Ed Miliband’s Net Zero obsession is a threat not just to our economy but the survival of Labour’s government
I HAVE said it before and I’ll say it again: when this Government eventually falls – and that is beginning to look as if it will happen rather earlier than it did a few months ago – its epitaph will be Ed Miliband’s hubristic promise to save us £300 a year on our energy bills by going green.
The Energy Secretary has just been slapped down by Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden, who admitted on Thursday that far from cutting bills, the Government’s Net Zero policies are driving them up.
Half the cost of the fuel bought by our gas-fired power stations last year, she said, was accounted for by carbon levies.
Miliband – mocked for his 2015 election stunt setting out pledges on a £30,000 tablet that became known as the EdStone – keeps telling us that fossil fuels are expensive and make us reliant on dictators, who in his mind have the power to determine global prices for gas and oil at will.
Yet the real reason that gas costs so much is that the UK Government is loading it with punitive taxes — not only in the form of consumption levies but also in the form of the windfall taxes which are leading to companies giving up on the North Sea.
And the situation for Britain’s gas supplies is dire.
Centrica revealed yesterday that we have less than one week of gas demand currently in storage.
The situation has been exacerbated by not just the cold snap but the closing of Russian gas pipeline supplies to Europe at the end of last year.
Energy companies did enjoy windfalls in 2022 and 2023, yet the Government continues to subject their profits to an effective “tax” rate of nearly 80 per cent.
Here is a conundrum. If renewable energy really is as cheap as Miliband claims, how come Britain — which derives one of the highest proportions of electricity from wind in the world — has the highest electricity prices of any member of the International Energy Agency?
If you want to know the real cost of wind and solar, it is no use just looking at the marginal cost of generating power.
You have to take into account the cost of energy storage, or some other kind of back-up, so we can cope when there is little wind and solar energy to be had.
Miliband’s latest plan for achieving his nirvana of a 95 per cent decarbonised grid by 2030 is to maintain all of our existing gas power stations on standby, even though they will be rarely used.
That will be fantastically expensive — it will be like paying to keep a car on the road when you only use it once a month to drive a couple of miles to the shops.
And in spite of Miliband’s massive expansion in wind and solar farms, they will never cope with the cold, windless weather conditions we have had this week.
Yet at other times they will be producing far more electricity than the country can consume.
In order to keep investors happy, the Government is having to offer them “constraint payments” to compensate them for when they cannot feed their energy into the grid.
These cost consumers £1billion last year, and that is forecast to grow to £1.8billion this year. By 2030 the cost will be astronomical.
Situation is dire
Miliband’s energy policy isn’t just failing to bring energy prices down.
It is also failing in its other stated aim: to provide more energy security.
On Wednesday evening we came perilously close to power blackouts as the cold weather drove up demand, wind farms were becalmed and solar farms, predictably enough, produced nothing after sunset.
As a result, energy companies were forced to pay through the nose to buy electricity from abroad, with wholesale prices spiking at £1,352 per megawatt-hour — 20 times the average cost.
Net Zero policy is making us ever more reliant on electricity imported via subsea cables.
Miliband has the fantasy that Britain will become an energy superpower, exporting our surplus supplies.
But that isn’t how it is working out at the moment. Last year we imported a record 16 per cent of our electricity.
Miliband forgets: neighbouring countries have also invested in wind power and experience much the same weather as us, which means that when we have surpluses they tend to have them, too.
In nine days’ time, the US will have a President who unashamedly puts national energy security ahead of climate goals.
We can be thankful that the US has invested heavily in fossil fuels, because we have become increasingly reliant on liquified natural gas imported across the Atlantic by ship.
He is a threat
Yet Britain is trapped in a Net Zero obsession which is killing off our manufacturing industry, has already killed off our primary steel industry, is making life harder for our farmers and is forcing households to pay more for their energy than they need to.
Worse, we have an Energy Secretary who is in denial about all this.
Some members of the Government have shown signs of becoming more flexible in recent months.
The ban on new gas boilers from 2035, it seems, will be relaxed, and electric vehicle sales targets are being reviewed.
But Miliband remains a formidable obstacle to a reasoned energy policy.
He is a threat not just to our economy but to the survival of his own Government.