Ed Miliband doesn’t want to know the cost of Net Zero, but here it is anyway
Story by Gordon Hughes • 1h
It has only been a few months since the publication of Clean Power 2030, the Government’s detailed map of the UK’s voyage to Net Zero. It is highly unlikely that the plan can become reality on the timescale envisaged, as the UK simply does not have access to the capital and engineers required to build the necessary generation plants and grid connections so quickly. But that almost doesn’t matter beside the most important fact about the plan: it will be extremely expensive.
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 ten 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.
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