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Appeared in the Telegraph; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/23/green-energy-net-zero-renewables-uk-miliband/

 

Britain’s net zero plan is to nearly double the demand for electricity (for heating, transport and artificial intelligence) and switch off most of the supply (gas and much of nuclear). If you think that does not add up, you are right. Perhaps Ed (Miliwatt-hour) Miliband is deliberately showing Keir (Starter-Motor) Starmer how barmy the plan is because this week the policy came unstuck – perhaps for good – in six different ways.

First Sir Keir had to watch Donald (Drill Baby Drill) Trump tear up electric-vehicle mandates and turn decisively against wind power. America, China and India are all going to increase their emissions by much more than we can possibly save. Not that wind power actually saves much anyway when a 2-megawatt wind turbine requires 1300 tonnes of concrete and 300 tonnes of steel.

Second, Starmer may have watched the Senate confirmation hearings of my good friend Chris Wright as America’s energy secretary. Wright’s innovations pretty well invented the shale gas revolution, turning America into now the world’s biggest producer of both oil and gas, ahead of even Saudi Arabia and Russia. That could have been our boom too. When Wright testified in the UK parliament in 2014 he said Britain had a fantastic opportunity to be a huge producer of shale gas, bigger than the North Sea, but only if we stopped footling around. Yet Miliwatt-hour has now even shut down the North Sea.

https://apnews.com/article/chris-wright-energy-trump-cabinet-picks-senate-hearing-7efa240238f13bc8930dadf4a1519cc6

Third, Starmer may have nervously checked the wind speeds and noticed that on the calm morning of “Dunkelflaute” Wednesday this week just 1% of our electricity came from wind power, even less from solar and a whopping 10% had to be imported at exorbitant cost to prevent the lights going out. How’s that for “energy security”? Norwegians are increasingly fed up with having to supply our power so this is not, to coin a phrase, sustainable.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/22/wind-power-collapses-less-1pc-uk-energy/

Fourth, Miliwatt-hour’s deputy, Torsten (Alarm) Bell MP, told a massive inexactitude from the despatch box: “Unless we deliver secure, home-grown renewable energy through cheap renewable generation, there is no energy security ahead”. Cheap? The owners of gas turbines and even diesel generators are licking their lips at the panicky price spikes that now come regularly when the wind fails. And we guarantee around £85 a megawatt hour for power from offshore wind, well above the price of getting it from gas, and then add billions to our bills for expanding, backing up and balancing the increasingly stretched and unstable grid that comes with wind. Unreliables are not cheaper than reliables however often Bell and Milivolt claim they are.

https://x.com/s8mb/status/1882178263503573152

Fifth, Sir Chris Stark (Staring Bonkers), the chief exec of the far-left Climate Change Committee, told a Commons committee that he does not believe projections of how much power the artificial intelligence industry and its data centres will need – and also that he plans to put data centres near where the power is generated. The idea that Google Deep Mind will relocate to the Moray Firth is for the birds (those that haven’t been chopped by wind turbines). As for demand, Sam Bowman of Works in Progress points out that the US state of Georgia alone, with 11 million people, is planning for 20 gigawatts of extra demand in the next four years to cope with AI. Our total peak demand in the UK is 60 gigawatts. Britain’s hitherto fabulous strength in AI is being strangled by net zero.

https://x.com/s8mb/status/1882116920448794703

Sixth, Jim Ratcliffe, the boss of Ineos, said on 13 January: “We are witnessing the extinction of one of our major industries as chemical manufacture has the life squeezed out of it” by high energy prices. De-industrialising Britain, he added, achieves nothing for the environment and merely shifts emissions elsewhere.

https://www.ft.com/content/65b387c9-4f32-430e-877b-9985ec03f385?shareType=nongift

Britain’s experiment in virtue-signalling to the world that we are leaders in net zero ambitions has been a risible farce. We have achieved: the highest electricity prices of any developed country; falling electricity usage; the loss of major industries; a worrying dependence on energy imports; a dangerous risk of blackouts; an impending net reduction in nuclear power; net zero impact on global emissions; and net zero influence. Even Rachel (From Complaints) Reeves surely now realises that growth means abandoning net zero.

By Matt Ridley | Tagged:  climate  Net Zero  telegraph  uk-politics