When I was made Energy Secretary in 2023, I asked civil servants what I thought was a simple question: prove to me that renewables are cheap.
This was, after all, the entire premise of Conservative energy policy for a decade.
After endless meetings and spreadsheets, it dawned on me that the way Government priced renewables made them look cheap in exactly the same way a Ryanair flight looks cheap.
While the cost of the flight seems like a great deal, once you’ve paid for a bag, a seat, and a sandwich, you realise you’ve been stung.
That’s because depending on the vagaries of the weather for our electricity supply comes with extra hidden costs that we cannot run away from.
We pay billions to switch wind farms off when it’s too windy, billions for expensive back up when it’s not windy enough, and tens of billions for the hundreds of miles of extra pylons needed to connect all of these extra panels and turbines into the grid.
I realised what was missing was a proper system costing of renewables – one that factored in all these hidden extras.
I started that work in the Department, but after the electorate decided they had had enough of us, Ed Miliband took over and promptly cancelled it.
The cheap power system uses a bit more gas, triples our nuclear capacity, and uses much less wind and solar.
It saves consumers over £320 billion on their energy bills by 2050.
That’s the equivalent of around £540 per household every year for the next two decades, and 80 per cent of our electricity would still come from clean sources.
On any objective measure that is good for the economy and good for the environment, but it will still not be enough for those who cling to their obsession with Net Zero ideology.
Ed Miliband’s swivel-eyed ‘Clean Power by 2030’ mission ignores the fact that only 10% of Britain’s emissions come from the electricity grid. 90% come from people’s daily lives and industry.
In order to address the 90%, you need people to make the switch to electricity, whether that’s to heat their homes or drive their cars.
A rational climate policy would prioritise electricity that is affordable for the masses over electricity that is perfectly clean.
Instead, Britain has been pursuing the opposite approach.
The strict targets in the Climate Change Act have forced us into a purist’s pursuit of a totally clean, yet utterly unaffordable electricity grid, followed by bans and bribes to compel the public to buy clean technologies that will end up costing them more to run.
The green lobby will say all of this is worth it to prove Britain’s ‘climate leadership’.
However, the ignominy of having the highest industrial electricity prices is not attracting anyone to our cause, in fact it is propelling Xi Jinping and others to bury deeper into the arms of cheap, coal power.
In modern terminology, our hot and heavy pursuit of Net Zero is giving others ‘the ick.’
Realising that the Department for Energy was promising Ministers that we were on the path to cheaper power, without any evidence to back it up, was the moment I realised that Net Zero had to go.
I am proud that Kemi Badenoch and I have rewritten the policies that we inherited because energy policy should be based on evidence, not ideology.
Our priority, starting with this report, is to do the technical analysis that has been absent for too long, to make sure we can have the cheap, reliable electricity that we need for a stronger economy and better environment.
Me for The Spectator
