The Conservative Party’s retreat from the commitment it made while in office to impose a “Net Zero” UK energy system by 2050 continues apace. On Monday evening it will take another stride when Lord Offord, the Shadow Energy Minister in the House of Lords, presents a report which examines whether this goal is realistic. Spoiler alert: the report, titled The True Affordability of Net Zero and authored by leading energy consultant Kathryn Porter, concludes that it very much isn’t.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has already suggested the target is “impossible” without “a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us”. Porter’s study contains a mass of detailed analysis which supports that claim, while casting doubt on assertions made by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.

Labour went into the last election promising average household energy bills would fall by £300, yet they have already increased by almost exactly this amount — and are set to rise much further. Miliband has tried to blame this on the volatile price of natural gas and Britain’s dependence on fossil fuel markets controlled by “petrostates and dictators”.

But, according to Porter, gas is not the reason why Britain’s industrial users pay more for their electricity than competitors abroad, or why our household electricity bills are the world’s fourth highest. Instead, this is down to a series of “policy choices” made since the country embarked on the green “energy transition”, including ever-deepening thickets of levies, taxes and subsidies. After all, the UK gas price is only the world’s 15th highest, and has risen much less than total bills.

Energy has become a critical political battleground, perhaps second only to immigration. Reform UK has already announced it would abandon the Net Zero ambition, as well as Miliband’s further goal of “clean power” — an electricity system that relies on fossil fuels for just 5% of its output — by 2030. Yet despite Reform’s recent gains, Miliband has said he is “absolutely up for the fight” to defend his project, and still maintains it will save money. There have been signs of dissent among Labour MPs who fear that Net Zero could cost them Red Wall seats, but the Energy Secretary maintains that abandoning the policy would represent a “total betrayal of future generations”.

Standing in Miliband’s way are some inconvenient truths. Even the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the quango he appoints to set the so-called carbon budgets which are supposed to get us to that 2050 goal, says that cost savings from the Net Zero path will only begin from 2038. What’s more, as Porter’s report points out, some of its assumptions appear to have no basis in fact.

For example, the CCC claims that the cost of offshore wind energy is falling, and will fall further. In fact, it is rising steeply. The “contracts for difference” for new offshore windfarms Miliband signed amid much fanfare last year guarantee their owners will be paid £83 for each MWh unit of electricity. Yet the price set out in contracts signed in 2022 was just £52 per unit. Happily for the contractors, the system allowed those who signed them to “rebid” for them in 2024 at new, more lucrative levels. This difference will be added to bills.

Meanwhile, the owners of the huge new Seagreen wind farm off the coast of Scotland were paid twice as much last year not to supply power as they had been for selling electricity, because the grid infrastructure could not cope. Switching Seagreen off cost £198 million: another addition to bills.

These and other expensive anomalies were created while the Tories were in power. However, Conservative sources tell me that the green enthusiasm which dominated the party under David Cameron and Boris Johnson has well and truly dissipated. Miliband’s claim that if Britain becomes a “climate leader” the rest of the world will enviously follow suit is also widely dismissed. Instead, as India, the US and China continue to burn more fossil fuels, the British Government is likely to wreck the economy, exporting jobs to high-emitting countries but in doing so increasing global greenhouse gas.

“The Conservative Party is going through a thorough renewal of its energy policy under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership,” Lord Offord informed me. “This report spells out the scale of the challenges we face” and “provides further evidence that the government’s Clean Power 2030 plan is neither achievable nor affordable”.

Tory sources say the party is careful not to issue firm commitments at this stage, for it is far from clear what state the energy system will be in when Britain next goes to the polls, and what might have to be done to get it back on track. But the political stakes are spelt out in Porter’s conclusion: that Labour’s hopes of economic growth cannot be achieved while the UK has such high energy prices. Net Zero, she writes, “represents a significant drag on the economy” and is “creating real hardship”.

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David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

DavidRoseUK

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