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The Baroness making a fortune from Net Zero She has promoted a controversial strategy to the Labour Party

What happens when the wind doesn't blow? Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

What happens when the wind doesn't blow? Christopher Furlong/Getty Images


September 13, 2024   5 mins

In the realm of science, few politicians are more powerful than Baroness Brown. As the chair of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, her remit is to consider the boundaries of Britain’s future: from AI to medicine, from biotechnology to climate change.

Of all these subjects, it is the latter that appears to interest Brown most. Indeed, not only does her work concern crafting Britain’s new energy strategy — she also stands to benefit from it.

There is no suggestion that Brown, a cross-bench peer known as Julia King before she was ennobled in 2015, has done anything unlawful, and in an email to UnHerd she stressed that her “integrity is critical”. Nevertheless, some of the entities now paying her may well come to benefit from the policies she has championed — including a decision by the new Labour government to invest at least £500 million in an unproven technology designed to store electricity.

In the middle of March, Brown’s committee published a report on “long-duration energy storage”. It took as read what some energy experts consider to be a controversial claim: that power generated by renewables such as wind farms and solar panels is cheaper than that from natural gas. The report’s main focus, however, was a large, unavoidable problem: what happens when there’s high demand for electricity, but the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?

“Some of the entities now paying her may well come to benefit from the policies she has championed.”

The solution it offered was certainly a novel one: a process known as “green hydrogen”. This would use electricity to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which would then be stored underground in salt caverns or disused natural gas reservoirs; when demand increased, it could then be burnt in adapted power plants to generate more electricity.

Such a proposal may sound like futuristic genius, but it wasn’t without its critics. In his evidence to the committee, Michael Liebreich, one of Britain’s foremost experts on green energy finance and technology, pointed out that green hydrogen is much more expensive to handle than that made by other means, such as “blue hydrogen”, which uses natural gas. In fact, turning “overhyped” green hydrogen into electricity effectively triples the original energy’s cost, because the process of doing so needs so much power. Undaunted, the committee said the government must “engage and communicate” with the public to cure “misperceptions”, in order to “ensure support for vital hydrogen and electricity infrastructure”.

In any event, days after the general election, the Department of Net Zero and Energy Security, led by Ed Miliband, announced it was honouring a Labour pledge to commit £500 million to green hydrogen, as Brown’s committee had recommended. Generous as this was, it seems inconceivable that it could lead to the creation of the gigantic power storage reservoir Britain would need by 2030 — the date by which the government has pledged to turn the country into a “clean energy superpower” with a net-zero electricity system.

On the first day that Brown’s committee met to hear evidence in September 2023, Brown declared two interests. One was a non-executive directorship at Ørsted, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of offshore wind, which pays her £40,000 a year. She also declared her non-executive directorship of a company called Ceres Power Holdings, at which her salary, according to the firm’s latest accounts, is £74,000. According to Ceres’s website, it intends to become the world’s biggest source of green hydrogen. “Future demand for electrolysis for green hydrogen production far exceeds supply,” wrote the Ceres CEO Phil Caldwell in the company’s 2023 annual report.

Baroness Brown of Cambridge. © UK Parliament 2024

Unlike MPs, peers do not have to declare how much money they earn from their paid, outside interests. As well as her income from Ceres and Ørsted, Brown’s only other interest where her income is known is the £27,000 she receives from chairing a subcommittee of the Climate Change Committee, the powerful body that Ed Miliband created last time he was energy secretary in 2008, which has statutory powers to determine Britain’s energy mix and sets its “carbon budget”. This takes Brown’s disclosed outside earnings to £141,000 a year.

However, she also receives undisclosed sums as a paid adviser to the nuclear industry company Holtec; as the chair of Frontier IP, a tech investment firm whose portfolio includes solar panel makers; and as the chair of the advisory board of BGF, another venture-capital outfit that invests in both wind and solar power. She has also declared she owns shares in Rolls Royce, which intends to build small nuclear reactors.

When I reached Brown by telephone and asked her to reveal the scale of these further payments, she abruptly ended the call. In an email, she clarified that her “integrity is critical” and her “interests are set out in full in the Register of Interests”.

However, in terms of enhancing her influence, yet another of her paid jobs may be the most important of all — her chairing of the Carbon Trust. An international consultancy founded by Tony Blair’s government in 2001, this advises businesses and public sector institutions across the globe on how to cut emissions. (She also refused to divulge how much she is paid for this, but it is evident that the Trust is well-endowed, with offices in London, Beijing, Singapore, Johannesburg and Mexico City, among others.)

Crucially, her work with the Carbon Trust appears to overlap with her role in the House of Lords. On 11 January, Brown announced she had appointed a new Carbon Trust chief executive, Chris Stark. She knew Stark well, having served on the Climate Change Committee during the six years when he was the committee’s chief executive. Her current Lords register entry even lists him as a member of her staff.

But Stark did not last long at the Trust, for on 9 July, five days after the election, Miliband revealed that Stark was to lead the government’s “Mission Control for Clean Power 2030”. He would, Miliband said, “have a laser-like focus” on delivering the government’s net-zero target and would be working with “key energy companies and organisations” to make this happen.

Brown is not the first public official to have become richer through her involvement with green energy. Andrew Montford, the director of campaign group Net Zero Watch, suggests the sector is especially prone to remunerating people with political influence: “The renewables industry is wholly dependent on politicians for its viability, and inevitably there are relationships that become much too close.”

The former Environment Secretary John Selwyn Gummer, now Lord Deben, is another of Brown’s associates, having chaired the Climate Change Committee 2012 – 23. Throughout this period, he was also chairman of Sancroft International, an environmental consultancy firm staffed by members of his family. In February 2019, I revealed that Sancroft had been paid more than £600,000 by firms that stood to benefit from the committee’s decisions, including Johnson Matthey, which was then in the electric vehicle battery business, and Drax, which has received billions of pounds in subsidies for burning wood pellets at its power plant in north Yorkshire.

Other examples include the former Liberal Democrat energy secretary Chris Huhne, who became a director of a wood pellet firm after his release from prison in 2013, and Chris Skidmore, the former Tory MP and energy minister, who also wrote a major report for the last government on how to achieve net zero. In January 2023, a year before he stepped down from Parliament, he started being paid an annual salary of £80,000 by the Emissions Capture Company, for what he described in the interests register as “providing advice on the global energy transition and decarbonisation”. For this, his entry said, he expected to work for between 160 and 192 hours a year.

As for Brown, she said in her email: “My role as chair of the cross-party Science and Technology Committee draws on the knowledge and expertise gained from my non-parliamentary work, and rather than being a conflict, this background strengthens the work I carry out in Parliament. On the Government’s recent decision to invest in hydrogen storage, I welcome this commitment and look forward to debating the committee’s report and its recommendations in the House in due course.”

In other words, we should be thankful that so many businesses in the energy sector want to reward her for her knowledge and skills. If only the rest of us could be so virtuous — and so prosperous.


David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

DavidRoseUK

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Nell Clover
Nell Clover
29 days ago

Her access to the Treasury and the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero in the context of commercial tendering processes has been raised at a departmental level. Whoever that brave soul was, early “retirement” beckons. It isn’t just one woman though. The web entangling government, taxpayer’s money, and renewables “advisors” is very sticky and recently got a lot thicker. With a political commitment to “decarbonise” the grid by 2030 utterly at odds with engineering reality, DESNZ is primed and ready to spend billions on any and all snake oil (carbon offset, naturally) salespeople that come knocking. Rational and objective departmental management has been replaced by a zealotry that would make Mao worry he’d gone too far.

Fear not, nationwide blackouts should be avoided: uber-expensive surge pricing will see us through. Ed will be spared the humiliation of being the minister that rationed electricity. The invisible hand of the dastardly market he’s broken will generate the price spikes that will deter demand and allow him to blame Russia / China / latest crisis. The zealots don’t care about freezing granny so that £500m electric arc scrap recycler in Wales can happily go the way of the blast furnace, made uncompetitive not by wages or materials or quality but HM Government energy taxes and energy policy.

Deindustrialised and impoverished, international supply chains broken, the true scourge of climate change (and socialism, by coincidence) will have been defeated: the modest material wealth of the upper working class and lower middle class will have been eroded to net zero. Pol Pot must be up in atheist heaven kicking himself for being 2 generations ahead of the curve; year zero has become net zero and net zero is our year zero.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
29 days ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Excellent. Pol Pot, the pastoral genocidal communist has largely escaped the historical spotlight he so richly deserves…

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
29 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Pol Stammer or Kier Pot anyone?

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
29 days ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

A fine paean to the idiocies of socialist over-reach in our lives, but pur-lease… less of the “atheist” which has got net zero to do with it
Why ruin an otherwise perfectly good argument? Does anyone’s god prefer a coal fire??

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
29 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Wasn’t Pol Pot atheist then?

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
29 days ago

Does it actually need saying? It may have done for you.

Ddwieland
Ddwieland
29 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

“Atheist heaven” was Nell Clover’s expression, an obvious oxymoron. That’s the only way atheism came into the discussion.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
29 days ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Great comment. I guess surge pricing will require compulsory smart meters. So that’s another layer of rage and frustration we can look forward to soon.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
29 days ago

Net zero will do *nothing* to manage the climate either way. It is Brobdigandian bull schitt.

Stuart Bennett
Stuart Bennett
29 days ago

“The renewables industry is wholly dependent on politicians for its viability…”

I may be wrong but any business that is dependent on politicians and their machinations isn’t a viable business. If it can’t compete on its own two feet it’s no good.

Point of Information
Point of Information
29 days ago
Reply to  Stuart Bennett

Imagine you were an environmentalist billionaire – money no object and you own a ton of land BUT your land is part of a nation state with neighbours who are free, voting citizens.

Now, do you think you should be able to put up that windfarm without planning permission or your neighbours consent? Government – at the very least local government – has to get involved if you want to use a substantial tract of land to do something that will affect other people under its jurisduction.

Now you want to sell some of you generated electricity to the national grid. The existing cables to your location are too small to carry the amount you want to sell. The roads need digging up to make them bigger. Please explain how you intend to do this using only the free market and no government infrastucture and therefore no politicians.

The same applies if you want to build your a coal mine, gas power station, battery storage facility or small nuclear reactor.

The article rightly draws attention to potentially corrupt politicians – the idea that any electrical or heating infrastructure can be built with no popular (or autocratic) representatives at all is pie in the sky.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
26 days ago

Except coal power plants are built where electricity demand is. Not where the sun shines or the wind blows.

Andrew McDonald
Andrew McDonald
27 days ago
Reply to  Stuart Bennett

Goodbye to the internet and the motorways, then. Most new major industries go through what you might call a pre-profitable phase before shaking off their govt funding and getting into shareholder value.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
29 days ago

“Green hydrogen” is not “novel”, as claimed in this article..
“Green hydrogen” that worked on a large scale and reduced energy costs would certainly be novel though. Also requiring novel economics and physics.

David Turver
David Turver
29 days ago

Great piece. And that’s not all. As you mention, the Baroness is a non-executive director of Orsted. By pure coincidence I am sure, Orsted was allowed to rebid and won new CfD contracts in AR6 for Hornsea Project Three in excess of the 25% limit. This came after Brown said in an interview for the Times that the Government needed to be a bit more generous and a bit more flexible in the terms they were offering in AR6.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/ar6-contracts-for-cronies

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
29 days ago

There is so much garbage being written about the climate that the discussion is effectively useless. But more open discussion should take place. It won’t because there are too many vested interests.
The science is extremely complicated. Nobody can even demonstrate that there is global warming because they change the measurement techniques every year and so you can’t accurately compare year on year. Scientists who were part of the original IPCC team have changed their minds and have been banned from future involvements because their faces don’t fit any more. Gainsayers have been labelled ‘deniers’ which carries a stigma like ‘heretic’ during the Spanish Inquisition. (I know, ‘Not the Spanish Inquisition.’)
The one person who definitely doesn’t understand the science is Ed, who will feel fine when everything goes wrong because he will just blame his advisors. He will be innocent.
To me, the biggest problem of all is those people in the USA who want to do something really positive and not just ban fossil fuels. The lobby is growing. They want to fire reflective particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s energy away from the planet. If an odd degree of temperature rise will cause a small but manageable problem, a couple of degrees of temperature fall would kill millions of people – especially in the USA and the UK.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
29 days ago

Ed has an A’ level in Physics, so he can’t plead complete ignorance.

Richard Rolfe
Richard Rolfe
29 days ago

D grade or E?

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
29 days ago

Sabine Hossenfelder has a good video on her YouTube channel where she examines the climate models. All the models show the climate warming against a baseline but they can’t agree what the baseline is!!!

Ddwieland
Ddwieland
29 days ago

And the models–all models–represent assumptions about factors that are not well understood–or even misunderstood. Climate models are weak and should have no role in strong government policy, but the policies rely on dogma that pretends to be scientific.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
29 days ago
Reply to  Ddwieland

Yes. The problem is not necessarily the difficulty of understanding the science behind the climate but the difficulty in producing a model. The latter is just a highly paid game.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
29 days ago

Over the last few years they have changed everything connected with measurement, so now there is no way of relating to past figures.

Richard F
Richard F
26 days ago

Watch Climate the movie

Pedro the Exile
Pedro the Exile
29 days ago

It took as read what some energy experts consider to be a controversial claim: that power generated by renewables such as wind farms and solar panels is cheaper than that from natural gas.
What an odd comment-there is absolutely no validity in the claim that renewables are cheaper-unless you take the historically high immediate post Ukraine invasion price spike as your gas reference and ignore all capital costs and grid connection costs for renewables-and assume historically low raw material prices ,virtually zero funding costs and maintenance free operation for renewables.Its a total nonsense and anybody with the capability of undertaking a simple mathematical model (which excludes all the pro nut zero zealots)can demonstrate the vast additional costs of “renewables”-and thats ignoring shut down payments in periods of over supply and the additional costs of firing up gas stations in periods of undersupply(ie most of the winter months).

Ian Wigg
Ian Wigg
29 days ago

I think part of the issue is that the pro “renewables” conflate micro and macro energy costs.

At micro level (i.e solar panels on the roof of your house and a storage battery) the costs will almost certainly be lower than fossil fuel or nuclear as the capital cost is very small due to minimal infrastructure requirements.

At macro level any potential savings in production costs are massively outweighed by the vast infrastructure capital costs required on transmission and delivery along with large scale repair and maintenance costs over the lifetime of the project.

Chris Bredge
Chris Bredge
29 days ago

I’d recommend the Eigen Values substack by David Turver for lots of facts and analysis on this subject.
He recently pointed out the letter that Milibrain wrote asking National Grid to tell him how to actually achieve Net Zero, thus proving that he has absolutely no idea and hasn’t had the wit or curiosity to find out before promising everything.

Pip G
Pip G
16 days ago
Reply to  Chris Bredge

Thanks for mention of Eigen Values. Just subscribed – useful.

Keith Carter
Keith Carter
29 days ago

Why can this woman, Brown, not see that she has conflicts of interest? Why is she allowed to continue in her public posts so conflicted?
I fear our system still relies on public servants having common decency.
I fear also that this is one of those ‘right side of history’ areas where the very act of asking these questions identifies one as an evil ignoramus, unable to understand the great and unquestionable virtue of anyone active in promoting net zero, even if it does so shamelessly line their pockets.

Robert
Robert
29 days ago

The renewables industry is wholly dependent on politicians for its viability…
Not much else to say.

Point of Information
Point of Information
29 days ago
Reply to  Robert

So is every energy industry including coal, gas, oil and nuclear.

The problem (everywhere) is corrupt politicians not that (preferably uncorrupt) politicians exist per se to manage national public infrastructure.

Nick Faulks
Nick Faulks
29 days ago

Nothing to see here, move on.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
28 days ago

These people are greedy and stupid. This net zero stuff is deeply sinister. It goes beyond corruption and seems designed to destroy the prosperous west

Alison R Tyler
Alison R Tyler
28 days ago

Why am I not surprised ?
No longer have any confidence in any government of any persuasion. They just play pass the parcel with public money and shower one another with position, status and cash.
I wish bad things for every last one of them.

Josef Švejk
Josef Švejk
28 days ago

When I saw the headline I suspected it to be about that awful wretch from Glasgow who made a fortune during covid with that thrall of a husband of hers. Thankfully it wasn’t.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
26 days ago

If you ignore all of the costs of green power of course it’s cheaper. The sun doesn’t charge and delivery is free too.

Alexander van de Staan
Alexander van de Staan
23 days ago

Oh dear, let me get this straight: Oceania’s Ministry of Net Zero is fully backing Baroness Brown’s Scientism & Alchemy Directorate at the House of Lords, pushing green hydrogen plans—peer-reviewed, naturally, by the Ministries of Truth and Plenty, and all to be compassionately enforced by the Ministry of Love?