re supposed to be all phased out.
The Bottom Line
Simply adapting to climate change as and when it happens would manage any climate problem. The climate is always changing. It has always changed. They say this year’s the worst in a hundred years. So it was worse a hundred years ago. They don’t go back a thousand years because we haven’t got records. But for sure it was worse a thousand years ago at some stage. We had the Little Ice Age; we had the Medieval Warm Period where it got much warmer than now. And what happened? They had so much surplus wealth they were building great cathedrals.
You pay all these costs—higher electricity bills, subsidies for wind and solar, expensive electric cars, the whole net zero transition—and you get nothing for it. It won’t change the climate. There is no possible advantage except that we feel good. We can then go around the world saying, “Aren’t we wonderful?” And I say no, you’re mad.
