Latest news with #RenewableEnergyFoundation
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Net zero subsidies cost British households £280 a year
Britain's green energy subsidies have added an estimated £280 to households' energy bills, research has found. Levies used to encourage construction of wind farms, solar parks and other renewables have added £25.8bn a year to energy bills paid by both households and industry, according to a study from the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF). The charity said the cost of the subsidies were a key factor in the UK's sky-high electricity prices and blamed them for accelerating the decline of British industry. John Constable, REF's director, said: 'Renewables subsidies are now costing £25.8 bn per year – or over £900 per household annually – about one third of which, £280, will hit the average domestic electricity bill directly. 'The remainder, £650, impacts households through general cost of living increases – as businesses like supermarkets recover their share of the green subsidy costs through increased prices. 'This is intolerable. It simply can't go on.' REF's estimate of the direct cost of green energy subsidies on household bills is strikingly similar to the £300 that Labour promised bills would decrease by if the party came to power and moved Britain's energy system to renewables. That claim has become a source of controversy since their election win last year, with Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, repeatedly challenged to show bills are going down. Average bills rose by 6.4pc, or £111 a year, when the latest energy price cap took effect last month. A Government spokesman disagreed with the REF figures used in the report and said it 'ignores the benefits of clean power and significantly misleads on the cost of renewables'. REF analysed the cost of 10 separate subsidy schemes imposed on homes and businesses by successive governments since 2002. The report, which was based on government data, is thought to be the first to draw together the cost of the UK's many green subsidies and the levies that support them. The most expensive subsidy was the Renewable Obligation scheme set up in 2002, which offers wind solar and other renewable producers guaranteed subsidies for two decades after they start generating. It cost an estimated £6.8bn in 2023. Its surging costs saw it blocked for new entrants in 2017, but companies accepted before then can still get payments up to 2037. It currently adds £89.26 to the average domestic fuel bill, according to separate data from analysts Cornwall Insight. REF said the total £25.6bn cost of such subsidies now accounts for more than a third of the £71bn spent on electricity in the UK in 2023, the most recent year it looked at. It means such subsidies are key factors in setting the UK's power prices, which are among the world's highest. It said: 'There can be little doubt that renewable electricity subsidies are a significant factor in the cost of living crisis and are very likely to be an important element underlying the weak growth in productivity in the UK economy since the financial crisis of 2008.' The latest Government analysis of electricity demand in 2024 said industrial power consumption had fallen by 22pc since 2010, while commercial and domestic consumption both fell by 22pc. Andrew Bowie, the Conservative shadow energy secretary, said: 'Ed Miliband can try to perpetuate the fiction that his net zero targets will save people money, but this research reveals the true cost of prioritising climate targets over cheap energy. 'Under new leadership, the Conservatives have been clear that the cost to families of net zero by 2050 will be far too high. Sir Keir Starmer must rein in his ideological Energy Secretary and urgently change course.' The Government argued that the subsidies were accelerating the move to clean energies and reducing UK vulnerability to future surges in gas and oil prices. A spokesman said: 'As shown by the National Energy System Operator's independent report, clean power by 2030 is achievable and will deliver a more secure energy system, which could see a lower cost of electricity and lower bills.' Ana Musat, of Renewable UK, the wind industry trade body, said: 'Looking at the cost of financial support for renewables in isolation is misleading, as it does not reflect the contributions of the sector to the economy. 'Offshore wind alone is attracting billions of pounds of new investment to this country, supporting 32,000 jobs, and this is set to rise to 100,000 by 2030. 'We're also expecting subsidy costs to begin falling in the near future, with a £1.8bn reduction for billpayers starting in 2027.' Many of the subsidy schemes now overseen by Mr Miliband were set up by the previous Conservative or coalition governments. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Net zero subsidies cost British households £280 a year
Britain's green energy subsidies have added an estimated £280 to households' energy bills, research has found. Levies used to encourage construction of wind farms, solar parks and other renewables have added £25.8bn a year to energy bills paid by both households and industry, according to a study from the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF). The charity said the cost of the subsidies were a key factor in the UK's sky-high electricity prices and blamed them for accelerating the decline of British industry. John Constable, REF's director, said: 'Renewables subsidies are now costing £25.8 bn per year – or over £900 per household annually – about one third of which, £280, will hit the average domestic electricity bill directly. 'The remainder, £650, impacts households through general cost of living increases – as businesses like supermarkets recover their share of the green subsidy costs through increased prices. 'This is intolerable. It simply can't go on.' REF's estimate of the direct cost of green energy subsidies on household bills is strikingly similar to the £300 that Labour promised bills would decrease by if the party came to power and moved Britain's energy system to renewables. That claim has become a source of controversy since their election win last year, with Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, repeatedly challenged to show bills are going down. Average bills rose by 6.4pc, or £111 a year, when the latest energy price cap took effect last month. A Government spokesman disagreed with the REF figures used in the report and said it 'ignores the benefits of clean power and significantly misleads on the cost of renewables'. REF analysed the cost of 10 separate subsidy schemes imposed on homes and businesses by successive governments since 2002. The report, which was based on government data, is thought to be the first to draw together the cost of the UK's many green subsidies and the levies that support them. The most expensive subsidy was the Renewable Obligation scheme set up in 2002, which offers wind solar and other renewable producers guaranteed subsidies for two decades after they start generating. It cost an estimated £6.8bn in 2023. Its surging costs saw it blocked for new entrants in 2017, but companies accepted before then can still get payments up to 2037. It currently adds £89.26 to the average domestic fuel bill, according to separate data from analysts Cornwall Insight. REF said the total £25.6bn cost of such subsidies now accounts for more than a third of the £71bn spent on electricity in the UK in 2023, the most recent year it looked at. It means such subsidies are key factors in setting the UK's power prices, which are among the world's highest. It said: 'There can be little doubt that renewable electricity subsidies are a significant factor in the cost of living crisis and are very likely to be an important element underlying the weak growth in productivity in the UK economy since the financial crisis of 2008.' The latest Government analysis of electricity demand in 2024 said industrial power consumption had fallen by 22pc since 2010, while commercial and domestic consumption both fell by 22pc. Andrew Bowie, the Conservative shadow energy secretary, said: 'Ed Miliband can try to perpetuate the fiction that his net zero targets will save people money, but this research reveals the true cost of prioritising climate targets over cheap energy. 'Under new leadership, the Conservatives have been clear that the cost to families of net zero by 2050 will be far too high. Sir Keir Starmer must rein in his ideological Energy Secretary and urgently change course.' The Government argued that the subsidies were accelerating the move to clean energies and reducing UK vulnerability to future surges in gas and oil prices. A spokesman said: 'As shown by the National Energy System Operator's independent report, clean power by 2030 is achievable and will deliver a more secure energy system, which could see a lower cost of electricity and lower bills.' 'Offshore wind alone is attracting billions of pounds of new investment to this country, supporting 32,000 jobs, and this is set to rise to 100,000 by 2030. 'We're also expecting subsidy costs to begin falling in the near future, with a £1.8bn reduction for billpayers starting in 2027.' Many of the subsidy schemes now overseen by Mr Miliband were set up by the previous Conservative or coalition governments.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
We blew the whistle on the Covid lab leak five years ago and were written off as cranks
If they're supposed to be members of a band of truculent conspiracy theorists intent on disrupting the machine of the state, Prof Gwythian Prins and John Constable don't exactly seem like it. 'In some sense we're all classic establishment figures… but slightly to one side of it,' Constable says, an observation at which Prins nods vigorously. Turning up at a pub just off Trafalgar Square (where Whitehall meets Clubland and visitors to the country mingle with the people who run it) the two men are immaculately turned out and mildly uneasy. Leather-backed armchairs are found; a pot of tea ordered. Prins, 74, is, among a catalogue of other things, the emeritus research professor at the London School of Economics. Constable, 61, is an academic, analyst and the founder of the Renewable Energy Foundation. They are not naturally keen on the spotlight, they insist, yet have come because, Prins says, 'this is a very important story which must be heard'. It relates to a specific sequence of events during the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, but really, it's about how the British government and Civil Service operates these days. Or rather, how it doesn't operate. 'But we'll come to that,' Prins says. This Sunday marks five years since Boris Johnson appeared on television live from Downing Street to announce a nationwide lockdown in a bid to stop the coronavirus outbreak. It was the most significant set of restrictions on British life in living memory, and rendered much of the country catatonic. Yet while most people outside of government and vital services were forced to put their lives on hold, others were energised to put their talents and expertise towards finding out about the virus. Prins, whose long career has primarily focused on history and geopolitics, including social epidemiology, was one of them. So too Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), whom Prins had met while carrying out work for the Ministry of Defence, where Prins sat on an advisory panel to the Chief of the Defence Staff. The immunologist Prof Angus Dalgleish and the Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen were also part of the group. They had, in fact, all been in communication as early as January 2020, when whispers about SARS‑CoV‑2 – the virus which causes Covid-19 – were spreading almost as fast as the virus itself. 'Soon after the announcements began to be made, Gus Dalgleish called me up and said his colleague, Sørensen, had done the single most obvious thing,' Prins says. As much of Europe focused on how to contain the spread of Covid, Sørensen began to analyse the virus itself. Sørensen's early research would eventually lead to the conclusion that SARS‑CoV‑2 was engineered during 'gain of function' experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Somehow, it must have escaped. This was essentially the 'lab leak theory', which was instantly mooted when the pandemic started and just as quickly dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Instead, the established narrative proclaimed that the likely starting point was contact between wild creatures and humans in a Wuhan wet market where early Covid cases were identified. 'There have been longstanding concerns in the virological community about the relative laxity in standards in Chinese laboratories,' Prins says. Accidents can happen. 'These things happen. It happened in this country at Pirbright with the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Human error.' Given what he knew about China's interest in biological weapons, Prins found the lab theory 'of sufficient interest' to give Sir Richard Dearlove a ring, who gathered this growing team together. Constable joined later, as did an anonymous civil servant. By this point it was early March and the theory that the wet market was ground zero in the emerging pandemic was becoming cemented in the public's perception. Governments were beginning to shut down their countries, creating policies on the fly and attempting to not contradict one another too much. Concerned, Dearlove and Prins's team felt they needed to do something 'rather more formal' than simply look into the virus and hope the government would reach the same conclusion, especially as they believed their findings would be relevant to decisions made about how best to protect the population and how to quickly develop a safe vaccine. So in March 2020, they sent to Downing Street two top secret documents titled An Urgent Briefing for the Prime Minister and his Advisers, which outlined their belief that SARS‑CoV‑2 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute, and countered many of the opinions held by experts on different elements of the Covid story. The first briefing, solely about the makeup of the virus and proposing a 'Norwegian vaccine' based on Sørensen's research, 'was presented to Number 10 not as an opportunity to say, 'Abandon everything else', but just to say 'You really should put this vaccine into your portfolio'. And that didn't happen', says Prins. The second briefing, sent 10 days after the first and received four days after the announcement of lockdown, was allegedly seen and believed by Boris Johnson. 'We know that,' Prins says. 'But he now says, 'I couldn't resist my advisers'. Well, for me that's not a very convincing answer. You're the prime minister of the United Kingdom, to govern is to choose, you are there to decide what to do.' Prins says he has since learnt that Johnson 'asked for redoubled efforts to discover whether what we were saying was true – and the result of those enquiries was to trash us and say that we're all conspiracy theorists or something'. Constable's major contribution to the team's work was to discover a different potential index case in Britain, or 'patient zero', which could have proved the virus reached these shores more than six weeks earlier than the official line. It in fact involved The Telegraph. Scanning the comments under an article written by Dalgleish one day, he found a subscriber who claimed that he and his secretary both had Covid-like symptoms as early as October or November 2019. The man, whom he tracked down with the help of a Telegraph journalist, then put him in touch with the people he thought had infected him, '[who] turned out to be a family of international business people who travel regularly from the Far East to Britain,' says Constable. 'They'd come for a shooting party in Wiltshire, and many people at this party had gone down with symptoms they subsequently recognised as likely to be coronavirus.' Constable persuaded the family to be tested, in the name of public interest, packaged this all up – their names, contacts, their story, the fact that they were willing to help – and passed it on to Number 10. 'And they did absolutely nothing. So because the tests were never done, we'll never know for sure.' Constable may have been entirely wrong, but he finds it alarming that he was dismissed out of hand. 'Whatever the general picture, you have a series of novel pieces of information being provided by a research group with a different perspective, producing points which would be novel and relevant and would have been important, if they'd been taken into account, and they were all neglected,' he says. None of this would be public – it was marked 'top secret', after all – had Prins's supposedly encrypted email account not been hacked in 2022 by a Russian group working for the FSB security service. He is 'very careful' with his communications, preferring to use Signal, an encrypted messaging and calls app, and Proton Mail, an encrypted email service, yet it didn't stop the hackers. A trove of Prins's emails, including 'a mixture of things that were correct, like this report, and a lot of stuff that was made up', were made public. It led to a slew of coverage, in the shadier outcrops of the internet, of the group's activities. 'If you believe them, I am a black spider at the centre of a Right-wing conspiracy theory to control the entire Western world,' Prins says. Constable waits a beat. 'Would that it were true…' Prins nods. So the team now regards their warnings as public documents, and on the fifth anniversary, have decided to talk about it, not least because, says Prins, everything 'that has happened in the last five years has made me and the rest of the team increasingly furious, because our advice was not taken'. The lab leak theory is just one element of the briefings which has been subject to a significant shift in public (and official) perception over the last few years. Once viewed as the preserve of cranks, it has slowly pulled up to the wet markets theory and now overtaken it as the prevailing explanation for the virus's origins. The New York Times recently changed its tune on the matter. And the CIA said on Saturday that the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus was 'more likely' to have a 'research-related' origin than a natural one, even if it had 'low confidence' in its conclusion. Full-scale lockdowns, the PPE debacle, the care homes crisis and almost every other aspect of the government's response to Covid has been a point of debate ever since the pandemic ended. The ongoing Covid inquiry rarely makes for comfortable viewing for anybody involved in the pandemic response at a governmental level. Invariably, it vindicates Dearlove and Prins's team – not least in shining a light on the 'false groupthink' that Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's former chief adviser, later identified as paralysing Downing Street during the early months of the pandemic. Prins and Constable are not here to name and shame individual ministers or even scientists – though they do say Sir Patrick Vallance, as the government's chief scientific adviser at the time, should 'carry the can' for blind spots – but are instead here to point out a systemic problem. 'This is about what's happened to our country, to our people, to our children,' Prins says. 'And we don't want it to happen again,' Constable adds. The team they assembled were not all scientists. 'The only thing we have in common is high IQ, I think,' Constable says. 'I think that's basically it,' Prins agrees. 'All of us [are] awkward customers, and extremely clever. That's what you need if you're going to have safe policy. It's true in any area but it's especially true in an area like this where lives are at stake. 'And that's what makes us so disappointed – I'll just use that rather low-grade word – that even with the qualifications that we carried with us, even with the fact that the prime minister of the day subsequently told us, directly, that he'd read this and was persuaded, the reaction was basically to shut us out and shut us down, and prevent any of our material being published.' Prins believes Johnson 'came back to work far too early' after his brush with death from Covid, and should instead have 'gone to Chequers and gone to bed, and read Tacitus, or written his Shakespeare book, and let someone else run the country'. Constable insists that the men want no credit, no recognition, no apology. They may well have been proven wrong on a lot of things, but the alarming thing, they believe, is that they weren't even heard. 'We're not trivial people, we're not time-wasters, we went through a lot of trouble to do this and it was ignored, and subsequent events have shown it was a great pity that we were ignored,' he says. 'My general consideration is that we can see something wrong with our governmental mechanism. It's not sensitive to information because it becomes locked within a particular tunnel vision, and cannot digest, or even see contrary information… Which is fascinating. And very worrying.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Major wind farm was paid £65m to cut power output by three quarters
One of Britain's biggest wind farms was handed £65m to slash its output by nearly three quarters last year, amid warnings that the country's 'staggeringly inefficient' power grid is pushing up household bills. The Seagreen offshore wind farm in the North Sea – the largest of its kind in Scotland – had its output curtailed for 71pc of the time it was due to operate in 2024, grid data show. This meant that of 4.7 terawatt hours of power its turbines generated, 3.3 terawatt hours were effectively discarded – with owner SSE paid by grid operators each time this happened. SSE also owns the Viking wind farm in the Shetlands, which had 57pc of its output curtailed last year at a cost of £10m. It was only switched on in August. The two sites have been paid another £1.5m so far this year for cutting output. Grid operators pay wind farms to switch off when they are generating but there is not enough network capacity to transport their power. But these curtailment payments ultimately go on to bills, in the form of network charges, and are paid by millions of households and businesses. Last year, separate analysis by the Renewable Energy Foundation charity found that wind farms were paid almost £400m to turn off their turbines. On Friday, SSE said grid upgrades were coming that would result in 'more and more of this power flowing into the economy, powering homes and businesses for decades to come'. A spokesman said: 'Seagreen and Viking wind farms are incredible assets that give Britain the ability to harness huge volumes of its own clean, homegrown energy that can drive economic growth while reducing reliance on volatile imports.' One source close to the company added that Seagreen's cheap generating price meant it was also more likely to be chosen for curtailment by grid operators than other, more expensive sites. But the figures will fuel a row that is raging in the energy industry over controversial proposals to introduce regional electricity pricing in the UK, replacing the current national price system. Greg Jackson, the chief executive of Octopus Energy, compared the existing arrangement to 'every region being forced to charge London house prices' and warned it would add £5bn to bills by the end of this decade. Writing for The Telegraph, he said: 'Britain suffers from a staggeringly inefficient market, reminiscent of the wine lakes and butter mountains of the old European Common Agricultural Policy. 'We are forced to pay wind farms billions each year to switch off and import energy from Europe when we have excess power we should be exporting. 'Without reform, energy costs will continue to rise and economic growth will remain elusive.' His comments come after Alistair Phillips-Davies, the chief executive of SSE, warned that switching to regional electricity prices risked pushing up bills and derailing Ed Miliband's plan for a clean power system by 2030. He warned the reforms would cause unnecessary delays and uncertainty, spooking the investors that ministers want to invest in wind and solar farms across the country. In an article for The Telegraph, Mr Phillips-Davies said: 'The clean power prize is a golden economic opportunity for Britain that is achievable without this costly distraction – don't blow it now. Responding to these claims, however, Mr Jackson accused wind farm developers such as SSE of 'scaremongering'. He said: 'If Government backs consumers over producers, corporates stand to forfeit easy profits – and will have to work harder. 'It is understandable they are deploying every threat in their arsenal to lobby politicians into inertia.' A spokesman for the National Energy System Operator (Neso) said curtailment payments made up 2.4pc of a typical annual customer bill. Based on the current energy bill price cap of £1,738, this would amount to about £42 a year. The spokesman added: 'Neso takes its role to deliver a safe, secure and reliable national electricity network at least cost to consumers, extremely seriously. 'We make constraint payments when it is most cost-effective to temporarily reduce generation output in a specific area. 'We are constantly looking for new ways to reduce costs associated with balancing electricity supply and demand on a second-by-second basis, as these costs are passed on to consumers in their electricity bill.' A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman said: 'The Neso's independent report shows we can achieve clean power by 2030 with cheaper electricity, even when factoring in constraint payments, and a more secure energy system for Britain. 'Through our Clean Power Action Plan, we will work with industry to rewire Britain, upgrade our outdated infrastructure to get more renewable electricity on the grid, and minimise constraint payments.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
