The Climate Change Committee (CCC) recently released the 7th Carbon Budget, setting out what the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions have to be in the period 2038-2042. Their report mentioned “misinformation” or “misinformed” on five occasions in the context of low-carbon technologies in general and EVs and heat pumps in particular. But, as we shall see, the CCC itself has been peddling misinformation in its own report on a scale that destroys its own credibility.
Heat Pumps
One of the most interesting passages is where the CCC say “one-third of people who said that they were unlikely to install a heat pump stated that it may not be possible to do so in their home and one-third stated that they would rather wait to see how the technology develops. This is despite heat pumps being a well-established technology, found to be suitable for the vast majority of UK homes”.
The trouble is that, in this interview from 2024, the new CEO of the CCC, Emma Pinchback, still did not have a heat pump in her own home. Her predecessor, Chris Stark, said the cost of heat pumps was too high and that it’s very difficult to install them in existing flats like his. Either they have both succumbed to the scourge of misinformation, or the CCC is peddling its own misinformation.
Renewable Electricity Cost Misinformation
More seriously, the whole basis of their costs, particularly for renewables, is very suspect indeed and is perhaps the biggest source of misinformation in the whole report (see Figure 1).
They assume offshore wind costs £51/MWh in 2025, falling to £31/MWh in 2050 and solar costs at £46/MWh in 2025, falling to £27/MWh in 2050. Their figures for 2030 onwards are lower even than the Government’s generation cost report from 2023 which was hopelessly optimistic. Moreover, they seem to have relied on models for their assumptions rather than look at actual data from renewables auctions (see Figure 2).
The orange line is the CCC cost estimate. The magenta line shows the awards and offers for fixed bottom offshore wind, with the shaded box reflecting that parts of contracts awarded in AR4 have been rebid at higher prices. Of course, there were no bids in AR5. The latest awards for new projects in AR6 were roughly twice the cost estimated by the CCC. Moreover, the trend is upwards, completely opposite to the CCC’s assumption. It is also worth noting that the CCC wants us to have 125GW of offshore wind installed by 2050. It is inconceivable that this can be achieved without significant floating offshore wind capacity. The costs of this technology are even more expensive and rising quickly, with the Government recently announcing that the AR7 offer price of £245/MWh in 2024 money will be higher than the contract awards in AR6. The AR7 offer price for floating offshore wind is more than six times the CCC’s assumption for 2030 delivery. The strike prices for solar power in AR6 are also roughly double the CCC’s assumption for 2030 delivery.
This gross under-estimate of electricity generation costs has knock-on effects throughout their calculations and is the source of much of the misinformation in the 7th Carbon Budget.
However, the danger to our electricity supply does not stop there. The electricity system is “designed around a 1-in-20 adverse weather year (1987), when the report they rely upon also mentions the 1-in-50 year event in 2010. They have repeated the error in the 6th Carbon Budget by looking at just single year events, not the multi-year wind drought from 2009-2011. This is the error that Chris Stark wanted to kill with technical language. This error means they have vastly under-estimated the amount of storage required to keep the lights on and so their capex costs are far too low.
Jolly Hockey Sticks
The CCC’s Balanced Pathway for Electricity Supply is based on a series of hockey stick charts for a vast range of technologies (see Figure 3).
The rate of delivery of offshore wind and solar must rise substantially. Low-carbon dispatchable generation capacity (gas with carbon capture or hydrogen) must increase almost exponentially from zero to over 38GW by 2050. Medium-duration and battery storage must also expand far more rapidly than they have to date, and interconnector capacity must increase fourfold, despite rising scepticism on the Continent. The amount of “time-shifted demand” – a euphemism for charging penal rates for electricity at peak times on dark, calm winter evenings – must rise from zero today to 32TWh by 2050.
Their plans for industry also show similar hockey stick predictions (see their Figure 7.3.3). Apparently, the proportion of energy for industry coming from electricity will almost triple to 72.8% by 2050, driven by all this supposedly cheap renewable electricity and heat pumps. Residual heat will come from green hydrogen, which costs more than six times UK natural gas and more than 20 times US gas.
This is what happens when you have a committee firmly ensconced in an ivory tower built on Fantasy Island: the Balanced Pathway becomes unhinged from reality.
S-Curves and Price Dislocations
We also have to suspend our disbelief when looking at their plans for our homes (See Figure 4).
According to the CCC, the proportion of homes with a heat pump (chart a) goes up much faster than it ever has, driven by a miraculous dislocation in the price of electricity compared to the price of gas (e), and a dramatic reversal in the trend of the cost of heat pump installations (f).
They believe the proportion of homes with heat pumps is going to miraculously triple between 2023 (0.59%) and 2025 (1.59%), or rise by 290,000 units, and then rise by more than 1.5% per year from 2029 to 2030 and over 3% per year from 2031 to 2032. 3% of roughly 29 million households is about 870,000 heat pumps per year. The latest Heat Pump statistics statistics show just 42,645 heat pumps were installed in 2024, in stark contrast to the over 98,000 claimed by the Heat Pump Association, using “market estimation techniques to extrapolate the data”. Of course, the CCC uses the Heat Pump Association data. The CCC assumes an average cost of heat pumps in 2025 of £11.4K, falling to £7.8K in 2050. However, the average cost of an air-source heat pump in the final quarter of 2024 was £12.5K, and ground-source heat pumps cost £25K. The trend in cost per kW of capacity installed is up too, not down. In addition, the CCC’s costs exclude ancillary costs such as a new hot water tank and radiator upgrades. They expect the take-up of heat pumps to be supported by government subsidy or discounted finance schemes.
The dislocation in the ratio of electricity to gas prices arises because they assume that electricity policy costs (aka subsidies) are moved either to gas or to general taxation. They want to hide the cost of all these “cheap” renewables elsewhere to mask the true cost. In their most extreme scenario, the price of electricity halves relative to gas between 2024 and 2026, going from a ratio of 4.32 to 2 in two years; that is a lot of cost to take from electricity and load onto gas bills. Yet strangely, the cost of home energy for households with a gas boiler falls out to 2050 after peaking in 2026 in all three of their scenarios (see their Figure 8.4). They must be assuming policy costs fall to almost zero because of the false low-cost renewables assumption.
None of these assumptions are remotely credible.
Overall Costs
The Climate Change Committee expresses the costs of their plans as the difference between the gross costs of their balanced pathway and a notional baseline. They do not provide the raw costs of either their pathway or the baseline, so it is impossible to get to the bottom of their actual cost estimates.
As we have seen above, they are under-estimating the costs of renewable generation and heat pumps. This is underlined by their estimate of electricity supply capex to 2030, which is just £88.5 billion (from their Figure 4.1), about a third of NESO’s estimate of £260-290 billion for the cost of Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 plan.
They say that EVs cost 37% more than petrol cars in 2023, but that premium will turn into a discount of 2.7% by 2028, growing to a discount of over 12% by 2050. This, coupled with falling electricity prices, drives an adoption rate of EVs faster even than Norway. But if their electricity price estimates are unreliable, then this prediction must also be consigned to the dustbin.
These faulty assumptions are carried through into their overall capital and operating cost estimates (see Figure 5).
Their assumption of unreasonably low-cost renewables is how they manage to claim that there will be net benefits arising from their plan from 2040 onwards. This extraordinary claim is made despite spending ~£10 billion per year (see their Figure 7.12.2) on “engineered removals,” by which they mean Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), a net energy sink, and Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS). They want us to spend over £30 billion on BECCS capex by 2050 and over £6 billion per year on opex from 2045. In addition, there is nearly £25 billion in capex and over £3 billion per year in opex by 2050 on DACCS machines to suck CO2 directly from the air. The total cost of all their engineered removals amounts to £180 billion by 2050. They would have us believe that despite this massive spending, their plan is cheaper overall than their mythical baseline of no further climate action.
It does seem rather odd that we need quite so many taxes, subsidies and other Government interventions to achieve these goals. It is almost as if the collective wisdom of the market does not believe the CCC’s misinformation.
You Vill Eat Zee Bugs
Not content with meddling with the energy system, industry and the way we heat and insulate our homes, the CCC also wants to interfere in the food chain. Alternative proteins are mentioned 34 times in the report. This is a euphemistic phrase for things like insect proteins, although they did note that their Citizen’s Panel was not too keen on eating bugs.
They also want to cull our cattle and sheep, calling for the number of livestock to almost halve (see their Figure 5.3), from 44 million this year to 25.8 million by 2050. In essence, they want to sacrifice our sheep and cattle on the altar of Gaia to appease the weather gods. They also want to cut meat consumption by a third, from 1,011g per person per week to just 678g.
Conclusions
What we have in the latest Carbon Budget is a Soviet-style five-year plan, where the Government is being urged to meddle in our lives to an unprecedented extent. The CCC wants more Government interference in energy, homes, industry and even the food we eat. All their calculations are underpinned by woeful cost assumptions, and they have repeated the same mistake about low wind years from the 6th Carbon Budget. The so-called Balanced Pathway is totally unhinged from reality. They have the brass neck to publicly worry about misinformation, despite propagating obvious untruths in their own report. Misinformation is supposed to be created by mistake, and disinformation is the knowingly spreading of false information. Sadly, we must conclude that the CCC is spreading disinformation.
The renewable electricity cost assumptions are far too low and carry through to much of the rest of the report. It does not take a genius to look at the results of the renewables auctions to check their figures. The NESO plan for Clean Power by 2030 has been in the public domain since November, so it is inconceivable that the CCC was unaware of their cost estimates.
This has not stopped Simon “Nine Times Cheaper” Evans from Carbon Brief promoting the false headline figures as gospel truth (see Figure 6).
NEW: Official advisers CCC say UK shld cut emissions 87% by 2040
— Simon Evans (@DrSimEvans) February 26, 2025Net cost of net-zero 73% less than thought
Total cost to 2050 = £108bn (~£4bn/yr, 0.2% GDP)
H’hold energy/fuel bills to fall £1,400
Electrification is key
THREAD + chartshttps://t.co/X8BO0Ylnxe
1/10 pic.twitter.com/IlyrGtpl8B
We can only hope that Parliamentarians are more diligent than Dr Evans and can muster the analytical skills to pull the Carbon Budget apart and subject it to forensic scrutiny before blindly adopting it as the law of the land.
I have made three FOI requests about the 7th Carbon Budget. It will be interesting to see the results.
David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack, where this article first appeared.
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Continuing excess deaths here in the NL also. Is it just me and my selective memory or did we not hear much about excess deaths of unknown cause years back? In the summer time too…Its certainly a head-scratcher. Unless you’re Swiss Doctor who is want to lay the blame on a summer cold-type virus and the heat before any other cause.
https://nltimes.nl/2022/09/09/excess-mortality-continues-august-scientists-struggling-research-cause
“Trevor Sinclair facing calls to be sacked after controversial Queen tweet”
A hate filled tweet for sure, and he has previous as his conviction for racially abusing a police officer while being arrested for drink driving. However if he is to be sacked it should be because he doesn’t have the sort of interesting things to say about football that would keep a listeners attention.
Hypocrisy is hypocrisy though. Had Matt LeTissier said “white people shouldn’t mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela” (he wouldn’t because he’s not like that, but i’m just making the point) an equally bone-headed statement, his feet would not have touched the floor on the way out.
Also note the use of the word ‘controversial’ in the headline. That suggests that it has some merit but is not well received in some parts. There is nothing controversial about it, it is grossly offensive and has no redeeming value whatsoever. As was the comment by the US Academic that was also in the news.
Free speech by private individuals is fine, but when you are a public figure it is not unreasonable for them to be held to a higher standard. Hence why I think it is a matter for their employers, but not for the police.
I wasn’t suggesting that he shouldn’t be sacked. Rather that his performance on Talk Radio is hard to square with his continued presence there. Its another ‘job for the boy’, with very little to merit it.
LeTiss demonstrates a good working knowledge of football and a reasonable perspective about the world, along with his sceptical attitude. You are right though. Sky canned him for not liking to have to wear the BLM badge on his jacket.
“British Climate Divergence: Jacob Rees-Mogg Appointed Energy Minister, as Charles is Crowned King”
There is a pragmatic necessity, that having followed the wrong energy policy for years, we don’t compound it by trying to carry on as if it hasn’t been a total disaster. It is the classic, ‘if you find your self in a hole, stop digging’.
It might be nice if they take a look at the pricing mechanisms for renewables too. Charles will just have to suck it up and let the new Prince of Wales berate us poor people for wanting to be warm in our homes, and put food on the table instead.
“Why was Kemi Badenoch overlooked for Education Secretary?”
I’m a Kemi fan, and hoped that she would get Education too. However, I can see the logic of having Kit Malthouse in there instead. He is older and more experienced, and seems the type to have a go at the blob. Kemi could be a future Prime Minister, but not if she throws herself across Education and is stymied or defeated. Trade will allow her to hone her skills and build her capital, in what is a vital role of expanding the economy. Its a positive role that will suit her positive outlook. I hope I’m right.
My worry about the Trade brief would be that it depends very much on the Government cutting EU induced red tape and regulations. Otherwise all she can really achieve is rolling over our pre-independence agreements.
Despite making noises in the direction, so-far at least deregulation has always been at the bottom of the to-do list along with all of the other manifesto promises that they have no intention of getting around to.
Accepted that priorities change, but the PM was quite forthright about bombing the EU red tape out the system. I keep hoping that she will follow through on her pledges.
I’ll be as happy as anyone if they actually do, but those are the kinds of things they talk about but for some reason never seem to actually do.
My late father used to call them ‘The Gunners’, on account of them gunner do this or gunner do that.
I’m posting this link here as a follow on to the discussion yesterday about Common Law. If enough of us follow this path, then we can & will set-up a parallel legal system which cannot be hijacked or corrupted by those who wish to control everything, as Common Law is higher than Maritime or Statute Law. BTW ever wondered why one is given citizenship? At birth we’re registered by the state as chattel, as a ship & are therefore subject to maritime law, which is set up for trade & commerce.
https://www.commonlawcourt.com/
Cash updates:
2022 coins from the Mint with Charles III on might be quite rare? By the time the Royal Mint produce them, it will be just a couple of months to 2023. They could become commemorative editions automatically – potentially worth more than their face value. Similar gamble with notes, perhaps.
I’d be surprised if they weren’t minted months ago.
Hmm. Is the Bank of England really into actuarial gambling? They would have to be pretty secret about manufacturing in advance, based on someone’s life expectancy. I suppose they might have reduced the amount printed and minted if they thought she was unlikely to survive for so many months each year. Might even be sketching some King William designs in the background!
Or they might not even bother, as it will be digital currency in the very near future?
https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/985093/the-queen-set-for-a-bumper-payout-from-offshore-wind-985093.html
Nice and tidy.
It gets worse when you learn that she has been interfering with inheritance laws….
Published documents from the National Archives reveal that the Queen on occasions used the consent procedure to privately lobby the government
Evidence suggests she used the procedure to persuade government ministers to change a 1970s transparency law in order to conceal her private wealth from the public.
Documents also show that on other occasions the monarch’s advisers demanded exclusions from proposed laws relating to road safety and land policy that appeared to affect estates, and pressed for government policy on historic sites to be altered.
Some of the bills the Queen reviewed before they were passed by parliament relate to wealth or taxation.
One of the richest families in Britain, the monarch’s property investments are exempt from inheritance tax.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vetted-more-than-1000-laws-via-queens-consent
This is what we are a part of!
https://twitter.com/winteroakpress/status/1568304210826989572?s=21&t=XAhgcTRzpq1UmFx8rHEK0Q
I think my wife gave me the new BJ1 variant. It sucks.
I have an antiquated Teasmade gathering dust in the attic. Don’t know why that just sprung to mind?