Shining a light yet again on our incompetent, lying politicians. There is no meaningful choice for the voters on most things but especially energy. Their inability to understand basic physics and maths ensures they just take the word of activists hiding in the shadows whilst we pay for this nonsense.
Spot on JB, however it goes further than that. The climate change nonsense is not about science. The political class don't give a stuff. They slap their bills on expenses.
It's about power (and not the energy sort). It's about controlling who can do what and when.
I think of Labour as ideological Guardian-reading nutters versus the Conservatives in thrall to the Big Money globalist cabal of WEF/Soros et al. As such, climate religion-driven Labour may well be even more dangerous.
They are also ready to toe the globalist line as we saw during the Covid "plandemic" with their calls for earlier, more severe lockdowns and with Starmer saying how he would deal severely with "anti-vaxxers" and voicing his preference for Davos over Westminster: https://x.com/JamesMelville/status/1793760309989024094?t=VjsYFvAMwP7mp4Fb9C4yaQ&s=19.
Being further to the left than the Conservatives makes Labour by nature even more authoritarian.
People need to stop voting for the treasonous Co/Lab/Lib/SNP Uniparty who are wilfully leading the people of this country into ruination.
Thanks David. But shouldn’t you also have mentioned the enormous costs of establishing a reliable ‘renewable’ grid (including local distribution) and of comprehensive grid-scale back-up?
The bigger issue is Labour haven't mentioned it, which irrespective of your views on climate, if the goal is 100% renewable penetration by 2030 then the grid has to be reconfigured and that means rebuilding it. Yes that will cost billions but without it there is NO possibility of achieving the 2030 goal. The fundamental enabler of this, even if you chuck billions at it, is sorting out the planning system to which they say nothing.
Personally i see this as a sop to keep Greenies in the Labour camp and shut up Millibrain wing of the party but if Reeves is true to her word about needing growth she knows that requires cheap and importantly available energy today not in five or ten years time so she will force through a more equitable policy between renewables and fossil fuels.
I very much agree. For the first time politicians - who have so far been living in dreamland - are having to come face to face with reality. Reeves cannot possibly support the vast costs involved and the whole project will have at least to be deferred. Miliband and the greenies won't like it but if Starmer/Reeves stay firm - and I think they have little choice - they'll have to lump it. This could even be the end of Net Zero.
As Ayn Rand is supposed to have said: ‘we can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.’ Well, Labour's been evading realty for a long time and soon the consequences will be manifest.
There's another big issue that's rarely mentioned. It's this: the UK doesn’t have nearly enough skilled technical managers, electrical and other engineers, electricians, welders, mechanics and other tradespeople to do the multitude of tasks essential to achieve the 2030 target – a problem exacerbated by Labour’s high priority plans for massively increased house building. This I believe could stop the whole thing dead even if there were no other problems. But of course there are plenty of those.
The idea that the UK can survive on windmills is laughable. It would mean not working for half the year.
Yet the state just doesn't care. Practical realty is irrelevant. Folk need to understand: this isn't about the environment or ecology. If it were, surely sinking 500 tons of concrete, 10 tons of steel, fibreglass and 1000 litres of oil into the sea bed is a stupid idea.
No, climate change, and all it's hangers on are just zealots trying to force social change. the lie is just another weapon.
Starmer recently "cut back" on his green spending commitment from about £28 billion to about £8 billion but this was a sleight of hand. He has not scaled back on his ambition to inundate the country with useless, pointless renewables.
His fascist plan is to get Big Money (ref. BlackRock/Mark Carney) to put up most of the money. They will be incentivised by massive public subsidies. This is money straight from the pockets of the general public into the coffers of Big Money.
I think there is plenty of wriggle room for more. A lot more. From the current Labour website page:
National Wealth Fund. Alongside Great British Energy will be a new National Wealth Fund that will invest in the jobs that can rebuild Britain’s industrial strength, and crowd in private investment in our ports, gigafactories, hydrogen, and protect our steel industry.
Key to the success of our plans is upgrading the national grid so that we have the infrastructure we need to move forward.
Then there's another paragraph about warm homes. The actual 22 page linked document is still the one drafted nearly a year ago with its fatuous claims about £93bn of savings over a Parliament.
As I understand it, the National Wealth Fund is supposed to be funded by the same windfall tax that is supposed to be earmarked for GBE, and there's a big overlap on what they are spending on.
Yet they moan about the fact most of the offshore wind is currently owned by non UK entities? Ummm that doesn't add up but of course it does because they are hypocrites and basically trying to con the British public they are different. The worst of it is that all the mainstream political parties have now been green chipped and the public brainwashed so much that to move away from it risks political suicide for any party that trys to dial back on it.
I think you are right. He intends to subjugate our future by mortgaging it in just the same way as Labour did under PFI. I suspect we will be signed up to China's Belt and Road as the only real source of investable funds from their trade surplus, and the price will be high. See the Cameron/Osborne deal on Hinkley Point and multiply by 50. Part of the price will be political, including endorsing Chinese takeover of Taiwan.
They will be Chinese made wind and solar. China will happily invest in ports: they already own Darwin that they could use as a naval base any time they want, for example.
The founder of Ember, originators of this nonsense, is Baroness Worthington. English graduate Worthington moved from Friends of the Earth to Ed Miliband's new department of energy and climate change where she was lead author of the disastrous 2008 Climate Change Act. In 2011 she was elevated by Miliband to the Lords. Perhaps to cover her new lobbying career she resigned the Labour whip in 2017 to become a cross-bencher. MIliband is still clearly taking orders from her in a perfect example of green crony capitalism.
Baroness Brown, DBE FRS FREng, member of the CCC and director of Ørsted just popped up in The Times to say that she thinks that AR6 prices aren't high enough to encourage the necessary investment. You have to guess that instead of the current value of just over £100/MWh she means at least £125/MWh or even something like the current average wind realisation including subsidies of about £150/MWh.
I do hope AR6 is flop as it will really bust open the myth about renewables being cheaper and even Labour will have nowhere to hide as Reeves is not going to sanction any increase other than inflationary for AR7.
Ah, the Robber Baroness who has just presided over a House of Lords report pushing hydrogen. She's also a director of Ceres Power which, surprise, surprise, is big on electrolysers.
Going all electric by 2030 - in five years - is a complete fantasy.
Firstly, all electric from renewables, is not all energy from renewables. At present, electricity is only 1/4 of total energy usage. But when we start using more electric vehicles and heat pumps, electric demand will double by 2035, and treble or quadruple by 2050.
Secondly - yet again they are avoiding the storage issue. At present our electricity backup is via gas and a bit of coal. When that is all closed down, the lights WILL go out on a regular basis.
As I said before, we need 30,000 gwh of backup by 2050. So lets call that 10,000 or 15,000 gwh by 2030, if Labour closes all our gas plants.
At present we have some 15 gwh of backup, and that will rise to 50 gwh by 2030. So we have a shortfall of some 14,950 gwh of backup. At the present rate of construction, that will take 1,500 years. So we might have reliable renewables by year 3570. Great planning, eh?
This is very important.
I wrote about this in 2004, that intermittent energy would bring the nation to its knees.
“Renewable Energy, Our Downfall”
The answer from Bliar and Cameron was that building nuclear would take too long. That was 20 years ago - those nuclear plants would have been constructed by now.
What they meant is that nuclear is unpopular with their Liberal Greeney allies, so it was politically unacceptable. (It was Cameron who changed the Tory logo to a tree.) Blair and Cameron both underscored this, when they announced nuclear plants the week they left office. Cowards that they were. (I think they both did this.)
Thirdly - the nation is bankrupt. All that technology is presently manufactured abroad, and there is no way in the world that Starmer can establish new British industries by 2030. And we cannot afford to pay others to build all that infrastructure. And he cannot just blame Tories for that - Blair was happily expanding Chinese imports during his naughties administration, because it kept UK inflation low.
Agreed but its now clear that even the ESO Future Energy Scenario of Falling Short (the least aggressive option of leccy expansion) is a work of fiction let alone their full on Consumer Transformation which is just cloud cuckoo. So the demand on the grid wont be there yet we embarking on rebuilding the grid to deliver that outcome and throwing ever more consumers money to incentivise more offshore windmills and other fandangle devices to generate electricity we wont need. This wont help keep bills down but what will be existential is if they follow the same roadmap as coal and destroy the CCGT fleet either through making it uneconomical to keep them as standby or forcing them to be decommissioned (demolished) for the photo op.
Oh and your bang on in the last paragraph and as a time served electrical engineer who used GEC and predecessors kit its utterly contemptible how politicians spout on about Britain is leading the world in offshore wind. We DONT its all foreign kit.
How is it that supposedly intelligent people become disciples of a fantasy island cult?. We all know it is a mania that will pass but how impoverished will we become before the mania passes and who will be held responsible?. You only need to see the video of Ed Milliband the other day to realise he is now the cult leader!!
David, you correctly draw our attention to the holes in Labour's energy policy plans. However, we should step back and see this as just part of a long line of current and imminent scandals, recent ones being the Post Office/Horizon and the infected blood tragedy. Collectively these scandals suggest that the British state can be rotten to the core; once a predator organisation penetrates to gain influence over UK policy then all the powers of the state are engaged, sometimes for years, to protect the predator and vilify or destroy those who would reveal the scandal. Thus we need to clean out our own Augean stables; we could start, for example, by ending the huge and varied subsidies to the rent-seekers of the mis-named "renewable energy" industries. Regards, John C.
Yes, Paul H, it was exactly the Covid scandal that I was thinking of when I wrote of "imminent scandals". Thank you for spelling it out explicitly; this is an absolutely enormous "affair", covering much of the Western world - the corruption is very widespread, I fear. It is interesting to note that the state is not always predatory. For example, 50 years ago I benefitted from the state's support for my university education. Times change. Regards, John C.
I like government world. Spending more is cheaper, inefficiency is productivity, cost is irrelevant and you get free publicity from a duplicitous, biased organisation whose pension is sunk into the scam.
It must be great being a politician. You don't even have to argue black is white You just say it is and no one has any choice.
All sarcasm aside, these dangerous, malignant hypocrites have got to be stopped, permanently. The net zero scam must be halted, the climate change act repealed and a market restored to energy that has no subsidy or tax or any form of government meddling whatsoever.
Great analysis thank you. Lots of knowledge here but also there is a lot of anger on this page. Much of it poorly directed. Can I ask is the anger at the idea of using renewables, is it that its just not feasible or is it because people here feel they are being lied to? I'm trying to understand that if they pledge was by 2040 would all here have found it more agreeable? Or are people here just plain against renewable energy or a plan to try and get to it?
Shining a light yet again on our incompetent, lying politicians. There is no meaningful choice for the voters on most things but especially energy. Their inability to understand basic physics and maths ensures they just take the word of activists hiding in the shadows whilst we pay for this nonsense.
Spot on JB, however it goes further than that. The climate change nonsense is not about science. The political class don't give a stuff. They slap their bills on expenses.
It's about power (and not the energy sort). It's about controlling who can do what and when.
I think of Labour as ideological Guardian-reading nutters versus the Conservatives in thrall to the Big Money globalist cabal of WEF/Soros et al. As such, climate religion-driven Labour may well be even more dangerous.
They are also ready to toe the globalist line as we saw during the Covid "plandemic" with their calls for earlier, more severe lockdowns and with Starmer saying how he would deal severely with "anti-vaxxers" and voicing his preference for Davos over Westminster: https://x.com/JamesMelville/status/1793760309989024094?t=VjsYFvAMwP7mp4Fb9C4yaQ&s=19.
Being further to the left than the Conservatives makes Labour by nature even more authoritarian.
People need to stop voting for the treasonous Co/Lab/Lib/SNP Uniparty who are wilfully leading the people of this country into ruination.
Thanks David. But shouldn’t you also have mentioned the enormous costs of establishing a reliable ‘renewable’ grid (including local distribution) and of comprehensive grid-scale back-up?
Probably, but I have done that elsewhere.
You have, but surely not mentioning these matters here means you are understating the true cost of Labour's plans?
The bigger issue is Labour haven't mentioned it, which irrespective of your views on climate, if the goal is 100% renewable penetration by 2030 then the grid has to be reconfigured and that means rebuilding it. Yes that will cost billions but without it there is NO possibility of achieving the 2030 goal. The fundamental enabler of this, even if you chuck billions at it, is sorting out the planning system to which they say nothing.
Personally i see this as a sop to keep Greenies in the Labour camp and shut up Millibrain wing of the party but if Reeves is true to her word about needing growth she knows that requires cheap and importantly available energy today not in five or ten years time so she will force through a more equitable policy between renewables and fossil fuels.
I very much agree. For the first time politicians - who have so far been living in dreamland - are having to come face to face with reality. Reeves cannot possibly support the vast costs involved and the whole project will have at least to be deferred. Miliband and the greenies won't like it but if Starmer/Reeves stay firm - and I think they have little choice - they'll have to lump it. This could even be the end of Net Zero.
As Ayn Rand is supposed to have said: ‘we can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.’ Well, Labour's been evading realty for a long time and soon the consequences will be manifest.
There's another big issue that's rarely mentioned. It's this: the UK doesn’t have nearly enough skilled technical managers, electrical and other engineers, electricians, welders, mechanics and other tradespeople to do the multitude of tasks essential to achieve the 2030 target – a problem exacerbated by Labour’s high priority plans for massively increased house building. This I believe could stop the whole thing dead even if there were no other problems. But of course there are plenty of those.
The idea that the UK can survive on windmills is laughable. It would mean not working for half the year.
Yet the state just doesn't care. Practical realty is irrelevant. Folk need to understand: this isn't about the environment or ecology. If it were, surely sinking 500 tons of concrete, 10 tons of steel, fibreglass and 1000 litres of oil into the sea bed is a stupid idea.
No, climate change, and all it's hangers on are just zealots trying to force social change. the lie is just another weapon.
Starmer recently "cut back" on his green spending commitment from about £28 billion to about £8 billion but this was a sleight of hand. He has not scaled back on his ambition to inundate the country with useless, pointless renewables.
His fascist plan is to get Big Money (ref. BlackRock/Mark Carney) to put up most of the money. They will be incentivised by massive public subsidies. This is money straight from the pockets of the general public into the coffers of Big Money.
The plan went from £28bn per year, to £8bn over the course of a Parliament.
I think there is plenty of wriggle room for more. A lot more. From the current Labour website page:
National Wealth Fund. Alongside Great British Energy will be a new National Wealth Fund that will invest in the jobs that can rebuild Britain’s industrial strength, and crowd in private investment in our ports, gigafactories, hydrogen, and protect our steel industry.
Key to the success of our plans is upgrading the national grid so that we have the infrastructure we need to move forward.
Then there's another paragraph about warm homes. The actual 22 page linked document is still the one drafted nearly a year ago with its fatuous claims about £93bn of savings over a Parliament.
As I understand it, the National Wealth Fund is supposed to be funded by the same windfall tax that is supposed to be earmarked for GBE, and there's a big overlap on what they are spending on.
It's all a fantasy anyway. So identifying proper funding is almost irrelevant.
Yet they moan about the fact most of the offshore wind is currently owned by non UK entities? Ummm that doesn't add up but of course it does because they are hypocrites and basically trying to con the British public they are different. The worst of it is that all the mainstream political parties have now been green chipped and the public brainwashed so much that to move away from it risks political suicide for any party that trys to dial back on it.
I think you are right. He intends to subjugate our future by mortgaging it in just the same way as Labour did under PFI. I suspect we will be signed up to China's Belt and Road as the only real source of investable funds from their trade surplus, and the price will be high. See the Cameron/Osborne deal on Hinkley Point and multiply by 50. Part of the price will be political, including endorsing Chinese takeover of Taiwan.
They will be Chinese made wind and solar. China will happily invest in ports: they already own Darwin that they could use as a naval base any time they want, for example.
The founder of Ember, originators of this nonsense, is Baroness Worthington. English graduate Worthington moved from Friends of the Earth to Ed Miliband's new department of energy and climate change where she was lead author of the disastrous 2008 Climate Change Act. In 2011 she was elevated by Miliband to the Lords. Perhaps to cover her new lobbying career she resigned the Labour whip in 2017 to become a cross-bencher. MIliband is still clearly taking orders from her in a perfect example of green crony capitalism.
Thanks for this - I guess there's not an engineer in sight.
Baroness Brown, DBE FRS FREng, member of the CCC and director of Ørsted just popped up in The Times to say that she thinks that AR6 prices aren't high enough to encourage the necessary investment. You have to guess that instead of the current value of just over £100/MWh she means at least £125/MWh or even something like the current average wind realisation including subsidies of about £150/MWh.
Good letters to have after her name, certainly. She is advocating public money replacing entrepreneurial risk - nice work if you can get it.
I do hope AR6 is flop as it will really bust open the myth about renewables being cheaper and even Labour will have nowhere to hide as Reeves is not going to sanction any increase other than inflationary for AR7.
Ah, the Robber Baroness who has just presided over a House of Lords report pushing hydrogen. She's also a director of Ceres Power which, surprise, surprise, is big on electrolysers.
Link to article for those able to read it:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/offshore-wind-needs-bigger-subsidies-warns-government-adviser-p3d823xjv
Going all electric by 2030 - in five years - is a complete fantasy.
Firstly, all electric from renewables, is not all energy from renewables. At present, electricity is only 1/4 of total energy usage. But when we start using more electric vehicles and heat pumps, electric demand will double by 2035, and treble or quadruple by 2050.
Secondly - yet again they are avoiding the storage issue. At present our electricity backup is via gas and a bit of coal. When that is all closed down, the lights WILL go out on a regular basis.
As I said before, we need 30,000 gwh of backup by 2050. So lets call that 10,000 or 15,000 gwh by 2030, if Labour closes all our gas plants.
At present we have some 15 gwh of backup, and that will rise to 50 gwh by 2030. So we have a shortfall of some 14,950 gwh of backup. At the present rate of construction, that will take 1,500 years. So we might have reliable renewables by year 3570. Great planning, eh?
This is very important.
I wrote about this in 2004, that intermittent energy would bring the nation to its knees.
“Renewable Energy, Our Downfall”
The answer from Bliar and Cameron was that building nuclear would take too long. That was 20 years ago - those nuclear plants would have been constructed by now.
What they meant is that nuclear is unpopular with their Liberal Greeney allies, so it was politically unacceptable. (It was Cameron who changed the Tory logo to a tree.) Blair and Cameron both underscored this, when they announced nuclear plants the week they left office. Cowards that they were. (I think they both did this.)
Thirdly - the nation is bankrupt. All that technology is presently manufactured abroad, and there is no way in the world that Starmer can establish new British industries by 2030. And we cannot afford to pay others to build all that infrastructure. And he cannot just blame Tories for that - Blair was happily expanding Chinese imports during his naughties administration, because it kept UK inflation low.
Ralph
Agreed but its now clear that even the ESO Future Energy Scenario of Falling Short (the least aggressive option of leccy expansion) is a work of fiction let alone their full on Consumer Transformation which is just cloud cuckoo. So the demand on the grid wont be there yet we embarking on rebuilding the grid to deliver that outcome and throwing ever more consumers money to incentivise more offshore windmills and other fandangle devices to generate electricity we wont need. This wont help keep bills down but what will be existential is if they follow the same roadmap as coal and destroy the CCGT fleet either through making it uneconomical to keep them as standby or forcing them to be decommissioned (demolished) for the photo op.
Oh and your bang on in the last paragraph and as a time served electrical engineer who used GEC and predecessors kit its utterly contemptible how politicians spout on about Britain is leading the world in offshore wind. We DONT its all foreign kit.
How is it that supposedly intelligent people become disciples of a fantasy island cult?. We all know it is a mania that will pass but how impoverished will we become before the mania passes and who will be held responsible?. You only need to see the video of Ed Milliband the other day to realise he is now the cult leader!!
They aren't intelligent is the answer just easily manipulated
Half decent and honest press coverage in the mainstream media would have put a stop to this suicidal nonsense years ago.
Can the press corpse (sorry corps) be revived?
I doubt it.
This greatly under-reported segment of the renewables subsidy regime has seemingly gone beserk:
https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/business/insights/rego-prices-renewable-energy/
https://renewable.exchange/blog/rego-index-update-october-2023/
Worth watching for further updates. A useful series of insights:
https://renewable.exchange/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PPA-Market-Report-2023-2024.pdf
Probably REGO market has peaked for now with more wind coming onstream, but it can't be ignored in the numbers.
David, you correctly draw our attention to the holes in Labour's energy policy plans. However, we should step back and see this as just part of a long line of current and imminent scandals, recent ones being the Post Office/Horizon and the infected blood tragedy. Collectively these scandals suggest that the British state can be rotten to the core; once a predator organisation penetrates to gain influence over UK policy then all the powers of the state are engaged, sometimes for years, to protect the predator and vilify or destroy those who would reveal the scandal. Thus we need to clean out our own Augean stables; we could start, for example, by ending the huge and varied subsidies to the rent-seekers of the mis-named "renewable energy" industries. Regards, John C.
Add to that the covid scandle. When the dust finally begins to settle on that issue, the other issues you mention will pale to insignificance
Yes, Paul H, it was exactly the Covid scandal that I was thinking of when I wrote of "imminent scandals". Thank you for spelling it out explicitly; this is an absolutely enormous "affair", covering much of the Western world - the corruption is very widespread, I fear. It is interesting to note that the state is not always predatory. For example, 50 years ago I benefitted from the state's support for my university education. Times change. Regards, John C.
To my mind its the innate inability of politicians to have any contrition or humility to accept they have got it wrong.
I like government world. Spending more is cheaper, inefficiency is productivity, cost is irrelevant and you get free publicity from a duplicitous, biased organisation whose pension is sunk into the scam.
It must be great being a politician. You don't even have to argue black is white You just say it is and no one has any choice.
All sarcasm aside, these dangerous, malignant hypocrites have got to be stopped, permanently. The net zero scam must be halted, the climate change act repealed and a market restored to energy that has no subsidy or tax or any form of government meddling whatsoever.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/06/07/desnz-admit-we-will-need-50gw-of-ccgt-in-2035/
DESNZ catching up with the rest of us
Great analysis thank you. Lots of knowledge here but also there is a lot of anger on this page. Much of it poorly directed. Can I ask is the anger at the idea of using renewables, is it that its just not feasible or is it because people here feel they are being lied to? I'm trying to understand that if they pledge was by 2040 would all here have found it more agreeable? Or are people here just plain against renewable energy or a plan to try and get to it?