There’s been a lot of noise about Keir Starmer’s decision to scrap Labour’s £28 billion green spending pledge. But there’s a much bigger green Labour pledge that’s being overlooked, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
In the melee a more rash policy has been overlooked: Labour’s pledge to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – which brings the present Government’s target forward by five years. This is one of the five great ‘missions’ laid out in the party’s pre-manifesto pitch, along with the creation of a state-owned company, Great British Energy, to achieve it. Not only will it save carbon emissions, Labour claims (without any evidence or published workings) but it will also save us an enormous amount of money, taking “up to £1,400 off the annual household bill and £53 billion off energy bills for businesses” within six years. This is quite a boast, considering the average household pays £1,928 a year in energy bills.
A large part of Labour’s decarbonisation plans are laid out in a document called ‘Make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower’. Labour says it wants to quadruple offshore wind and double onshore wind by 2030, as well as to triple solar capacity. But this is likely to be impossible, not least because the National Grid won’t be able to get hold of enough subsea cables to plug in the required number of extra offshore wind turbines. There are four suppliers of such cables in the world – all of them have full order books until 2030.
Would Labour’s plan be doable even if it could get the required kit – and would it really save households money? Labour’s case is based on the idea that wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of energy around. It repeats an often-quoted conceit that, at one point in 2022, “renewable energy was nine times cheaper than gas” and asserts that it remains much cheaper.
But the “nine times” claim was never true. It was made by CarbonBrief, a green energy advocacy website. It arrived at the figure by taking the prices paid for gas power at the very peak of the market in the summer of 2022 – £446 per megawatt-hour – as European countries rushed to fill their gas storage facilities ready for winter, following the loss of Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine. It then compared them with the long-term, guaranteed ‘strike prices’ offered to operators of wind and solar farms over a 15-year period. In an auction in 2022, wind and solar farms agreed to a strike price of £48 per megawatt-hour.
It was like comparing the cost of a bus journey using a season ticket to that of hailing an Uber in rush hour. If you take the average price of gas power over the past 15 years, it is considerably less than wind or solar power.
Worth reading in full.
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This is of course completely undoable but the damage that will be done to the country up to 2030 in seeking to achieve this impossible dream doesn’t bear thinking about.
What exactly will comprise “decarbonisation of the grid?” Some clear definitions would be helpful. Are we talking carbon, carbon dioxide or both? Or are bits of each permissible?
The answer is that Kneel hasn’t got a clue. He wouldn’t even know how to de-furr a kettle let alone take carbon from the grid. I assume he will be employing those lovely people from ‘The Science is Settled PLC’ to assist in this era defining adventure.
Presumably wind and solar will become self-financing within oh let’s say about twelve months and this alone should halve domestic energy bills as the outrageous subsidies will no longer be required from taxpayers. No ? Thought not.
Obviously long before we reach 2030 the requirements from industry will have all but vanished as manufacturing disappears abroad so that should go some way to reducing our 1% of the 3% of alleged man-made Co2 emissions. Sadly, the likes of India and China will pick up our surrendered manufacturing and worldwide Co2 output will expand as they push for greater growth.
So the grand result of the “decarbonisation of the grid” will be an extremely impoverished Great Britain; a cold, starving, rag festooned population teetering precariously on the edge of survival, shuffling about between their hutches in the 15 minute cities, assuming Disease X and its miracle “vaccines” haven’t killed us all off.
Even by Kneel’s standards this isn’t a great sales pitch. Perhaps he could get Bliar in to give it a polish?
Oh, hang on….
He could bring blair back as his foreign secretary like rishi did with Cameron!
You call him “Kneel”. I call him a “Beady Eyed Parasite”. —-But great comment. —-So what does the following statement mean do you think? “Total De-Carbonisation and a commitment to an economy based on fairness and social justice”. —–If it is really about climate and temperature caused by carbon dioxide where does social justice and fairness come in? ——Actually it is the other way around. The question should be where does De=Carbonisation fit into the Socialist/Marxist agenda?—-The socialists lay the blame for their “climate crisis” firmly at the door of capitalism. They claim that emissions of CO2 are gong to cause warming, floods, droughts, storms and wildfires (all based ofcourse on modelling, which is evidence of nothing) But CO2 is also something else. It is the one gas that can be directly tied to Industrial Capitalism, and this is what the socialists are really fighting. There is that old saying that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”—–CO2 is the socialists friend because it is another thing with which to attack capitalism.
Thanks varmint.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-global-crisis-food-water-and-fuel-three-fundamental-necessities-of-life-in-jeopardy-2/5446025
I cannot recommend this article highly enough. An incredibly deep dive in to the controls the globalists exercise on the three essentials for human life : food, fuel and water.
A long read at 20 plus minutes but well worth the effort and time.
It’s bloody depressing Hux!
How the hell in three short years did life change so much? Its like we slipped through a wormhole in to another dimension!
As I read the above article from Global Research I had exactly the same thought Dings.
Our governments have truly declared war on the people.
I really think companies not countries are becoming the future superpowers!
It’s not down to the threat of destruction anymore it’s financial control of starvation on a worldwide scale, and,as with the pandemic, companies hold sway even over the most powerful countries!
As CJ Hopkins says it’s a coup d’état by Globocap. A global capitalist takeover of democracy by unelected faceless elites.
No I don’t think it’s that at all. Communists were never defeated and if you read the Marx manifesto you’ll note most of it has been achieved. We are fighting global communism, they are merely using corporations to do it.
xx cheers xx
Great article ….thanks
A country is called a superpower because it has a lot of power over other countries. No amount of wind turbines and solar panels in the UK will enable the UK to force other countries to do its bidding more effectively. Hence, clean energy superpower is a nonsense term.
Correct, along with ‘green jobs’
There is nothing clean or green about bird choppers or solar panels.
They destroy the environment and are entirely dependent on hydrocarbons in their entire life cycle from build to operations to backup.
Unfortunately, we are deemed rich enough to afford them and out ploticians are corrupt enough that they can be made to force them onto us. That’s the whole raison d’etre of the Labour program to degridify the carbon (let’s shuffle these meaningless terms a little, just for fun): Starmer has been bought by the people who want to sell wind turbines and solar panels. That’s even publically known. These people ‘invest’ huge sums into Labour. They obviously also invest into the other party and actually, every other party which stands the slightest chance of getting MPs into parliament.
Outcome: Any political debate about anything actually happening or planned to happen in the UK is once again drowned out by (bought) barkers shouting “Antisemithing!” from all rooftops. As if this particular dwarf state in former Turkey would matter that much.
Prosperity, well being and longer lifespans are a great thing. ——Do we all agree? YES I think we probably do ——So what has given us those things? The answer is very simple ———FOSSIL FUELS. There is a very big moral case for coal oil and gas. In the third world where people live on a dollar a day, where over one billion people do not even have any electricity and die young of preventable diseases after a short life of back breaking labour they do not have prosperity and well being. because of absurd climate treaties these people are coerced into leaving their resources of coal and gas in the ground and we fob them off with some money for turbines. But by telling them they cannot use their coal and gas what we are really telling them is that they cannot have electricity and this is morally repugnant. There is nothing more terrifying to the western environmental movement and Progressive Politicians than poor people in poor countries getting the same standard of living as us in the wealthy west. here in the wealthy west we too are to lower our standard of living and are having the fuels that gave us prosperity in the first place removed. The excuse is the “climate crisis”, but there is not one single shred of evidence for it. CO2 has become the Progressive Bureaucrats dream gas, where all their social justice prayers have been answered. DeCarbonisation is simply Eco Socialism, climate and social justice and equality for all rolled up into one commie package called Sustainable Development.
Spot on.
Where did all the common sense go?
Excepting of course the highly concentrated doses present on here, and a few other non MSM sites.
I expect and predict it will come back with a vengeance, when reality hits, which is going to happen well before 2030. They’ll spin it for a few more painful years, but reality has this way of proving you an imbecile and a cretin.
They’re deliberately destroying our energy security and (when you look at their other plans) planning to create what will effectively be a Communist State.
The best most of us can do is look after “your own.” Prepare for shortages/rationing and boost your household resilience (food, fuel etc). It’s going to be like living in Heath’s 3-day week, but this time it will be 7-days a week.