Labour’s Green Obsession Will Cost £18 Billion A Year
By Paul Homewood
Labour’s plan to set up the Great British Energy company at a cost of £8.3bn is just part of its wider Green Plan, which is still included in its website:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Make-Britain-a-Clean-Energy-Superpower.pdf
According to Sky News, it comes with a cost of £23.7bn over five years, equivalent to £870 for every household in the country. But what will we get for the money?
In addition to Great British Energy, which cannot be funded by increases in windfall taxes, as claimed by Labour, we are promised these goodies:
Upgrading of ports is, of course, yet another cost associated with offshore wind. As for green hydrogen, carbon capture and gigafactories, the money will in all likelihood be wasted, and certainly won’t benefit the public.
Transitioning the steel industry will involve wasting billions so that efficient processes are replaced by hydrogen fuelled ones. But the cost of hydrogen is so great that whatever is left of our steel industry will be unable to compete with international rivals.
This list, together with GBE, costs £15.6bn, so the remaining £8.1bn will presumably be allocated to insulation schemes:
Free insulation has been on offer for so many years that it is hard to see there are many homes left who have not had some. But the plan appears to be to hand billions to local councils to spend on council houses.
But why should taxpayers fund this? Let the councils themselves pay for it, and recover the expense by putting up rents.
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In any event, the amount is tiny, and will make very little difference to the UK’s energy consumption. For example, £8 billion would pay for just 800,000 houses at £10000 a time, the sort of amount of money that might make a difference.
And even that would not save £500 a year, given that annual heating bills for the sort of small houses involved are probably little more than £1000. Labour’s promise also implies that everybody will benefit from this saving.
But the most ridiculous claim of all is that “hundreds of thousands of jobs” would be created. At £50000 a job, you’d be looking at a cost of tens of billions a year. And you can double that amount when the cost of materials, travel etc are added on. Quite clearly this money is not on the table.
By the way, the document, which although undated must have been written last year, states:
As we know, this claim from Carbon Brief was only true for a few days.
But then it goes on to claim that energy bills will fall by £1400, based on the high prices still prevalent last year:
It is fraudulent for Labour to continue linking this report prominently on the website, without any qualification that the costings are no longer correct.
Indeed, Labour’s renewable plans will inevitably force up energy bills even faster than under Tory policies. This is what labour promise:
Based on current market prices, the extra wind and solar power planned will be subsidised to the tune of about £13 billion a year. That’s £500 per household, on top of the cost of the Green Plan.
The insane obsession with floating wind power alone would cost £4 billion a year in subsidies, given its strike price of £244/MWh.
Meanwhile, Labour clearly have no plan for when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.
Thank you, Ed Miliband!
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Make Britain an under-powered, over-priced, under-performing, clean energy ex-Super-power which YOU will have to pay for and pass the pollutants costs on to your grandchildren.
(Fixed)
This doesn’t even scratch the surface. The National Grid estimated in 2020 that net zero would cost £3 trillion by 2050, so that figure needs doubling, and then doubling again for all the costs of storage. £12 trillion over 24 years is £500 billion a year, which divided by 20 million families is £25,000 per family per year.
Recent report estimates from the GWPF costed net zero by 2050 at £3Tn and rising, that’s an additional £100k per household
politicians are developing policies from that part of their anatomy, however many X, Y chromosomes they have, where the sun doesn’t shine.
The list they provide is for nothing but grants for crackpot schemes.
‘Investment.’
“You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” — Inigo Montoya
‘We will invest…’ = we will spend your money like there’s no tomorrow.
Like drinking beer is investing in a brewery – and we know where that ends up.
It’s a form of invasion, isn’t it?
Sheesh!! If they’re going to extend and build on nuclear and develop SMRs there doesn’t seem much point in lumbering the country with so much intermittent wind and solar. In any case, as I understand it, nuclear cannot be modulated for backup for intermittent wind and solar. Labour claimed Sunak’s claim that taxes would rise by £2k for every family was disingenuous: they need to remove the mote from their own eyes and lying figures.
You will be shocked how many Friends of Labour will be the heads of these new companies, managing the billions Labour grants to them.
See: Friends of Obama, 2012
Is floating wind the most costly intermittent energy creation source in the world?
Home insulation has been tried before, ironically by the Rudd Labour Government in Australia. People died which is typical of new Labor.
Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program
Two workers died as a result of electrocution installing foil lined insulation; one worker was electrocuted installing fibreglass “pink batts” (all three in Queensland); and one worker died from hyperthermia, also installing “pink batts” (in New South Wales).
But why should taxpayers fund this? Let the councils themselves pay for it, and recover the expense by putting up rents.
If Labour somehow made energy more affordable, all that would happen is that people would use more of it, a variation of Jevons paradox.
And that’s a bad thing?
Yes, if you don’t have enough generation capacity.
And there’s the rub, there’s not enough generation, hence NG’s DSR and punitive ToU tariffs
“NG’s DSR and punitive ToU tariffs”
In English – rationing.
But the politicians won’t say that.
I wonder why ….
Auto
And nobody will challenge them or the very idea of Net Zero during the tv debates.
maybe Nigel Farage on the TV debate tonight will mention Net Zero he often dies on his own TV programme referring to it as Nut Zero.
“he often DOES on his own TV programme ” I hate autocomplete! Sorry
”THE CHALLENGE WE FACE”
That would be physics and reality.
Labour logic: in 1948 the creation of the NHS – access to medical care for all, free at the point of delivery – would overall improve the health of the population, prevent disease, and a healthier population would therefore require less medical intervention. This would mean cost of the NHS would only increase overtime more or less in line with inflation.
By 1950, the NHS was costing twice what had been budgeted in 1948.
Bonus: universal medical care and medical advance did increase life expectancy, from about 67 years in 1950, to 71 years in the early 1970s, to about 81 currently.
The State pension launched in 1948 was based on pensioners on average not drawing it for more than 5 to 10 years. As life expectancy went up, it went bankrupt by the late 1960s.
At the root of Socialism is the fatal conceit, the notion those governing know enough to plan and control economic and social outcomes.
That Labour’s energy plans will fail, is a given. The unknown is at what final cost.
A little while ago there was a graphic posted on here comparing the cost of various electricity generators. It struck me that the one for gas had a big chunk labelled “Carbon”. I understood this to mean carbon tax. It was nearly half the total cost and more than the cost of the actual fuel. It must be easy to make renewables look cheap simply by piling on the carbon tax to gas. So does that carbon tax feed through into our energy bills and could the government get rid of it if it wanted?
Yes and Yes.
But how would they meet Net Zero then, with Gas & Coal being so cheap.
”So does that carbon tax feed through into our energy bills…”
Worse, it feeds through into everything we consume where electricity is used somewhere in the supply chain – everywhere right? Plus that carbon tax is applied to gas and every manufacturing process which it is decided emits carbon dioxide.
It is like Excise Duty which is paid at the source of manufacture and then passed on through the supply chain to the end-user being compounded as it goes.
Carbon tax is a Pigou Tax designed to end up with the end-user to internalise a cost not included in the manufacturing cost, meaning the consumer does not pay the full price for the benefit they derive.
The fantasy is ‘future generations’ are paying this cost, and we get the benefit, because… climate change caused by naughty us.
This fake reasoning is exposed by the lack of concern for future generations landed with trillions in debt to fund Net Zero, plus pay for the unaffordable public services from which we now benefit but for can’t pay out of earning, so borrow from the future in order that Uniparty can bribe us to vote for them.
Yes another one of Boris’ taxes. Carbon/green tax, beer tax and sugar tax.
Google tells me that UK Carbon tax started in 2013 under David Cameron as part of the EU Emissions trading scheme.
Excellent!! An good reason to dislike Cameron even more! Boris did put it up though. As I remember looking round the mantle piece to the telly, when BJ announced it on the news. I send the early morning on the internet, whilst the other half has telly on. Hence why I remember somethings. As all these taxes and the furlough experiment, had my saying how socialist, this conservative government were/are!!
With planetary boiling, why do we need a Warm Homes Plan?
According to UN Antonio, we’ve now moved from global boiling, to climate hell
A reminder about Labour & warm/insulated homes:
“Retrofitting each house on Abbey Road, Huddersfield cost around £60,000, which means doing the same for the nation’s 1.6million council houses would cost £96billion”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11260727/Councils-green-plan-hailed-Keir-Starmer-Labour-conference-costs-60-000-home.html
Add to that the cost of mould damage to housing from cavity wall insulation
Is it just me, or do the three faces in the propaganda photograph not show three sterotypical maniacs from the three classes of society? The tokenistic woman is a sort of crazy, smug, upper-class, piece of totty, giving sweeping commands; the grinning imbecile on the left of the picture is a middle-class (he wears glasses) sheep who is going to enjoy passing on her commands, and the vacant-faced, rough-looking, guy is the moron who is going to do all the work, and is starting to smile beatifically because he has been told he will be given a day off at the end of it all. They missed out quite a few woke icons but perhaps they have been accidentally cropped out; after all, things HAVE been rushed out, as Sunak surprised everyone by his impulsive eagerness to stop being a pretend politician and instead to live the billionaire lifestyle abroad, in a country where the lights will never go out.
Ha-ha! The ‘middle-class’ chap was none other than the multi-millionaire Marxist, Ed Miliband. Gawd ‘elp us when he gets in control of our energy.
Labour will do what they always do, bankrupt the country, impoverish tax payers and rush headlong into anti democratic practices in an attempt to maintain their power forever – socialism has never worked, anywhere and never will – its socialist elites will still be richer, getting richer, whilst they offer a few crumbs, occasionally, from their well catered, overflowing table, meanwhile, they will double down on their woke, incompetent projects without a care in the world, even as reality comes crashing through the doors
Their problem this time is that the socialist Tories have spent all the money AND maxed out the credit card so their usual spend, spend, spend policy faces a major problem. More borrowing will upset the global bond market and drive up interest payments. Robot Reeves has already ruled out NI, income tax and corporation tax rises but that leaves capital gains tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty on shares and homes, wealth tax via a council tax band increase and of course a raid on people’s pensions following the tradition of Brown & Balls destroying company pension schemes.
From the first day their plans will fail as there are no cable laying ships available until 2030 to connect up any additional wind farms to those already planned. But, of course, that is based on Labour winning a working majority which is actually looking much harder than the polls would have you believe. The current polling methods fail to account for the muslim vote which could be a factor in up to 80 seats and where taking a share of the vote could let a Tory sneak in. Despite this being a clear factor in the election, the legacy media is not noticing or avoiding it for the obvious reason.
For as long as the sheeple (majority of UK citizens) vote for the uniparty of Tory and Labour, nothing will change. It will take an economic recession to make them notice the reality of netzero and green energy fairytales.
It may never get to this stage if NATO keep using Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia, attacking their anti-ballistic radars with Western missiles and drones. Nobody will win a nuclear WW3.
I may be wrong but I suspect that Labour don’t plan to invest directly in all this “green energy” nonsense. The trick they are planning is to get Big Money to put up the money (ref. Mark Carney/BlackRock et al), incentivised by guaranteed subsidies which the public will pay for via their ballooning energy bills. Big Money won’t care that it is all total nonsense technically.
Labour have apparently not thought through how they can hope to get away with such ruinous, infrastructure-wrecking plans without the people finally rebelling, unless they have ulterior plans to shackle us all in digital straitjackets of some sort. They were very keen on vaccine passports during Covid which fortunately petered out. Maybe they plan digital ration cards for energy (Net Zero) or food (the war on farming) or digital ids linked to a central bank digital currency.
I can not believe that no one is considering what is going to happen once the subsidies finish, and all the wind turbines are completely worn out, having operated 20 years in a hostile environment like the N Sea. Power companies will simply walk away or blackmail the UK government i.e. us, to stump up more subsidies for a new set of turbines.
Reform has the only pragmatic policy for energy. Use fossil fuels for as long as possible to allow us to develop nuclear capacity . Even after that, use fossil fuels where necessary to support indigenous industries.
In any case, all of this energy crisis is predicated upon dodgy, false, climate science.
Barry Paterson C. Eng.
I for one have considered that, but I am a lone voice who gets little traction even on this website habituated by energy infrastructure experts. As I note in my recent paper “Debunking the climate change hoax”:
“The deployment, against the advice of a government Chief Scientific Advisor, of intermittent expensively-subsidised so-called renewables like wind turbines and solar panels which end up as toxic non-recyclable junk when they reach the end of their short service lives should never have been embarked upon in the first place. This has been money straight down the drain, or rather money straight from the pockets of the general public into the coffers of Big Money.”
For details, see https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.
Labour’s Green Obsession Will Cost £18 Billion A Year… if we are lucky!
Add that to the BILLIONS currently and being increasingly spent providing a Western lifestyle free of charge to anyone from any corner of the world who fancies free lunch at our expense while at the same time continuing to recreate the squalor they came from. All while claiming to be fleeing from those very systems and you have a system ripe for collapse (not even thinking about the multitude of problems they import together with tribalism and factionism), along with an distorted sense of entitlement and grievance taught to them by twisted lefties.
What is this GB Energy?
It looks like it will not be an electricity generator, you cannot buy energy from it?
It looks like another hapless Green Investment bank, using ours and borrowed money.
Since it is government trying to pick winners, it will crash & burn like all such projects
Another huge unfunded liability
One notices a tactical shift away from control of CO2 emissions (impossible and pointless) towards clean clean CLEAN energy as justification for windmills
True. Since the fraud is widely debunked, pushing it in an election year is sure to drive voters away. The other gang eager to force women to death by forced reproduction and have goons with guns shoot people over plant leaves is also shifting. BOTH frauds are backing water in fear of driving voters into the arms of Libertarians who want to ban neither energy nor plant leaves.