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!

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June 7, 2024 at 08:40AM