As wild fires spread around continental Europe, and also hit the UK, an unusual consensus seemed to emerge in UK press - climate change is real and we need to act urgently on clean energy. You would expect the Guardian to say things like that, but the Telegraph ran an opinion piece saying that ‘the right needs to get serious about climate change’ and another saying that party leader Kemi Badenoch ‘must reverse course on net zero before she destroys the Tories’.
She did come back with a response, but it was mainly left to others to maintain the contrarian view, with, for example, John Constable, one time editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, saying ‘Climate change is real, but it is an unfortunate fact that renewables are useless.’ And in a Prosperity Institute paper, ‘Good Money After Bad- The Spiralling Costs of British Green Energy Initiatives and What We Can Do About It’, David Turver developed the contrarian view in more depth – with endorsements from Reform’s Richard Tice and from the GWPF offshoot Net Zero Watch.
Turver, a retired engineer, now an energy consultant, who, he noted, could occasional be found on GB News, said that green energy subsidy and grid integration costs ‘have grown six-fold since 2010/11 to £19.8bn in 2024/25 and are forecast to exceed £40bn annually by 2030/31. This will be equivalent to more than £1,400 per household’. To avoid that he said we must repeal or amend the Climate Change Act, end or curtail renewables subsidies, including setting the Renewables Obligation (RO) to zero and renegotiating existing CfD contracts. We must also scale back grid expansion plans and reduce reliance on long-term Capacity Market contracts for battery storage in favour of firm capacity, renegotiate or cancel contracts for Carbon Capture, green hydrogen, and related schemes, with compensation limited to verified sunk costs up to a clear cut-off date. Aggressive stuff.
It is true that the RO has been very costly, but it is being phased out in preference for CfDs. Turver however looks to much more than that - in effect a major cut back for renewables. But, apart from calling for a ‘reorientation toward affordability and security of supply,’ he doesn’t say what should be done instead, but he does say that a new Prosperity Institute report will cover that soon: presumably coal, gas and nuclear will be favoured. Hopefully it will look at the potentially very high costs of that big shift.
Labour’s new Energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, has yet to join in this debate, but whereas Turver claimed that ‘the cost of gas pales into insignificance compared to the total cost of generating electricity from renewables’, her predecessor, Ed Miliband, has been adamant that it was gas prices that were the main reason for consumer price rises. The debate goes on!
Though it is getting a bit urgent. It’s not just gas and oil prices, along with wildfires, heatwaves, and flooding, that are a worry for the UK and the rest of Europe. China has just launched its new 5 year energy plan with a target of installing 3.5TW of renewables by 2030, around a 50% increase, with some firm capacity ratings being set, to be enabled via storage/smart/flexible grids, to reduce the need for using coal plants for balancing. The overall aim is for clean energy sources to account for 50% of total power generation by 2030, led by wind and solar.
China must find the UKs tortuous policy debate on green power very strange. It may not be doing everything right, but China is clearly pushing ahead very fast - and it is also selling hardware overseas successfully. Carbon Brief notes that ‘Chinese exports of clean-energy technologies have been surging, especially since the closure of the strait of Hormuz. At the same time, Chinese investment in clean-energy projects in Belt and Road Initiative member states totalled $20bn in the first half of 2026.’
China is aiming to be a major global player. And the UK? Does it actually have anything to sell? To be fair, it already gets about 50% of its power from renewables, but the technology is nearly all imported and much of it is foreign owned. However, the UK does still allow free and open debate! And that’s not something we can take for granted these days, even in the West, with, in the USA, Trump in denial and seeking to block green initiatives- and even climate discussions! Perhaps it’s not surprising then that the Guardian carried a militant call for action: ‘To safeguard its political and economic future, Europe needs to accept that the US’s environmental war must be met with an economic response – coordinated with other actors, including China’. Tough stuff…as Ed Miliband takes on his new global role. And the flaming hot summer is still not over…
A short post this week. And, as I noted in my last post, I’m taking a break now- to hopefully cool off. Back soon.
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