When Ed Miliband didn’t come to the House of Commons to deliver a statement it became obvious the wheels had come off his ‘plan’ to deliver zero carbon electricity by 2030, says Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
This is a man who loves to preach about his Clean Power project, and yet on Tuesday when the National Energy System Operator (NESO) finally published its analysis of his plans to decarbonise the entire electricity grid in just five years, he was nowhere to be seen.
If you read its report, you can understand why.
It makes for very difficult reading for an ideologue who spent the General Election claiming he would cut household bills by £300 by delivering “100% clean power by 2030”. Instead, it makes clear that even with a “Herculean effort” – the words of the Chief Executive of the Neso – the best-case scenario is that costs remain the same.
Even this broken election promise – it’s certainly not £300 off bills – is only achievable in a fantasy world where several impossible things magically happen at once.
First, Mr. Miliband would have to rewrite the planning system, overcome global supply constraints and community dissent to build twice as many pylons and cables in the next five years as we have built in the last 10.
As even his own “head of mission control”, Chris Stark, acknowledges, “all planned transmission network projects must be built on time”. If Ed doesn’t deliver then consumers will be on the hook for billions of pounds in constraint payments, where we pay wind farms to simply switch off and sit idle.
Despite building more offshore wind than any other country bar China, we would need to contract as much offshore wind capacity in the next one to two years as in the last six combined.
As we have seen in the most recent auction round, which Mr. Miliband bumped up, this approach is already driving up bills. Just last week the Institute for Fiscal Studies said that green levies, which people pay on top of their electricity bills, would rise by an extra £120 per household.
In a world where we are contracting vastly more wind power at breakneck speed, this will only go up.
That’s just the start. For instance, during the current (Europe-wide) lull in wind, Britain’s 30 GW of installed wind capacity at times has been producing less than 1 GW of electricity.
Read the rest here.
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