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.