Fury is mounting over the use of Chinese steel in constructing the £4 billion, taxpayer-funded Net Zero Teesside power plant. Over the weekend, project backer BP awarded a £5 million contract to China’s Modern Heavy Industries for 7,000 tonnes of steel. China and steel haven’t exactly had a spotless record in the past year…
Trade body UK Steel has slammed the decision, with Director General Gareth Stace saying “BP’s decision to buy 7,000 tonnes of Chinese steel, worth around £5m for the Net Zero Teesside project, rather than sourcing it from British Steel just miles away, beggars belief.” Meanwhile Tees Valley Tory Mayor Ben Houchen: “It’s crazy that a multibillion-pound project underwritten by the UK Government, and therefore the UK taxpayer, will be using Chinese steel.” British Steel’s Scunthorpe operation lies just 112 miles away from the site…
Industry minister Chris McDonald claimed he is deeply disappointed by BP’s decision, and said he will be speaking to them today. See how that goes in the Golden Keir-A…
The true cost of Net Zero could exceed official estimates by trillions, according to a fresh report by the Institute of Economic Affairs. The think tank predicts it could cost Brits £9 trillion by 2050. Over the weekend the National Energy System Operator predicted it would be £7.6 trillion…
The IEA notes that NESO leaves out the cost of carbon emissions and bases its sums on ultra-optimistic borrowing rates for wind and solar – 5% and 5.2% – lower than the current 30-year gilt yield of 5.3%. Meanwhile, the Climate Change Committee is still insisting Net Zero will only cost £108 billion. And that’s the quango that advises the government on Net Zero…
New IEA Director General Lord Frost said:
“We can now see it was sold to the public on the basis of fantasy numbers…The whole of Net Zero badly needs a proper rethink before it kills off more of British industry and leaves British households permanently subject to unreliable supply and higher bills.”
And they said enjoying the breeze and the sunshine was free…
Spare a thought for energy minister Michael Shanks this morning, who’s had an tricky start to the year. During energy questions in the Commons, he was asked by Tory MP Harriet Cross what the price of oil and gas is today. He couldn’t answer…
After some waffling, Cross eventually put Shanks out of his misery, informing the House that oil is at $62 a barrel and gas at 72p a therm. That’s around a third lower than what the government itself deems “windfall” prices, despite Labour hammering the industry with punitive windfall taxes. Chin up, Shanks. Maybe 2027 will be your year…
An overnight report from the grid operators over at the National Energy System Operator has trashed Ed Miliband’s economic case for Net Zero. If you needed any more proof…
The report, which modelled two ‘pathway’ scenarios – Miliband’s ridiculous clean power target versus a ‘holistic’ delayed approach – finds the UK would save £14 billion every year if it ditched Labour’s strict targets. £500 for every household every year, the equivalent of 0.4% of GDP…
NESO operates the entire energy grid and recently pointed out that transmission costs will rise next year by more than £40 per household thanks to disparate renewables serving more of the grid. The grid operator also estimates that if fuel prices fall in line with DESNZ’ projections Miliband’s policies will cost even more. £19 billion per year…
DESNZ will be raging at the impartial findings – it deploys outrageous spin in response to all reports of this kind. Can’t hide this one…
Miliband appeared at the Commons Environmental Audit Committee today to defend his attempts at the latest COP vanity conference in Brazil to push strict net zero policies:
“It would be a total dereliction if we walked away… siren voices are saying we should walk away from this process, it would be a total betrayal. I’ve got two kids who are 15 and 16, they would look at me in the future and rightly say ‘you have left future generations totally in the most appalling circumstances’… we are 1% of global emissions, if we walk away we are signing an absolute disaster warrant for future generations.”
This comes as UK billpayers are themselves set to be hit repeatedly by sky-high bills from the net zero ‘transition.’ Future generations will no doubt conclude that Miliband signed an absolute disaster warrant for consumers and businesses with ‘Clean Power 2030’…
Cheap energy campaign Net Zero Watch is warning that huge cost increases are a direct result of policies. A forecast by the National Energy System Operator predicts the fees which fund the maintenance of the UK’s high-voltage electricity transmission network will hike the average household energy bill will rise by £42.18 next year. That’s a whopping rise of 82% on this year…
Maurice Cousins, Campaign Director at Net Zero Watch, tells Guido:
“A near-doubling of charges is exactly what happens when you build an electricity system around the weather rather than physics. These spiralling costs are transmission costs, and they are entirely predictable. Once you depend on intermittent generation from remote sites, you need an oversized, heavily engineered transmission network to compensate and simply to move electricity to where it is required. None of this makes energy cheaper. To end the cost-of-Miliband crisis we need to ditch Clean Power 2030.”
Ofgem’s work is adding £108 to bills by 2031. The so-called TNUoS cost for the average household was £51.30 in 2025/26 – next year “the TNUoS cost for the average domestic household is forecast to be £93.48 for 2026/27 which forms 10.6% of the average annual electricity consumer bill.” A ‘total betrayal’…
ExxonMobil Chairman Paul Greenwood has directly hit out at Labour over its business-bashing policies. Last night the global energy giant announced plans to close its manufacturing plant in Fife, putting hundreds of jobs at risk…
Greenwood pinned the blame squarely on Labour, saying their policies have stripped the UK of the low-cost operating environment and competitive market conditions needed to keep the site viable. He said on the Today Programme:
“I will be blunt – I have one of those keys to success in place, and that is a brilliant workforce. Two of those keys I deliberately do not have because of Government policy. You know what’s happening in the North Sea, we’ve had windfall taxes, we’ve had a ban on production licences – I need cheap sources of abundant ethane and I do not have them, because the North Sea – because of Government policy – is declining rapidly and that ethane is increasingly high price. I have to have a burden put upon me of CO2 taxes – we paid £20 million last year in CO2 taxes, that will double in the next four or five years. My international competitors do not have those costs. I also have to deal with high energy costs and those kind of things, so these are deliberate Government policies that are undermining us.”
Yesterday GMB Union’s Scotland Secretary Louise Gilmour wrote to Reeves telling her to cut the windfall tax on oil and gas firms -which Reeves increased in the last budget. The Treasury has been briefing that she has been weighing up cutting the levy. Not so hot for Miliband. Something he can reverse when he enters No10…
Speaking at his speech on how to achieve “progressive capitalism” Wes Streeting fired a dig and Andy Burnham:
“Bond markets are not bond villains and fiscal rules matter.”