Net Zero - a catastrophe for the UK.

[snowbear22]

The cost of Net Zero has been grossly underestimated by successive Governments-

in 2019 Conservative Philip Hammond estimated 2.1 trillion, the Office of Budget responsibility last year 803 billion, but the cost of decarbonising Britain turns out to be vastly more than the population has been led to believe. Turver writes, the true cost could be as high as £9 trillion – or up to £250,000 per British household.

Wind and solar can be cheap at the point of generation, but they are intermittant and unreliable without vast amounts of backup, storage and grid reinforcement. Turver shows that when these system-wide costs are included, the price of energy soars.

We already have among the highest electric costs in the world and the real costs have not hit yet.

I just don't think that this Government are competent enough to roll it out successfully.

I don't think there will be enough charging ports by 2030 when they ban new diesil cars for instance, I don't think we have the money to invest in and set up a whole new system and back up system without investing the trillions we don't have.

Our debt is The UK's debt-to-GDP ratio is historically high, hovering around 100%, with recent figures showing it between 95% and 104% of GDP, a level last seen after World War II- our credit cards are maxed out already.

YABU - it is worth it, I am willing to put up with the higher costs and substantial hit to the ecconomy for the sake of reducing Global warming

YANBU - It's too expensive and unreliable

net-zero-a-multi-trillion-pound-catastrophe

The Cost of Net Zero by David Turver

Our electricity prices are high because we pay a subsidy to cover the cost of building wind and solar farms - hence businesses don’t come to the Uk cos of energy costs -I mean do you really think China is building and shipping colossal wind turbines out of charity -we are paying for all this.

Our electricity prices are controlled by the price of gas. The high cost is due to that. Interesting article about it below.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/electricity-pricing

They're knocking down all the beautiful old stone walled arch railway bridges near me and replacing them with pre fabricated steel ones for electric trains.
It makes me pretty sad tbh. These bridges are an engineering feat and rather beautiful, and they're just bulldozing them.

This is the frustrating crux of the matter, and I think we need to look at decoupling the unit price of electricity from the unit price of gas ASAP. I had no idea it was so difficult or complex, but I guess capitalism is a clever beast.

AFAIK the government has just taken the green levy off our electricity bills and absorbed it itself, but it's a drop in the ocean while we're still tied to the unit price of gas.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/21/trump-us-stranglehold-eu-uk-energy-supply-lng

The sooner we can generate our own electricity, the sooner we're free from relying on unstable maniacs and dictators for our fossil fuel supply.

If you attempt to trace the source of the culture war on "Net Zero", you soon come up against some very shady organisations- and the dollars, roubles and rials that are bankrolling them.

The anti net zero culture war does push bullshit like energy bills are high because of it. And people fall for it.

It's not unreliable if we properly embrace nuclear.

One of the risks of nuclear is that the fuel comes from overseas. Investing in tidal would make more sense in a self sufficiency way.

Fusion should still be the aim though. Almost unlimited power. Shame brexit stopped the UK being part of the European fusion project

The problem with nuclear is that it's a political football. 30 years ago we were planned to build family of reactors but Blair got cold feet and cancelled them.
Now all the expertise has left the country or retired and we have to rely on the Chinese to build them.
Sheer political incompetence

The uranium comes from overseas, yes, but so does about £10 billion worth of coal and oil. If we properly commit to HALEU and SMR production then we can at least rely on ourselves to manufacture the fuel and the energy itself.

This is not true.

The other problem with nuclear is that we still have no idea of how to dispose of the spent fuel safely. Plus, it's eye wateringly expensive.

We may still need more of it, but developing further alternatives would be ideal.

Nuclear fusion has to be the future. It is safe and clean with no issues that fission has with waste products.
We are still some years away from it becoming industrially viable but it has to be the way forward.

Nuclear takes at least 15 years to build. It's prone to long and expensive shutdowns if faults are found. If something goes catastrophically wrong you get a Fukishima or Chernobyl on an island the size of a postage stamp, and processing the waste and decommissioning is nasty and expensive.

After almost 100 years of operation we still haven't figured out where we are going to bury the spent fuel from the first generation - Sellafield cleanup estimate costs are currently running at about £60 billion (which of course no government really wants to pay out for and sort). Any private investors for new nuclear will be long gone by the time cleanup time comes round.

Despite all of this the government is pouring money into stuff like small modular reactors.

I think we do need nuclear for baseload, but it needs to be the absolute minimum we can get away with rather than something we rely on. Otherwise it is just kicking the can down the road and heaping a different set of cleanup costs on our great great grandkids.

What happens do you think when you spend years irradiating stuff with fast neutrons ? The waste generated is easier to handle but still not pleasant.

Yes, it's expensive - but less so than a lot of people think when cost is levelised across the reactor's lifespan. But it's never going to be cost effective to rely on it completely - it needs to be part of the energy mix, alongside renewables.

We do have an idea of how to dispose of it safely, and plans are in place - see the UK policy framework for managing radioactive substances and nuclear decommissioning.

Seems odd that China is pursuing net zero at a breakneck pace, and is already reaping the benefits. Why do you think they aren't phased by US tariffs ?

Plus net zero generates a lot of jobs that will be valuable in the future.

Really we should have gone 100% nuclear 4 decades ago.

However there needs to be some nuance, probably not achieved here. What exactly do people think "net zero" means, and more importantly, what are they imagining should happen. That the UK goes hell for leather to restore it's dependence on foreign oil and gas ????

I broadly disagree with the negativity in the article. Becoming less reliant on imported oil and gas is hugely important for the environment and to national security. We are getting there with renewables.

However the country has definitely made some missteps. For example, I was working on the legal side of some small scale solar projects 5-10 years ago. It was widely known in the industry that it was grid connections that were delaying projects and there was a lot of frustration. So entrepreneurs, energy companies and funders were pushing ahead with projects, but they couldn’t connect them to the national grid. There was a real lack of foresight on that side of things. The same applies to battery storage - that is essential alongside renewables which produce well in certain conditions and not at other times.

That wouldn't be the same China that seems to be adding significant amounts of new coal power per year ?

In fact China probably added more coal generation power in 2025 than the entire UK generating capacity.

Now China is doing pretty well with renewables. But it appears to be adopting a pragmatic approach, that the transition needs to be slower and that fossil fuel to renewables transition needs to be staged more rather than done all at once, which of course would cripple industrial production and spike energy costs. A bit like what we are doing here.

I imagine that the transition should be better managed. Rather than trying to pull the plug completely on fossil fuels better to reduce our dependence on them more gradually over time. Basically a more realistic approach which better balances cost incurred now and benefit to the environment rather than an approach that at the moment seems to be based largely on zealotry to try to achieve a difficult objective at high cost.

Baby and bathwater spring to mind.

I totally get that forcing the taxpayer to fund projects that private companies will make obscene profits from and charge a fortune for the energy generated from those projects to permanently fleece us.

But that is a legacy of the governments from 2010-2024. Who were busy shovelling taxpayer money to their mates faster than it could be counted.

All of that is being unpicked.

But in the long run - in the world where we hope our children and grandchildren will grow up in - we cannot continue with gas and oil. Environmentally, economically, diplomatically, politically or socially.

I'm not sure the national security argument stands.

We are currently importing 10-20% of our electricity (because we are closing down our fossil fuel plants and oil/gas production capability). So basically switching from importing oil and gas to importing electricity instead.

We are also putting a lot of generating capacity in the North Sea, which can probably be more easily destroyed by subs snapping the export cables (the government has just started figuring this out) and is less capable of being defended than power plants on land.

Depends which government, I suppose. This new government is finally- belatedly- grasping the nettle of a grid upgrade.

I’ll forward this to The Whitehouse if that’s ok Serendipity.

It’s a disgrace the government are rushing to net zero meanwhile its citizens can’t afford to put their heating on . This new technology is not even proven it’s just a socialist ideology. There’s no point Britains sit freezing whilst the superpowers are increasing coal production etc etc

Could you fit any more ill informed cliches into such a small rant?

You think they don't know ?