British democracy is under threat. Bursting into an otherwise reassuringly dull discussion on how enthusiastically to pursue mass migration and net zero, Nigel Farage has torn up electoral convention by disagreeing with his opponents on core issues. In a complete break with democratic norms, the demagogue’s manifesto promises to “Scrap Annual £10 Billion of Renewable Energy Subsidies”, with Farage declaring on X that “Reform UK will scrap Net Zero targets, which will save us £30bn annually.”

Thankfully, the guardians of democracy were quick to the scene. “No you won’t. And no it wouldn’t. But you know that. Which is why you won’t come on @RestIsPolitics because these claims won’t stand up to a moment’s examination”, tweeted Steward of Truth, Alistair Campbell, before hurrying off to record another round of furious agreement with retired Tory impersonator, Rory Stewart. “Reform UK’s climate denial undermines democracy” warned the esteemed “climate misinformation” experts of LSE’s Grantham Research Institute. The official voice of truth was more tempered, with BBC climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, informing us that “the cost of a unit of power from a new solar or wind project is lower than the cost from a new gas generator, according to government figures,” whilst noting the need to account for “other factors”, like “backup power for when the sun isn’t shining, or the wind isn’t blowing”.

“While renewables are relatively cheap and getting cheaper it is hard to say for certain whether an electricity system with a high level of renewables will lead to higher or lower bills than one that relies more on gas,” he concludes. 

Yet, despite this yellow card, Farage continues to insist that renewables are expensive. His opponents, on the other hand, have failed to temper their claims about the sunlit uplands of the renewable future. This all raises the question: is there an easy, unambiguous way to settle this debate?

The answer, as it turns out, is “yes”. In fact, the figures are all public. 

In the upcoming Contracts for Difference (CfD) auction for renewable subsidies, the government is offering a strike price of £85.05/MWh for solar, £89.23 for onshore wind, £101.78 for offshore wind and a mouth-watering £245.38 for floating offshore wind. All of these are above the current (elevated) market reference price of electricity, which has averaged £63.80/MWh this year, and well above the historic norm of about £45/MWh. 

1-0 to Farage, then. That said, it may be a tad unfair to extrapolate from a hypothetical price — after all, none of these offers have been accepted, and Deputy Chair of the Climate Change Committee, Baroness Brown, has warned that the subsidies on offer are too low to attract much interest, due to recent cost inflation. 

To be fair to the Baroness, let’s ignore recent inflation and look at prices paid to renewable generators already on CfD contracts. This year, public accounts show consumers have, on average, paid £160.5/MWh for offshore wind, £111.22 for onshore wind, and £107.8 for solar — respectively £97.2, £48.26 and £44.75/MWh above the reference market price at the times that power was consumed. Costs run to £202.5 million a month, or £2.43bn on an annualised basis — £86.17 per household.

However, Contracts for Difference only accounts for 17 per cent of the UK’s renewables. This is small fry compared to the payouts under the Renewable Obligation (RO) scheme, which funds 60 per cent of the UK’s renewable generation via a £31.78/MWh charge on electricity supplied to consumers. In the 2023/24 financial year, these subsidies cost consumers approximately £7.41bn – resulting in a subsidy top-up of around £116/MWh, on top of the market rate, for each renewable generator lucky enough to have signed up to the scheme before applications closed in 2017. This year, the scheme is set to cost £7.9bn, or £280 per household. 

Finally, let’s check out the Feed in Tariff (FiT) scheme, which largely supports small-scale solar producers. The latest report, covering 2022-23 shows the scheme cost over £1.73bn, providing producers an average subsidy of around ~£194.38/MWh — 300% this year’s market price. 

Together, these schemes cost over £10.6bn — or £375 per household — last year. This year, they are set to rise to at least £12.06bn — or £428 per household. As CfD subsidies rise when gas prices fall, this price will rise as energy prices continue to normalise.  All this, despite these schemes accounting for little over 30 per cent of electricity generation. Worse, as David Turver points out, all these subsidy schemes are inflation-indexed, meaning that, even if we stopped building new wind turbines tomorrow, costs will continue to rise.

But wait — as our diligent BBC correspondent reminds us, the costs don’t stop there. Weather-dependent renewables require 100% backup to prevent blackouts. However, this on-and-off-again routine shreds the financial viability of the gas fired stations needed to provide that backup. To resolve this, National Grid ESO must maintain a Capacity Market, which subsidises producers to stay in the market, and a Balancing Mechanism, which provides additional payments to ensure producers power up and down as the supply of renewables fluctuates. In the year to March 2024, the Balancing Mechanism cost £2.46bn, and Capacity Market payments came to £793.5m, for a total of £3.25bn, paid via network charges. This brings the subsidy total to £13.85bn last year (£491 per household), and a rough 15.31bn this year (£543 per household).  

The need for backup, combined with the geographical dispersion of renewables, points to a final cost: the need to more-than double the size of the grid. National Grid ESO has announced £54bn of spending on the grid upgrades to 2030 and a further £58bn in the 2030-2035 period — translating to £383 per household per year to 2030, and £411 per year for 2030 to 2035, via network charges. This looks to take the grand total per household to £926 per year, and growing, to 2030. 

All this, without accounting for the cost of carbon taxes, such as the Emissions Trading Scheme (£5.8bn) and Climate Change Levy (£2bn), nor the cost of forcing a switch to heat pumps or electric vehicles.

This all seems something of a slam-dunk for Mr. Farage.  

Yet, looking across the news this week, there seems a distinct lack of embarrassing corrections or apologies. No #BBCVerify tweets. No viral clips of party leaders being forced to confront official figures. What gives?

Part of the story is one of civil servants responding to impossible targets with made up figures. The source cited by the BBC, and numerous other articles, is an August 2023 government report predicting new renewables would be significantly cheaper than gas generation. This prediction ran face first into reality four weeks after publication, when the government’s subsidy auction attracted zero bids for offshore wind, with onshore coming at more than double the predicted price. 

As elucidated elsewhere in this distinguished journal, this cock-up is neither novel nor accidental. The government’s impossible 2035 grid decarbonisation target, and plan to expand offshore wind 450 per cent to 2030, requires renewables to be cheaper to build than they are. Faced with a contradiction between their legal obligation and reality, civil servants have repeatedly ignored the latter – in this case, by imagining flagrantly unrealistic capital and operation costs, and output for renewables, and then slapping a hypothetical 111% carbon tax on gas generation for good measure. 

In a normal world, this would all be noticed by political commentators. In our world, things are different. Faced by a populist, anti-establishment mob, SW1’s reflexive circling of the wagons has left it blind to rot within its own ranks. 

Take the aforementioned Climate Change Committee Deputy Chair, Baroness Brown, who we encountered recommending higher subsidies for offshore wind. Alongside her official role as an impartial adviser to the government on net zero, the Baroness sits as an non-executive director of both Orsted — which operates 40 per cent of the UK’s installed offshore wind capacity — and green hydrogen developer Ceres Power Holdings — a fact obviously unrelated and coincidental to her demands for enhanced subsidies for green hydrogen. 

Outgoing Chair, Lord Deben, was last year caught failing to declare his private company’s work advising Sustainable Development Capital LLP; a “specialist investment firm” with a “proven track record of financing and developing clean energy, energy efficiency and decentralised energy infrastructure projects.” He did, however, remember to declare Greencoat Capital Ltd — a “specialist manager dedicated to the renewable energy infrastructure sector.” This comes after the 2019 revelation that his company had raked-in an undeclared £600,000 from green business interests. 

As their employer’s name suggest, the dogged democracy defenders of LSE’s Grantham Research Institute, like those at its Imperial College namesake, are beneficiaries of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment — an organisation set up by billionaire asset manager Jeremy Grantham, half of whose portfolio was reported to be in “green venture investments” as of 2021. As detailed in Ben Pile’s meticulous report for Climate Debate UK and the Together Association into the influence of foundation money in UK climate politics, the two universities had received a collective £65.4m from the Grantham Foundations by 2021. Imperial has also received money from the European Climate Foundation (ECF), which — along with its parent organisation Climate Works — received £16.6m from the Foundation in the same period (Grantham is by no means the ECF’s biggest benefactor, however – that honour goes to “anonymous”, at £36m in 2020 alone). 

The ECF casts a long shadow across the European climate policy space — drafting, amongst other things, the European Commission’s Energy Roadmap 2050 — but that is a story for another article. 

Another darling of the centre is former Minister of State for Energy — and driver of Theresa May’s 2050 Net Zero commitment — the Right Honourable Chris Skidmore. Mr Skidmore won fresh plaudits last week for taking time out of his profitable net zero consulting career to publicly pledge allegiance to the Labour Party on climate grounds. He is also notable for authoring 2022’s government-commissioned Independent Review of Net Zero which, amongst other things, called for government support for carbon capture projects. Not included in the report, nor his register of interests, was the £80,000 gig he’d received from Emissions Capture Company (which does what the name suggests). Presumably embarrassed by this honest mistake, Mr. Skidmore quietly updated his register 25 days after his report had hit the press. 

… it’s only a matter of time before the Net Zero project collapses under its own weight

Were any of this behaviour funded by fossil fuel interests, it is hard to imagine such figures being lauded in polite circles. Yet, it’s hard to be shocked by this erosion of standards. The post-2016 reframing of British politics as a battle between the progressive and the backward — the experts and the ignorant — has provided perfect camouflage for insider-presenting opportunists to appeal to the increasingly paranoid tribalism of the establishment. Net zero scepticism, alongside immigration restrictionism, is now populist-coded. Embracing it makes you an outsider — with all the social and career implications that entails. No amount of data is going to change that fact.  

Yet, if persuasion will not work, Farage’s strategy of pitiless assault might just do the trick. With one buttress of the Net Zero consensus — the Conservative Party establishment — set to be shattered, the next few years of growing public resentment of Labour’s eco-radicalism will leave ample opportunity for a reformed right to pull down the teetering structure. If not, it’s only a matter of time before the Net Zero project collapses under its own weight. The country is heading towards a future of unsustainable household bills to prop up a Net Zero project that, ultimately, cannot be made to work. If neither Farage, nor objective facts, can burst the green bubble, reality will.