Somewhat bemused by these @thegwpfcom claims on the cost of #netzero, I've been having a look into the various 'reports' they produced today thegwpf.com/cost-of-net-ze…. Come with me on a tour that contains quite a bit of magical thinking and not a little mystery
The headline figure (as reported by @GuidoFawkes, @talkRADIO and now The @spectator) is £3 trillion over 30 years - about £100bn per year. That's just for two sectors, electricity and housing, so the suggestion is this could be an understatement
Of crucial importance, therefore, are the source numbers GWPF uses. Garbage in, garbage out - right?
The electricity report thegwpf.org/content/upload… contains a lot of numbers. But only a few turn out to be important
The most important is the cost given for offshore wind power, £113-124/MWh. While reasonable for wind farms coming online now, it's way above contracts signed for projects delivering in a few years' time (around £40/MWh, same ballpark as the wholesale price, so subsidy-free)
GWPF's established approach to low offshore wind prices is to argue they're not real and that the wind farms won't be built. Which has to be reconciled against the facts that in the real world, contracts have been signed and investors have gone through due diligence
GWPF's offshore wind cost figure is further inflated by claiming that system flexibility - making up for the intermittency of wind generation - virtually doubles the cost, to £209/MWh. That's also way beyond academic estimates
The extreme elevation of both these numbers is key for generating their high #netzero cost figure
It's worth at this point asking where the numbers come from. Two sources are given: The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), which hasn't existed for four years; and the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland (IESIS) iesisenergy.org
Look further into who does IESIS's energy modelling, and one turns up the names of Capell Aris and Colin Gibson... which are also the names on this GWPF report. So: one source that is by definition out of date, and another that is the authors' own previous work
There are other numbers in the document that look somewhat awry, but I'm not sure I need to say any more at this point
The other report, on the cost of decarbonising housing, comes from Michael Kelly, another long-time GWPF associate. It's shorter and has fewer numbers - the main one being that the cost of decarbonising all UK buildings could come in at £2.3 trillion thegwpf.org/content/upload…
Here the main problem is the central assumption. Kelly assumes that you can take the cost per household seen during a pilot project - for example, for retrofitting insulation - and extend that across the whole country
But this isn't how life works. Home-owners and landlords upgrade their buildings progressively. An example: if govt decides to ban new gas-fired boilers from 2025, people will fit heat-pumps (or whatever) the next time they need to renew their heating system, not en bloc in 2024
So the real cost is the difference between replacing systems with low-carbon or high-carbon kit. Which is one reason why the @NatInfraCom analysis produced a very different number for the national cost of adopting zero-carbon heating - £120-300 bn nic.org.uk/wp-content/upl…
If you're in doubt, please do read the two pieces of work - @thegwpfcom and @NatInfraCom - and see which you find more rigorous
The lovely thing about producing non-peer-reviewed material is that there is no obligation to be consistent - as demonstrated by Andrew Montford, GWPF's deputy director, in his companion piece extolling nuclear reactors and Allam Cycle turbines thegwpf.org/content/upload…
The cost of small modular reactors will fall quickly, he claims, as people build tens of them (not that they exist yet, but whatever). Yet GWPF does not admit the same is true of renewables even though the real world has built tens of thousands or even millions of the things
Spare nuclear electricity is a boon, he argues, as it can be used, whenever it's available, to run things like desalination plants that don't need to run all the time. But spare renewable electricity is, in GWPF-view, a pest, even though it can be used in exactly the same way
As I argued in my 2018 book Denied amazon.co.uk/Denied-rise-fa…, Britain's climate contrarians, who once ruled the comment pages of our national media, now make a rather sorry sight 
Lost in the media, lost on the backbenches, and most definitely lost in the court of public opinion where a whopping 82% of the public supports the UK getting to #netzero by 2050 citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/how-c…
Launching cost numbers like these into public discourse isn't going to change that. Swap out-of-date numbers for the real ones, challenge your own assumptions and abandon groupthink... then we'll talk
This thread isn't just for you, @JuliaHB1 and @FraserNelson - but I hope it helps
