The climate scaremongers: Red Ed’s energy plan means 50 years of extra charges
PAUL HOMEWOOD
ED Miliband’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero has admitted that as much as £240billion will have to be spent on upgrading Britain’s electricity network in order to meet Net Zero targets.
According to the Daily Telegraph: ‘Britain’s electricity network will require up to £240billion of upgrades to support clean power targets, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has admitted. In new estimates released by the Government, the cost of building new pylons and power lines will skyrocket in the next 24 years to achieve the Government’s net zero ambitions.
‘The energy department has already warned that grid upgrades will cost £80billion by 2030. However, the latest forecasts indicate that this is just the start of a much larger upgrade programme – with households poised to foot the bill.
‘The costs of grid expansion are loaded on to consumers’ energy bills to pay for upgrades carried out by the UK’s monopoly transmission operators: National Grid, SSE and Scottish Power. This includes building new pylons across the country to transport electricity generated by renewables, including rural wind and solar farms.
‘The scale of the upgrades was revealed at a conference this month, attended by officials from DESNZ.’
In addition to the £80billion already programmed by Ofgem, the National Energy System Operator (Neso) has already identified further investments of £58billion, which will be needed by 2035 if we are to meet the Sixth Carbon Budget laid down by the Climate Change Committee. This targets a five-fold increase in offshore wind farm capacity to 86GW by 2035, along with much more solar power. Electricity consumption is also projected to increase by 64 per cent to power our electric cars and heat pumps.
All of this demands thousands of miles of new pylons and transmission cables, bringing power from Scotland and the North Sea to the towns and cities where it will be used. Existing transmission lines and substations will need reinforcement to handle the increased flow of electricity.
Billions more will also be spent on battery storage systems to manage the inherent instability of wind and solar power.
https://www.neso.energy/industry-information/connections-reform
Beyond 2035, further upgrades will be necessary, with electricity consumption due to triple from current levels.
None of this expenditure would be necessary if it was not for Net Zero and the rollout of expensive, intermittent renewable energy. Bear in mind as well that none of this spending includes the cost of upgrading the local electricity distribution networks, the low voltage grid which brings electricity into our homes and factories. Experts have estimated this will cost hundreds of billions more to cope with the extra demand for electricity.
All this investment plus a return on capital will have to be reimbursed to the grid operators – National Grid, SSE and Scottish Power – with the cost ending up on our energy bills. Last year, we paid them around £3billion in transmission revenue, but that number is projected to rise to £12billion by 2030 just to start paying back the £80billion investment. Typically these returns are based on an asset life of 45 years. That means we will be locked into these extra charges until the 2070s.
Based on DESNZ’s estimate of £240billion, that cost will eventually triple, equating to £1,300 a year for every household in the country.
Miliband and all the other politicians and bureaucrats who have foisted Net Zero on the country have long known that a massive upgrading of the electricity grid would be necessary to achieve their aims, even if they may not have known the actual costs involved. But they have covered up the fact. Instead, they have repeatedly lied that we would all benefit from cheap renewable energy, which would bring our bills down eventually.
For the first time, voters will have a chance at the next election to put an end to Net Zero. It will be a tragedy if that chance is not taken, which may well happen because of senseless infighting and personal vanity among the right.
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Britain can’t afford Ed Miliband
Andy Burnham is reported to have cooled on the Energy Secretary as a potential chancellor. Let’s hope that’s right
TOM TUGENDHAT
Sadly the Charles our Energy Secretary studied in history was Marx, not Stuart. Ed Miliband believes only socialism, not freedom will change Britain’s energy mix. He’s wrong and that’s risking our carbon-free future.
Clean, cheap power is a prize worth chasing, but you need energy to reach it and the journey from carbon to non-carbon will be one of the most energy-hungry undertakings in our history. The wind turbines, the electricity grids, the fission and, I hope, fusion reactors and the factories that will install it all demand more power, not less. But instead of freeing our industry and innovators, we’re seeing both hollowed out.
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Miliband’s carbon strategy is to stop. Instead of generating the energy needed to succeed, he’s holding us back like a panicked lieutenant in no-man’s land. He’s shutting off our cheap, reliable carbon energy and made it harder and more expensive to deliver the clean power meant to replace it. So we are pinned down, paying the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world and watching jobs die all around us. The latest to go was the Denby potteries, which had survived 200 years of war and peace but couldn’t manage two years of Miliband’s virtuous vanity that mistakes paralysis for prudence.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised: he’s been a socialist flagellant practically since birth. His father was one of Britain’s foremost Marxist theorists and he led Labour from the hard Left, with policies that look punitive even with the high taxes we see today. He wore the nickname Red Ed with pride.
Socialism doesn’t change, it’s all about power – who controls it, and who directs it. Today that’s energy: which firms will get the subsidy, which the bill?
With the need to build data centres and inject life into our digital economy, energy is only going to be more important and higher prices mean lower growth. And we only have a brief time to get this right, or we won’t just see old jobs go overseas, we will ensure the new ones never arrive.
Many others understand the need for cheap power. Even the German Greens have been in governments that burn lignite, a dirty coal, because they surely know Miliband’s dream of net zero without global agreement is just unilateral industrial disarmament.
This socialist vision of utopia exists nowhere. Norway taps the gas fields we share and sells us the energy, and China builds new coal-fired power plants to help make the steel we’ve effectively forbidden to reduce carbon outputs.
Our real emissions have barely moved, they’ve just moved abroad. Poor Ed, he missed the economics lesson that, while taxes are territorial, carbon is global; so we’re paying with our jobs for higher carbon outputs from dirtier industries with lower employment standards overseas. I’m not sure he’s thought this through.
Ed is still singing the Internationale, but all we can hear is Stalin’s “socialism in one country”. And it will fail again. You can’t separate economics from physics in just one country.
It is virtue by vice, squeezing the hope out of the economy with a policy based on all sacrifice and no salvation.
The Telegraph: continue reading
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(UKR)