This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
The national conversation about energy policy in Britain has become completely dysfunctional. Over 25 years, successive governments have made the removal of carbon dioxide-emitting energy generation the overriding priority. Two irreconcilable camps have emerged as a result: one claiming that decarbonisation is essential to making our energy cheaper and more reliable, the other claiming it will do exactly the opposite. With “Net Zero”, the objective of making all forms of public and private energy generation carbon neutral written into law, there seems no chance of finding a middle ground.
In the absence of reasonable discourse, each side is reduced to questioning the integrity and motives of the other. The pro-Net Zero side call the sceptics “deniers” of science and content to let the world burn. The sceptics regard the enthusiasts as fanatics whose conformity to fashionable opinion will destroy Western industrial civilisation. Currently however, the balance of influence is firmly against the sceptics; even to slow down the push for decarbonisation would overturn the principle a generation of policymaking has been built on.
Since the 1990s, successive governments have been implementing initiatives to reduce carbon emissions and encourage investment in renewables. In 1997, the UK signed the Kyoto accord, committing to a 12.5 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions against a 1990 benchmark, by 2012. In 2001, the Climate Change Levy was introduced, imposing a standard charge per kilowatt hour of energy on commercial and public sector users. And in 2005, the UK began participating in the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), a cap-and-trade initiative by which industrial and utility entities were subject to a system of allowances which Britain replicated after Brexit.
In 2008, Britain became the first country to bind itself to legal targets with the Climate Change Act, steered through parliament by Gordon Brown’s fresh-faced energy secretary, Ed Miliband, who envisaged Britain leading the world by example in a moral crusade. This legislation committed to an 80 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050. Since that point, installed capacity of renewable generation has increased approximately elevenfold, from around 6 to 65 GW.
In her final act as prime minister, Theresa May amended the Climate Change Act to commit to decarbonising the entire electricity grid by 2035; a target which has been brought forward to 2030 by a greyer-haired Miliband in his role as the Starmer government’s secretary of state for Energy Security and Net Zero. Theresa May’s amendment also committed to full system decarbonisation of the whole economy by 2050, with industry locked in via the ETS.
The 2006 Stern Review might have led to a reasonable cost-benefit conversation, as it set out to quantify in financial terms the impacts of climate change. Its findings were dramatic, but established some logical parameters for discussion. The American economist, William Nordhaus, subsequently published a critique of Stern’s methodology in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2007, questioning the discount rate Stern applied to harms in the far future, compared with costs of decarbonising immediately.
He suggested this caused Stern to exaggerate the social cost of a tonne of carbon emitted. Stern’s conclusions were intended to have applied at a global level, but between his estimations and Nordhaus’s counterproposals, the British might have had a reasonable debate about how much to spend cutting each unit of emissions.
But at an official level, that never happened due to a far more fundamental lack of agreement about the basic costs of decarbonisation. A consensus emerged during the second half of the New Labour era (but certainly not limited to Labour figures) that the transition could actually be economically beneficial. Renewable power would be cheaper than traditional sources; and by leading the way in the transition, whole new industries could spring up in Britain. The sceptics regarded this as nonsense.
Are renewables cheaper?
The pro-renewables case rests on the levelised cost of Energy (LCOE) for solar and onshore wind now being lower than fossil fuels. Renewables require no fuel, and shield consumers from global commodity price swings. LCOE measures the net present cost per unit over a plant’s lifetime, covering capital, installation, maintenance and fuel.
Utility-scale solar and onshore wind costs have crashed; new solar is about 85 per cent cheaper than 15 years ago, onshore wind around 65 per cent cheaper. This produces very low headline LCOE figures for new capacity. A 2024 study by Arup for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) estimated roughly £41 per megawatt hour (MWh) for solar and £45.8/MWh for onshore wind.
DESNZ’s subsequent report gave medians of £58/MWh for new onshore wind and £60/MWh for solar, against £147/MWh for gas. Similar conclusions appear in the House of Lords Library’s 2024 briefing, plus 2025 reports from the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and the National Energy System Operator (NESO). This large cost gap is the trump card that advocates for renewables play. After all, how could anyone in good faith promote fossil fuel energy generation that is 2.5 times more expensive and causes climate change?
Yet the UK has the developed world’s highest commercial electricity prices and the fourth-highest domestic ones. British prices have risen faster than gas import costs and diverged sharply from other gas-reliant countries. Sceptics of renewable energy attribute this to the intermittency of wind and solar, which imposes extra costs and burdens on the grid to keep it stable. They say it has eroded system resilience and introduced critical inefficiencies.
The intermittency problem
Electricity must be generated in real time as it is consumed. In an alternating current (AC) grid, supply and demand need delicate balance. Britain’s grid operates at 50 Hz, with current alternating 50 times a second between source and load. If demand exceeds supply, frequency drops; if supply outpaces demand, it rises. Equipment functions in a narrow frequency band and disconnects to avoid malfunctions outside that range. This can trigger blackouts which cascade to full grid collapse.
The output of wind and solar energy is highly unpredictable due to changeable weather. Unlike gas, coal, or nuclear plants that are “on tap”, solar and wind vary uncontrollably. The wind may blow steadily during demand troughs early in the morning but then be almost nil whilst demand peaks on a windless winter evening.
Consequently, intermittent generation requires back-up. This is typically gas, because Britain ended coal generation and nuclear power is slow to ramp up. The low LCOE for new solar and wind generation excludes costs for maintaining, building, or fuelling back-up. It also emits the full integration expenses for connecting dispersed generation. Thus, headline claims hide much real cost, and alternatives like battery storage or pumped hydro add capital costs that may exceed that of the generators themselves. But intermittency challenges do not end there.
Between 1990 and 2008, Britain built perhaps the world’s most efficient electricity market. Some elements of the system remain; producers bid as cheaply as they can to supply, and the market price is set by the most recent (and thus expensive) bid to have been accepted. Low bids are based on short-term expenses (mainly fuel and labour), and developers make back long-term costs by supplying at periods of higher demand at prices driven by rivals with higher short-term costs.
But the high correlation of wind and sunshine creates gluts or droughts of those forms of power; they are either producing when supply is high and prices are low, or not producing at all. Hence, they cannot capitalise on tight markets to recover long-run costs.
Conversely, with no fuel needed, renewables have low variable costs, allowing bids far below gas or nuclear. So when they are producing, their bids are always accepted, making stable baseload generation like nuclear uneconomic; especially when low demand and good weather means intermittents can fulfil most of the grid’s needs. No non-intermittent source can compete with their short-run marginal costs.
The result is that renewables almost never set the market price; nearly 90 per cent of the time, gas sets it, as it is the easiest generation form to ramp up quickly to handle intermittent fluctuations. Renewables supporters highlight this to portray gas as expensive, but it is clearly only part of the story. This leaves policymakers with two challenges: covering the long-run costs for renewables, and ensuring grid stability in a mix where baseload is crowded out by cheap intermittent generation.
Squaring the intermittency circle
To enable renewables developers to cover long-run costs, a contractual instrument was adopted called Contracts for Difference (CfDs). The CfDs are separate from the contracts that the developers have with utility companies who actually buy the power they produce. The CfD is a price-stabilisation mechanism, and the counterparty is a state-owned entity called the Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC).
Developers must bid in allocation rounds to build new renewable generation capacity, in a reverse auction in which the projects with the lowest “strike price” are accepted. These strike prices reflect all of the long-term costs, including capital and maintenance. The purpose of the CfD is to ensure that the developer gets paid that strike price for every megawatt hour of power that renewables produce. The strike price is compared against a benchmark called the Intermittent Market Reference Price (IMRP), which is based on day-ahead trading data intended to calculate how much the developers will actually get paid for their power in the market.
If the IMRP is lower than the strike price, then the operator is paid a “top-up” for the difference by the LCCC, but if the IMRP is higher than the strike price, then the LCCC can claw back the difference. Top-ups from the LCCC have been consistently greater than the clawbacks they have received from generators, rising to a £2.5 billion deficit in 2025, overwhelmingly to offshore wind.
This clearly amounts to a subsidy, no matter how reluctant many are to accept that term. The cost is covered by the CfD Supplier Obligation Levy, which is paid by utility companies, and is reflected in electricity bills. This represents a transfer of commercial risk away from the developer, and onto the consumer. The overall result is that CfD holders get paid the same price, regardless of what the market demand is when or where they produce their power.
Quite obviously, this strips any meaning out of the price mechanism. And it leaves NESO with the other half of the problem, which is how to cover the shortfall when intermittent generation isn’t producing. This is done through the Capacity Market (CM).
The CM was introduced in 2014, following the Electricity Market Reform Act, and is based on biannual capacity auctions. The purpose is to decide how much firm capacity is needed to keep the grid supplied at all times, and then to have the owners of generation sources bid to provide it, until the desired capacity is reached. Note that this is not a bid to supply electricity — just a bid to constitute a certain per centage of needed capacity. Each power generation source is assigned a “de-rating” factor based on its reliability over the previous few years.
Gas generation is typically de-rated at around 95 per cent, because it is highly reliable. This means a 1,000 MW gas plant could bid to fill roughly 950 MW de-rated capacity. Nuclear is typically de-rated to around 75 per cent. Solar power on the other hand has a de-rating factor of around 5-6 per cent, with onshore wind at 6-8 per cent and offshore wind at 8-10 per cent. This would make their participation in the capacity auctions a largely pointless exercise, so most do not bother. Suppliers bid at the lowest price until 100 per cent capacity is met, subject to the de-rating of each generation source, with the highest price setting the tariff that all suppliers are paid for their capacity.
Successful bidders are then paid subject to their de-rated capacity and must be ready to supply at a defined notice period (usually a few hours) in case NESO declares a System Stress Event. This means being fuelled, maintained and staffed, ready to go. They can then bid for short-term supply contracts, through the balancing market — but regardless of that, they receive a capacity payment simply for being available on standby. Once again, this is funded by a levy; the Capacity Market Supplier Charge, charged to utilities which ends up on electricity bills. Once again, a commercial risk removed from the supplier is transferred into a financial obligation for the consumer. In 2024–25, it amounted to over £1.3 billion.
How much does this cost?
In her May 2025 paper The True Affordability of Net Zero, consultant Kathryn Porter compares the UK’s actual decarbonised path with a counterfactual gas-dominated system. She estimates intermittent renewables added roughly £17 billion in extra consumer costs in 2023–24 and a cumulative economic loss of £220 billion (in 2025 pounds) over the previous two decades. Porter highlights escalating curtailment payments to wind producers under CfDs, when operators are paid the strike price for power they cannot export due to grid constraints.
This is a result of the loss of market discipline, as renewable suppliers are paid regardless of when or where they generate. These payments reached £1.2 billion in a single year, driven by remote Scottish and offshore wind farms producing surplus power that transmission lines could not handle, forcing NESO to order curtailment.
Additionally, there have been huge increases in transmission infrastructure costs in recent years. The companies which manage Britain’s transmission lines recover costs via Transmission Network Use of Service charges (TNUoS), levied on generators and suppliers. The totals charged under TNUoS were in the hundreds of millions annually in the early 2000s. Within a few years of the Climate Change Act, by the early 2010s they had risen to £1-2 billion. By 2020 they were over £3 billion, rising to around £5 billion currently. In 2027 they are predicted to be £7 billion, with further growth forecast.
Renewables integration accounts for 70-90 per cent of this increase, largely from connecting remote and offshore sites, and reinforcing vast North-South flows to shift excess northern wind to southern demand. The CfD model eliminates incentives to site renewables near population centres, especially in wind-poor South East England. Northern wind often displaces other generation and turns England into a substantial periodic net electricity importer from Scotland (something to keep in mind come another Scottish independence referendum).
The claim that wind and solar are cheaper because they need no fuel looks rather thin once all of these additional costs are considered. In his Institute of Economic Affairs paper The Costs of Net Zero, retired consultant David Turver reviews official analyses since 2019 that attempt to quantify the total bill. These include a letter from then Chancellor, Philip Hammond in 2019; reports by NESO in 2020 and 2025, the Climate Change Committee in 2020 and 2025, and the OBR in 2025.
Though the analyses differ in scope, the variations are startling. In 2025, the OBR put the hit to the Exchequer alone at £803 billion, whilst the CCC claimed the entire economy would face just £108 billion of costs. But whilst the inconsistency may seem glaring, in truth both figures are almost certainly low, by an order of magnitude.
Addressed to Theresa May in her final days in office, Hammond’s letter did not include a full report, but he estimated total costs of £1.5 to £2 trillion over 30 years. May went ahead regardless. NESO went further in its 2020 Future Energy Scenarios report, outlining four pathways for the UK’s energy system to 2050. Three reached Net Zero by 2050, with another not quite making it. Calculating net present value costs in 2020 pounds, all came in at or just under £3 trillion, with the most aggressive scenario appearing slightly cheaper on account of some highly optimistic shifts in consumer behaviour regarding heating and driving.
However, Turver points out that the discount rate used makes even these figures look artificially low; the real cost likely approaches £5 trillion (equivalent to roughly 165 per cent of current UK GDP). NESO’s updated FES report in 2025 does not give total costs for its revised set of scenarios, but the implied cumulative totals for its in-year estimates come in at around £7 trillion.
Neither report compares Net Zero transition costs against a counterfactual with no transition, as Porter’s exercise did. As renewables advocates correctly note, any energy system demands ongoing investment. Yet intermittency effectively means running parallel systems; one with renewables heavily subsidised via CfDs to maximise capacity, with grid stability left to the legacy dispatchable fleet.
In a Prosperity Institute paper It’s Broke: Fix It, Rupert Darwall sets out the divergence between total installed capacity and dispatchable generation. From 2009 to 2024, 44.9 GW of renewables were added whilst 33.3 GW of coal, nuclear and gas capacity vanished. Total capacity increased by 20.7 per cent overall, but generated electricity fell by 24.2 per cent, resulting in a 37.1 per cent loss in output per unit. This is the system “doing less with more” as Darwell puts it. Some of this is a result of falling demand and efficiency gains, though much of that drop reflects higher prices, rendering British commerce unviable.
This is set to continue; installed capacity will roughly double from 2024 to 2030, and again by 2050 to reach 440 GW. But the gap between de-rated and total capacity will rise from around 7 per cent in 2008 up to 68 per cent by 2050. Though de-rated capacity will rise to 80 GW before 2030 and reach 140 GW by 2050, huge new demands on the grid should delay any premature sigh of relief.
When the wind doesn’t blow
It is when we consider firm capacity that the situation is at its starkest. Firm capacity relates to the total dispatchable generation available in periods where solar and wind power are both minimal for extended periods, the dreaded Dunkelflaute. Historically, dispatchable meant coal, nuclear and gas, but now mainly means gas, as well as hydro, with a dwindling nuclear component. Dispatchable generation peaked in 2010 at over 90.4 GW. By 2022 it had fallen by almost half, down to 44.2 GW, and is predicted to bottom out at 25.5 GW by 2035. And the latter figure assumes that the lifespan of the country’s already superannuated stock of gas power plants can be extended to 35 years across the board.
The winter of 2025–26 was generally very windy, so we were spared any near misses, but the grid came very close in January 2025 to being completely overwhelmed. In her “Watt-Logic” blog, Kathryn Porter described how NESO’s balancing mechanism strained every sinew to prevent blackouts. NESO operates a system of imbalance pricing over an electronic platform designed to correct surpluses or deficits in supply. Suppliers get paid one price to supply above their contracted volumes, and pay another for any shortfall.
On the evening of 8 January 2025, these two prices hit £5,500/MWh and £2,900/MWh respectively. The discrepancy cost NESO £20m in a single evening; not to procure power, but simply to balance the system. At its tightest point, the grid came within one per cent of being overwhelmed, meaning that almost any minor failure could have triggered blackouts. This makes the substantial further losses to firm capacity, and increases in demand anticipated in the next decade, an alarming prospect indeed.
In the wake of the January 2025 near miss, pro-renewable advocates such as Ecotricity founder Dale Vince cited the extreme marginal costs as proof of gas generation’s expense. This seemed to ignore the whole point of scarcity pricing; to wring every last watt from a system working at its absolute limit. And as intended, that marginal capacity came from gas — the back-up of last resort in a system with a chronic shortage of dispatchable capacity; capacity which has been allowed to wither away to make room for intermittent renewables, which deliver cheap output when the wind blows or the sun shines, but nothing when it doesn’t.
The high prices that Vince and others point to are intrinsic to the current Net Zero plan, which relies on gas to back up intermittency whilst letting firm capacity retire without replacement. To use this as evidence against gas strains the limits of good faith.
Beyond the tight spots whilst renewable output is low, there is a separate threat to stability when renewables are dominating the energy mix. Wind and solar do not rely on steam driving a big turbine, as coal, gas or nuclear do. In a traditional grid, steady frequency is maintained by the synchronous rotation of many of these turbines; this spinning mass is a store of kinetic energy, known as rotational inertia, which acts as a stabilisation mechanism should supply drop suddenly. In a system dominated by solar or wind, without large turbines, grid operators lack this inertia and are not afforded the critical moments it can provide to stabilise frequency when a generator trips. We saw this in Spain in 2025, when a single trip in a solar-dominated energy mix caused a cascade of generators to drop out in a matter of seconds.
Life on the grid
In addition to decarbonising electricity generation, Net Zero means swapping everything else that burns fossil fuels for something that doesn’t. For consumers, that means moving to electric vehicles and replacing gas boilers with heat pumps. Both shift massive energy loads from other sources onto the already strained national grid.
Due to disputed technical and cost barriers to uptake, it is hard to put a figure on the precise load that will come from either, but in her January 2026 paper Electrification: Can The Grid Cope? Kathryn Porter estimates road transport, domestic heating, industry and data centres could add between 7 and 10 GW of peak demand by the end of this decade.
Given firm generation capacity is predicted to decline sharply during that time, with the grid already struggling at tight spots under current demand, there are serious questions about the system’s ability to cope. Porter notes that even supposedly renewables-committed Germany has quietly ramped up gas investment to avoid outages in the 2030s. Britain hasn’t made any gesture as dramatic as Germany’s nuclear shutdown, but our policies have resulted in similar practical outcomes for dispatchable generation, without Germany’s coal plants.
Hydrogen is often prominent amongst alternatives to electrification in long-term forecasting, but it tends to disappear from plans as deadlines approach. Its extremely low energy density requires storage at cryogenically low temperatures or extreme high pressure, which thwarted earlier ambitions for hydrogen cars and home heating. Both of those burdens are now expected to sit firmly on the grid; yet hydrogen remains a feature of DESNZ visions for industry. Despite a hive of excitable and well-funded R&D, hydrogen’s inherent challenges suggest much of this demand will also end up falling on grid-based electrification.
The end of British industry
In a paper Destroying the Foundations for the Prosperity Institute, Rian Chad Whitton argues that since 2008, Britain has gone from an exceptionally strong manufacturing base to one at serious risk of disappearing in the coming decades. It may be that climate policy has escaped proper scrutiny because many outside the manufacturing world wrongly assume British heavy industry was destroyed in the 1980s.
In reality, British industrial output peaked around 2002, when we still had the world’s fourth largest industrial economy. Petroleum refining, metallurgy and chemicals thrived in the late 1990s, attracting foreign investors, notably the Japanese carmakers, drawn by a stable business environment.
Since then, manufacturing has withered. Output is now roughly half of 2000 levels, and employment in those sectors has fallen by the same. The ETS and Net Zero regulations have driven large industrial users toward expensive electrification. Despite exemptions from green levies, UK electricity remains four or five times more expensive than coal or gas-based power. Steel has suffered most visibly, with output now about a quarter of 2000 levels. Car production is down by half from pre-2008 figures; cement output by around a third, and refined petroleum down 40 per cent from its peak.
Whitton emphasises that energy prices aren’t everything, but they become decisive when they far exceed those of competitors, as Britain’s do. The shift to recycled steel for automotive use could have been to our advantage, but given electricity is the main input, investors have naturally avoided a country where it is so much costlier.
Alarmingly, many foundational industries are still only just embarking on the journey toward electrification, and there is a great deal of additional cost to factor in yet. Across industrial sectors, energy costs have already risen fourfold as a per centage of total value added; from around 3 per cent twenty years ago to around 12 per cent today.
Beyond industries losing competitiveness due to high electricity costs, Net Zero means banning products for which British manufacturers enjoy reasonable market share, in favour of alternatives which we are far less good at. The clearest example is cars; Britain had become the European hub for several Japanese firms whilst retaining strong heritage brands like Jaguar Land Rover, which performed well at home and in the US.
British policymakers were lured by claims that setting early deadlines to phase out internal combustion-engined cars would let British manufacturers leap ahead and dominate the EV market. This didn’t happen, for two main reasons. Most obviously, high energy costs limit Britain’s appeal as an investment location. Switching from ICE to EVs demands enormous capital outlay, even for established players like Nissan and Toyota with large sunk costs here.
Second, the British government’s habit of “enshrining” political ambitions in legislation has blunted the impact of law as a reliable indicator of what is likely to be allowed in the UK in the future; political ambitions can always be modified. Under Boris Johnson, waves of Net Zero legislation set aggressive targets for decarbonisation, which many observers regarded as an exercise in political signalling, expecting them to be softened or scrapped when it became expedient.
Car plants and assembly lines require huge investment and long lead-in times. The original 2040 ban offered a workable 23-year horizon, but accelerating it to 2030 confronted manufacturers with a stark now-or-never choice. With serious doubts over charging infrastructure, grid stability and consumer appetite for EVs, it presented an enormous risk unless ICE vehicles were truly outlawed.
The result was paralysis, with firms unable to invest in future ICE production due to the phase-out, but equally reluctant to commit to EVs. Today, the only major pure EV built in Britain is the Nissan LEAF, with electric Range Rovers due later in 2026. It remains uncertain whether future electric versions of the successful new Land Rover Defender will be produced in Britain; the current ICE version is made in Slovakia. The INEOS Grenadier is assembled in France.
A similar pattern appears in boiler manufacturing, where Whitton notes British firms hold about two-thirds of the home market and remain fairly successful. For heat pumps, however, UK share drops to around one third, with German, Japanese and South Korean competitors dominating. Many early ideas behind Britain’s decarbonisation drive promised future prosperity with a “Green Industrial Revolution”, yet this shows no signs of materialising.
Turnover in the government’s Low Carbon and Renewable Economy “green manufacturing” sectors has stagnated at £17 to 19 billion annually over the decade to 2024, even as energy-intensive industries shrank. Workers displaced from those sectors are not being absorbed into the new green economy.
The plan was that we would lead others to follow our decarbonisation targets, whilst Britain built a strong green manufacturing base to export to them. Instead, other countries have happily sold us the tools for our transition whilst refusing to follow suit themselves. This has mainly involved Asian nations, though some European ones too. They’ve succeeded because their investment climate has improved relative to ours; they have better long-term supply-chain security, and cheaper, more reliable energy. Increasingly, emerging markets now offer a more predictable regulatory outlook than Britain as well. To a great extent, they enjoy these advantages because they don’t have our climate policies.
Net Zero in One Country
Might Britain’s “Net Zero in One Country” approach have worked if it were accompanied by aggressive protectionist measures designed to inculcate this green industrial revolution in its high-risk early years? There has been no appetite for this from any British government over the last twenty years, not even from Net Zero true believers on the left such as Ed Miliband. On their own terms, it was unnecessary; they claimed decarbonisation was not only morally and scientifically justified, it was also a cost-free economic gain.
Presumably, they believe that the green industrial revolution is still either waiting in the wings, or is already happening and simply not being counted yet. Perhaps they believe it is happening and are only peripherally aware of claims to the contrary, which they put down to fossil fuel-funded cranks and right-wing malcontents? Certainly, many of those in Miliband’s orbit would categorise pretty much every sceptical analyst I have quoted in this article in those terms.
Despite the accusations of bad faith, most people on both sides of the debate are sincere, although they may be even more sincere in their dislike of one another. But it is not those with firm views on either side that have decided policy so much as the balance of what we may call elite consensus: academics, senior civil servants, metropolitan professions, people in wholesale financial services, politicians themselves, national journalists and the ecosystem of advocacy organisations. This is largely but not exclusively a London-based world, with relatively limited exposure to the reality of energy-consuming manufacturing.
Amongst these people, the median view of the impact of man-made climate change is probably at the most extreme end of the spectrum of scenarios modelled by mainstream climate scientists, with many individuals’ fears quite a long way beyond that. Decarbonisation using wind and solar is seen as the default prevention strategy, and as such it is sustained by a tremendous moral urgency and political momentum. The combination of this with the relatively limited level of technical or scientific background amongst Britain’s decision-making class means individual concerns about the practicalities of renewables are likely to be discounted in favour of a more herdlike trust in the collective wisdom of their peers.
Looking at our new energy system, two aspects particularly stand out. Firstly, there is the eclipsing of nuclear fission; our single form of low carbon, reliable generation. Installed nuclear capacity has fallen by half since its peak and is now around 6 GW. The LCOE metric which, either innocently or by design, happens to make wind and solar appear especially cheap, does the opposite to nuclear.
But more importantly, solar and wind, with their very low marginal costs when they’re generating, mean that other forms of supply need to fit in around it, which gas is well suited to. Nuclear was better suited to reliably meeting a per centage of minimum demand consistently. But a system with lots of cheap but unreliable generation wants back-up, not baseload. What was once regarded as the fuel of the future has been discarded in favour of windmills.
The second point is that in the absence of baseload, Britain is now running a power system that increasingly relies on forms of generation that ought to be marginal. The most obvious manifestation of this is our reliance on the interconnectors to continental Europe; at peak times, between 15–20 per cent of demand is now being met by the interconnectors. Intended to allow countries to trade excess power, the interconnectors have become a sticking plaster for Britain rather than a part of a balanced system. Price arbitration means that we are now overwhelmingly an importer, especially from France with its plentiful nuclear generation.
Absent massive leaps in energy storage technology, we are stuck with the intermittency problem. The legislative framework, including the Climate Change Act and subsequent reforms to the energy market, are all geared toward incentivising the creation of as much renewable capacity as possible, with stability of the grid left as a problem for others to fix. And for the foreseeable future, that fix means gas, at increasingly marginal prices.
Even by its own logic, this will never get us to Net Zero. The total costs of the transition are likely to run into trillions of pounds and have already cost hundreds of billions. It is these costs that we feel in our energy bills, and which are causing manufacturing to close or leave. No recent British government, certainly not the current one, has given any indication that they have reckoned with these facts.
Despite claims made subsequently, the rationale for the energy transition was not about reducing prices or enhancing energy security — it was about stopping climate change. If the national energy debate can seem divorced from the practicalities, it is because for many in our policy-making class, it is not about energy at all. It is a proxy for debate about climate change.
Consequently, arguments about grid resilience are likely to be of limited effect until we address the anxieties of influential people, many of whom hold sincere but alarming views about the habitability of the planet in the near future. This issue will only get worse as generations who grew up subject to doom-laden predictions take the reins.
