A friend told me I needed to simplify my articles and produce a Net Zero for Dummies. Well, here goes, the folly of Net Zero in eight charts (1/12)
Net Zero is sold as a climate fix, but it’s ineffective. UK’s 0.8% of global emissions means our cuts barely dent the climate (2/12)
CO2 isn’t the only climate driver—ice cores show temp swings with stable CO2. Net Zero is a futile gesture (3/12)
Net Zero spikes energy costs. UK had the priciest industrial & domestic electricity in 2023 (IEA data). EU 2024 stats confirm UK’s industrial power is the most expensive in Europe. Renewables aren’t cheap—they’re driving the surge (4/12)
Renewables like wind & solar aren’t the bargain they’re claimed to be. Renewables cost more than gas-fired power (with carbon tax). Grid balancing & backup costs make them pricier still (5/12)
Some new renewable projects got “cheap” contracts, but many, like Norfolk Boreas & Hornsea 4, were cancelled or rebid higher. Add grid & backup costs, and they’re still more expensive than gas. Claims of cheap renewables don’t hold up (6/12)
Net Zero is tanking the UK economy. High energy prices cut consumption & emissions & stagnated growth. No rich nation thrives with low per-capita energy. We’re exporting jobs to China & the US, fuelling unemployment & poverty (7/12)
“Green jobs” in wind & solar sound nice but cost £220K/year in subsidies per job. We’re swapping market-driven jobs for subsidized ones—a recipe for economic disaster. Net Zero’s job promises are a costly mirage (8/12)
Renewables aren’t green. Wind & solar use huge amounts of land & ocean, scar the environment, and rely on critical minerals mined with child/slave labor. Their energy return is low compared to production & backup needs. (9/12)
Net Zero curbs freedom. Gov advisors push propaganda, urge meat cuts, limit driving & flying, and control products like cement & steel. The Energy Act 2023 lets them manage your EV charger, appliances, even your fridge. Non-compliance? Jail. It’s a power grab (10/12)
Summary: Net Zero won’t change the weather, jacks up bills, kills jobs, and relies on unsustainable renewables. It’s a costly, controlling policy that harms the economy and personal freedom. A dumb plan pushed by dummies. (11/12)
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One failed turbine at Scroby Sands exposes the scale of the cost of decommissioning offshore wind farms. And there’s precious little cash being set aside to cover it. A thread (1/n)
Scroby Sands is a relatively small 60MW offshore windfarm. In 2023 one of the 30 turbines caught fire and owner RWE has decided to decommission that single turbine (2/n)
In the accounts up to end 2024, we can see the wind farm is losing money, with pre-tax losses of £4.7m, despite earning ROC subsidies worth £9.8m, or nearly 48% of revenue (3/n)
The data is in, so now we know how much the Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) scheme cost us in 2024/25. A thread 🧵(1/n)
First, overall generation under the scheme was down on the year at just under 8TWh. It is beginning to look like a downtrend has been in place since 2020/21 (2/n)
The total cost of the scheme fell slightly too to £1.84bn (3/n)
If NESO cannot produce a complete set of energy scenarios and we can't rely on the costs, then what is the point of NESO. A thread (1/n)
Many green blobbers have got very huffy about my report for the IEA looking into the various estimates of the cost of Net Zero (2/n) iea.org.uk/publications/t…
Fulminator-in-chief was @ret_ward who even went even went so far as to write to the @iealondon and demand the report was withdrawn (3/n)
Another record year for CfD subsidies with £2.6bn paid out to renewables generators. Where does all the money go? A thread 🧵(1/n)
2025 was a record year, with £2.6bn paid out, up from £2.4bn in 2024. Offshore wind took the lion's share of over £2bn, with tree-burning taking £428m, dedicated biomass £118m. Onshore wind took 67m and solar £0.1m. (2/n)
September to December 2025 were also the top 4 subsidy months on record, with November 2025 being the highest month taking £311m. (3/n)
Yesterday's AR7 results show that Miliband, NESO and the CCC are gaslighting the nation. AR7 is locking in index-linked high electricity prices for decades. A thread 🧵(1/n)
So, what happened? A total of 8.4GW of offshore wind was awarded contracts. Of this 8.2GW was fixed-bottom at an average of £91/MWh in 2024 prices, with 0.2GW of floating at £216/MWh. But these prices show the price of offshore wind is rising (2/n)
AR7's 20-year index-linked contracts are only about £9/MWh above AR6's Hornsea 4 15-year contract that was cancelled as uneconomic. However, on a like for like basis AR7 would probably have cost about £105/MWh (3/n)
Alastair and Rory caught telling porkies about solar power while shilling for lossmaking Fuse Energy. When facts and truth are ignored, The Rest is Propaganda. A thread 🧵 (1/n)
The central claim of their clip was that solar is a “very cheap and affordable way to generate electricity”. But in the UK at least, that claim is manifestly untrue. Solar is in fact very expensive (2/n)
We subsidise solar in 3 ways. The basic cost of solar from feed-in-tariffs is £229/MWh for 2024/25. To that we must add £33/MWh for grid balancing and backup costs, giving a total of £282/MWh, or >3X gas-fired electricity including carbon costs (3/n)