Britain's net-zero-obsessed energy policy came unstuck this week in six different ways:
1. Donald (Drill Baby Drill) Trump tore up electric-vehicle mandates and turned decisively against wind power. America, China and India are all going to increase their emissions by much more than we can possibly save.
2. Chris Wright testified how the shale revolution has turned America into now the world’s biggest producer of both oil and gas, ahead of even Saudi Arabia and Russia. That could have been our boom too.
3. On the calm morning of “Dunkelflaute” Wednesday this week just 1 per cent of our electricity came from wind power, even less from solar and a whopping 10 per cent had to be imported at exorbitant cost to prevent the lights going out. How’s that for “energy security”?
4. The wind business is paid £85 a MWh, well above the price of getting it from gas – and then we add billions to our bills for expanding, backing up and balancing the increasingly stretched and unstable grid that comes with wind. Unreliables are NOT cheaper than reliables
5. Britain’s hitherto fabulous strength in AI is being strangled by net zero. Chris Stark of the CCC said he does not believe this and anyway data centres can move to where the wind farms are. He's in denial.
6. Jim Ratcliffe, the boss of Ineos, said on 13 January: “We are witnessing the extinction of one of our major industries as chemical manufacture has the life squeezed out of it” by high energy prices. De-industrialising Britain, he added, achieves nothing for the environment and merely shifts emissions, business and jobs elsewhere.
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