HS2 cost billions and we KNOW about trains. All we know about net zero is it will cost us a TRILLION
FROM HS2 to the 2012 Olympics, I am sick of governments selling us grand projects on the basis of enticingly small estimates – only for costs to escalate, with taxpayers ending up stung for many billions of pounds extra.
But the biggest con is yet to come.
How many times have you heard ministers or quangocrats telling us that achieving net zero carbon emissions will cost a piffling sum — or even that it will save us money? Don’t believe it.
The Government may have little idea of how it is going to achieve net zero, but one thing is for sure — the eventual bill will come out at many, many times what we have been told.
Yesterday, the National Infrastructure Commission published its Second National Infrastructure Assessment, which is meant to tell the Government what infrastructure it needs to build to ensure that the country can thrive and remain resilient to natural and man-made disasters.
Green ideology
The point of the NIC, which was set up by David Cameron, was supposed to be to unblock Britain’s infamously slow ability to deliver important infrastructure such as new road, rail and air projects.
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We have been waiting for an additional runway for Heathrow since 1946, for example — a period in which many other countries have built multiple international airports.
But like so many government agencies and quangos, the NIC has been captured by green ideology — and is now preoccupied with trying to decarbonise Britain at any cost.
The NIC isn’t quite saying that achieving net zero will be cost-free — it estimates it will take £1TRILLION of public and private investment between now and 2050.
Yet it claims that, in return, our energy bills will fall by 50 per cent by 2050, so as to offer us some financial award at the end of the process.
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Does anyone really believe that?
Take heat pumps, which the NIC wants to provide the heating for all our homes by 2050.
The technology, it claims, “is highly efficient, available now and being rapidly deployed in other countries”.
Try telling that to the many UK homeowners who have taken the plunge — and been left regretting it as they shiver.
It is true that a properly installed heat pump in a modern, well insulted home can be effective.
But most heat pumps run at much lower water temperatures than do traditional gas-fired heating systems, which means they struggle to heat older homes.
You don’t have to take it from me — just listen to Bosch, which manufactures heat pumps but which earlier this year advised owners of older properties to stick with boilers instead.
To fit a heat pump which may not quite succeed in keeping you warm, you could be facing a bill upwards of £10,000 — probably way more than a gas boiler.
It doesn’t end there. If you need to insulate your home, resize your radiators or fit underfloor heating (recommended with heat pumps), the bill can come to £30,000 or more.
The NIC wants the government to fit heat pumps in poorer households for free and bung the rest of us £7,000 towards the bill —but of course we will all be paying it out of our taxes.
As for the assertion that heat pumps are cheaper to run than gas boilers, that’s not what many heat pump owners are finding.
To be cheaper than gas heating, a heat pump needs a “coefficient of performance” (COP) of around 3.5 — which means it needs to pump out three and a half times as much heat energy as it consumes in electrical energy.
But a recent government-backed trial of 750 heat pumps found the average COP was only 2.94 — and that this fell sharply to below 2.5 in cold weather — i.e. just when you really need to heat your home.
The NIC rules out using hydrogen boilers to replace gas boilers — a simple switch which could save homeowners thousands of pounds.
But if we all have heat pumps, we are going to need to generate vastly more electricity. At what cost?
True, the marginal cost of generating electricity by wind and solar farms — which the NIC wants to form the basis of our energy supply — is very low.
But the upfront cost of building wind and solar farms has soared along with commodity prices.
The last time the Government tried to auction rights to build offshore power stations, it received not a single bid.
On the hook
Moreover, if we are going to rely on wind and solar we are going to need massive amounts of energy storage to cope with days when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
What does the NIC have to say on that? Only that “government should support the market” to come up with possible solutions.
How much these will cost us, the NIC has no idea.
But here is a clue from the US Pacific National Laboratories, which estimates that storing electricity in lithium batteries currently costs around $330 (£270) per MWh — around six times as much as it costs to generate the electricity in the first place.
So much for cheap renewable energy.
The bill for HS2 kept multiplying in spite of us knowing how to build high-speed railways.
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But no one really knows how we are going to achieve net zero, which will require as-yet embryonic technologies to decarbonise difficult industries such as steel and cement.
We are going to be on the hook for a vastly greater bill.