UK ‘Net Zero’ Policies Will Cause Permanent Electricity Rationing

Written by Doug Brodie on January 13, 2025. Posted in Current News

My latest post on the anti-science self-harming ‘Net Zero’ climate hoax which is propelling the country into blackouts and ever-deepening economic decline

It’s quite long I‘m afraid, but it has to be to do justice to this complicated subject. I’ve tried to keep it simple so that even technophobes should be able to understand it.

Apologies to my new MP Mr Leadbitter for picking on him, but his support for the draconian Climate and Nature Bill gave me the impetus I needed to launch this tirade.

To: Mr Graham Leadbitter, MP for Moray West and Nairn

Cc: The five Reform UK MPs

Bcc: Various, no elected politicians

Climate change and the corruption of science

Dear Mr Leadbitter,

Introduction

This email, my first and I hope last to you as my new MP, is to protest against your support for the anti-science self-harming ‘Net Zero’ ‘climate change’ hoax. I was prompted to write by learning that you are one of the 192 MPs who supports the even more horrendously self-flagellating Climate and Nature Bill currently working its way through parliament.

I have been writing to politicians of the Con/Lab/Lib/SNP Uniparty for decades to protest against their support for the pointless and unworkable 2008 Climate Change Act which in 2019 morphed into draconian “Net Zero”.

For all of that time, Uniparty politicians have conspired to disenfranchise the electorate by their united determination to pursue the establishment-backed but never justified “climate change” agenda which no electorate has ever voted for, aka alleged dangerous man-made global warming due to CO2 emissions from the burning of ‘fossil fuels’.

This email explains why the only rational interpretation of the Uniparty’s ruinously expensive, destructive and pointless Net Zero agenda is that it is a malign attempt to cripple the UK economy and impoverish the nation and its people.

My hope is that this email causes the scales to fall from your eyes as to the evil futility of Net Zero. If not, I hope that you will respond positively to give your justification of your stance.

Debunking the false science of alleged man-made global warming

Over recent millennia the world has experienced dramatic changes in its climate, e.g. the Roman Warm Period, the cold Dark Ages, the Medieval Warm Period followed by the Little Ice Age and now today’s mild global warming.

Thirty or more years ago, before the start of the barrage of false propaganda about alleged man-made global warming, if anyone had been asked what was the main driver of these historic climatic changes, they would most probably have answered correctly “It’s the sun” (directly or indirectly).

Sadly, over the last 30 years the general public been subjected to a constant blizzard of false ‘climate change’ brainwashing on the fearmongering, anti-science pretence that the level of atmospheric CO2 supposedly caused by the combustion of ‘fossil fuels’ is the main “control knob” of the global climate.

This is a lie, a fiction invented by devious environmentalists for ulterior anti-humanity motives. It is also very insulting to the intelligence of the general public as it asks that we should dismiss the dramatic natural climatic variations of the last two millennia as being somehow no longer relevant.

The “official” ‘climate change’ narrative is so full of holes and contradictions that it can be easily debunked by anyone with a modicum of aptitude in science and engineering, and time to spare.

I like to think that the paper I had published last May drove a coach and horses through it. That paper provides easy-to-understand evidence from many independent scientists that the main driver of the global climate is the sun, not atmospheric CO2 as the establishment shamelessly asserts without any acceptable evidence.

I urge you to study it at your leisure: Debunking the climate change hoax.

The climate ‘science’ being pushed by the global establishment is blatantly false. There is no credible scientific or observational evidence that rising CO2 emissions cause dangerous global warming.

If there was, we would have heard all about it ad nauseum. Honest, unpoliticised science shows that rising levels of atmospheric CO2, falsely blamed by the establishment on the burning of ‘fossil fuels’, will have a minimal impact on the global climate.

This is because the global warming effect of CO2 is already “saturated” (explained in my above paper). Conversely, rising CO2 levels are very beneficial for plant growth, forestry and agricultural productivity.

The climate change hoax is only sustained by the coordinated promulgation of multiple falsehoods by multiple agencies of the global and national establishment for their own selfish financial, virtue-signalling or ulterior political motives.

The conspiring bodies entrenched throughout our suicidally-deranged society are all-pervasive, e.g. the United Nations and their COP circuses, the EU, the World Bank, the Bank of England, Big Business, Big Tech and the WEF, billionaire philanthropaths (Bloomberg, Soros, Gates), the King, the Met Office, the Climate Change Committee and the DESNZ, local government, the school system, the captured mainstream media, especially the biased BBC with their fearmongering fake attributions on the fake climate emergency.

The reality that atmospheric CO2 poses negligible problem for the climate means that all our manic efforts to reduce CO2 emissions have been pointless.

The deployment of intermittent, expensively-subsidised so-called renewables like wind turbines and solar panels which end up as toxic non-recyclable junk when they reach the end of their short service lives should never have been embarked upon in the first place.

The claims that these things are “clean” and “sustainable” are an insult to our intelligence.

In case you think I am some sort of lone-voice conspiracy theorist, the following is a short compilation of statements from various renowned independent scientists which support my stance:

Emeritus Professor Hal Lewis years ago described the global warming scam (his words) as “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.”

Professors Richard Lindzen and William Happer describe how ‘Net Zero’ policies will have a trivial effect on temperature but disastrous effects on people worldwide.

Nobel Physics Laureate Dr John Clauser has launched an excoriating attack on the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, calling it a “dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”.

The famous physicist Richard Feynman explains why belief in “settled science” [as used by climate hoax grifters like Al Gore to shut down debate] is the end of hope and progress.

Emeritus Professor Ian Plimer neatly debunks the scare that dangerous global warming is being caused by the four percent of atmospheric CO2 which is man-made while disregarding the other 96 percent as somehow not relevant.

Polymath writer Willis Eschenbach explains why the claimed “97 percent consensus” on alleged man-made global warming is meaningless, invoking the famous sayings of many great thinkers.

Debunking the ‘Net Zero’ supposed solution to the non-problem of “climate change”

Along with many other concerned citizens, for decades I have been warning politicians of all parties that their engineering solution to “tackle climate change” based mainly on the deployment of weather-dependent ‘renewables’ is infeasible and will only lead to economic disaster.

Over all those years of emails, I have never, ever had a straight answer from any politician to any of the points I raised. Will you be the first?

15 years have passed since the Climate Change Act came into force and with the passage of those years it is now obvious that:

• The majority non-Western world is never going to follow suit on the West’s self-sabotaging ‘Net Zero’ endeavour, which renders it pointless. Our non-Western competitors must be laughing at our stupidity.
• Many scientific papers have been published which prove that atmospheric CO2 poses negligible risk to the climate, e.g. here, here and here,
• All the alarmist predictions of imminent climate catastrophe have failed to come about,
• As with all the deceptions inflicted on us during the Covid scam, it is clear that the establishment has lied to us about “climate change” from the very beginning,
• Our soaring energy bills and the ongoing deindustrialisation of the UK economy are proof that ‘Net Zero’ is ruinously expensive and destructive.

Is it just a coincidence that UK industrial electricity prices are the highest in Europe, more than double the EU14 median, and four times higher than the USA, while dissembling Uniparty politicians boast that the UK is a world leader in hugely expensive, short lifespan, unreliable offshore wind power and the UK ‘Net Zero’ legally-binding “carbon budgets” are enforced by climate lawfare?

The obvious answer is NO.

So well done the Uniparty */sarc* for severely degrading the competitiveness of the UK economy and ruining so many businesses for no useful purpose. And that’s before Mad Ed Miliband spaffs countless more £billions on ‘Net Zero’ malinvestments including a quadrupling of extortionate offshore wind power and a farmland-ruining tripling of solar power which will do little more than save some globally inconsequential CO2 emissions.

He would do far less damage and waste far less money by instead employing large gangs of people, maybe all the illegal immigrants lounging in taxpayer-funded hotel accommodation, to dig big holes in the ground and then fill them in again using only shovels, or better still teaspoons.

The graph below refers to the first bullet point above and the supposed global energy transition from ‘fossil fuels’ to ‘renewables’ which, contrary to all the establishment propaganda and Ed Miliband’s COP29 protestations, simply isn’t happening:

The UK emits just 0.8% of global CO2 emissions, so even if you don’t accept that establishment climate science is false, I defy you, Mr Leadbitter or anybody else, to give a credible justification for pushing ahead unilaterally with self-harming, infeasible UK ‘Net Zero’.

And if by some miracle your ‘Net Zero’ “Nirvana” came to pass in Scotland in 2045 as supposedly “planned” by the inept SNP who have made a 10-year pig’s ear of the minor task of procuring two new “eco-ferries” (more here), and then all your short lifespan wind turbines and solar panels started falling to bits, you might care to ponder how on earth you would go about replacing them with ‘net zero’ ‘fossil fuels’ and no heavy mining, manufacturing and transportation facilities.

Vote Uniparty (Labour, or the Conservatives, or the Lib Dems, or the SNP) to send your children and grandchildren back to living in the middle ages! The Reform UK Party is the only Westminster party committed to scrapping ‘Net Zero’.

The remainder of this section gives a simple engineering explanation, with technical images for the benefit of the technically challenged, of why ‘Net Zero’ as being rolled out in the UK is never going to work but will instead create inevitable rolling or prolonged electricity blackouts and even higher sky-high energy bills.

First, a couple of posts (images below) to show the futility of ‘Net Zero’, especially unilateral ‘Net Zero’ which is being cruelly and needlessly imposed on the UK populace by the control freaks of the UK Uniparty.

The first shows that global dependence on ‘fossil fuels’ in 2022 had barely changed from 25 years previously and is on a trajectory that would not reach ‘Net Zero’ for at least four centuries, most probably never.

The second shows the puny level of UK CO2 emissions relative to China and the world as a whole.

Next consider this graph from a recent post by energy analyst David Turver showing the UK minimum wind electricity generation per day from 2015 to the present.

David writes: “It is apparent that the minimum wind generation in each day since 2015 has barely changed, despite wind capacity more than doubling since then. This chart reflects the mathematical truism that 1 x 0 = 0, 10 x 0 = 0 and 100 x 0 = 0.”

The electricity supply from solar is even more intermittent on daily and seasonal timescales, falling to zero every night, reaching only nugatory levels in gloomy midwinter when power is needed most and potentially causing troublesome oversupply in cloudless, breezy (lots of wind power) summer conditions when demand is low.

The next graph shows the half-hourly peak to trough grid share of ‘fossil fuel’ electricity supply as it works hour by hour, day by day and week by week to balance fluctuating demand and the varying supply from intermittent ‘renewables’.

These controlled ‘fossil fuel’ variations are an inverse of the uncontrollable (apart from curtailment) wind and solar supply, rising as the supply from ‘renewables’ falls and vice versa.

A graph of wind and solar supply share would show an inverse fan shape, starting from 2010 at just one percent then widening over the years to reach peaks of over 60% in 2024 but with the trough level barely changing from current lows of as little as 2%.

The graph was published by the eco-fanatics of CarbonBrief who clearly thought that the brief 2.4 percent ‘fossil fuel’ trough in April 2024 showed that ‘decarbonisation’ was working, apparently without realising that the graph indirectly demonstrates how ‘decarbonisation’ of the grid using only intermittent ‘renewables’ is totally impossible without inflicting severe blackouts.

My colleague Jamie Jessop explains why in this post.

The CarbonBrief graph shows that the ‘fossil fuel’ grid share of UK electricity in 2010 was mostly above 80 percent and seldom less that about 70 percent whereas now in 2024, it varies between about 60 percent and three percent.

Analysis of the numbers in the corresponding NESO annual historical fuel mix data shows that UK total electricity supply including imports fell from 2010 to 2016 by 10 percent and to 20 percent in total by 2024.

This was not a benefit of the move to ‘renewables’. On the contrary, it was mainly due to deindustrialisation and the drop in electricity demand caused by sky-high energy prices (see chart below) caused mainly by the deployment of expensive ‘renewables’.

Dissembling UK Uniparty politicians have all repeated the boast that “Since 1990 we have cut emissions by 42 percent while our economy has grown by two thirds”.

They never admit the cuts came largely from deindustrialisation then not accounting for the foreign ‘fossil fuel’ emissions used to supply our substitute imports. This also applies to our insecure interconnector electricity: “Hidden import emissions amounted to 46 percent of the UK’s overall carbon footprint in 2019, up from 14 percent in 1990”.

As David Turner has noted, the CarbonBrief graph shows that the peak ‘fossil fuel’ level of the grid mix has hardly changed from 2016 at around 60 percent. This is despite the NESO data showing that from 2016 to 2024, annual wind and solar grew from 13 to 34 percent while coal and gas fell from 51 to 27 percent.

Does this mean that we are already close to a fundamental limit on the maximum practical grid penetration of intermittent wind and solar? We shall see.

Note also that the trough level of ‘fossil fuel’ supply has not levelled off since 2016 in the same way as the peak ‘fossil fuel’ level. This is mainly because the grid has insufficient connectivity and capacity to deliver the full generational output from all our wind and solar plants.

The £35 billion, landscape-despoiling grid updates planned by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband will mitigate this effect, but so what? Upgrading the grid at vast expense will only deliver more inconsequential savings in CO2 emissions.

It is the peak level of ‘fossil fuel’ grid share which is critical to keeping the lights on, the essential dispatchable power needed for when the wind doesn’t blow, the sun doesn’t shine and international interconnectors could become unavailable, as we almost saw recently when Norway threatened to cut its interconnector supplies during a continent-wide wind drought.

The same emissions-saving argument also applies to energy-squandering, eye-wateringly expensive ‘carbon’ capture and storage and ‘green’ hydrogen. The only rationale for these technologies is to reduce CO2 emissions but there is no need for any such reductions in the first place!

Pressing ahead with these unilaterally, as Miliband is doing, will only accelerate our economic decline. Maybe that’s the plan.

Looking ahead to 2030, for simplicity let’s assume that Miliband manages a doubling of the 2024 wind and solar supply of 92 TWh, a demanding stretch given all the logistical obstacles.

Assuming for simplicity that the other elements of the 2024 mix remained unchanged, that would give a total 2030 UK electricity supply of 362 TWh, up a whopping 34 percent from 270 TWh in 2024.

This may or may not be needed depending on whether the anticipated increased demand from EVs and heat pumps (and the unanticipated demand from power-hungry AI data centres) exceeds the fall in demand from ongoing deindustrialisation and self-rationing to keep energy bills down.

Under this scenario the annual share of wind and solar electricity would rise from 34 percent in 2024 to 51 percent in 2030 while that of fossil fuels would fall from 27 percent in 2024 to 20 percent in 2030, nowhere near the Starmer/Miliband 5% target.

The ‘fossil fuel’ peak supply of 2024 would remain largely unchanged except for from the drop resulting from the recent closure of our last coal-fired power station.

It is surely obvious how this demonstrates the fatal flaw of the entire intermittent ‘renewables’ folly.

The simple point is that if demand were to rise by 92 TWh but supply was unchanged apart from “gone AWOL” wind and solar, demand would have to be cut by blackouts, which will no doubt be euphemistically called rationing to help ‘save the planet’.

Bear in mind that falling electricity demand over the past 20 years has so far acted to mitigate against this problem.

The stark truth is that expensive, short lifespan wind and solar is almost totally redundant as far as delivering reliable electricity is concerned because it has to be almost 100 percent duplicated, at great cost, by reliable back-up supplies.

All these so-called ‘renewables’ achieve is to save some inconsequential CO2 emissions and even that may not amount to much when account is taken of the massive lifecycle CO2 costs of their raw material mining, manufacture, transportation, installation, grid connection and transmission lines, maintenance and eventual decommissioning and disposal.

Officialdom needs to stop sticking their collective heads in the sand on this issue because anytime soon there will be insufficient dispatchable electricity to meet the inevitable shortfalls between demand and supply in cold, dark midwinter when there is little or no wind, as in the severe multi-week Dunkelflaute of 2010 (coming again soon?).

The lights stayed on in the UK in 2010 because at that time wind power supplied only one percent of our electricity.

We have been flirting with a potential Dunkelflaute disaster for years, as captured in this post from December 2023. And grid-scale battery storage is not a feasible fall-back solution to this problem.

That technology is not actually on Miliband’s agenda although he is planning to spend £millions on sticking plaster giant inertia flywheels to try to maintain grid stability through transient spikes of wind and solar intermittency.

There is little likelihood that Miliband will increase the ‘fossil fuel’ electricity supply by 2030. To the contrary, the likelihood is that it will be cut.

Attempting to implement the Starmer/Miliband fantasy five percent ‘fossil fuel’ grid share would be an unmitigated disaster. As for giving us cheaper energy bills, pull the other one Miliband, it’s got bells on.

I love the Schadenfreude that the chickens are coming home to roost under the aegis of Ed Miliband who started all this nonsense through his 2008 Climate Change Act.

Future blackouts are inevitable without a ‘Net Zero’ U-turn to rapidly boost our dispatchable electricity supplies, preferably at the same time halting and starting to unwind the deployment of our unmanageable and pointless weather-dependent ‘renewables’.

On top of this sleepwalking-into-disaster, clownshow-grid-tinkering madness, our Uniparty politicians want to coerce the general public into adopting expensive, user-unfriendly, environmentally-unfriendly, fire-prone, prohibitively expensive to insure, car industry-wrecking EVs which typically have to do about 70,000 miles before their net saving of CO2 emissions beat a diesel; and expensive to buy, install and run, ineffective, especially in freezing conditions heat pumps.

To paraphrase Greta Thunberg in reverse, how dare you try to force such unpopular and pointless technologies onto the general public. Your behaviour is intolerable. You politicians are supposed to serve us, not dictate oppressively to us in pursuing policies based on nothing but lies and wishful-thinking.

My layman research shows clearly that the UN’s dystopian ‘Net Zero’ and humanity-hating Agenda 21/2030 which no electorate has ever voted for have been deliberately designed to “collapse industrial civilisation” (the words of UN IPCC founder Maurice Strong) and impoverish and shackle the populace, all for the ulterior objective of imposing totalitarian political control.

Conclusions

Paul Homewood’s analysis of the economy-wrecking impacts of the Climate and Nature Bill shows that any MP who supports it, like you Mr Leadbitter, have no regard for the wellbeing of their constituents or the wider electorate.

I find it very sad that supposedly responsible people can be so naive and poorly informed as to not realise that such extreme policies would very soon bring the economy to a juddering collapse. Maybe that’s the plan, to reduce us to the status of a country like Guyana.

I suspect that 30 years of brainwashing on “climate change” and its supposed “solution” have caused you and many others to succumb to an irrational tribal derangement syndrome. The link is to a very insightful 18-minute film by Andrew Montford on the cult of climate catastrophism which has put our society on a road to disaster.

Tribal derangement almost certainly applies to the tyrannical Lib Dem MPs, all 72 of whom support the suicidal Climate and Nature Bill. To give you the benefit of the doubt, I suspect that you and they are unknowing “useful idiots” to the globalist paymasters who want to neuter (or worse) the plebs of the general public.

However the “useful idiots” label does not apply to the deep state-briefed privy counsellor leaders of the Lib Dems and the other parties of the Uniparty who I’m sure are fully aware of the critical damage they are wilfully inflicting on the country at the behest of their Malthusian globalist overlords.

I hope that this email will persuade you to abandon your support for the misguided Climate and Nature Bill and the wider ‘Net Zero’ agenda. If not, I defy you to justify your stance without resorting to fallacious arguments such as using cherry-picked facts or data, ad hominem attack, lying by omission, appealing to (corrupt) authority or spouting party-political platitudes.

If you don’t know what a grid black start could entail, I suggest you find out as soon as possible.

USA President-elect Trump correctly calls “climate change” a hoax and his new energy secretary is going to eviscerate Net Zero in the USA. Trump’s election is a major setback for the deep state conspirators who were most probably complicit in his failed assassination attempt.

Hopefully President Trump will prevail and sweep away his opponents. I earnestly hope for the sake of my children and grandchildren that Reform UK will soon prevail to sweep away the bad things in this country, including ‘Net Zero’.

Header image: The Sun

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