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Labour’s Net Zero dream is coming to an end

This isn't looking great, Keir. Credit: Getty

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.

In theory, and in normal times, Labour ought to have plenty of room to go big on rural infrastructure, given that it mostly impacts Conservative and Liberal Democrat-held seats. But having won so big, Keir Starmer now has lots of restive backbenchers with small majorities in just those areas. Once their local opponents start making hay over any new development, how long will Labour’s discipline hold on while getting all these pylons built?

It isn’t that the Government couldn’t make progress. It might have announced the Planning and Infrastructure Bill before working out what to put in it, but that will allow them to take suggestions from the National Grid, which has insisted that planning reform is essential to any green transition.

But at this point, the headline target is a zombie policy. It would be difficult even were the Government seriously committed to trying to hit it. But it isn’t: even as NESO insists that nuclear will be critical, the Chancellor seems to have stalled investment whilst the Treasury is recycling old money as new spending commitments.

The poverty of ambition is painful, especially on nuclear power. Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs) wouldn’t just help get the UK to Net Zero — it would then be a technology we could export, making a serious impact on global emissions while boosting manufacturing and trade. Once again, however, Britain is stalling while other countries push ahead with potentially transformational technologies, such as the nuclear-powered container ship recently proposed by China.

For now, the target will stick. But when it starts to get closer, and we’re totally unprepared for it, expect to see Labour pushing it back, just as did Rishi Sunak the ban on selling petrol cars. Let’s hope Miliband and co weren’t too pious about that.


Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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Steven Carr
Steven Carr
1 month ago

Last 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.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago
Reply to  Steven Carr

Past Treasury reports suggest that if they say £40 billion a year it will be £100 billion a year.

Trevor Q
Trevor Q
1 month ago
Reply to  Steven Carr

Glad to see they are going to great expense to put in new gas pipes in our village shortly.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago

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.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
1 month ago

It was the parting shot of that awful failure Theresa May, who wanted to leave a ‘legacy’.

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
1 month ago
Reply to  Judy Englander

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.

Michael Cazaly
Michael Cazaly
1 month ago
Reply to  Judy Englander

Does anyone know what her husband’s investment fund was investing in when she, as PM, was pushing Net Zero?

Just asking…

Mrs R
Mrs R
1 month ago

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.

Charles Savage
Charles Savage
1 month ago

Better now to refer to it as “Not Zero”

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago

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.

Carel de Goeij
Carel de Goeij
1 month ago

Well put. Suicide is never cheap.

Mark Phillips
Mark Phillips
1 month ago
Reply to  Carel de Goeij

We were assured that it was at least painless by MASH.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago

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.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

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.

Ernesto Candelabra
Ernesto Candelabra
1 month ago

Net Zombie might be an appropriate catchphrase. On second thoughts it’ll only encourage them.

AC Harper
AC Harper
1 month ago

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.

Mrs R
Mrs R
1 month ago
Reply to  AC Harper

Deleted

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  AC Harper

Excellent point.

charlie martell
charlie martell
1 month ago
Reply to  AC Harper

Not while Milliband is there. This guy is a dangerous and fanatical nutcase let loose.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
1 month ago

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.

charlie martell
charlie martell
1 month ago
Reply to  Tyler Durden

” 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.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
1 month ago

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.

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
1 month ago

There will be blackouts. I’m getting solar panels AND a battery.

Paul Airey
Paul Airey
1 month ago

Better to get a generator

Charles Savage
Charles Savage
1 month ago

Much better a wood-burning stove (the sun doesn’t shine at night, and only weakly and intermittently during the short winter daylight hours!).

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  Charles Savage

What about a coal burning stove?

Kiddo Cook
Kiddo Cook
1 month ago

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….

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Can’t wait to see Milliiband § Co having to justify their crassness.

Steve Gwynne
Steve Gwynne
1 month ago

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.

charlie martell
charlie martell
1 month ago

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.

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago

I fully support Net Zero by 2150 (because I will be dead and gone 100 years before that).

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
1 month ago

Net zero is a sick joke: nothing remotely wrong or bad about the air where I live

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
1 month ago

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.

Andrew McDonald
Andrew McDonald
1 month ago
Reply to  Francis Turner

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.

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
1 month ago

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?

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  Francis Turner

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.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

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

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

When you say “NZ”, I assume you mean “Net Zero”, not “New Zealand”….

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago

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.