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November 4, 2024 - 7:00am
This weekend, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) read the last rites to Labour’s policy of hitting Net Zero by 2030.
Alright, that’s not quite how they put it. The report, commissioned by Ed Miliband, concludes that the objective is “a huge challenge but is achievable”. You need to parse these things, however. It is seldom the habit of officials to outright tell ministers their plans are hopeless — and in any event, in a technical report NESO can stick to the realm of what is technically possible, rather than what is politically achievable. And the politics looks impossible.
Consider the money, for example. Now, Rachel Reeves has actually been fairly generous to Ed Miliband; he’s had £22 billion (over 10 years) for a major Carbon Capture and Storage project, and his department’s budget has risen from £6.4 billion in 2023/24 to £14.1 billion in 2025/26.
Not bad, especially when other ministers and backbench MPs are being asked to stomach means-testing the Winter Fuel Allowance. But it’s not anything like enough: according to NESO, hitting Net Zero by 2030 would require investment in Britain’s energy infrastructure to the tune of £40 billion a year.
The Energy Secretary might be the Treasury’s favoured son at the moment, but does anyone think he’s going to triple his budget?
Assuming for a moment he could work that miracle, he’d then run into all the practical and bureaucratic hurdles that make it so unnecessarily and abjectly awful at getting anything built. And a lot would need to get built. NESO says it would take 1000 kilometres of new onshore power lines, plus 4500 kilometres of undersea cables, to hit Net Zero by the Government’s deadline. Even that is just scratching the surface; industry and government projections suggest the green transition could require up to 460,000 kilometres of onshore cables by 2050.
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SubscribeLast week the wind was quite still, and without gas power the country would have been plunged into chaos.
Thank goodness it is going to be too expensive to replace gas with solar and wind power. The recent report says that getting the equipment in place for Britain to commit suicide is going to cost 40 billion a year.
Past Treasury reports suggest that if they say £40 billion a year it will be £100 billion a year.
Glad to see they are going to great expense to put in new gas pipes in our village shortly.
Can anyone remember why we were heading for NetZero in 2030? Clearly, the new steel making facility at Port Talbot is never going to happen.
It was the parting shot of that awful failure Theresa May, who wanted to leave a ‘legacy’.
To be fair to May, not something I thought I’d ever say – her target was 2050. It’s Miliband who has insisted on making the grid net zero by 2030.
Does anyone know what her husband’s investment fund was investing in when she, as PM, was pushing Net Zero?
Just asking…
I believe it was part of a global compact put together and overseen by the UN. The EU signed up and so did the U.K as did several other countries. All part of the UN’s sustainable development goals that are the framework for its agendas 2030 and 2050 which can be viewed on their website.
May also signed up to the UN’s Global Compact on Migration.
Better now to refer to it as “Not Zero”
I’m becoming increasingly alarmed by these developments in Britain in Europe. You can’t keep spending billions and billions on eco vanity projects that only make the economy less productive. Add in the costs of mass migration and there’s a real possibility of serious social unrest in the not-too-distant future.
Well put. Suicide is never cheap.
We were assured that it was at least painless by MASH.
This is what virtue-signalling has brought us to.
They know it isn’t going to work. We know it isn’t going to work. They know we know it isn’t going to work. But they’re going to do it anyway, destroying the lives of millions just to demonstrate their sanctity.
One day there must be retribution.
They have already spent billions on wind and solar, driving up energy costs so high they had to start subsidizing consumer power bills. They are now eliminating the subsidies to spend more on wind and solar, which will drive up power bills even higher. The doom loop of all doom loops.
Net Zombie might be an appropriate catchphrase. On second thoughts it’ll only encourage them.
I rather expect that the Net Zero plans are this millennium’s version of the Soviet 5 year plans. Too ideologically sacred to abandon, far too ambitious to achieve.
I rather expect Net Zero planning will continue, but the planning will drop off cabinet agendas, the physical office will move to a smaller room at the end of a corridor in the basement, and the work will settle on producing excuses why the Net Zero plans will not be effective anytime soon. There will be a knighthood for the committee chairman though.
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Excellent point.
Not while Milliband is there. This guy is a dangerous and fanatical nutcase let loose.
The catastophic floods in Spain occurred because China has been allowed to burn inordinate amounts of coal over the last 20 years and heat up the world’s sea waters.
I live there on the ocean where we saw similar floods 5 years ago, if significantly less ferocious. The air was stifling hot that morning (last Tue I think) when all that heat came off the Mediterranean and made its way up the coast to Valencia forming a veritable hurricane.
” Heating up the world’s waters”
Where is your scientific proof for such a wild assertion? It has been hot before you know? Rain has fallen on baked mud before. There are multiple reasons for this tragedy.
Even the IPCC make no claims that extreme weather is more common now than hitherto.
Energy transition can’t be enforced by diktat
If it’s going to happen, then China will be at the forefront.
If it doesn’t, or takes decades, China has the biggest coal & gas capacity too.
There will be blackouts. I’m getting solar panels AND a battery.
Better to get a generator
Much better a wood-burning stove (the sun doesn’t shine at night, and only weakly and intermittently during the short winter daylight hours!).
What about a coal burning stove?
Pointless virtue signalling but with a £22Bn price tag that will fail, just like HS2, digitalisation of the NHS patient records and Ajax AFVs to name a few. All predictable but who cares, it’s only taxes….
Can’t wait to see Milliiband § Co having to justify their crassness.
If there is one thing I love about Brexit (as I anticipated) is the massive increase in public engagement in national political issues.
Our national demos is now massively more informed and massively more engaged to know that Labour are an absolute failure in every way, except of course for the 20% (and decreasing) voters who put this cadre of ideological lying zealots in power.
Leaving aside the fact that Net Zero is not even desirable and is rather a giant scam, the idea that it could be achieved by even say, 2060 , or 2100, or later is for the birds and little children.
Every house would need a new supply and distribution equipment. Every cable to every street need renewing. Every sub station need re fitting. Every cable to every sub station need renewing. Everything that took nearly a hundred years to put in would need renewing. At the same time as everyone else is trying to do it. It is IMPOSSIBLE.
And that is just domestic use. Industry predominantly uses gas or oil. This can never , ever be replaced by renewables. Repeat NEVER.
I fully support Net Zero by 2150 (because I will be dead and gone 100 years before that).
Net zero is a sick joke: nothing remotely wrong or bad about the air where I live
Given that every flight made by every jet aircraft expels the entire life time equivalent of ‘ n’ thousand cars, that electric ships will not happen, the whole eco sandaloid obsession is purely a somewhat sad and tragic religion substitute for an ever increasing amount of people to whom the internet is a divine equivalent of Moses on the mount.
Like to see the figures behind that ‘n thousand’ claim! The CO2 cost of a flight London-JFK is around 259-350 tonnes inc radiative forcing, and a petrol car pushes out around 220 grammes CO2 per mile (so maybe 10,000 x 220gr = 2.2 tonne per year). But you may have better data than Google.
A Boeing 747 uses 67,000 gallons of fuel per flight.. 100,000 miles in an average car uses 2,500 gallons… next question please?
Last week, I flew from Perth, Australia to Helsinki, Finland for a holiday. I do something broadly similar four times a year. The planes I was in have been broadly full. It strikes me that a lot of people are not that bothered amount Net Zero.
The only way to ever reach net zero is by extinction. NZ is Pol Pot level insanity. The sooner this anti-scientific dangerous delusion is tossed to the ash heap the better
When you say “NZ”, I assume you mean “Net Zero”, not “New Zealand”….
Speaking as someone who lives in Australia, the problem seems to me to be that while most politicians around the world know Net Zero is not going to happen anytime soon, and are happy to content themselves with a bit of greenwashing, Ed Miliband is a zealot who not only thinks it can happen, and wants to do his best to see that it does. In short, he is a threat to the UK economy.