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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It is circumstances like this that reveal beyond doubt what are the values of the Conservatives. The few who complained include some who did nothing when Ministers but the bulk of the Conservative Party sees no reason to object.
Left wingers are preferred to GB News, in their eyes.
However much this same small band of Tory MPs remonstrate with their Party on various issues they don’t make the slightest difference in the big state, leftwards drift of the Party.
“Good practice”??????????????????? So Cultural Marxism is good? All media must spout leftist progressive dogma to be classed as “Good”? When you only have one narrative you have tyranny. Conservative views are to be criminalised. If only 46 conservatives wrote to the prime Minister then the rest need to just admit they are no longer conservatives.
“If only 46 conservatives wrote to the prime Minister then the rest need to just admit they are no longer conservatives….”
….and Resign their seats.
Right wing?? so, a level headed, common sense, white british male human being like me is right wing am i?
If that’s what you progressive mp’s want to call 80% of your countries voters then,so be it! I’m a right wing racist! and I’ll vote accordingly!
Your apparent belief that level-headed, common-sense, white British men exist marks you obviously as fascist, ie, throroughly despicable opponent of the people who don’t who’s secretly itching to genocide transwomen by excluding them from women’s sport competitions or something likewise horrible, say, torture millions of people to death.
Do you know me?
Can’t we have some sort of truth-in-advertising which stop groups like Stop funding hate!
from using obviously misleading names for themselves to (try to) hide the actual focus of their activities? Would a betting outlet be allowed to advertise itself as Provider of financial services many people chose to trust?
How quickly would things change if all government advertising was pulled from CAN members?
Jim Hacker was meant to represent the typical, spineless Tory MP but he did at least try to fight The Blob, and occasionally won.
These kind of spineless so called “representatives of the poeple” make my f-ing blood boil!
So the government is happy with the bully-boy tactics of CAN. What a surprise.
Pedantic comment: scepticism of or regarding, not “towards”. Sorry.
Is this the same advertising world which regularly over represents coloured and mixed race families in TV advertisements?