Renewable Energy: Costs

Lord Moynihan of Chelsea Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Frost for calling this debate and for his excellent opening remarks. I call attention to my register of interests.

Each day, the direct and indirect cost of renewables expands upwards and outwards, with subsidies, constraints, payments, curtailment, demand-side response, artificial inertia, and on. There have been rising prices every year from 2002 to 2020, at a time when—contrary to the assertion of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—gas prices were broadly flat. Now, we have the highest electricity prices in the developed world.

This week Ed Miliband claimed that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels and that the price of electricity will go down by £300. These assertions generated widespread derision. The Centre for Policy Studies called them “nakedly dishonest”, saying that

“the £300 figure is pure garbage”.

I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, just made a similar assertion.

We are told that net zero can be achieved at modest cost, but behind almost all those claims are the assertions of DESNZ, which are, unfortunately, divorced from reality. My noble friend Lord Frost mentioned experts discrediting DESNZ’s figures. The findings of others, including Dr Aldersey-Williams of Robert Gordon University and the independent energy consultant Kathryn Porter, are also completely inconsistent with DESNZ, yet its figures are treated as gospel throughout our institutions. The Climate Change Committee uses them and NESO’s claim that the Secretary of State’s plan is affordable depends on them. If current costings, rather than those of DESNZ, are applied to the Royal Society’s recent study on a net-zero grid, the overall cost rises, arguably, to an unaffordable level.

We are basing public policy on hopeful predictions that have little grounding in reality. Policymakers should surely demand to know what net zero would cost, using real numbers. It is unforgiveable that successive Governments have failed to prepare a cost-benefit analysis of net zero that is based on real, hard data.

Several weeks ago I told your Lordships’ House that

“net zero is a religion”.—[Official Report, 24/10/24; col. 774.]

How else can one interpret its proponents’ head-in-the-sand approach? Entire industries have been destroyed in this country—cars, aluminium, steel, North Sea oil—and for what? China’s carbon emissions are already five times the emissions of the entire European Union. India is about equal to the EU but rising fast. We ourselves are a rounding error. Why pursue this extraordinary destruction of value in our economy, spending huge random amounts that will not—as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, put it—“save the world”?

The Government should be honest about their fudge, delegitimise those who created it and start again with credible, disinterested analysis as to what the real cost is, what it might be in future, whether we can afford it and what the overall impact on the country and the economy will be. Remarks in the recent debate implied that we must not concern ourselves with the cost, because we have to do this to save the planet. That is emotion-based, not calm and fact-based, reasoning. We must accept that, at some given level of cost, we would want to decide that net zero was unaffordable. We must find out, using facts and assertions, whether net zero’s cost takes us into that unaffordable territory.

To conclude, I hope that the Government will consent to my noble friend Lord Frost’s request for a speedy inquiry into what the costs really are and whether their expected impact on the nation is affordable. I do not believe it is.

Climate Agenda

Lord Moynihan of Chelsea Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my interests as listed in the register. My remarks today will not be about the expected extent of climate change; however fervently some may wish to introduce that, it is not the topic of this debate.

Let me quickly address the claims made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton. I read the Climate Scorpion report that he based his remarks on. He may wish to read it more carefully. The “tail” that the report refers to is not, as I took him to say, what is expected to happen in the end; rather, it is the highly unlikely worst case. It is our old friend the precautionary principle rearing its ugly head again; it is time we stopped basing policy on the precautionary principle.

I welcome my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead and congratulate her on making her maiden speech in this debate. Net zero was introduced in the waning days of her premiership, and since that Bill was passed—four years and four more Prime Ministers later—there has been no impact assessment of it. How can that be? One might wonder to what degree the impact is seen as unimportant, because net zero is a religion rather than a logical decision. Let us hope that that is not it. Microsoft and Amazon, of course, did their impact assessments, decided that renewables were for the birds and are purchasing nuclear power stations instead. We need a critically evaluated choice in which net zero’s impacts, particularly its cost, receive far closer consideration.

As my noble friend Lord Mackinlay, who is not in his place, has pointed out, in 2019 the Climate Change Committee estimated net zero’s cost at £50 billion a year—more than was claimed earlier in this debate—and quickly raised it to £70 billion. The OBR opined that the overall cost would be £1.4 trillion, which is £56 billion a year from now until 2050. That was five years ago, and we know how under-costed government projects always are. Depending upon your assumptions, different estimates increase from that £1.4 trillion up to £8 trillion or £9 trillion. At those sorts of sums, exactitude is by the by: such amounts will beggar the country regardless.

The Chancellor recently expressed alarm over a £20 billion pound black hole, but here we are talking of speculative expenditure going into the thousands of billions of pounds. You would expect us to have a pretty high level of certainty, therefore, that net zero was going to work. Do we? Not so much. Let us consider just a few of the many different ways in which our net-zero plan could fail. If the speculative net-zero carbon models prove overly pessimistic, the entire cost will have been wasted. If the rest of the world fails to follow us—that, let us face it, is pretty much what is happening—we will beggar ourselves while making the merest pinprick in atmospheric carbon levels. If we overload our grid because we do not overcome the formidable technical challenges of bringing solar and wind power from source to point of need, we will have brownouts, blackouts and a dangerously shrinking economy. If the controversially optimistic forecasts of the decline in the cost of mandated green products and wind power, and even in the number of windless days by 2050, fail to eventuate, the cost of net zero will dramatically and unaffordably escalate.

If, God forbid, we end up in, or near to, a war, and belatedly realise that our lack of heavy industry, of steel, of hydrocarbon feedstocks, imperils this nation, then net zero will be abandoned—although most likely too late for us to win that war. If there is a Europe-wide energy crisis, it will uncover our folly in relying on the trio of, first, renewables, secondly, one large, not-yet-working nuclear station and, thirdly, imported energy that, due to the crisis, suddenly becomes unavailable. Then, calls for a proper energy security policy will quickly lead to us dumping net zero. Any one of these could be enough to do for net zero, yet several are already what the situation is, with others lurking in the background. Probability theory tells us, therefore, that 2050 net zero will, in the end, never come to pass. Like some religiously motivated children’s crusade, it will never arrive at its intended destination, but there will be plenty of misery along the road.

Until such time as it is actually abandoned, net zero’s exorbitant cost and its overweening regulation will frustrate much human happiness, crowd out many useful innovations and, whatever ridiculous claims are made, lead to lower economic growth. Economic growth in our country is entirely possible, whatever is said. It comes from three things: leaner government, lower taxes and less regulation. Net zero is the opposite of each of those three. From the Financial Times to academia, the view is the same about green jobs, but talk of green jobs is nonsense. With net zero, the economy will grow more slowly, jobs will be fewer, innovation will be in so many ways frustrated and our nation will become less wealthy.

To conclude, sooner or later the net-zero programme will come to be seen as having been a tragic cul-de-sac. The longer we take to conclude that, the worse it will be for our economy. We owe it to our country to end this misguided, ultimately catastrophic programme as soon as possible.