Campaign to highlight the serious economic and societal implications of expensive and poorly considered climate and energy policies #CostOfNetZero
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Joined September 2014
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Net Zero Watch retweeted
Renewables will cause a grid collapse sooner or later, and when it happens, the industry will lie through its teeth and blame anything but the actual cause - and the media will swallow the narrative wholesale. No lessons will be learned. The policy will not change. Power supply will become ever more expensive and precarious, until we're into full blown energy rationing. Warnings will fall on deaf ears.
It’s official: a legal investigation has found engineers in Britain’s electricity grid control room are stressed because renewables make it so hard to keep the lights on. And when they raise concerns, managers won’t listen - they only want “good news”
thetimes.com/article/413d547…
Net Zero Watch retweeted
It is extraordinary that NESO’s takeaway is that the core allegations made by the whistleblowers are unsubstantiated.
As I’ve always said, the core allegation is that the electricity grid is not being run securely. In that respect, the Eversheds report is utterly damning.
Not only does it say that renewables are making our grid more difficult to manage, but it says that several engineers in the control room profoundly disagree with NESO management’s claim that the grid was secure on 23rd June.
There are multiple serious problems highlighted - from a culture of managers only wanting to hear ‘good news’, to poor record keeping, and, most concerningly, a reluctance to action complaints from engineers because of the need to 'keep stakeholders happy'.
In other words, managers are failing to improve the security of our electricity grid because keeping Ministers in DESNZ happy is seen as more important.
NESO's Chief Executive earns close to £1 million a year and the whole organisation costs the better half of a billion pounds to run. The country and billpayers deserve better.
Government should be holding NESO to account, but instead, Ministers spent their time attacking me for raising the control room engineers' concerns and for making sure that any kind of investigation took place at all.
If this had been washed under the carpet, then where would we be?
A grid that is increasingly at risk and Ministers who, frankly, preferred to be asleep at the wheel rather than to do their jobs and protect our electricity supply.
With regards to the engineers' concerns on corporate affairs and record keeping, Eversheds did not give a clean bill of health as NESO is claiming. They found that a culture of 'reputational sensitivity' does indeed affect operational decision-making, and recommended several changes to correct significant failures in record keeping practices.
While I am on maternity leave, the Conservative team will continue to press the Government on this issue, because the bottom line is this: if we cannot trust NESO management to be honest about our ability to keep the lights on, how can they stay in their roles?
I look forward to the release of Ofgem's investigation on whether the grid was run securely on 23rd June. But we do now know that the control room strongly feel that it wasn’t.
An independent investigation has found no evidence to substantiate the core allegations against NESO around operational decision-making and record-keeping.
It constructively identifies areas where we could improve how colleagues can raise concerns and how we respond to them. We will act on the recommendations and be open with colleagues about our progress.
Read the report: bit.ly/4jtGewn
Net Zero Watch retweeted
The GWPF is delighted to announce that Kathryn Porter (@KathrynPorter26) has been appointed to our Board of Trustees.
Kathryn brings a wealth of technical expertise on energy and is dedicated to educating policymakers from across the political spectrum about this crucial subject.
Net Zero Watch retweeted
The New Statesman's cover story is a welcome retreat from Net Zero, written by @EdConwaySky. Is it time for journalists to start asking some pretty pointed questions of DESNZ and the CCC?
Conway is great, but unfortunately gets it wrong when he says "There is a point – most likely a decade and a half in the future – at which the savings from net zero (less spent on gas and fuels) should outweigh the costs of building all the necessary infrastructure."
Because increasing renewables capacity leads to increasing curtailment (due to overgeneration), that simply cannot be true.
If Ed would like me to show him why, I'm happy to help. I hope to heaven he isn't taking the CCC's word at face value.
Net Zero Watch retweeted
"We have this idea of climate leadership, and yet never has it been spelled out what the benefits are to the average citizen in the UK."
Countries are looking enviously at America and China's energy security and growth, not ours.
Net Zero Watch retweeted
@Miatsf and @mgshanks need to see this. The plans for GB are the same.... Massive overbuild of the grid to accommodate the intermittency of wind and solar the cost of which is added to our bills
The post quotes Katherina Reiche, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy in Germany addressing the German Parliament...
"For too long, the production costs of wind and photovoltaics from the plant have been declared as the sole costs of the energy transition.
"The cost of the overall system was lost sight of, redispatch, nets and secured performance were “discentively ignored”.
"A power system must bring together 8,760 hours a year of generation and consumption and also function without wind and solar.
"In addition to the existing infrastructure of controllable power plants, we are building a weather-dependent generation structure without being able to do without secured power.
"In addition, there are grids, storage, control energy, redispatch and reserve. The less frequent backup power plants run, the fewer operating hours their fixed costs bear.
"There are no two parallel infrastructures for the price of one."
Economic reality: moving to a grid based on wind and solar is very very expensive and policymakers have ignored many of the costs because they want to think renewables are cheap. They're not
@AndrewBowie_MP @ClaireCoutinho @griffitha @cmackinlay @TiceRichard @AndyBurnham @DavidGHFrost @mattwridley @Iromg @AllisonPearson @MerrynSW @EdConwaySky @mattotele @jonathan_leake @afneil @julietsamuel
lnkd.in/p/e3-bRGh5
Net Zero Watch retweeted
I have written about this before when the BBC did their silly report on French banquets and when @Madz_Grant wrote an excellent piece on the Two Fat Ladies back in May for The Spectator.
This goes well beyond the old class politics of the countryside. Hunting and other rural traditions have historically been attacked as symbols of privilege and hierarchy. But there is now another dimension…
Net Zero requires substantial changes to land use and fewer cattle and sheep by 2050 (see Carbon Budget 7).
The Blob knows that livestock farming is sustained by a wider culture that treats grazing animals and the traditions surrounding them as normal features of country life. Changing the land-use settlement therefore also means challenging some of the cultural assumptions that sustain it.
Seen in that context, the sneering at Labradors, country pubs and a pint of ale starts to make rather more sense.
🚨 EXCL: Labour minister claims that visions of Britain based on warm ale, pubs, and black labradors are a 'far-Right' fantasy that 'never really existed’
dailymail.com/news/article-1…
Net Zero Watch retweeted
This just adds to the sense that Western politics is increasingly performative, seeking to appear on message to maintain parochial status. But what is at stake is not election to the student union…
Oh the irony
Rutte spent 14 years running one of Europe’s largest refining countries, the Netherlands. Did he use those years to build energy resilience?
Gosh, no. He was busy championing the Green Deal and prematurely reducing hydrocarbon supplies ahead of demand realities - like all of them!
His government shut Groningen, Europe’s largest gas field, imposed a 5-year moratorium on shale-gas exploration and production, and introduced a national CO₂ levy on industry on top of the EU ETS.
Now Rutte changed jobs and, as NATO Secretary General, discovers the strategic value of energy security: in a war, Europe needs “massive amounts of diesel and all the oil products.”
Net Zero Watch retweeted
Are Mark Rutte and NATO “climate deniers” @ret_ward?
These slurs only serve the interests of our enemies. They delegitimise scrutiny of policies that have weakened our energy security and industrial capacity while hostile states build theirs.
There is no virtue in making the West weaker.
CC: @afneil
Net Zero Watch retweeted
Not just Miliband. I want to see @EdwardJDavey held to account. Unlike in 2022, the breakdown of the cross party consensus on energy will mean he has no where to hide this coming winter.
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Net Zero Watch retweeted
We are heading for the mother of all energy crunches this winter, the second in four years. We need more refined oil products, particularly diesel and aviation fuel, and more natural gas.
Geopolitics is the proximate cause. But decades of delusional policymaking have left us badly exposed.
I hope journalists do their job in the coming weeks and months. Politicians were repeatedly warned by energy realists and figures in the defence and security establishment about the risks of rapid decarbonisation and policies designed to suppress domestic hydrocarbon production. Those warnings were ignored. In some cases, the people making them were smeared as cranks, climate deniers or fossil-fuel lobbyists.
This vulnerability was not unforeseeable. Choices were made. There needs to be accountability for them.
Net Zero Watch retweeted
I actually find this depressing. Many of us have been making these arguments for years. They were central to our opposition to Net Zero, the fracking ban and the retreat from domestic oil and gas production.
We made them again after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
We were - and still are - smeared as “climate deniers” and “fossil fuel lobbyists”.
This is a complete failure of British and European statecraft. 👇
Oh the irony
Rutte spent 14 years running one of Europe’s largest refining countries, the Netherlands. Did he use those years to build energy resilience?
Gosh, no. He was busy championing the Green Deal and prematurely reducing hydrocarbon supplies ahead of demand realities - like all of them!
His government shut Groningen, Europe’s largest gas field, imposed a 5-year moratorium on shale-gas exploration and production, and introduced a national CO₂ levy on industry on top of the EU ETS.
Now Rutte changed jobs and, as NATO Secretary General, discovers the strategic value of energy security: in a war, Europe needs “massive amounts of diesel and all the oil products.”
Net Zero Watch retweeted
Dr Fiona Hill, co-author of the Starmer government’s 2026 Strategic Defence Review, told Congress in 2019 that Putin had personally stressed to her as far back as 2011 how much of a threat he considered fracking to Russian interests.
If our own defence and security experts understand the strategic importance of fracking and domestic hydrocarbon production, why has Ed Miliband banned it and pursued policies that harm the North Sea?
Net Zero Watch retweeted
Both the Government and the Conservative opposition are now touting electrification as the solution to high electricity prices. In this short video, I explain why this idea is doomed to failure.
Net Zero Watch retweeted
Miliband is behaving irresponsibly here.
In my opinion, I actually think framing climate change in these terms is a massive overreach and that it will eventually backfire because people can see how absurd it is to categorise it like this. It smacks of desperation too.
But more concerning is how it will undermine national security. Much like the “45 minutes” WMD claim, invocations like this breed cynicism and ultimately erode public trust in genuine warnings about threats to the country.
If everything becomes an urgent national security threat, the language eventually loses its force precisely when we need people to take seriously the very real threats posed by hostile states and non-state actors such as terrorist organisations.
Net Zero Watch retweeted
“There really is no direct link between cancelling Rosebank and stopping wildfires…”
Former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, criticises the naive approach we have been taking to climate policy.
Watch his full lecture at the link below 👇
Net Zero Watch retweeted
How ironic.
Here is @ECIU_UK’s former director minimising claims that Russia used disinfo and active measures to stop shale development in Europe, despite NATO’s former Secretary General saying he had seen evidence and Dr Fiona Hill, the co-author of the UK’s SDR and a respected Russia analyst, telling a US Senate Committee in 2019 that Putin personally told her he wanted to stop it at the Valdai Conference in 2011.
As I wrote in December for The Critic, a 2018 US congressional committee also found Russian use of social media to manipulate Western energy markets by promoting falsehoods about shale gas and domestic production of hydrocarbons.
Similarly, a 2017 US Intelligence Community Assessment found evidence of Russian-sponsored anti-shale propaganda.
We also know from the Clinton e-mail leaks that the US State Department was concerned about Russian active measures being directed towards fracking, following the announcement of the Global Shale Gas Initiative to promote energy independence in Europe.
Black also denies that supply-chain dependency on China can pose a security threat to the UK, despite warnings from members of the intelligence community, some clean energy advocates and the fact that China regularly flexes its geoeconomic muscle, not to mention Ukraine’s claim that China’s industrial base is supporting Putin’s war machine.
But there is also something really incoherent about ECIU et al arguing that the CRINKs are promoting “climate disinfo”.
If climate change is real (true) and - as NGOs and UK Ministers like Miliband claim - the world is undergoing an irreversible transition away from fossil fuels (patently not true), why would the CRINK states share an interest in promoting climate denial?
If anything, the more obvious strategic interest is in persuading the West to suppress its own domestic energy resources and to accelerate deindustrialisation while becoming increasingly dependent on technologies, supply chains and critical minerals controlled by its geopolitical rivals.
Perhaps we should be rather more interested in the disinformation that actually helps to make the West weaker at the energy and industrial level?
"NATO warned in 2024 that Putin’s efforts to promote climate change denialism across member states had accelerated and that Russia is the main driver of misinformation about the clean energy transition online"
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6re…
