Miliband Picked the Wrong Week to Boast That Wind Power is Britain’s “Biggest Source of Electricity”

BY: BEN PILE

Though Ed Miliband was jumping and dancing about wind power becoming “Britain’s biggest source of electricity”, it was surely a terrible week for him and his plans. On Monday, the Daily Mail reported that wind power had “overtaken gas” in this strange metric of Net Zero’s progress. “This is a huge moment in our journey away from energy insecurity and towards clean homegrown power,” said Miliband. It was a huge moment indeed. But not in the way he was anticipating.

First, the news coincided with the country being plunged into a cold snap, with temperatures reaching as low as minus-14°C in some parts of England. So much for global warming; snow and frost covered most of Britain for days.

Demand for energy – both power and gas – are vital in such conditions, not merely to keep the lights on, transport moving and factories and businesses running, but to keep people alive. This weather is very quickly lethal without the means we have produced throughout history to protect ourselves from it. From our clothes to the design of our homes and public institutions, all have been developed with such weather in mind, such that, it more rational times, a cold snap was just a cold snap. Now, the entire energies of officialdom seem bent on unravelling this hard-won resilience to ‘save the planet’, but not to save us.

Miliband’s delight also coincides with rises to the energy price cap. Despite coming to power on the promise of “lower bills”, the Labour Government has overseen rises in the prices consumers must pay, up 10% in October and 5% this month. The BBC reports that analysts predict that the cap will rise by a further 3% in April.

Then, on Wednesday, the National Energy System Operator (NESO), which the National Grid sold to the new Government in September, and which is charged both with managing the county’s power and plotting the course to Net Zero, issued an Electricity Margin Notice, explaining on X that this meant “tight margins on the electricity system for Wednesday evening between 4-7pm”.

“The EMN does not mean electricity supply is at risk,” NESO assured the public. But this assurance was misleading. On NESO’s own terms, demand came within 500 MW of the grid’s capacity available to supply. As independent energy sleuth David Turver, who kept an eye on the unfolding crisis, reported on X, prices on the wholesale power market rose to an extraordinary £5,000 per megawatt hour. (For perspective, prices at the end of November averaged at around £85 per megawatt hour.)

It may well be the case that NESO has developed mechanisms for managing the risk of a supply gap. But as the U.K.’s energy infrastructure is made ever more weather dependent, target-based policies will increase these risks and make managing them ever more expensive. From the point of view of a consumer on a prepayment meter, there is no difference between a power cut that is caused by insufficient capacity being available on the grid and that meter cutting of his supply because he cannot afford the rising cost of electricity or gas. And the same is true for companies, whose bottom lines, once crossed, mean they can no longer compete on global markets.

New data were also published this week by Net Zero Watch (NZW), whose analysis shows that the costs of the Contracts for Difference (CfD) green electricity subsidy scheme, which came into effect a decade ago, has now reached a record high. NZW’s Andrew Montford pointed out that this amounts to about “£20 million pounds per day under this one subsidy scheme alone”. As more and more renewable energy plants come online, these sums will rise. The previous subsidy regime, Renewables Obligation, that still subsidises plants that were commissioned before the CfD scheme, cost U.K. bill payers £7.4 billion in 2023, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The OBR’s data show furthermore that the U.K.’s Emission Trading Scheme cost us a further £5.8 billion. Fuel Duty, a sin tax, cost a whopping £25 billion. In total, green taxes raised £50 billion.

And that figure can only rise, as Miliband and the Government commit to more and more green energy on terms that are ever more favourable to so-called ‘investors’. The Government’s plan to make Britain a ‘clean energy superpower’ by 2030, for example, requires ‘investment’ of around £50 billion per year. If we assume that those investors expect only a modest return on their ‘investment’ of, say, 5%, then these rent-seekers, to use the proper term, whose profits have been guaranteed by the CfD scheme, and therefore necessarily cannot reduce the cost of energy, will be adding in the order of £2.5 billion per year to the total cost of subsidies.

News got even worse for Miliband on Friday. After many years of total intransigence from the Bank of England, which became effectively a green energy lobbying outfit under the stewardship of Mark Carney, it finally admitted that Net Zero was pushing energy prices up, not down. According to the Telegraph, emissions permits “accounted for nearly half the cost of fuel bought by gas-fired power plants last year”. This, the BoE has finally admitted, is driving up inflation. The Government replied, shirking responsibility, stating that “we do not recognise this analysis”, and that “carbon prices under the Emissions Trading Scheme are set by the market”.

But that, as with most stuff produced by Ed Miliband and his underlings, is sheer disingenuous bullshit. It is Government policy to restrict the U.K.’s domestic production of natural gas, and this policy is shared by European governments. Thus, policy drives scarcity, and scarcity drives high prices. Moreover, the Emissions Trading Schemes operated by the UK and the EU are also created by policy, and they were designed precisely to limit gas production, eventually leading to its phase-out.

The effect of this policy can be seen in reports that emerged on Friday that, following the cold snap, ‘Britain’s gas storage levels are “concerningly low”‘. Whereas the U.K. typically starts the year with gas storage tanks that are nearly 100% full, at the end of 2024 and into the first week of January tanks were at just 60% – a scarcity exacerbated by the recent closure of Britain’s last coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe on Soar.

All of this bad news was met by complete intransigence from the Government, which seemingly replied to every critical question from reporters by reiterating the promises of the “clean energy super power”. “Our mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower will maintain the U.K.’s energy security in the long term – investing in clean homegrown power and protecting billpayers,” the Government told Sky News – the same as is reported by the Telegraph.

For how long can the Government sustain this sloganeering in the face of a stinging reality of cold weather, rising prices, business closures and a collapse in trust between the Government and its agencies and, indeed, its supporters? There is no mechanism for the public to force the Government away from its green ideological ambitions. But there are signs of visible cracking of the consensus. On Friday, Labour-aligned journalist, Dan Hodges told Talk TV’s Mike Graham that the party was unlikely to be able to keep Miliband in post in the wake of all this bad economic news. “A number of Labour MPs, a number of ministers are starting to wonder if Ed Miliband, frankly, is just being allowed to run out of control on this issue,” said Hodges. Reality is slow to reach the Labour ranks. But we can hope that they will find the means to throw him and his extreme agenda under the bus at last.

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The above article was moved to TLB from our British site UK Reloaded.

This article (Miliband Picked the Wrong Week to Boast That Wind Power is Britain’s “Biggest Source of Electricity”) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Ben Pile and dailysceptic.org.

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