The Telegraph has a piece by Gordon Hughes, former Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh, about the real cost of Net Zero in the UK and it doesn’t make for comfortable reading. Frustrated by the absence of the lack of any sensible costings of the Government’s Clean Power 2030 plans, he’s done his own. The person who should be squirming in his seat the most is, of course, Ed Miliband, except that his head is firmly in the sand.
Hughes points out that the UK simply doesn’t have either the capital or engineers to achieve the 2030 ambitions. But it’s much worse:
You won’t hear that from Ed Miliband, who still insistently repeats the mantra that decarbonisation of the grid will protect us against price spikes caused by “volatile” gas markets. But he cannot know this, because his department has resolutely refused to produce a credible estimate of what the planned Net Zero electricity system will cost. Indeed, one of his first acts as Secretary of State was to cancel the system costing belatedly commissioned by his predecessor, Claire Coutinho.
In the absence of any official estimate, I have recently calculated and published my own system costing of the Net Zero grid, and I can therefore tell readers with some certainty that Clean Power 2030 is an astonishingly poor deal. On average my calculations show that the Net Zero grid would be a remarkable £15 billion per year more expensive than our current one – even allowing for the possibility of our being hit every 10 years by the rare combination of events that led to the 2022 energy price crisis, namely the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline and the simultaneous outage of large parts of the French nuclear fleet. Put another way, Net Zero will only look affordable if there’s a crisis. In normal times it will cost us dear.
Why is decarbonising the grid so expensive, given that the cost of generating wind and solar power is almost nothing? The answer is that Clean Power 2030 involves building, maintaining (and periodically replacing) enormously more machinery and grid connection than we currently have, and the payment of huge extra costs in such areas as balancing the grid. My calculations indicate that every household will need to find an extra £925 per year, probably paid for via higher electricity bills.
It’s already clear that the economy can’t sustain any further energy price rises, let alone increases on the scale that Clean Power 2030 would produce. And there are worse problems: it’s not at all clear that we will make it to 2030 without blackouts, as a glance at the Government’s plans for generation capacity over the next few years shows that we might have a crisis on our hands before then.
In essence we may not have enough generation capacity to keep the lights on.
That will mean new gas power stations, but there’s a problem, says Hughes:
Even if we can get the new gas-fired power stations we need built in time, it is unlikely that they will be the high-efficiency combined cycle units that have been the backbone of the grid for three decades. Instead, we will get so-called open-cycle units, which are more suited to intermittent operation, but will deliver more expensive power (and more emissions). Worse, their owners will have to be paid very high prices when we need them to get through periods of no wind and sun, as much of the time they will sit idle. And there will have to be enough of them to power most of the grid without help, as Dunkelflaute windless gloomy periods can last for days and the grid’s batteries for only hours.
The costs will be astronomical:
To put it another way, under our current direction of travel, the best-case scenario is that electricity becomes impossibly expensive but the lights stay on.
With the Government desperate for growth, it is clear that Net Zero is a voyage that the United Kingdom simply can’t afford to take. We will have to turn back if our economy is to survive.
Hughes suggests consumers will be priced out of using power. Unless the Government starts waking up it may be too late and it will face the uncomfortable discovery that when the power cuts start the voting British public won’t care where the power comes from or who provides it, so long as they get it and can afford it.
Worth reading in full, and let’s hope someone in particular does read it.
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The idea that renewables power should be cheap or free because wind, sun and falling water cost nothing is as daft as saying oil, coal and gas are free because each of them is laying in the earth waiting to be used. Uranium ditto.
The cost of turning any resource into a usable commodity or service is what makes them more or less competitive. I suspect that coal would still be the cheapest if externalities were included and the most effective scrubbers were used on the smoke and other outputs. But it would not be free.
Excellent point
Yes at that point it mostly lost me… there aren’t pixies at the end of the garden running these things, working for nowt. And that’s before you consider the billions borrowed to build and install them in the first place, that debt costs…
The government and political establishment know nothing about financial management. They never have.
These are the people that every year spend more than they collect. Every single year. Not occasionally. Not half the time. Not even most of the time, but always. Every single year. Resulting in an ever growing mountain of debt.
The only reason they can get away with it is because they have the power to print money and some ability to extract ever more taxes from the public.
No company or household can act in this way, but states can and do.
So what would make anyone think that they would be competent in working out the cost of Net Zero or Zero Covid, or any of their other insane projects?
Why would they, it’s not their money. Never is.
Problem is, none of the western economies can stop now, otherwise the People may see just how few single digit percent their currency is now actually worth. We’ve been metaphorically ‘clipping the coins’ now for so long, there is barely a slither of coin left
Not only would Net Zero be horrifyingly expensive, it wouldn’t bloody work – you can’t power a modern civilisation on intermittent breezes and sunbeams.
The industrial pioneers of the early 18th century knew that three hundred years ago, when 24/7/365 King Coal began to supersede windmills and waterwheels. No contest.
As for Minister for Energy Insecurity and Mastermind of Net Zero, Edward Samuel Miliband – Specialist Subject NOT the b. obvious.
In a couple of paragraphs you have superbly summarised the madness of net zero.
No problem. People can just go out and chop down trees.
You’re right this will happen. But I’m sure most agree it’s a really bad idea.
Deliberate Disaster of Net Zero
Winter 2025 cooler than 1925
notalotofpeopleknowthat
To summarise the article in the Telegraph:
Not having enough energy at our disposal will not be a problem if the economy has crashed and no-one really needs energy. The economy will crash without enough energy.
So it looks like the UK is screwed.
I’ve taken this from an article elsewhere, which although US is equally relevant to the UK.
“I’ve recently begun to realize what an understatement or misstatement it is when we talk about “taxpayer money” being spent on waste, fraud and abuse.
“Taxpayer money” implies that it’s money that the government has taken as taxes from employed, hardworking, taxpaying Americans. Which hits hard enough, when talking about waste, fraud and abuse.
But the term “taxpayer money” doesn’t convey a meaningful, important, hidden truth: That only a portion of all that money being fraudfully stolen and spent is money collected as taxes. A large portion of it—maybe the largest portion of it—is borrowed money, stealthily put on a giant credit card in the name of the citizens of America.
We and our children and our children’s children are like indentured servants, who will live their entire lives working to pay off both the principal and interest on tens of trillions of dollars stealthily borrowed in our name by others, spent by others, and given to others without our knowledge, input or consent.
We didn’t know or understand exactly what was happening, but the people doing it knew. And they did everything they could to keep us from knowing.
The concept of “wasting taxpayer money” doesn’t begin to convey the breadth and depth of the crime being perpetrated on Americans. It’s theft, fraud and indenturing of innocent people—enslavement—on a grand scale.
And in all the world, it is primarily just Americans that are being taken advantage of in this way. We’re the goose with the golden eggs.
So when you hear someone talk about how we’re spending or wasting “taxpayer money,” what they’re really talking about is making us all indentured servants to banks, elites, and enemies of “free America” for the next hundred years.”
written by Edward Dowd
Nailed it – we should really call it ‘taxpayer debt’… it might make people think
Christopher Booker predicted this 20 years ago.
Net Zero is a scam some people are literally making billions from and every minute this scam can be kept going increases the amount of money transferred to them. That’s the whole point of this exercise.
Has anyone got an update on Ed Milliband’s plan for our Plutonium?
The greatest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated. Reliable affordable energy taken and away and replaced by unreliable un-affordable part time energy that has to cover huge areas of land. —–WHY?—– Because the UN and WEF say our standard of living in the western world is too high (unsustainable), and our squirming parasite politicians do everything they can do to get a little gold star on their lapels from the phony planet savers. —–Net Zero is about reducing standard of living by forcing unaffordable energy on us and pretending it is all about saving the planet or energy security or jobs or any of the other porkies they tell that the bought and paid for media regurgitate as if it were all ultimate truth instead of a pack of lies.