Admit it: Net Zero is fantasy
The announcement that the Hornsea 4 offshore wind project has been put on ice strikes another blow at the credibility of the Net Zero project. In 2017, Whitehall told us that the cost of windfarms was falling dramatically, and that by 2025 it would have reached something like £50 per megawatt hour (in current prices). Achieving this would mean that capital and operating costs would both have to fall by about 50% and output would have to increase by a similar amount.
Eight years on, the sorry facts are starting to emerge. As I have pointed out previously, only one windfarm – Moray West – will be commissioned in 2025 and its most recent financial accounts suggest there will be only a marginal reduction in capital costs over what has been seen in recent years. The output data so far are not indicating any great improvement over previous windfarms either.
The events at Hornsea 4 have now shown that the gulf between official cost figures and reality will stretch far out into the future too. The huge windfarm – at 2.4 gigawatts, the largest in the world – was expected to start operations in 2030. It had agreed to sell power at an index-linked £85 per megawatt hour, £10 more than current market prices, and at least £40 per megawatt hour dearer than the figures put forward by DESNZ and the Climate Change Committee (CCC) for offshore windfarms commissioning in 2030. If, as the windfarm’s developers Orsted explained in their announcement, £85 is now inadequate to ensure profitability, the official cost figures are clearly fantasy far into the future too.
The absurdity of the official costings for renewables has been clear for some time now. Ministers know about the problem – Lord Frost raised it with Lord Hunt of King’s Heath in the chamber some months ago – but have turned a very determined blind eye to it. The reason is not hard to guess: if realistic assumptions were used, the apparent cost of the decarbonisation project would rise by trillions of pounds and they would have to admit that the whole idea was a fantasy.
That Net Zero is just that – the product of minds that have lost all touch with reality – is already widespread in the public consciousness and is spreading in the Westminster village too – Kemi Badenoch recently described the policy as ‘irrational’, which is a polite way of saying the same thing. But it’s not just the costings; the official estimates of the renewables capacity that will be delivered by 2030 seem to be divorced from the real world too. We have built 17 gigawatts of offshore windfarms in the last twenty years, but the CCC claims we will install another 29 gigawatts in the next five. This is a fairy story. In fact, it’s even worse than that. Since the output of new windfarms is not soaring as the CCC has claimed, we would actually need over 40 gigawatts of new capacity by the end of the decade to deliver the same amount of electricity. The idea is deranged.
Wherever you look in the CCC’s carbon budgets you find similar problems; they are more like statements of faith than engineering reports. Important issues, such as materials and manpower requirements, are ignored or brushed aside in a few words. For example, the most recent budget – the seventh iteration in the CCC’s 17-year history – noted belatedly that it might be a good idea to put together a human resource plan for the project. What, we might wonder, have they been doing for the last two decades?
Similarly, we recently saw a minor fault on the Spanish electricity grid turn into a blackout across the Iberian peninsula because of a lack of so-called ‘grid inertia’, the stabilising effect traditionally delivered by fossil-fuelled power stations. Sceptics have long been flagging a lack of grid inertia as disaster waiting to happen for the renewables revolution, yet the term is not even deemed worthy of a mention in the carbon budgets. To do so would be to question the faith.
Another technical issue that you might think would have caught the eye of the government’s official advisers on decarbonisation is the problem of so-called ‘wake effects’ – essentially upwind windfarms ‘stealing’ the wind from downwind ones. This has had wide play in the technical press, and has even made it into the mainstream media but, extraordinarily, has not apparently attracted the attention of the CCC.
The carbon budgets endlessly intone the names of new technologies in a sort of low-carbon litany, the committee members seeming to plead for technological intercession in the way that churchgoers plead with the saints. It’s interminable – hydrogen storage, carbon capture and storage, synthetic fuels, you name it. That most of these technologies remain stuck on the drawing board and are in no danger of escaping it in the next few decades matters not a jot. It’s about faith.
And therein lies the problem. The energy system, a triumph of the enlightenment, and perhaps the greatest product of rational minds, has been captured by the benighted and superstitious, people for whom belief matters more than fact, and whose faith matters more than the wellbeing of the people around them. The result so far has been soaring energy prices, wholesale deindustrialisation and economic stagnation. And if the same people stay in charge, it will become much, much worse.