The Cost of Green Jobs
The astronomical cost of jobs in renewable energy
Introduction
Recently, Shadow Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has been promoting his party’s “Green Prosperity Plan” again.
Interestingly, he was “ratioed”, meaning he received more replies than likes, so maybe the public is starting to rumble his ruse. Nevertheless, he is likely to be in the Cabinet after the election, so we need to pay attention to what he says. Labour claim that their plan will “deliver more jobs, more investment and lower bills.” Time to look at how much these mythical jobs in the renewable sector cost us and hazard a guess at whether they stand a chance of delivering the promised prosperity.
How Many Green Jobs Are There?
From time to time, the ONS publishes an assessment of Low Carbon and Renewable Energy Economy (LCREE). This covers the number of businesses, turnover and how many jobs are involved in the LCREE. Helpfully, they break down the figures by sector, including offshore wind, onshore wind and solar power. The latest available figures for 2021, show the number of full-time equivalent jobs in the UK for these sectors was 10,600, 5,000 and 6,400, respectively.
How Much do Wind and Solar Power Receive in Subsidy?
There are three subsidy regimes for renewable energy in the UK. These are Feed-in-Tariffs (FiTs), Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs) and Contracts for Difference (CfDs).
Each year Ofgem publish the FiT report and dataset that details the total amount of electricity generated, total payments and the capacity installed by technology. In scheme year 12, running from April 2021 to March 2022, 79.4% of FiT capacity was solar and 11.9% wind. The rest was made up of hydro and anaerobic digestion plants. The total payments under the FiT scheme were £1,557m. If we split these payments by capacity, we can determine that solar power received £1,236m in FiT payments and wind (assumed to be onshore) received £185m.
Details of ROCs issued can be found on the Ofgem portal. The value of ROCs related to the output period of the whole of 2021 was £2,009m for offshore wind, £1,251m for onshore wind and £493m for solar power.
The Low Carbon Contracts Company publishes a database of CfD payments that can also be split by technology. This shows that offshore wind received £612m in 2021. This figure is lower than might be expected because gas prices started to spike in late-2021 and so some CfD-funded wind farms started to refund money under the CfD scheme. Because strike prices for onshore wind and solar power tend to be lower than for offshore wind, these two technologies paid back £22m and £204m, respectively.
The total subsidies in 2021 for these three sectors is around £5.56bn. This compares to the ONS estimate of £14.56bn turnover for the same sectors. Putting it another way, 38% of the turnover is pure subsidy.
What is the Cost of Green Jobs?
Pulling all this together, we can add up the total subsidy received for these technologies and compare it to the number of jobs in each sector.
We can see that each offshore wind job cost £247K in subsidy, each onshore wind job nearly £283K and solar £238K. The average across all three sectors is nearly £253K per job.
Now remember, this is not a one-off payment to get a new industry up and running, it is an ongoing annual payment. The ONS does not publish its estimate of the salaries in the sector, however, the annual subsidies are far higher than any reasonable estimate of the average salaries paid in the sector.
Conclusions
It is crystal clear that all talk of a “green revolution” is simply a pipedream. These green jobs are only a façade, Potemkin jobs to give politicians and policymakers a good sound bite and make them feel good about themselves. The idea that we can move to “Green Prosperity” by subsidising each job to the tune of over £250K is plainly absurd. If we take any further steps down this “green prosperity” road, we risk bankrupting the nation.
This article has also appeared in the Daily Sceptic.
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The other issue is that none of the equipment is made in the UK and hence we are subsidising imports. Solar panels are almost exclusively made in China and wind turbines in Denmark, Germany, China and Spain.
BOTH parties are totally unfit to govern and present a clear and present existential danger to the economy and to the social fabric of the nation. They both want to deindustrialise the economy and industrialise the natural landscape in their mad, malign pursuit of an unachievable and utterly pointless 'Green' utopia which assures that only that a nightmarish Green dystopia will be delivered to order as a direct result of the attempt to get to imaginary 'Net Zero'.
Is it really too much to expect the majority of voters to be aware of this, as well as being aware of the many other nation-destroying policies which Labour and the Cons stubbornly cling to and intend to implement to the detriment of us all? It's not staring us all in the face now, it's slapping us hard around the chops, daily and repeatedly. If you want to save your country the choice is obvious: do NOT vote for ANY of the major parties, which are all 100% captured by outside interests, but DO vote - for independents, for Reform even, for any other minor globalist opposition candidates who might be standing OR, most importantly, SPOIL your ballot paper by writing 'None of the above' or 'I do not consent'. Spoiled ballots ARE counted.
If the MAJORITY use their vote to give the Uniparty a well deserved kick in the goolies, it will be the first step in a much needed political and cultural revolution in this country. If the majority vote Labour in order to kick the Cons in the goolies, traitorous politicians from both parties will be laughing their socks off as they quickly finish the job which they started in earnest in 1992, of destroying our once great nation. GB will NOT recover from 5 years of Starmer, Milliband, Reeves et al.
Unfortunately, the polls suggest the brain dead electorate WILL vote Labour in a landslide. When that happens, I'll be giving up the ghost and concentrating solely on self-preservation as the ensuing Chaos engulfs the country. Very depressing.