A leaked report estimates that the cost of decommissioning Britain’s gas grid, as part of the country’s goal to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050, could total £65 billion, with households picking up the tab. The Telegraph has more.
Households face an estimated bill of £2,300 each to shut down Britain’s gas grid as part of the Government’s drive towards Net Zero, a leaked draft of an official report suggests.
The cost of decommissioning the grid could reach a total of £65 billion, according to a draft National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) report.
It is the first time a public body has examined the future of the 176,000-mile network of buried pipes, which serves eight in ten homes but risks becoming obsolete under plans to reach Net Zero carbon emissions. Unused pipes must be removed or they risk decay and experts fear the potential collapse of roads.
Households could be left to foot the bill through higher energy bills or taxes since there is no provision for decommissioning in current government budgets, and energy companies are not obliged to cover the costs.
The NIC did not dispute the figures when contacted, although an insider insisted the report was a draft and could change before final publication next month.
The NIC believes the grid could theoretically be converted to carry hydrogen, which is cleaner, but that would also come at cost of “tens of billions of pounds” and there are doubts over the suitability of hydrogen as a mass heating solution.
Senior Conservatives said the figures raised serious questions about the Government’s plan to reach Net Zero by 2050.
Craig Mackinlay, a Tory MP who chairs the Net Zero Scrutiny Group in Parliament, said: “Bit by bit, the true astronomical cost of Net Zero is being revealed, and it’s far from clear the products we are being forced to switch to are any better than their forebears.
“The forced conversion from gas boilers to heat pumps appears to be a case in point; it will also leave the country with a vast network of redundant infrastructure that will take tens of billions of pounds to decommission.
“I’m worried the command and control approach to Net Zero that the Government is taking will leave us with a cost of living crisis that stretches far into the future.”
The prospect of hydrogen heating looked “dead in the water”, Mr. Mackinlay added, after Grant Shapps, the former Energy Secretary, appeared to rule it out in July.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Business and Energy Secretary, said the Government’s Net Zero plans were “stuck in cloud cuckoo land”.
He said: “The Government cannot decommission the gas grid, because it can’t afford to.
“They have got to look very seriously at whether the legal obligation to reach Net Zero is realistic.”
However, Kwasi Kwarteng, another former business and energy secretary, said the costs of decommissioning was “hypothetical”.
He said: “Given the infrastructure we’ve got, it doesn’t make sense to decommission the whole grid at vast expense. I cannot see a government doing that.
“It’s unrealistic to expect that all household heating in this country will be electrified.”
Under current proposals for households and businesses to “stop unabated burning of natural gas”, ministers are backing electric heat pumps as the main replacement for gas-fired boilers.
But if most households ditch their boilers, the existing gas grid cannot just be switched off and left in the ground due to safety concerns.
One industry source said: “We’ve got large-diameter pipes criss-crossing major cities. If we were to just turn them off and not maintain them, they would decay – and roads could start falling in.
Worth reading in full.
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F’ing lunatics.
When did we vote on making net zero by 2050 a legal obligation?
How to engineer the total collapse of a nation-state(s). By Klaus Schwab
The lunatics are actually running the asylum!
“You VILL eat ze bugs!”
The lunatics know exactly what they are doing, they are bankrupting the country and its citizens such that the politicians friends in Blackrock, Vanguard etc can buy your homes, state assets etc at bargain bucket prices and then tie us into feudalism by charging us rent etc to live in and use things that once belonged to us and which we paid a heavy price for.
That’s the real explanation Hester.
Agreed but it’s still madness.
It was in all their manifesto’s and waved through without a single question asked as an amendment in 2019 to the Climate Change Act of 2008. ——They have us all by the short and curlies as this is enshrined in law, and that means it MUST be done no matter the cost or absurdity. With YOU the big time loser
The Act could be repealed or amended. It must be. We need to agitate to see this as a commitment in party manifestos.
Yes it MUST be repealed. —-But “MUST BE” according to who? —–Net Zero was approved by all of the main political parties. None of those squirming politicians even asked a question as to the cost/benefit of this absurdity. So none of those parasites are going to repeal it are they? So who is going to repeal it? ——It is ok for us all on the Daily Sceptic all agreeing it should be repealed but who is listening to us? —-Very few and certainly not the pretend to save the planet politicians sucking up to the UN Eco Socialists.
Have you seen the joke we’re a really stupid idiot sits at the end of the branch while he saws it off?
!
Welcome to 21st century UK
Sounds about right
Blair’s Britain, aided and abetted by Cameron, Bunter and May.
Good luck with the next election….not!
Vote for an independent candidate.
As I told Lee Anderson by email “Sorry Lee me duck, but I’ll vote for a goat if one stands in Ashfield!”
This proposal is treacherous and the composers of the document should be regarded as acting against the State . It is remarkable to note the laid back nature of the likes of Rees-Mogg and Kwarteng who by their response appear to almost condone this nonsense . It would seem we live in Totalitarian State which allows voting , but all parties are in line to destroy the British Economy and standard of living .
They seem to believe they can just dip into our wallets whenever they wish.
If a credible anti-net-zero party emerged who wouldn’t vote for them?
It is called Reform!
“Households face an estimated bill of £2,300 each to shut down Britain’s gas grid as part of the Government’s drive towards Net Zero, a leaked draft of an official report suggests.”
Then followed by starvation and civil war. What underpins the modern world and the world’s 8 billion population is industrial farming and cheap reliable fossil fuel produced energy. Nuclear is the only viable alternative to oil, coal and gas.
Buckminster Fuller was an Architect, Systems Theorist, Author, Designer, Inventor and Futurist. He imagined a world using solar power using giant solar arrays orbiting the earth, but this is what he wrote about the energy producing networks as they were in the 1960s and when the global population was around 4 billion:
“Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world’s politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.
Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor’s intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world transforming and world shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the design-science revolution. Despite this historical demonstrable fact, world society as yet persists in looking exclusively to its politicians and their ideologues for world problem solving.”
That’s hilarious. I’m in Northern Ireland, a new gas supply was brought to my property boundary by gas infrastructure company Firmus about 3 years ago.
Can’t decide whether ‘our betters’ are stunningly clever and using their apparent incoherence, contradiction and terminal incompetence as weapons/feints to permanently wrongfoot us, defuse resistance and sap morale; or whether they may just be complete psycho basket cases who should be permanently sealed up, like nuclear waste, for the public good. I suppose they may be both?
I cannot understand how they can be without any foresight as to their policies, despite being told by myself and colleagues. They are certainly both and should be locked up forever!
What makes Net Zero so insulting is the fact that it is impossible for it to achieve its stated goals of altering the weather. And yet we’re going to spend billions on it in the UK, in the Western World we’ll spend trillions.
If every Western nation achieves Net Zero by 2050, billions of people will die around the world from starvation (Net Zero’s destruction of industrialised agriculture) and cold (not enough energy to keep the lights on and heat homes).
And the weather will not have changed one iota as a result.
“If every Western nation achieves Net Zero by 2050, billions of people will die around the world from starvation (Net Zero’s destruction of industrialised agriculture) and cold (not enough energy to keep the lights on and heat homes).”
…erm….that is the intention.
O/T but notice that Rory Stewart’s sob-piece reported in DM about the terrible pressures MPs are under, driving them towards breakdown and suicidal thoughts, isn’t exactly attracting a sympathetic response from btl commentators. Quite a few home truths being lobbed.
Well, all I can say is that I hope my MP, Rachel Reeves, is having a hard time and learning something in the process. I’ve been laying it out for her, in writing, in pretty respectable but totally unambiguous terms for at least a couple of years. She must be living in denial; she’s aged quite a lot since “the pandemic”. But after it all, I am pretty sure she went into this as just a useful idiot…
£65billion to decommission the gas network is chicken feed compared with the total costs of net zero. I did a very rough estimate of the cost of battery storage needed if there’s no fossil fuel generation based on the figures for wind and solar output so far this month and total demand. Wind speeds this month have been lower than average this month, but similar periods of low winds will happen fairly frequently and need to be accounted for. The 2 big unknowns are how much nuclear capacity we’ll have in 20 years time and future prices for the lithium, cobalt etc. needed for the batteries. If a lot of countries try and achieve net zero demand for minerals will increase massively and prices will be sky high.
A fairly conservative estimate for the cost of battery storage is £3trillion, the actual cost could well be £5trillion or more. If the batteries have an average useful life of 10 years we could be spending £500billion a year just on storage, let alone all the other costs of net zero.
Maybe the government has grown so used to printing money that they think they can keep doing it forever. Maybe they have zero numeracy skills or common sense.
Yes Matt, they really do have: “they have zero numeracy skills or common sense.” They have been told, but they carry on. I think that they are being held hostage by an external force, and the Civil Service to do all these stupid things. The question of WHY is still completely unanswered. Essentially it is Treason.
“Essentially it is Treason.”
A point I have made repeatedly for many months.
Have they been told? The Climate Change Committee, and various other groups have estimated the cost of net zero to be as low as £1.4trillion, because it seems likely they haven’t thought about electricity storage. If we didn’t need the massive amounts this might not be too far from reality and if it was a one of expense because wind turbines, EV’s etc. lasted 2 or 3 times longer than they actually do it might be affordable, which isn’t to sat that it’s money that needs to be spent.
Households Face £2,300 Bills to Decommission Gas Grid Under Net-Zero Plans
Actually, no they don’t.
Households will pay an increased tax levy amounting to up to £2,300 pa as a result of government incompetence.
Sorted.
This is all completely insane! For me the only way to understand it is to recognise that we now have a pseudo religious Doomsday/death cult in total control of Western civilisation.
Those of us who can see through the hoax/madness can only look on in disbelief.
Perhaps power cuts, mass deaths from hypothermia and civil unrest might be the only way to jolt us out of this?
The decline of the Roman Empire is taking place right in front of your eyes, do you see it yet?
It looks like a scare story about the financial effect of the proposed policy. It says nothing about what has been done recently, and is still being developed. That is, upgrading the pipework to accept blending hydrogen and methane gas in the system. E.g. https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2022/01/britain-s-gas-grid-preparing-to-accept-20-per-cent-hydrogen-mix-by-2023/
I know that lots of old iron gas pipes (which would not be suitable for H without leakage) have been replaced locally over the last few years.
The IET is a completely corrupt organisation now. Their Magazine is just left wing nonsense throughout, strangely the staff used to run electronics weekly before they ruined that with the same rubbish!
methane + hydrogen under pressure . . .
My memories of school chemistry ring alarm bells . . .
Lets face it the reality is any estimated costs will be vastly underestimated as all Government projects, the NHS failed computer overhaul, HS2, spending on warships, and planes, always at least 50% uner estimated.
What a joke
At the rate they are borrowing, the country will have gone bust long before 2050 so I wouldn’t be too worried about this.
Your quite right about going bust first, but as long as you have a job with government you should be alright. The fear of roads falling in because of rotting pipes is a joke, they are actively trying to remove cars from the road as it is. Roads falling in will only be bigger pot holes to the ones we already have
The best heating system we ever had or are likely to ever have is as with every bit of fantastic technology that gives us our prosperity and well being to be REMOVED by the pretend to save the planet eco socialist scumbags. Wakey wakey people you better stock up on pullovers because your new heat Pump won’t cut it and the scumbags know that. You are secondary to the UN and it’s Sustainable Devlopment lowering of western living standards that your own parasite politicians are fully onboard with.
I know that new housing developments in the UK are being built without mains gas supply. Have any housing estates with existing gas supply been told that gas will be shut off from a particular date? If so, what sort of notice period has been given?
I can’t see any practical way the gas grid could be closed down except by withdrawing service area by area. If ‘they’ have not yet given notice anywhere then eliminating domestic gas consumption by 2050 seems very unlikely – thank goodness.
“….experts fear the potential collapse of roads”. When has a collapsing ever worried the authorities?
You’ll need to dig trenches to lay in the new electrical cabling that will be needed in every street so do it at the same time – we can all do without heat and light while they do it. Oh hang on, we’ll have to do without anyway!
Is there a straight jacket large enough to encompass the Houses of Parliament, as clearly they are all bar one or two completely barking?
Dagenham at least.
Why would such solid pipes buried several feet down cause collapses in the road surface? In the unlikely event that the gas distribution network were abandoned all that would be necessary would be to flush the gas out of the pipes. Another nonsense report commissioned at great expense.
If we’re that worried about pipes collapsing after the gas is removed, pump in liquid concrete. Better be damn sure that we’ve done with them first though!
What a pity!
We´ve just sent all those £billions to the Ukraine . . .