Thread by @BarnabyCBW

So, today Civitas has published a great new report, publishing the "realisistic" costs of Net Zero. Apparently, it’s a whopping £4.5 trillion, or £6,000/home/year.

Wow. However, how do these numbers stack up?

(tl;dr: no. but stick around for the 🧵, because it's fun). 1/12

(I would normally ignore this sort of thing, but the numbers are so ludicrous, it needs calling out)

Well, anyway, as an energy nerd, I am particularly drawn to p47 where CAPEX of energy costs are calculated to be £810bn. Seems a lot, and is around a fifth of the total costs in the report. 2/12

So how did they get there? Well, with some quite ingenious methodology that I have not seen before. It seems the plan was to do as follows:
3/12

Take the rough CAPEX of new generation at £1.3m/MW (which is probably not far off?), but used MW*h* instead.

That is right. The basis of the entire calculation confuses MW and MWh. Quite a fundamental error, but let's run with it anyway. Because it's fun.
4/12

First,it means, for our purposes today, overestimating power prices by over 10,000 times. £1.3m/MWh when actual wholesale prices are in the region of £100/MWh
5/12

So anyway, then our author has taken the electricity demand expected in 2050 of 623TWh. In the @theCCCuk's 6th Carbn Budget the range for demand across scenarios is 550-680 TWh in 2050, so fine.
6/12

Then the magic happens: multiply 1.3 (£m/MWh) by 623 (2050 demand in TWh) = 810. And voila, £810 billion. Why this is the appropriate calculation for CAPEX is a complete mystery. But a magician never reveals his secret.
7/12

Except it's not £810bn, is it. Because we have got a bit confused with our units. If you actually multiply £1.3m/MWh by 623TWh you get...
£810,000 billion.
8/12

That’s right – accordingto this methodology, we are going to have to spend a close to a quadrillion pounds on new generation. I didn’t even know quadrillion was a thing. This is palpably nonense.
9/12

For context, those green lovies @IEA have just estimated the *global* investment in green energy for net zero to be $4.5 trillion a year (or ~$90 trillion in 2030-50). Our friends at Civitas has concluded we need to spend 9 times that in the UK.


10/12iea.org/news/the-path-…

I know nothing about the authors of the report, but this is so fundamental it’s embarrassing. Even a basic feel for infrastructure numbers should tell you this is mad.
11/12

I can't speak to the rest of the report, but on this basis alone it belongs in one place.
12/12

Someone who can speak to the rest of the repot is the unassailable @DrSimEvans:

https://twitter.com/DrSimEvans/status/1707370418665816421?t=O8AtFbIUIFTXdshWiExWpA&s=19