MATT RIDLEY: The official true cost of net zero is the same as spending £1 a SECOND for the next 31,000 years!
By Paul Homewood
The truth is out. An official report has admitted for the first time the scale of the cost of reaching net zero by 2050.
A study by the National Infrastructure Commission, released on Tuesday, concluded that hitting the 2050 target will roughly double the amount of money we would have spent anyway on infrastructure over the next 27 years to £2 trillion: an additional £1 trillion spent on the green agenda.
For a word that skips off the tongue so easily, a trillion is mighty big. Imagine you were to spend a pound a second: how long would it take you to spend £1 trillion? The answer is more than 31,000 years.
So to have spent a trillion pounds by today at the rate of £1 a second, you would have to have started when woolly mammoths roamed free.
Most of that trillion will go on replacing petrol cars with electric ones and gas boilers with electric heat pumps, and on generating, transmitting and distributing the extra electricity needed for these two uses. It also includes a host of other capital projects, including better household insulation. With all that electric demand, we would need extra power stations, extra pylons and upgrades of household electrical circuits. And we would need subsidies for installing the heat pumps and buying electric vehicles.
Oh, and £74 billion would be spent on closing down the gas grid: the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), which was set up to promote economic growth, has been so captured by the green lobby that it is now a National Dismantling Commission.
With the exception of home insulation, very little of that £1 trillion would actually improve your lifestyle in any practical way. It does not promise to give you cheaper or more reliable electricity. It would not save you any money or give you any more spare time — or make you more productive.
It would generally replace smaller things with bigger things — more pylons, heavier cars, bigger radiators, wind farms instead of gas turbines — so it would actually clutter the world more.
It’s not like the fortunes we spent setting up the railways in the 1840s or the electricity grid in the 1950s or the internet in the 1990s. These gave us something new and useful. Net zero merely gives us exactly the same product in a different way.
The NIC claims pursuing net zero will provide energy in a cheaper, more reliable and more secure way, but this is nonsense: as I have written on these pages before, going back to coal would deliver those goals, whereas wind farms don’t work when the wind does not blow and heat pumps don’t work as well in very cold weather. In effect, therefore, we would get a lower-quality product.
So it’s like replacing all the UK’s coffee shops with more expensive, bigger ones that serve exactly the same coffee and have slightly longer queues. The £1 trillion spent on this, of course, is money we would not be able to spend on schools and hospitals.
This point seems to be lost on almost all our politicians who persist in implying that somehow building a lot of larger coffee shops to replace all the Starbucks and Costas would make us all richer.
‘The economic benefits of net zero far outstrip the investment required,’ intoned Theresa May at the Tory party conference. Earth to Theresa: investing in something is a cost, not a benefit. The benefit comes from the improved product your investment generates, if any.
That is not to say nobody benefits from all this spending. Net zero is proving very effective at rewarding the few at the expense of the many. Those who finance, plan, build and sell these decarbonised products and services (which includes lots of Chinese firms) are making out like bandits. As are those who preach about them. The rest of us are going to be paying for it all.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The National Grid estimated the cost of getting to net zero by 2050 at £3 trillion back in 2020, when offshore wind turbines were still being constructed. This figure took no account of storage costs, which are likely to be at least as much again, and probably underestimates grid reconstruction costs. National Grid FES 2023 requires nine times the offshore wind generation today in its “consumer transformation” scenario.
I question whether even the most sceptical writers appreciate the true scale of the impossibility of funding net zero. We would need about 20 terawatt hours of storage just to cope with a calm couple of weeks in winter, some 700 times current storage capacity. We have no technology capable of delivering this. Batteries, even if you had all the materials, would cost £6 trillion at today’s prices. Pumped hydro cannot provide anything like this amount of storage. Filling thousands of salt caverns with hydrogen at 300 bar pressure to burn (at 40% efficiency) is another suggestion, but we have no idea if it’s feasible, and yet more wind turbines are needed to produce the green hydrogen to store.
Back in 2020 was before costs soared as well…so how much more than £3trillion is it now.
@jeremy23846,
Thank you!
Even if the UK could command £3trillion, or £6trillion or £12 trillion, or whatever unbelievable £number, which, all too transparently the UK cannot, it would be perfectly pointless.
This is because BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, published in June this year, unambiguously reveals that despite the significant CO2 emission reduction achieved by 14% of the World’s population, represented by Europe and North America, global CO2 emissions continue to mount because 77% of the World’s population, represented by Asia and Africa, depend upon fossil fuels to climb out of all-too-often abject poverty!
Just like Europe did, prior to the coal-energized industrial revolution
I would be delighted to share with all you other “Homewood fans” the presentation that I delivered this year to a European Geological Survey of note, focused on the impossibility of delivering the vast quantity metals and minerals that are required to deliver the “net zero” fantasy so espoused, only by the UNFCCC and only the national Governments of the democratic OECD, advised by the once credible International Energy Agency (the IEA). All delivered ESG compliantly and by 2050, of course!
My email is sharman@incoteco.com
Hugh Sharman :
Agreed. But it’s not simply the impossibility of the delivery of the vast quantities of metals and minerals it is the danger to our national security by relying upon China, a state described by our security services as “hostile”, for our energy infrastructure (turbines and solar panels, both of which have relatively short lives before needing replacement) plus all the metals and minerals required for generators, motors, batteries and cabling required for electrification, if not the actual finished products, evs etc, themselves.
Thanks John Brown!
Yes, of course! China (most unfortunately) is totally dominant, Globally, in finding, mining and refining all these “critical” metals and minerals as well as of the manufacturing of high tech products, demonstrating a level of Governmental and Policy forming competence far superior to us in the “democratic” OECD.
The analysis I referred to in my reply to Jeremy 23846 goes into the details!
Terrifying!
£1 ? Is that all? EACH – or the whole Country? Och it must be the entire Universe. They can charge what they like, I don’t think many of us will be there by the end of THIS Century …. thinking of the Grandchildren, then, eh? How nice, loading them with all that responsibility.
Or , to put it another way , about £6000 per family per year .
No one estimated the cost of NetZero before the foolish idea was accepted. MPs with green halos just hoped it would work out. But they now know they have committed everyone in this island to penury for a scientifically false concept.
Let the MPs and their Advisors PAY: After all when there is an accident at work, or whatever ( you know the story) .. The Chief Exec or whatever loses his head ( has to JUMP) – but let’s not let them jump off the hook – Let them stay and PAY. this includes all who colluded ( the MSM ). “That’ll lern ’em.”
And Mother Nature will _still_ do whatever she feels like irrespective of how much money politicians waste on the “climate” “green” and “net zero” frauds
I don’t like these arguments involving money, few people can grasp their significance. Better for me are the (lack of) feasibility arguments, many more people can grasp the impossibility of a new nuclear power station every year for the next 30 years.
The simpler answer is to just point out the deficit between the amount of minerals and materials available and the amount required for Net Zero.
” many more people can grasp the impossibility of a new nuclear power station every year for the next 30 years. ”
The French built 50+ nuclear power stations in approx 25 years.
” The French built 50+ nuclear power stations in approx 25 years.”
That’s probably 50+ nuclear reactors, not nuclear power stations ( a station can contain more than one reactor)
Actually Micky under the Mesmer Plan the French built 56 reactors in just 15 years between 1974 to 1989. The original plan was for 170 by 2000.
https://francenuclear168.weebly.com/messmer-plan.html
A truly remarkable achievement by anyone’s measure.
Thanks Ray, an impressive construction programme.
Reading around, this webpage details nuclear reactors operating in France https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx , including construction dates.
c60GW total?
As mentioned previously, the UK should have constructed a range of PWR nuclear power stations based on Sizewell B
People only get the money argument when they see themselves having to pay extra for no personal gain. ULEZ is a classic case in point. Compared with the true cost of net zero, which if you were generous and said it was £10 trillion, or getting on for £400,000 a family, ULEZ is a spit in the sea, but it’s tangible and immediate. At the moment, nobody’s had a heat pump or an EV forced upon them at their own cost. Maybe the real first impact will be when the banks decide, in their virtue signalling way, that they won’t lend money on houses rated below EPC C. At a stroke, 59% of the housing stock will be unsellable, unless a lot of money is spent on insulation that will make many homes dark, damp and mouldy. The housing market will suddenly polarise; a giant version of the madness of property being valued by school catchment area, ULEZ zone or broadband speed. Meanwhile the banks will no doubt buy at a substantial discount the properties that need the least doing to them, and rent them out.
And still our likely future energy secretary, Ed Milliband, claims he will make Britain “fossil fuel free” by 2030. He really is a complete idiot.
How does Ed Millipede not understand that zero hydrocarbon fuels is not physically possible. How would he eat? How would his EV be made? How would he travel to all the Net Zero junkets? How long does he think it takes to transition to a new energy system, even if a viable replacement were available?
I think that you are asking an awful lot of Millipede’s brain to do thinking. All his brain cells are able to do is manage the basic functions of breathing, walking and eating a bacon sarnie.
And we have that to look forward to in 2024!
My costs for 60% wind power is £2.7 trillion (total energy, not just present electricity).
That includes £1 trillion for stored backup, which many of these reports tend to forget. We need the equivalent of 600 Dinorwig storage systems, to keep the lights on when the wind and sun do not work.
R
The cost would be around £3 trillion, and we have nowhere near 600 suitable sites. A modern Dinorwig might store 30 gigawatt hours at a cost of £5 billion. 20,000 gigawatt hours is nearer to what we would need.
Paul, I think it’s time for a succinct (1 page max) but very pointed letter to be sent by us to our MPs. Are you able to draft something that has all the latest Net Zero stupidity highlighted, including its impossible cost, impossible implementation, idiotic policies, zero benefit, etc. etc. I would happily send it to my Conservative MP who’s one of the green stooges (or just can’t think rationally) [and who also thinks the covid-19 response policies and mRNA therapies are the best thing since sliced bread].
Should be renamed NutsZero
Princess Nut Nuts Zero?
🙂 Mebbe.
Suggestion for more persuasive writing about this revolting fact:
State it as £3,600 per hour.
Or £37000 for every household in the country!
The true cost of net zero will be nearer ten times that figure. Think £2 trillion on the grid, at least £3 trillion for storage, and £3 trillion for the rest.
Not bad for a cause based on a newly invented religious ideology….and certainly without any basis in any form of science, except maybe political science!
Just think how much hard earned cash from people actually contributing to the wealth of the country is being stolen and handed to the legions of worthless climate officers and other sundry chancers and hangers on steeped in the religion of Klymutt
This petition has stalled and needs kicking back into life:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/643533
Matt Ridley did a lot of work on the cost of the climate agenda years ago, and published ‘The Rational Optimist”. Sadly he then went completely quiet on the subject until earlier this year in a period when the whole climate policy panjandrum was being assembled, and when we needed people like him to speak up.
“I don’t like these arguments involving money” – climanrecon
I agree. Though if it works to kill Net Zero, I’m okay with it.
My problem with the cost arguments are that they represent a static view . . . today, carried out til 2050.
That’s not what’s going to happen. As government clamps down on fossil fuels, and takes other Net Zero actions, the economy is going to contract. Severely.
Net Zero CAN’T cost £3 trillion, because you AREN’T GOING TO HAVE £3 TRILLION!
Net Zero means the end of a prosperous Britain. The threat is existential.
It may as well be 200,000 Trillion – the fantasy has no ceiling, especially when you’re just transferring money from the masses to the elites, nothing to do with a mythical climate crisis
Using pi times 10 to the 7th seconds in a year, that’s approximately real money!