Who decides who misleads the committee and should be fined? It would surely be used to suppress criticism of bad government policies. When I looked at some of the evidence provided to select committees I find a lot of it is designed to echo government lines of thought. Some of it is full of lies, perhaps in some cases through ignorance (particularly when it comes to individual submissions).
It would make far more sense to offer the opportunity for community notes or open peer review (as for example GWPF do for their more important papers). We should be opening debate, not closing it down.
An advantage of that is that it is open to journalists to read and pick up on. Some might learn how they can learn something.
The details of the maximum strike prices and other auction parameters (other than the budgets) are due for release on 24th July. We will then be able to gauge the chances of a reasonable number of bids or another failed auction. It's a difficult choice for Miliband, as if he lets prices go higher he will be accused of increasing costs for consumers.
My read is for offshore wind projects (not floating) there will be a budget but Milibrain has the ability to flex it during the bidding process to make sure he gets what he wants!
They've also confirmed no rebids for AR7 but are clearly paving the way to overturn that for AR8 if things don't play out as they want. So that shuts out Hornsea 4 and pushes them to select developments that are not very far down the planning route so I just can't see much of this being realised before 2030.
The bigger threat overall is all the excess generation is going to mess with wholesale pricing with more negative SPs and risk generators pulling assets off line and letting NESO sort it out in the BM.
Brave words, but he should look at the final contract terms when they are published. He may find it difficult to do without crystallising a lot of compensation payments.
In England & Wales looks like c 10GW of sites already have development consent but no CfD. Another 3-4GW are well on with planning process so will be eligible under this 12mth rule. Scotland operates another process which could add another 5-8GW.
So if they go all in they will be adding a huge amount of CfD costs let alone constraint problems but unlikely much of it realised before 2030 though.
There remain many uncertainties. The DESNZ announcement on REMA may confirm the abandonment of zonal pricing, but it introduces fresh uncertainty over a new system for allocating TNUoS charges and connection charges for generators (and presumably, consumers). There are other tweaks that will impact forecasts of how much generation will be lost to negative prices curtailment and paid for curtailment and what payment levels might be.
Add in rising capital costs, supply chain uncertainties and the fact the government has to pay over 5.3% for 20 year money and there will need to be a clear comfort factor before locking into a 20 year price deal. If the revenues will be insufficient because of low volume and inadequate prices in some combination There will be few bids, and we will be back to the AR5 scenario.
Miliband would be foolish to assume that 20 year price fixes will result in over 10% cheaper prices. As wind farms age maintenance bills tend higher and performance erodes. Being compelled to keep generating may make little sense.
Reneging previously agreed contracts would be the best way to stop paying for things we don't need and which will cost us more (on the network, balancing etc.), but it sets a strong precedent undermining UK credibility and would make investors wary and demand more returns due to the risk.
Perhaps a middle ground of closing any future rounds of the scheme but honouring existing contracts to end of life?
Many contracts are protected by Qualifying Change in Law provisions that entitle them to demand compensation for loss of profits if discriminatory taxes or changes in market rules affect profits. These were deemed necessary precisely because it might get easy to pay high prices to get the investment done, but then cheat by changing the rules and taxes afterwards.
Any approach that triggers QCiL is not going to work. There is a need to be rather more subtle, and also a need to keep the lights on which requires planning rather than summary action.
Net Zero is a blatantly obvious plot to wreck the economy and it’s high time someone did something about it. In the words of Jo Nova’s new logo “A perfectly good civilization is going to waste …”
Can anyone suggest how legal action could be taken against them? Isn’t this something that a body like Net Zero Watch should take on? I would happily support a crowd-funding to finance it. If a legal challenge were along the lines that Net Zero is on track to wreck our civilisation and in any case is pointless because hardly anyone else is doing it, wouldn’t it be worth having the arguments aired in open court, under oath, even if legally it doesn’t stand a chance because of the legally-binding nature of the Climate Change Act ? Who knows, an unbiased judge might even adjudicate that the CCA has to be revoked.
With a very few honourable exceptions, e.g. Esther McVey, Sammy Wilson and Lee Anderson, practically everything said is a lie which is inevitable given that Net Zero is wholly predicated on the deliberate lies put out by the UN IPCC, the WMO, the Met Office, the CCC et al.
I’ll give Miliband his due, he is a good actor. He paints himself as a passionate, patriotic and altruistic believer in his supposedly noble endeavour which he now claims is going to save nature as well as the global climate. In my opinion and the opinion of long-time climate sceptic Lord Monckton he is pursuing a malign ulterior agenda: https://x.com/NotFarLeftAtAll/status/1943210511505461574.
The muppet leader of the opposition starts his reply with the inanity: “I think we can all attest to the fact that Britain today is warmer than it was before”. So what, has he never heard of climate natural variability caused by, inter alia, reduced global cloud cover, El Ninos and Hunga Tonga? When he goes on to suggest that Miliband has been economical with the truth, the Speaker steps in with this nugget: “Order. We need to be careful about what we say. I think that the hon. Gentleman has suggested that the Secretary of State was not honest, and I think we are all honest Members here”.
The only good thing about this pantomime is that it is gong to be an annual event, giving us an annual opportunity for mockery and disparagement. In Climate Scepticism, Mark Hodgson slams Ed Miliband’s “State of Climate” debate as a pompous parade of alarmism: https://cliscep.com/2025/07/15/send-in-the-clowns/.
Are you sure about that? ChatGPT finds that tagline under Jo Nova but not Marcel Crok. As far as I can see (all my searches come up in Dutch!), Marcel Crok has always been a climate sceptic, co-founder of Clintel which organised the World Climate Declaration that there is no climate emergency.
Read it again. I pointed out that Crok conveyed the opposite message to Miliband's alarmism. Albeit in Dutch I think he was the originator of the phrase the state of the climate, naming his reports and website accordingly. Miliband's adoption of the phrase is ironic, although it may be an expicit attempt to change the meaning from Crok's realism.
Sorry, we’ve been at cross-purposes. I imagined you were referring to “A perfectly good civilization is going to waste …”, not the Dutch “Staat van het Klimaat”.
As with Miliband’s planned annual Climate and Nature statement, it is very foolish of the Met Office to spread panic about climate trends of just a few decades. It’s blatant fearmongering.
If the establishment theory of man-made global warming were true, and many eminent independent scientists have proved that it is not true, there is not a single person on earth who could discern this alleged global warming in the short term. This is because the according to the UN IPCC’s own (pseudo) science, man-made CO2 global warming takes place at a slow but steady rate of about 0.2°C per decade, an utterly imperceptible 0.02°C per year and over half a lifetime for 1°C which Paul Homewood reckons is about the mean temperature difference between Oxford and Birmingham.
To be expected and smacks of desperation as the realities around renewable energy come to roost. When the subsidies and legislation are changed and withdrawn by future governments there will be arguments over who is responsible for the mess. If I were in charge of a renewables company I would be looking well about me for some robust insurance.
Proof, if any additional proof were needed, of how uneconomic renewables are … twenty years after we started installing offshore wind they still need government aid to ‘prime the pump’.
Thank you for this latest revelation of the scam. There must be a mechanism to counter governmental bribery and obviously wasting taxpayers money that were originally meant to be used to get the unreliables industry going. It seems we are now into evermore such expenditure into the indefinite future. What happens when the unreliable equipment has to be replaced either because of internal failure or systems end of life. Will the funding scam continue?
I should have added this point in the article, but now developers can get a CfD to support "repowering" old onshore wind projects. Guess which prominent Labour donor might benefit from this new policy.
The reason there doing that is the ROC supported sites will start falling off the gravy train soon and aren't viable without so he needs another ruse to keep them in the game. I can't see it making a material difference to installed output as onshore windmill parks output will be limited by the rating of the connection. Of course they could apply for an uprated connection but that will just cause even more problems in Scotland where generation is already way beyond transmission capacity. I guess they could repower with less turbines so as to remove the number of eyesores but they would have to be taller so that will bring whole load of pain from planners.
He has thought this out and can't see being successful for onshore. Offshore with the lack of need for consents will probably get plenty of interest as the developers keen to geta foot in the door while the largesse is still flowing.
There needs to be a concerted campaign to lobby Labour MPs to make sure they realise this is a huge vote loser. I am happy to help out but it needs to be pushed actively by as many people as possible. I have been doing this with our MP but it is slow and frustrating getting the message across. So far I have been fairly subtle in my communications to her but it’s time to be a little more insistent.
I am sure a number of Labour MPs are beginning to realise their positions are becoming untenable as things stand at present. The next round of huge rises in electricity prices will give momentum, especially should this coming winter the Grid should fail - standby gas generating stations are now getting old and more unreliable with their off-on-off modus operandi.
I cannot lobby my Green MP. She is completely focused on her religion of Net Zero. How she got elected in our rural county is beyond many of us.
Gas price is pretty steady so far and we are over half way through current monitoring period so don't see any material change. They will have to factor in next years capacity market costs which are up a fair bit in value to generators but will only add a few quid/MWh in the round so will be lost in the noise and certainly not picked up by media. However, the following year they nigh on double and this should make people take notice of the cost of providing all this standby generation.
then i read the notes "T-4 data is adjusted for RPI" argh the good old adjustment factor that hides the real cost away from the headlines.
Assuming all awarded assets are in play (they aren't) and add those units on 15yr contracts I get costs of £1.95B next year vs from c£1.33B this year so i make it c50%.
The following year the T-4 jumps up to over 60 at awarded price probably be c65 when the CPI adjustment is made and this is what is pushing the annual costs to 3.5B and thats before the top up T-1's are added.
They've released T-4 target for 29/30 at 40GW again so not expecting to lose gas anytime soon.
I understand your frustration but don't give up hope. There are potentially ways to tackle even Green MPs - but the message needs to be focussed on costs and practical alternatives to Net Zero that really protect us from changing climate - natural or otherwise. I shall be discussing this today with my friend @davidjotoole whose substack is well worth a look as he brings a very specific Trade Union perspective to the discussion.
This is a real threat to the ability to hold power to account:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/fine-witnesses-who-mislead-select-committees-mp-urges/ar-AA1INjG9
Who decides who misleads the committee and should be fined? It would surely be used to suppress criticism of bad government policies. When I looked at some of the evidence provided to select committees I find a lot of it is designed to echo government lines of thought. Some of it is full of lies, perhaps in some cases through ignorance (particularly when it comes to individual submissions).
It would make far more sense to offer the opportunity for community notes or open peer review (as for example GWPF do for their more important papers). We should be opening debate, not closing it down.
An advantage of that is that it is open to journalists to read and pick up on. Some might learn how they can learn something.
The details of the maximum strike prices and other auction parameters (other than the budgets) are due for release on 24th July. We will then be able to gauge the chances of a reasonable number of bids or another failed auction. It's a difficult choice for Miliband, as if he lets prices go higher he will be accused of increasing costs for consumers.
My read is for offshore wind projects (not floating) there will be a budget but Milibrain has the ability to flex it during the bidding process to make sure he gets what he wants!
They've also confirmed no rebids for AR7 but are clearly paving the way to overturn that for AR8 if things don't play out as they want. So that shuts out Hornsea 4 and pushes them to select developments that are not very far down the planning route so I just can't see much of this being realised before 2030.
The bigger threat overall is all the excess generation is going to mess with wholesale pricing with more negative SPs and risk generators pulling assets off line and letting NESO sort it out in the BM.
He wont' care about that.
"Perhaps they should announce they will repudiate the contracts if they get into office?"
Reform just did!
best and only bet ... force an election...
Richard Tice has announced that a Reform government would strike down any AR7 contracts and put developers on notice the CfDs now have political risk.
https://x.com/TiceRichard/status/1945512209334903080?t=Bfm7vpZxnkTw0MdQWmZpMg&s=19
Brave words, but he should look at the final contract terms when they are published. He may find it difficult to do without crystallising a lot of compensation payments.
In England & Wales looks like c 10GW of sites already have development consent but no CfD. Another 3-4GW are well on with planning process so will be eligible under this 12mth rule. Scotland operates another process which could add another 5-8GW.
So if they go all in they will be adding a huge amount of CfD costs let alone constraint problems but unlikely much of it realised before 2030 though.
There remain many uncertainties. The DESNZ announcement on REMA may confirm the abandonment of zonal pricing, but it introduces fresh uncertainty over a new system for allocating TNUoS charges and connection charges for generators (and presumably, consumers). There are other tweaks that will impact forecasts of how much generation will be lost to negative prices curtailment and paid for curtailment and what payment levels might be.
Add in rising capital costs, supply chain uncertainties and the fact the government has to pay over 5.3% for 20 year money and there will need to be a clear comfort factor before locking into a 20 year price deal. If the revenues will be insufficient because of low volume and inadequate prices in some combination There will be few bids, and we will be back to the AR5 scenario.
Miliband would be foolish to assume that 20 year price fixes will result in over 10% cheaper prices. As wind farms age maintenance bills tend higher and performance erodes. Being compelled to keep generating may make little sense.
Reneging previously agreed contracts would be the best way to stop paying for things we don't need and which will cost us more (on the network, balancing etc.), but it sets a strong precedent undermining UK credibility and would make investors wary and demand more returns due to the risk.
Perhaps a middle ground of closing any future rounds of the scheme but honouring existing contracts to end of life?
Many contracts are protected by Qualifying Change in Law provisions that entitle them to demand compensation for loss of profits if discriminatory taxes or changes in market rules affect profits. These were deemed necessary precisely because it might get easy to pay high prices to get the investment done, but then cheat by changing the rules and taxes afterwards.
Any approach that triggers QCiL is not going to work. There is a need to be rather more subtle, and also a need to keep the lights on which requires planning rather than summary action.
Net Zero is a blatantly obvious plot to wreck the economy and it’s high time someone did something about it. In the words of Jo Nova’s new logo “A perfectly good civilization is going to waste …”
Can anyone suggest how legal action could be taken against them? Isn’t this something that a body like Net Zero Watch should take on? I would happily support a crowd-funding to finance it. If a legal challenge were along the lines that Net Zero is on track to wreck our civilisation and in any case is pointless because hardly anyone else is doing it, wouldn’t it be worth having the arguments aired in open court, under oath, even if legally it doesn’t stand a chance because of the legally-binding nature of the Climate Change Act ? Who knows, an unbiased judge might even adjudicate that the CCA has to be revoked.
Just look at the ludicrous Climate and Nature statement debated this week in parliament, Hansard record here: https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2025-07-14/debates/FBD99ED2-C8BA-4FF2-B072-FB8D853BDCEB/StateOfClimateAndNature.
With a very few honourable exceptions, e.g. Esther McVey, Sammy Wilson and Lee Anderson, practically everything said is a lie which is inevitable given that Net Zero is wholly predicated on the deliberate lies put out by the UN IPCC, the WMO, the Met Office, the CCC et al.
I’ll give Miliband his due, he is a good actor. He paints himself as a passionate, patriotic and altruistic believer in his supposedly noble endeavour which he now claims is going to save nature as well as the global climate. In my opinion and the opinion of long-time climate sceptic Lord Monckton he is pursuing a malign ulterior agenda: https://x.com/NotFarLeftAtAll/status/1943210511505461574.
The muppet leader of the opposition starts his reply with the inanity: “I think we can all attest to the fact that Britain today is warmer than it was before”. So what, has he never heard of climate natural variability caused by, inter alia, reduced global cloud cover, El Ninos and Hunga Tonga? When he goes on to suggest that Miliband has been economical with the truth, the Speaker steps in with this nugget: “Order. We need to be careful about what we say. I think that the hon. Gentleman has suggested that the Secretary of State was not honest, and I think we are all honest Members here”.
The only good thing about this pantomime is that it is gong to be an annual event, giving us an annual opportunity for mockery and disparagement. In Climate Scepticism, Mark Hodgson slams Ed Miliband’s “State of Climate” debate as a pompous parade of alarmism: https://cliscep.com/2025/07/15/send-in-the-clowns/.
It struck me as a weird tribute to Marcel Crok's De Staat van het Klimaat - which of course conveyed the opposite message.
Are you sure about that? ChatGPT finds that tagline under Jo Nova but not Marcel Crok. As far as I can see (all my searches come up in Dutch!), Marcel Crok has always been a climate sceptic, co-founder of Clintel which organised the World Climate Declaration that there is no climate emergency.
Read it again. I pointed out that Crok conveyed the opposite message to Miliband's alarmism. Albeit in Dutch I think he was the originator of the phrase the state of the climate, naming his reports and website accordingly. Miliband's adoption of the phrase is ironic, although it may be an expicit attempt to change the meaning from Crok's realism.
Sorry, we’ve been at cross-purposes. I imagined you were referring to “A perfectly good civilization is going to waste …”, not the Dutch “Staat van het Klimaat”.
Jaime Jessop exposes the lies put out by the Met Office in their recent State of the Climate report, used by Miliband as a pretext to pursue his treasonous Net Zero war against the people of this country: https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/uk-met-office-state-of-the-climate.
As with Miliband’s planned annual Climate and Nature statement, it is very foolish of the Met Office to spread panic about climate trends of just a few decades. It’s blatant fearmongering.
If the establishment theory of man-made global warming were true, and many eminent independent scientists have proved that it is not true, there is not a single person on earth who could discern this alleged global warming in the short term. This is because the according to the UN IPCC’s own (pseudo) science, man-made CO2 global warming takes place at a slow but steady rate of about 0.2°C per decade, an utterly imperceptible 0.02°C per year and over half a lifetime for 1°C which Paul Homewood reckons is about the mean temperature difference between Oxford and Birmingham.
To be expected and smacks of desperation as the realities around renewable energy come to roost. When the subsidies and legislation are changed and withdrawn by future governments there will be arguments over who is responsible for the mess. If I were in charge of a renewables company I would be looking well about me for some robust insurance.
Proof, if any additional proof were needed, of how uneconomic renewables are … twenty years after we started installing offshore wind they still need government aid to ‘prime the pump’.
Thank you for this latest revelation of the scam. There must be a mechanism to counter governmental bribery and obviously wasting taxpayers money that were originally meant to be used to get the unreliables industry going. It seems we are now into evermore such expenditure into the indefinite future. What happens when the unreliable equipment has to be replaced either because of internal failure or systems end of life. Will the funding scam continue?
I should have added this point in the article, but now developers can get a CfD to support "repowering" old onshore wind projects. Guess which prominent Labour donor might benefit from this new policy.
The reason there doing that is the ROC supported sites will start falling off the gravy train soon and aren't viable without so he needs another ruse to keep them in the game. I can't see it making a material difference to installed output as onshore windmill parks output will be limited by the rating of the connection. Of course they could apply for an uprated connection but that will just cause even more problems in Scotland where generation is already way beyond transmission capacity. I guess they could repower with less turbines so as to remove the number of eyesores but they would have to be taller so that will bring whole load of pain from planners.
He has thought this out and can't see being successful for onshore. Offshore with the lack of need for consents will probably get plenty of interest as the developers keen to geta foot in the door while the largesse is still flowing.
Dale Vince? And new onshore wind?
There needs to be a concerted campaign to lobby Labour MPs to make sure they realise this is a huge vote loser. I am happy to help out but it needs to be pushed actively by as many people as possible. I have been doing this with our MP but it is slow and frustrating getting the message across. So far I have been fairly subtle in my communications to her but it’s time to be a little more insistent.
I am sure a number of Labour MPs are beginning to realise their positions are becoming untenable as things stand at present. The next round of huge rises in electricity prices will give momentum, especially should this coming winter the Grid should fail - standby gas generating stations are now getting old and more unreliable with their off-on-off modus operandi.
I cannot lobby my Green MP. She is completely focused on her religion of Net Zero. How she got elected in our rural county is beyond many of us.
Gas price is pretty steady so far and we are over half way through current monitoring period so don't see any material change. They will have to factor in next years capacity market costs which are up a fair bit in value to generators but will only add a few quid/MWh in the round so will be lost in the noise and certainly not picked up by media. However, the following year they nigh on double and this should make people take notice of the cost of providing all this standby generation.
CM costs are forecast to double from October 2025.
T-4 is 30.59 up from 18.00 this year.
T-1 is 20.00 down from 35.79 this year
then i read the notes "T-4 data is adjusted for RPI" argh the good old adjustment factor that hides the real cost away from the headlines.
Assuming all awarded assets are in play (they aren't) and add those units on 15yr contracts I get costs of £1.95B next year vs from c£1.33B this year so i make it c50%.
The following year the T-4 jumps up to over 60 at awarded price probably be c65 when the CPI adjustment is made and this is what is pushing the annual costs to 3.5B and thats before the top up T-1's are added.
They've released T-4 target for 29/30 at 40GW again so not expecting to lose gas anytime soon.
I'm just going off the LCCC forecast, covered here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/hidden-costs-renewables-going-up#:~:text=Capacity%20Market%20Backup%20Costs
Forecast monthly costs go up from ~£75m to >£150m in October, the new delivery year. But actuals have been running ahead of their historical forecast.
Many thanks for your insight. I am now more educated in this.
I understand your frustration but don't give up hope. There are potentially ways to tackle even Green MPs - but the message needs to be focussed on costs and practical alternatives to Net Zero that really protect us from changing climate - natural or otherwise. I shall be discussing this today with my friend @davidjotoole whose substack is well worth a look as he brings a very specific Trade Union perspective to the discussion.
Thanks. I will with interest.
Thanks for this bonus! What’s the situation like for onshore wind and CfDs David?
See reply above. New CfD support for "repowering" old onshore wind sites.