So cheap, renewables, so, so, cheap
We’re fully aware of the claims about how much - how little - it costs to generate electricity using renewables. We’d also point to this:
A £58bn plan to rewire Great Britain’s electricity grid to connect up new windfarms off the coast of Scotland is expected to trigger tensions with communities along the route.
The £58 billion is a cost of renewables. It’s entirely possible that it’s a worthwhile cost - equally, that it isn’t. But it’s definitely a cost of renewables.
The ESO said three times as much undersea cabling would be laid than onshore infrastructure by 2035 and estimated its blueprint would add £15bn to the economy, creating 20,000 jobs a year.
Those 20,000 jobs are also a cost of renewables, not a benefit.
Note that all of this is true whatever one’s view of climate change, the necessity or not of dealing with it and so on. These are costs of doing that dealing. So, cheap may not be quite the right word. For the cost of renewables is not to be measured by the generation of a watt, it’s the cost of delivering, reliably, a watt to when and where it is to be used.
But our real ire is aimed at this:
Britain’s electricity networks will not hit net zero until 2035, National Grid has said, undermining a key pledge by Labour to hit that target by 2030.
…
The deadline prompted a backlash from Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, who said a Labour government would make ESO accelerate its programme to hit the 2030 target. A spokesman said: “We said 2030 for decarbonising the grid and we meant it.”
No, not who is demanding what, which political party etc. Rather, that something like this is being determined by political pledges in an electoral (well, almost certainly one) year.
Whether we have a decarbonised grid or not depends upon the benefits of having one against the costs of having one. Accelerating the process makes it more expensive - and thus reduces the net benefit of doing so. It is possible to calculate either way. But who believes that anyone is? We’re being treated to political performativity over the spending of £58 billion and perhaps more. That is, we’re not being treated to rational decision making in the slightest.
Which is why we don’t like politics as the method of economic decision making. Simply because the economic decisions are not, therefore and thereby, made upon economic grounds.
This is not a party political point in terms of who it is demanding whichever - it’s a complaint about party politics itself as a method of economic decision making.