The entire net-zero edifice is crashing to the ground

Telegraph

14-02-2025

The UK needs gas. We need it for heat: 85 per cent of UK homes use a gas boiler. We need it for power: around a third of which came from gas generation last year. Roughly half of the 'capacity market' required to back-up unreliable renewables on cold dark windless days comes from 90 gas plants. We need it for industry, with the 'clean power' alternatives still 3-4 times more expensive.
The Government's net-zero ambitions don't change this reality, nor will they for at least two decades. Those capacity market plants, for example, are all on 15-year contracts. Homeowners don't want heat pumps, and the data centres required for AI need our energy system to grow, not shrink.
The UK and EU tested to destruction in 2022-23 the idea that we can rely on Russia to supply what we need. The price shock, and decision to underwrite prices, helped bring down Truss administration. This year we're seeing even the Norwegians wobble on exports as supporting us is driving up their domestic prices. It is surely a statement of fact, then, that the UK's energy security depends affordable supplies of gas. Yet we have some of the world's most expensive energy, due to over-reliance on imports, and the failure of the alternatives to fossil fuels to live up to their promise to cut bills.
So great news, the plucky drillers at Egdon Resources, after years of tests, believe they've found a massive new source of supply, under our feet, in the East Midlands. Noting that early drilling estimates are just that, it is claimed it could generate over £100 billion in revenues, £27 billion in tax, 'thousands of jobs' and reduce 218m tonnes of CO2 emissions by displacing imports.
Win, win, win, win.
A serious government, cheered on by a serious Parliament, would be bending over backwards to ensure Egdon can 'drill, baby, drill' as soon as possible. Ed Miliband, our Energy Secretary, would be driving 50 miles south from his constituency, hi-vis jacket at the ready, to open the site. Sadly, he's more likely to be standing with the single-issue anti-fracking campaign groups.
We are now more than two decades into a Parliamentary consensus that we must either leave gas in the ground, or make it so expensive to extract, that it amounts to the same thing. Net-zero is a moral crusade not a consideration of trade-offs with affordability and security, both of which are far more important to the public. They also find it hard to explain those choices to local residents.
Even when the politicians are supportive, the laws they've made allow Nimby councillors and judges to block or overturn permits on the basis of climate targets, absolutist environmental regulation, disproportionate planning and safety rules, and misapplied assertions of human rights.
Onshore hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, then is 'banned' in the UK, while the offshore north sea taxes are so high that investors are fleeing Britain. The Government is starting to get the message on getting the state out of the way on nuclear power, but the logic does not extend to fossil fuels.
Simply lifting the moratorium would also be insufficient. There needs to be a wholesale shredding of the previous Governments' efforts to try and reassure the public with the 'highest standards in the world', and a ruthless focus on delivery. This means consistent and limited regulation with other industries not special rules to fail to appease implacable opposition.
The only signs of anything like that being possible are currently coming from Reform, who have just five MPs, backbench Conservatives, and a few peers. But Reform now are using the same zero risk, pro-regulation tactics as anti-fracking campaigners to attack renewables, which will make building a consensus for serious energy security harder.
In short, we should not be optimistic. It may take another horrific spike in energy prices to shake some sense into Parliament. But even last time they thought the solution was higher taxes, and accelerating decarbonisation ambitions, making the problem far worse.