Following on from Tony’s post about the cost of the Net-Zero-by-2050 pledge in Australia, the GWPF has today released several reports looking into the “astronomical” costs for the UK.

Andrew Montford has written Three trillion and counting: Net zero and the national ruin. Andrew discusses a report from the Committee on Climate Change, chaired by the notorious Lord Deben, published last May, which was astonishing in its lack of any detail or costings estimates. Furthermore, the response to an FOI request was that they didn’t have any information on costs. So Andrew set out to do the work that Deben and his cronies at the CCC couldn’t be bothered to do for themselves. Andrew’s report focuses just on two aspects of the transition, the decarbonisation of electricity, and the transformation of homes, and comes up with the headline figure of £3 trillion.

The three trillion report is partly based on figures from The Future of GB Electricity Supply, by Colin Gibson and Capell Aris, who have many years experience working for the National Grid and in nuclear and pumped storage power systems. They report that the approach proposed by the CCC, depending primarily on wind and solar, simply wouldn’t work, because of the intermittency problem. Although it is good to hear experts in the field confirm this, it seems mind-bogglingly obvious, and I’m amazed that anyone would be so scientifically illiterate as to suggest such a scheme. Gibson and Aris put forward a plan based on nuclear power, plus gas with carbon capture.

Thirdly and fourthly, there’s Decarbonising housing: the net zero fantasy by Michael Kelly, and Reducing emissions without breaking the bank, also by Andrew M.

All of this has had a lot of publicity in the media today. There’s an article at the Spectator by Andrew, a discussion at Guido, (“The Net Zero project was rushed through with no proper discussion or costings having been carried out. After the obscene spectacle of HS2 costs more than tripling over the last decade, Guido would have thought the Government would take more care over this enormously expensive decarbonising project that is pushing ahead with next to no scrutiny…”) and James Delingpole’s headline is Eco-Loon Boris’s £3 Trillion Net Zero Scheme will Bankrupt Britain.