Rishi Sunak is Right to Turn to Gas, But Wrong to Claim He is Keeping Bills Down

Britain will build new gas power stations, Rishi Sunak has said, as he vows not to risk blackouts to achieve Net Zero. The Telegraph has the story.

The country will need gas as a back-up when there is not enough wind or sun to create renewable energy, the Prime Minister says in an article for the Telegraph.

Despite having pledged to phase out fossil fuels by 2050 to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions, Mr. Sunak says new gas power stations will ensure energy security and therefore the safety of the nation.

Writing in the Telegraph, he says: “When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, this is how we will keep your lights on and your bills down.

“It is the insurance policy Britain needs to protect our energy security, while we deliver our Net Zero transition.”

He adds that the approach of the Labour Party – which has pledged to create a green electricity system by 2030, five years earlier than the Tories – would “put us at risk of blackouts”.

Mr. Sunak is seeking to draw a dividing line between the Conservative Party’s approach to Net Zero and that of Labour.

The Government said the move to back new unabated gas plants – meaning their emissions are not captured – was a “common sense” approach to Net Zero, that would ensure the country met its green goals in a “sustainable, pragmatic way”.

It’s obviously good that the PM is investing in reliable sources of energy. But how exactly does building a whole supplementary power system to make up for the unreliability of renewables “keep bills down”? As retired scientist Dr. John Fernley, who has a background in wind energy, said to me this morning when he saw the Prime Minister’s comments:

Yes it will keep lights on but how can it possibly be claimed to be keeping the bills down? Because of the unreliability of renewables we are having to build and operate two parallel energy generation systems, a renewable one for when the wind and sun are favourable and a gas one for when the wind and sun are not favourable. Because we are a windy island renewables will work most of the time. These gas-fired power stations, which are expensive to build and maintain, will therefore be idle for most of the time.

The truth is that if we wanted to keep the lights on and the bills down we would run the gas-fired power stations 100% of the time and close down the renewables which are an expensive folly. Unfortunately successive Conservative Prime Ministers Theresa May, Boris Johnson and now Rishi Sunak have been eco-zealots and committed us to enormously expensive Net Zero policies which will cost ordinary people a great deal and achieve absolutely nothing for the climate because the U.K. is only responsible for 1% of global CO₂ emissions. The big emitters in the developing world, meanwhile, are responsible for 65%, of which China alone is 30%, with their emissions rising every year.