“Families and businesses will have lower bills forever.” This is the promise the Labor Party makes to the British public should it come to power.
One of the Labor government’s six “mission statements” for the government is to make the UK a “clean energy superpower” by 2030, investing in wind, solar, carbon capture and energy storage. Great British Energy, a new state-backed investment company, will help fund the replacement of fossil fuels with a carbon-free electricity system. This expansion of renewable energy will not only save the planet, Labor argues, but also provide us with reliable, “homegrown” energy – and lower prices as a result.
But don’t let this green narrative fool you. In reality, Labour’s energy policy is a recipe for higher bills and economic misery.
The first hole in Labour’s green transition plan is the absence of the hundreds of billions of pounds of investment that will be needed to fund it. Starmer originally pledged to borrow £28bn a year to invest in the roll-out of renewable energy, but Labor has gradually reduced the amount it is willing to spend, while maintaining its target of a carbon-free electricity grid by 2030.
Labor has now earmarked £8.3bn for Great British Energy’s investment plans in the next parliament. But to give you an idea of ​​how little money there is in the energy sector, consider that National Grid is setting aside £30 billion to spend over the same period maintain our current energy infrastructure. If the money for this supposed clean energy revolution doesn’t come from government subsidies, it will have to come from higher bills.
In any case, despite what Labor claims, a grid based on renewables will not reduce costs. Solar panels and wind farms are only getting more expensive to install, thanks to higher interest rates and rising commodity prices. Even if they are in operation, they do not reduce electricity prices. This is because they are intermittent power sources. They can’t generate electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. This means they must be supported by more reliable alternatives such as natural gas or coal. Transferring these fossil fuels to the energy grid creates huge additional costs in the short term.
You only have to look at renewables-obsessed California to get an idea of ​​how that might turn out. Between 2011 and 2017, the cost of installing solar panels across the state dropped by 75 percent. But at the same time, electricity prices were rising five times faster than in the rest of the US, largely due to the problem of intermittency. Or take Germany, which has invested more in wind and solar energy than any other country on Earth. So called EnergiewendeGermany’s policy of phasing out fossil fuels and nuclear power led to a 50% increase in electricity prices between 2006 and 2017. This gave Germany the most expensive electricity in Europe, even before the war in Ukraine exposed its excessive dependence on Russian gas.
Higher bills aren’t the only risk of working towards carbon-free electricity. The GMB union, which represents half a million workers and is one of Labour’s biggest donors, warned that Starmer’s “unviable” clean energy mission would lead to “blackouts and blackouts”. At its annual conference last week, she called on Labor to “listen to the advice of scientists, engineers and energy specialists” and abandon its 2030 commitment. Starmer dismissed the warnings as “absolute nonsense”.
Workers’ efforts to decarbonize the grid also threaten good-paying jobs and economic growth. In Aberdeen, the heart of Scotland’s lucrative North Sea oil industry, there are fears that the current government’s 75 per cent windfall tax on oil and gas companies – introduced as a temporary measure in 2022 – could lead to the loss of more than 100,000 jobs. While the Conservatives plan to phase out the tax by the end of the decade, Labor has said it will raise it to 78 per cent. It will also withdraw investment licenses for oil and gas in the North Sea to accelerate the green transition. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves was nonchalant about the risk of job losses. “We don’t want to preserve a declining industry,” she said in Edinburgh this month. But Britain’s oil and gas industry is only “declining” as green-leaning politicians want to tax and regulate it into oblivion.
It is not the first time in recent months that Labor has prioritized its commitment to Net Zero over the livelihoods of working people. News earlier this year that the Port Talbot steelworks was to replace its coal-fired blast furnaces with low-carbon electric arc furnaces at a cost of almost 3,000 jobs prompted little more than a shrug from Starmer. Labour’s position appears to be that these jobs are a necessary casualty of the decarbonisation of British steelmaking. If Labor is unwilling to protect workers from unemployment and deindustrialisation, it is safe to assume that it is unlikely to protect us from higher bills and blackouts either. After all, when push comes to shove, Labor is likely to pursue Net Zero at all costs.
Ultimately, this Net Zero fantasy puts Labor directly at odds with the interests of ordinary working Britons. It risks higher bills, power outages and major job losses. Keir Starmer’s promise of a clean, green future is a dangerous fantasy.
Thomas Osborne she is an editorial assistant at the company pointed.
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