The Impossible Dream
An inevitable nightmare
POSTED ON 06 MAR 23
BY MARK HODGSONIN NET ZERO, POLITICS, RENEWABLES, STATS
Paul Homewood has a scathing piece about the National Audit Office report dated 1st March 2023, on “Decarbonising the power sector”.
It is difficult to disagree with Paul’s concluding three paragraphs:
The report does briefly mention the necessary upgrading of the grid, the cost of which is not included in the £400 billion mentioned above. But it makes no attempt to put a cost on it, or for that matter the government for its failure to do so.
Given that the NAO’s remit is to ensure value for money, surely they should have demanded that the government produce a fully costed and audited budget for decarbonising the power sector, without which the whole strategy cannot properly be assessed.
A thorough and truly independent report by the NAO would surely have called into question the whole decarbonisation strategy, as being wasteful and poor value for money, poorly thought through, impractical and endangering the UK’s energy security.
However, I see enough criticism in the report regarding the Government’s approach to net zero to make it a worthwhile read. One hopes that politicians might read it and start to worry more than a little about their ludicrously expensive and appallingly impracticable pet project. What follows is simply a cut and paste exercise on my part of paragraphs lifted from the report, with page references given, so that any interested readers can check out the references if so minded. The NAO report may not offer the much-needed hauling over the coals of the net zero project, but I believe there is enough in what follows to make any sane person read it and weep. Everything that follows (save for the conclusion) is a direct quote from the report.
Key facts (page 4):
https://cliscep.com/2023/03/06/the-impossible-dream/
