According to the Telegraph, electricity consumers in the Southeast of England will either have to pay more or face blackouts. Citing a National Grid executive’s candid remarks, the paper reveals the problem is one of the network’s congestion, compounded by the variability – or unreliability, in fact – of wind and solar power, on which the U.K. is increasingly dependent. Urgent reform is therefore needed, claim the executives of the monopoly – one the largest investor-owned utility companies in the world – which will benefit from the hundreds of billions of pounds of “investment” required to “save the planet”.
The market reform will allow utility companies to charge more in areas that face greater grid demand, in much the same way that London, for example, has a Congestion Charge to limit usage of the city’s central roads. As London’s population grows, and as Net Zero policies require the electrification of heat and transport, and more renewable energy sources are added to the grid, this congestion will increase. Wind farms are typically built miles offshore, or in rural areas far away from the capital, so users further away from the sources of power must pay the extra transport and congestion costs.
National Grid has been lobbying Government for this rule change for some time. Back in March, the PLC welcomed the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA). “Great Britain’s electricity transmission system requires an expansion at unprecedented scale and pace,” said the article, adding the far less plausible claim that that zonal pricing could produce savings to the consumer of around £1 billion a year.
It’s funny how expensive all this “investment” that is going to “save consumer’s money” has become. Also in March, National Grid announced a £60 billion investment in transmission infrastructure to meet the then Government’s 2035 target for the grid’s total decarbonisation. The problem, according to Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch, was that the £60 billion was additional to a £54 billion package announced in 2022. Moreover, that investment only covers the “20,000 kilometres of the transmission grid”, says Montford, not the 800,000 kilometres of distribution cables – transmission being the main arteries of the network, while distribution being the fine blood vessels, carrying the power to its point of use. The £114 billion investment will add an extra £150 per year to the average household energy bill, Montford estimated. And now the new Government has brought the date of decarbonisation forward to 2030, those costs are going to rise.
How does this save anyone money? National Grid cannot explain. The Government cannot explain. Armies of Westminster wonks cannot explain. Yet somehow, the notion of “cheaper bills” drives the argument for every policy that requires astronomical amounts of “investment”, which, presumably, need to be paid for by you and me.
One similar such scam is the proposal for the Time of Use (TOU) pricing. According to its proponents, energy consumers can take advantage of times of greater supply or lower demand, at which there may be lower or even negative prices. This may make sense for certain large industrial consumers. But for domestic consumers it means organising one’s life around the weather. In a developed, First World industrialised economy, utilities ought to be there when people need them, not when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. As energy prices rise and power becomes more scarce, this de facto rationing will hit the poorest consumers the hardest.
Environmentalism is a deeply regressive ideology. And the moral degenerates who celebrate it claim the poor will be better off because… they can get up in the middle of night to use their washing machines. Lower energy prices… when you don’t need the power. It’s a trick. A lie.
No less extortionate and regressive is this notion of making energy cheaper by charging people in London more for electricity than people elsewhere. And no less pig-headed, either: “Our mission is for clean power by 2030 because this is the best way to achieve energy independence and protect billpayers,” a DESNZ spokesperson told the Telegraph. And this is a clue as to how National Grid, and countless other chancers, are getting away with it.
The repetition of dogma in the face of challenging questions from a journalist about a looming and regressive shift in energy policy signals that it’s not up for debate. National Grid and its subsidiaries have been engaged first and foremost to service a political agenda, not to develop infrastructure of the kind that the public desperately needs. Hence National Grid has been brought directly into the new Government’s “Mission Control” under the direction of former Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), Chris Stark – or Sir Chris Stark as he will no doubt shortly be.
In a normal world, such proximity between private or corporate interests and policymaking would be widely viewed as inappropriate. But saving the planet changed all that. There is no time for scrutiny of superheroes! And anyway, the cost of saving the planet is peanuts compared to the cost of destroying the planet. So get your chequebooks out. The most fantastic inversion of reality has occurred and it is now those who question relationships between government and business that are viewed with suspicion and accused of having ulterior motives. Questioning Net Zero policy? You must be a fossil fuel shill!
The questions “How much is it going to cost?”, “How is this going to be done?”, and “What are the consequences if this policy fails?” are routinely met by the same smears. But promises of “energy security” and “lower bills” do little to allay fears that, as it rolls on, the policy agenda looks ever more like a rent-seeker’s paradise. Now you will be charged more based on where and when you use electricity because utility companies, once publicly owned, are now merely landlords who can charge ever more rent by producing scarcity and congestion, rather than the movement of electrons.
I have long wondered why officials, politicians and wonks are so intransigent. Why did the likes of the CCC not engage with critics, answering them in good faith? The answer is that they don’t have to. Legislation doesn’t require them to be scrutinised and doesn’t require them to answer criticism. And the same holds true for the dodgy relationships forged by the new Government and its agency suppliers. They are opaque and unaccountable. They do not answer to the people who they claim they will provide with lower bills and “energy security”.
The only sanction I can think of in response to such intransigence is the threat of nationalisation without compensation. I am not in favour of state confiscation. But it seems obvious to me that any company that lobbied for such an agenda in the hope of vast profits – legalised confiscation, via a monopoly, after all – ought to have calculated the political risk of undermining democracy.
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