Net Zero Electricity Fantasies to Cost British Consumers £100 Billion Over Next Six Years

Net Zero electricity taxes and levies are set to cost British consumers almost £100 billion over the next six years, according to the latest official figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The ‘environmental levies’ total includes a variety of green rackets from paying suppliers to produce uneconomic energy to persuading consumers to install inferior technologies. As the insane dash towards Net Zero continues in elite political circles, the costs have started to spiral out of control.

Almost all green technologies seem to require huge amounts of public subsidy with no end in sight to constant demands for cash. Recently, offshore wind generators refused to take further Government licences in the North Sea unless the U.K. Government complied with their demands for higher guaranteed prices. In real terms the Government is now prepared to pay over £100 per megawatt hour, a price more than the current estimated cost of gas-powered electricity.

The investigative climate journalist Paul Homewood has been digging into the figures for years, and notes the offshore wind business is already being subsided to the annual tune of £4.8 billion. This despite the fact that we have been promised ‘rapidly falling’ wind power costs that would bring our bills tumbling down. “Now we know that was always a lie,” observes Homewood. Looking at the financial accounts, Homewood concludes that there is “no prospect” that costs will decline in future. On the contrary, he continues, they are likely to continue increasing as supply chain and manufacturing problems mount.

“We are therefore now locked into permanently high electricity prices, with contract prices guaranteed for 15 years,” he notes.

Homewood has produced the table below from the latest figures from the OBR. In total it shows how all the ‘environmental levies’ surrounding the production of electricity are set to provide hard-pressed U.K. consumers with an entirely unnecessary collective bill for £95 billion over the next six years. As Homewood notes, the figures below show the cost added to energy bills by the various assortment of renewable subsidies, capacity market payments and the climate change levy.

Homewood has added in three relevant costs to the OBR table. The feed-in tariffs scheme was recently excluded, but in Homewood’s view it is wrongly left out since it increases energy bills. The Climate Change Levy on productive business is noted elsewhere in the OBR report, but Homewood has “taken the liberty” of adding it to his table. It need hardly be added that this does not involve all the cost of runaway Net Zero fiscal madness. Homewood notes, for instance, that there is no mention of the costs of electricity grid upgrades, system balancing cost and constraint payments – all the direct result of increased renewable generation. And, of course, one can take it out even wider to include the cost of keeping vast amounts of gas capacity idle, waiting to fire up when the wind stops blowing, often for days at a time.

But it might be asked, what is £100 billion when an almost complete dismantling of modern economic society is being planned? A mere down payment on wealth destruction on an unimaginable scale. At a time when the political will to control immigration has withered, massive deindustrialisation is being planned in Europe, with unimaginable effects on the less affluent members of society. On the basis of an unproven hypothesis that human-produced carbon dioxide controls a climate headed for disaster – now deemed ‘settled’ and beyond debate – small, well-funded elite groups in society are planning to remove 85% of the world energy supply within less than 30 years. How far they will get in this madcap, nightmarish scheme before being repelled by gathering rational and democratic forces, only time will tell.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.