Recently, Shadow Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has been promoting his party’s ‘Green Prosperity Plan’ again, promising more jobs, more investment and lower bills. However, these claims do not stand up to scrutiny. Currently each job in the wind and solar power sectors is being subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of over £250,000 per job, every year. This is the path to penury, not prosperity.
Miliband was ‘ratioed’ on X, meaning he received more replies than likes, so maybe the public is starting to rumble his ruse. Nevertheless, he is likely to be in the Cabinet after the election, so we need to pay attention to what he says. Time to work through the data to find out how much these mythical jobs in the renewable sector cost us.
From time to time, the ONS publishes an assessment of Low Carbon and Renewable Energy Economy (LCREE). This covers the number of businesses, turnover and how many jobs are involved in the LCREE sector. Helpfully, it breaks down the figures by sector, including offshore wind, onshore wind and solar power. The latest available figures for 2021 show the number of full-time equivalent jobs in the U.K. for these sectors was 10,600, 5,000 and 6,400, respectively.
There are three subsidy regimes for renewable energy in the U.K. These are Feed-in-Tariffs (FiTs), Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs) and Contracts for Difference (CfDs).
Each year Ofgem publish the FiT report and dataset that details the total amount of electricity generated, total payments and the capacity installed by technology. In scheme year 12, running from April 2021 to March 2022, 79.4% of FiT capacity was solar and 11.9% wind. The rest was made up of hydro and anaerobic digestion plants. The total payments under the FiT scheme were £1,557m. If we split these payments by capacity, we can determine that solar power received £1,236m in FiT payments and wind (assumed to be onshore) received £185m.
Details of ROCs issued cab be found on the Ofgem portal. The value of ROCs related to the output period of the whole of 2021 was £2,009m for offshore wind, £1,251m for onshore wind and £493m for solar power.
The Low Carbon Contracts Company publishes a database of CfD payments that can also be split by technology. This shows that offshore wind received £612m in 2021. This figure is lower than might be expected because gas prices started to spike in late-2021 and so some CfD-funded wind farms started to refund money under the CfD scheme. Because strike prices for onshore wind and solar power tend to be lower than for offshore wind, these two technologies paid back £22m and £204m, respectively.
The total subsidies in 2021 for these three sectors is around £5.56bn. This compares to the ONS estimate of £14.56bn turnover for the same sectors. Putting it another way, 38% of the turnover is pure subsidy.
Pulling all this together, we can add up the total subsidy received for these technologies and compare it to the number of jobs in each sector.
We can see that each offshore wind job cost £247,000 in subsidy, each onshore wind job nearly £283,000 and solar £238,000. The average across all three sectors is nearly £253,000 per job.
Now remember, this is not a one-off payment to get a new industry up and running, it is an ongoing annual payment. The ONS does not publish its estimate of the salaries in the sector, however, the annual subsidies are far higher than any reasonable estimate of the average salaries paid in the sector.
It is crystal clear that all talk of a “green revolution” is simply a pipedream. These green jobs are only a façade: Potemkin jobs to give politicians and policymakers a good sound bite and make them feel good about themselves. The idea that we can move to “green prosperity” by subsidising each job to the tune of over £250,000 each year is plainly absurd. If we take any further steps down this “green prosperity” road, we risk bankrupting the nation.
David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack page, where this article first appeared.
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“If we take any further steps down this “green prosperity” road, we risk bankrupting the nation.”
That is the intention.
And once bankrupt the country can be sold lock, stock and barrel.
Don’t forget to subtract the jobs lost because of these renewables. 2000 at Port Talbot was it? How many in fossil fuel industry on top?
2,500 at Port Talbot. Probably around 5,000 when supporting trades / businesses are taken in to account.
We are now the only country in the G20 without the wherewithal to produce high grade steel. If that isn’t a crime under “Defence of the Realm” by Fishy and Co I don’t know what is.
Quite right. Did a piece here.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/subsidised-green-jobs-killing-real
There is one problem and really one problem only: a public that seems happy to have their money confiscated and then spent by someone else.
The people who confiscate and then spend the money have every incentive to do it more and more because they get the benefit from spending the money and almost none of the pain.
For as long the public is fine with that, things will continue the same. The public fleeced and money wasted on political vanity projects.
The Eco Socialist con artists are quite remarkable people. They are able to stare people in the face and tell them the biggest bare faced lie ever told. It takes a particularly nasty piece of work to have the gall to stand there knowing you are as full of crap as these people are. Or as Mark Twain pointed out “Politicians are like diapers, they need changed often and for the same reason”. ———-Hey Huxley I see you have put your boredom to one side for the moment —xx
But WE are the spreaders of fake news, misinformation, malformation and disinformation apparently.
However, truth is truth, whatever they try to do to deny it!
We need to stop concerning ourselves with Net Zero, it is impossible on any timeline – unless the entire planet is happy to return to the Stone Age.
The only “good” thing about having Starmer as next PM is that he will be the one that has to kick the can on all of their net zero fantasies.
Yes he may well have to kick the can well down the road, but on the cans way down that road we are all going to suffer green misery, impoverishment, and all the other economic disaster that Maurice Strong told us about when he said “The lifestyle of the affluent middle classes are unsustainable” ——–To all those who think this about the bloody climate you need to wake up.
To be fair I did put good in inverted commas, there is nothing good coming from that @#$&ard and his party, like Democrats on steroids in terms of the damage they can wreak, and no opposition to stop them, most will cheer them on and demand more and faster.
Next 5 years will be horrific.
But we can confidently say that no matter what he does, or what he spends, their wet dream of Net Zero (Wet Zero?) will fail utterly, on his watch!
The problem is that the rewards and costs of this are asymmetric, at least at the moment. Those who benefit have a great incentive to grab power and financial rewards. Those of us who are paying for it are paying, but not at the levels that cause too much hardship. Some things can be sidestepped anyway for now. Take EV car sales targets, for example. Right now we can choose to buy a ICE car if we wish to, but it won’t be long before there just aren’t enough ICE cars available to meet demand and prices of ICE cars will rise. Car manufacturers will already have plans in place to wind down ICE car production, and once it’s gone it isn’t coming back. Sadly, I don’t think there will much effective resistance until it is all too late.
I am bored of the eco nuttery but as you quite rightly comment…
“The Eco Socialist con artists are quite remarkable people. They are able to stare people in the face and tell them the biggest bare faced lie ever told.”
I might be bored with the graphs and figures proving our case but where we have establishment figures pushing utter garbage I am more than prepared to post comments. The greenwashing is just lies and I am way past believing any of it. The reality is that this government and the next are set on a course intended to bankrupt the country in its entirety. When the country is bust we will be sold to the IMF, BIS with the likes of Vanguard and Blackrock taking stakes. Everything will be sold, houses the lot.
Don’t forget – “you will own nothing and be very, very unhappy.” Klaus wasn’t joking.
Isn’t it bloody marvellous? —–Yet a huge chunk of the country think they are “saving the planet”. I truly feel sorry for them.
I don’t feel sorry for anybody who has fallen for either the C1984 crap or the green crap. What I do know is that a lot of those who fell for the jabbery are decidedly NOT falling for the eco lunacy scam. And I do mean A LOT.
Yes well we may think a “lot” are not falling for it, but Net Zero is still going full steam ahead. So this “lot” better double and treble its numbers and start to get more vocal .because it is only the loudest that seem to get listened to in this country.
Can we stop calling it “Renewable energy” and start calling it “Unsustainable energy supply”?
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it cannot therefore be renewed.
I am immensely critical of the whole charade of “whatever its called today”, but even I will concede it can have a place, but not at scale, and not as a supplier to a grid system.
Solar panels on your roof “can” provide reasonable amounts of electricity, which can be stored for very near future use. In warmer climes they can heat water and provide electricity in remote locations.
Likewise wind turbines can provide electricity to remote locations and communities, but their downsides mean they are almost totally unsuitable in almost any setting.
Yes but these niche technologies like sun and wind should have to compete in the marketplace, not subsidised to the hilt using our own money.
Absolutely, no subsidies at all.
Ok “part time weather dependent unreliable expensive politically motivated dumb energy”
Amazing: that’s a £million pounds subsidy for every 4 jobs!
Well done to David Turver for exposing this travesty.
Yet despite this outrage that masquerades like all the other GREN CRAP as “saving the planet”, only 15 comments appear at this point on a website like this. ——–What hope is there for the general public finding out about this disgusting waste of our money when a bought and paid for media will sweep stuff like this under the carpet?——YOOHOO BBC are you listening? Where are your investigative journalists? Oh I see they are all too busy telling us all the ice is going to melt by next Tuesday.
Why would you do any of that stuff, what is the orginal impetus? You can look at Rio 1992 and that is a big part of it but of course the real agenda is the unspoken one. As if on a dark night we met at a secluded mansion and decided to bond ourselves in cannibalism. No one would ever admit to anyone afterwards that they were part of a ritual human flesh feast. The depopulation agenda operates along similar energetic lines. They want us dead and they want us to acquiesce for as long as possible in order to ensure maximum efficiency. They augment secrecy with plausible deniability. Uselss eaters defiling the earth with intellects barely above that of lower primates. Surely we can just eradicate them. From their perspective that is all of us. This thinking is as old as our culture. They just have more highly developed and refined tools these days.
Now it’s the turn of Network Rail to gaslight us into believing that “Climate Change” is increasing the cost of maintaining the network. The relentless drip-feed of articles beginning “because of climate change…” might have the desired effect in the short-term, but ultimately, as in any gaslighting relationship, the public will ultimately decide that the resulting abuse is too much and will end the cosy relationship with the abusive, authoritarian relationship that it has with the Government. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68721690
No, “WE” don’t risk bankrupting the nation.
The f’wits in Government (Red, Yellow and Blue) are doing it.
This should come as no surprise, subsidised jobs are not proper jobs.
When younger people bang on about climate change, I remind them they will be picking up the tab, economically and socially, for their ideological folly.