Critiquing Net Zero requires competence and peer review

A conservative report makes a howler and provides an open goal to Net Zero advocates

There has been a mini-fallout from publishing a report by the conservative think-tank Civitas. The report argues that Net-Zero, far from costing an estimated £1 trillion up to 2050, as outlined by the Climate Change Commission (CCC), will cost £4.5 trillion, or £6,000 per household per year.

The report has been lambasted for an incredible mistake, where it appears to confuse watts (W) with watt-hours (Wh) and uses the latter concerning capacity instead of generation.

In simple terms, watts describe the level of power at a moment in time, whereas watt-hours describe the amount of power consumption over a period of time. Confusing the two is unforgivable for a report discussing energy. Any politician or talking head would be chastised for making such an error. 

The primary issue of the report centres around its estimates for capital costs, which it is argued will come to £810 billion. The report uses the figure of 623 TWh as a benchmark for Britain’s generation needs by 2050, but confuses this with new capacity.

By mixing TWh with TW, the report implicitly claims the UK needs 623 TW in new capacity from now to 2050. For comparison, the EU’s installed power capacity was 930 GW in 2021. Based on this, the report implies the UK has to build 670 times the installed capacity of the EU by 2050 to meet its net zero target.

Why then, if the capacity additions are so enormous, is the figure for the CAPEX energy costs ‘only’ £810 billion? To put it simply, the report compounds its errors.

It uses the estimated “cost per MW installed” and mixes it up with MWh. To get to its figure, it calculates £1.3 million/ MWh and multiplies that by 623. £1.3 million per MW is correct, but £1.3 million per MWh is a massive overestimate.

It then multiplies the resulting 810 (623 x 1.3) by 1000 to get to £810 billion for its final estimate. But that would be for 623 gigawatt hours. 

MW is W x 1000, GW is MW x 1000, and TW is GW x 1000.

If it took its sums to its logical conclusion (TWh) and multiplied by 1000 again, its CAPEX costs for 623 TWh would be £810 trillion. Not only has the report confused watts with watt-hours, but it has also confused gigawatt-hours with terawatt-hours. 

So, rather than explaining that Net Zero’s costs would be £4.5 trillion, it implies they would be at least 180 times (810 / 4.5)  greater just for the CAPEX costs. It would not be £6,000 for every household per year; it would be over £1 million per household every year.

The report has many other issues, but this alone is enough to demand a retraction. 

This is hugely embarrassing for Civitas employees, most of whom had no role in the report. I know former and current employees at that organisation who actually know their stuff. Robert Clark has forgotten more about military matters and Chinese involvement in UK supply chains than most people will ever know. The author of the net zero report came from outside. But clearly, there was no peer review in place. 

Worst of all, the apparent problems of the report do not stop it from getting transmitted through conservative media. It has been puffed up by Net Zero Watch, the Spectator and the Times, much to the glee of their detractors. 

Of course, pro-Net Zero voices muddy the data to support their claims. Simon Evans of Carbon Brief put out this graph below, inferring that exploiting the Rosebank field was equal to the emissions of 90 countries, totalling 400 million people.

This is highly dubious, given it mixes the Rosebank field's lifetime emissions with the annual emissions of countries. Evans is clever and knows his brief, so this is not a mistake but an apparent attempt to make the decision seem as damaging to the environment as possible.

This is to say nothing of more egregious claims of Carbon Brief, which in August 2022 combined volatile global natural gas prices with offshore wind auction prices to promote a headline that offshore wind is nine times cheaper than gas.

Net Zero champions can get away with such sleights of hand because there is a consensus at the governmental, corporate and non-profit levels that backs the general premise of switching to variable renewables.

I am very sceptical of Net Zero. I support nuclear power and do not think baseload energy can or should be replaced in an industrialised society. I do not support the massive, heavily subsidised expansion of wind or solar in the UK. I do not believe millions of high-paying green jobs can reindustrialise Britain. The net effects of asymmetric decarbonisation will leave Britain and Europe less competitive than East Asia or the U.S., which combine green investments with plenty of non-green industrial expansion.

But if this consensus is to be challenged, the burden of proof has to be on those challenging it. This episode highlights just how ill-equipped to change elite opinion conservative media is in Britain.