Boris announced his new wind-powered policy with great aplomb today – insisting that hundreds of new fixed arrays in the sea and “windmills that float on the sea” will power “every home in the country”. A bold claim. The only figure he used when describing this green at sea vision was £160 million for “ports and factories across the country” to manufacture the turbines. But what would be the real cost?
A freedom of information request was answered by the Government earlier this year, denying access to the calculations that led to former Chancellor Philip Hammond warning that the net zero target would cost £70 billion a year or “well in excess of a trillion pounds” overall, based on calculations from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. BEIS wrote back saying:
“Extracting information about these calculations is a time-consuming process, and also requires a second person for quality assurance.”
Hammond’s figures themselves figures suggest that the government doesn’t believe the low cost estimates from Lord Deben’s Committee on Climate Change, and that Government is keeping quiet about the true cost of decarbonisation.
The FoI answer went on to reveal that there is a huge body of work the Civil Service has done on this subject that they have been keeping quiet about – with “over 220,000 specified data points… organised over 100 Excel workbooks.” Work that the Civil Service does not want to publish…
