Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
President Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was long overdue.
Signed by President George Bush and ratified by a unanimous Senate in October 1992, the treaty’s purpose is to avoid “dangerous human interference with the climate system” by restricting greenhouse gas emissions, most of which derive from energy.
From the very beginning, the UNFCCC has been an unmanageable mess. While the treaty’s offspring—the Kyoto Protocol, Copenhagen Accord, and Paris Agreement—have been the focus of much conservative ire, these agreements merely amplify the UNFCCC’s many flaws. It pits developing countries against developed countries, creates unrealistic expectations, promotes bureaucratic “solutions,” and is a money sink.
The UNFCCC provides clear and fixed divisions of labor between developed and developing countries based on the principles of “common but differentiated responsibilities” and “historical responsibility.” In practice, that means developing countries have few obligations, and their actions are largely contingent on financial support from developed countries.
The Convention, however, reflects the world as it was three decades ago, not as it is today. Its signatories failed to consider that developing countries wouldn’t stay poor forever.
Consider that since 1992, China’s economy has grown more than 1,000% and its emissions more than 250%. It’s now the world’s second largest economy and largest greenhouse gas emitter. Yet in the eyes of the UNFCCC, it’s still considered “developing.”
China isn’t alone. Singapore, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar also are developing countries in the UNFCCC. There is no avenue to change their status under the treaty.
Poor countries are along for the ride. They have little interest in addressing climate change, justifiably prioritizing economic advancement and poverty eradication over climate. They are more than happy to power progress with hydrocarbon fuels.
Indeed, the vaunted energy “transition”–– the treaty’s promised outcome–– has turned out to be a mirage. Data from the International Energy Agency reveal that since 1992, global energy demand has jumped a whopping 76%. Over the same period, the amount of carbon emitted per unit of energy consumed has declined just 3%, leading to a 71% jump in CO2 emissions from energy.
Still, about three quarters of a billion people worldwide lack access to sufficient electricity, the single best indicator of a nation’s human welfare. Coal, especially in Asia and parts of Africa, will remain the fuel of choice for generating electric power for many years. Wealthy economies are clean economies.
Deception and greenwashing also pervade the UNFCCC. Take the Paris Agreement. It calls for limiting the increase in the global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.” Although the treaty does not define what these temperature targets mean for global emissions, the UN now says they mean, “emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050,” something to which the Parties did not agree.
In fact, the Parties explicitly rejected draft proposals for specific emissions targets and timetables, including net zero emissions by 2050, because they knew full well such a goal was out of reach. The treaty’s temperature language is nothing more than a green Rorschach test.
Inconsistent with the claims of a climate crisis, the UNFCCC works at a snail’s pace—not that the results are worth the wait. For example, it took nine years for the Parties to negotiate language implementing the Paris Agreement’s provisions on international carbon trading. Those same Parties also urge a 40 to 45% cut in global emissions in five years. Who is kidding whom?
On top of all this, at each annual “COP” meeting the U.S. must resist extravagant financial demands, efforts to weaken intellectual property protections, demands for climate reparations, calls to end the consumption of meat, and other silly ideas.
But perhaps the most potent justification for bidding adieu to the UNFCCC was provided by
Christiana Figueres, the UNFCCC Executive Secretariat during the Paris talks, who in a candid moment said, “This the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally . . . to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.” This is not what President Bush signed onto or the Senate ratified.
The U.S. has invested far too much political and financial capital into a process ill-suited to address the ostensible climate problem, a process that often works against American interests and values. Indeed, at a time when the U.S. is in an artificial intelligence race with China—competition shaped by access to affordable and reliable energy—the UNFCCC is an expensive distraction.
We are well out of it.
Stephen Eule is a visiting fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics. He’s an energy sector expert, known for his work at the intersection of energy security, climate change, and technological innovation.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Across the Atlantic, a self-inflicted disaster is steadily unfolding. One of the United States’ closest allies, the United Kingdom, has surrendered energy riches and industrial prowess.
Across the Atlantic, a self-inflicted disaster is steadily unfolding. One of the United States’ closest allies, the United Kingdom, has surrendered energy riches and industrial prowess.
This decline is not the result of any shortage of capital, technological capacity or natural resources. Instead, it is the consequence of an ideologically driven climate agenda that has elevated “green” symbolism over engineering reality.
For years, politicians have beaten their chests about the U.K.’s “world-leading” renewable capacity. They paraded statistics showing wind and solar generating most of the electricity, conveniently ignoring that this only happens when the wind blows and the sun shines.
When “green” generation doesn’t perform, British taxpayers pay for natural gas-fired power plants to back up idle facilities and stabilize the grid. They also pay “constraint payments” to switch off wind turbines when it is too windy to operate them.
This is the great deception of the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) metric the green lobby loves to cite. LCOE excludes the enormous price of grid balancing, backup generation, curtailment payments, transmission expansion and subsidies – all required to prop up the green sham.
In the real world – where bills must be paid – the U.K. has created for itself some of the highest electricity rates on the planet, up to four times more than in the United States. One-third of Scots live in energy poverty. But the real cost never shows up in glossy charts that promote manipulated data representing wind and solar as cheap.
The price caps of Great Britain’s Office of Gas and Electricity Markets now dominate household conversations, which are amplified by each winter’s anxiety over lifestyle choices. Heat or eat has shifted from a slogan to a lived reality. Once a power behind the Industrial Revolution, Britain has shamefully imposed on its citizens energy poverty. Families ration warmth while politicians celebrate decarbonization targets.
One reader told U.K.’s Independent of heating only a single room with a wood-burning stove, mimicking a 19th century living standard 200 years later. Such is the “Green Industrial Revolution” promised by know-nothing managers of energy policy.
And for what? So that the U.K. can reduce its negligible contribution to global emissions of harmless carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, China and India build coal plants to power the manufacturing exported to them by those who have frittered away British industrial might.
Manufacturers have little choice but to leave when a “carbon tax” and heavy-handed regulation on carbon dioxide emissions artificially inflate the cost of energy. Steelmakers are on their knees, facing energy bills that have surged by billions, rendering British steel uncompetitive against foreign rivals free of net-zero dogma.
Nowhere is the insanity more visible than in the North Sea. For decades, offshore oil and natural gas were the crown jewels of the British economy, providing cheap, reliable energy and revenue to fund public services.
Today, this resource is being sacrificed at the altar of climate theology. The Prime Minister’s punitive windfall taxes and refusal to issue new licenses have effectively killed North Sea energy development. Investors have fled. Rigs are decommissioning. Thousands of skilled jobs are evaporating.
Compare this to U.K. neighbor Norway, which continues to extract oil and natural gas from the sea and sell to global customers, including the U.K. While Britain dismantles its energy sovereignty to appease the likes of Extinction Rebellion, Norway enriches its citizens and funds its sovereign wealth fund.
The contrast is humiliating. The U.K. imported over 50% of its natural gas supply in 2024 from Norway.
Apologists for this British collapse point to anything but the truth. They blame Brexit and the Russia-Ukraine war. They blame a “global recession,” pretending that the U.K.’s de-industrialization isn’t an outlier. But the fundamental reason for the collapse is the “green” agenda espoused by the political establishment for 20 years.
It has been a bipartisan failure. Tories chased the “green vote” by banning fracking and demonizing diesel. The Labour party doubled down with net-zero mandates that defy the laws of physics and economics. They built a grid fragile to the weather and expensive to the user.
A crusade to avoid an imaginary climate catastrophe of the future has created a very real economic disaster in the present.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
As European energy expert Samuel Furfari aptly puts it, green hydrogen is “like burning Louis Vuitton handbags for heat.” It’s an extravagant waste, especially in water-scarce Wyoming.
With federal subsidies pouring billions into clean energy hubs, states are lining up for projects like Wyoming’s Pronghorn Clean Hydrogen Center.
A large green hydrogen storage tank stands prominently at an industrial facility. This image highlights the integration of sustainable energy solutions with modern infrastructure.
As European energy expert Samuel Furfari aptly puts it, green hydrogen is “like burning Louis Vuitton handbags for heat.” It’s an extravagant waste, especially in water-scarce Wyoming.
With federal subsidies pouring billions into clean energy hubs, states are lining up for projects like Wyoming’s Pronghorn Clean Hydrogen Center.
Let’s cut through the hype: Green hydrogen is a money pit that costs up to three times the energy to produce than it yields. That’s right — it costs double or triple the energy of the hydrogen made. It can’t handle the intermittency of wind and solar, and it worsens regional water scarcity. Wyoming taxpayers should demand a halt before more dollars vanish into this green financial nightmare.
First, the energy math is damning. Producing one kilogram of green hydrogen — about the same energy as a gallon of gas — via electrolysis requires 50 to 85 or more kilowatt-hours of electricity, yet yields just 33 kWh of usable energy.
That’s a whopping 1.5 to 2.5 net loss.
Factor in all inputs: harvesting and purifying water (10-13 times more water than hydrogen produced), cooling, splitting water with electricity, compression to 10,000 psi — triple an average scuba tank — chilling to near zero (minus 460 degrees for liquefaction), and storage losses to top it off.
Besides energy losses, the full costs for green hydrogen facilities like Pronghorn — including capital for electrolyzers, infrastructure ($1,000 to 2,000 per kW), labor, operations and maintenance — push costs to $5 to $8 per kg. The energy-equivalent gallon of gas costs less than $3.
Grey hydrogen from natural gas (abundant in Wyoming) costs around $2 per kg on an equivalent basis, with a steady supply and existing infrastructure. These hidden expenses make the Pronghorn project a bigger financial black hole for Wyoming taxpayers.
As one energy specialist notes, “Every time you involve hydrogen, you get not small losses but large, substantial losses.”
Why squander electricity on a fuel that devours more power than it delivers? The only reason is climate ideology. Because it doesn’t make any economic sense. And green hydrogen will not change future temperature one iota.
Worse, wind and solar — the backbone of green claims — can’t power these industrial behemoths. Green hydrogen electrolysis plants, like Pronghorn, need 24/7 operation to be economical. They can’t be flipped on and off like a light switch as the wind gusts or clouds roll in.
In Wyoming, wind generates power only 30 percent to 40 percent of the time, solar just 20 percent to 25 percent.
Projects like Wyoming’s Sidewinder Hydrogen Hub envision giga-scale facilities, but intermittency means they would be idle most of the time, further spiking costs.
Proponents tout storage, but using stored hydrogen to generate electricity for more hydrogen? That’s “second-generation” folly, additionally costing an additional 100 percent of the energy yielded, plus leaks and inefficiencies. It’s absurd.
Abundant natural gas provides a steady baseload without additional expense or water stress. Natural gas has a fully built-out infrastructure, ready demand, no need for subsidies, and pays taxes and royalties. None of this is true for green hydrogen.
Water scarcity seals the deal. Green hydrogen guzzles nine to 13 times as much pure water for every kilogram of hydrogen produced, requiring even more for cooling. In arid Wyoming, hydrogen production will compete with agriculture, communities and nature.
They will have to pay for water rights, too — another expense.
Infrastructure nightmares compound the waste. Hydrogen’s tiny molecules escape easily (10 percent storage loss), embrittle metals and risk explosions — remember the Hindenburg? We have zero dedicated pipelines; retrofitting costs billions, and it’s unsuitable for existing gas lines. It will destroy them through embrittlement. Remember, it has to be compressed to 10,000 psi and frozen.
Demand? Where is it? No mass market for hydrogen trucks or planes exists; it’s five times pricier than natural gas, ignoring extras. Big players like BP scrapped 18 projects to save $200 million, and Shell axed Norway ventures for lack of buyers. Australia’s $750 million plant? Canceled as a money-loser. Reasonable people are fleeing green hydrogen money pits.
Federal handouts — $9.5 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act — prop this up, adding to the $38 trillion debt and fueling inflation. Wyoming, rich in natural gas, should pivot to compressed natural gas: easier (stored at 3,500 psi vs. 10,000), no super-wwchilling, infrastructure-ready (1,500-plus stations), and convertible gas engines.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright nails it: Natural gas yes, hydrogen no. These states can’t afford dumb ideas mimicking Europe’s failures. Let’s kill the hubs.
Let markets decide; subsidizing green hydrogen is burning our future — just like burning Louis Vuitton bags. Wyomingites are smarter and more frugal than supporting this waste. Time to rise up and put a stop to this wasteful green folly.
I know you will all be surprised as I am that $10s of billions spend on renewables has failed to produce a viable replacement for a single coal plant.
Eraring coal-fired power station to stay open until 2029
In short:
The country’s biggest coal-fired power station will stay open for another two years.
The Eraring plant in New South Wales was due to shut next year.
What’s next?
It will now close in April 2029 to “support energy supply” through the transition to renewables.
The planned closure of Australia’s largest coal-fired power station will be delayed by two years, until 2029.
Origin Energy’s Eraring power station, on the shores of Lake Macquarie, south of Newcastle, was due to shut down in August 2027.
…
“Good progress is being made on the delivery of new energy infrastructure including major transmission works and projects like our large-scale battery at Eraring, but it has become clear Eraring Power Station will need to run for longer to support secure and stable power supply.”
…
RBC Capital Markets analyst Gordon Ramsay said it was “no surprise” to the market Origin had decided to extend the life of the plant.
Mr Ramsay said the decision was a “result of the slower than expected rollout of renewables in Australia (other than rooftop solar)” which was taking longer than the federal government’s forecast.
“We also assume the government likely has growing concerns about the reliability associated with Australia’s aging coal-fired generation fleet and its possible future impact on electricity supply and prices, particularly after Eraring’s closure,” he said.
Mr Ramsay believed it might also “reduce what may have been higher future wholesale electricity pricing in NSW” had Eraring closed next year.
I’m confused. If renewables are cheaper than coal, how can keeping a coal plant open help reduce wholesale prices? And if coal is a far greater threat to grid reliability than renewables, as our Aussie federal energy minister has assured us, why does our reliable renewable grid need backup from an unreliable old coal plant?
The next Aussie federal election is due mid to late 2028, so maybe the plan is to shut down the coal plant early in the next election cycle, just in case there are a few minor teething problems with Australia’s Net Zero power grid.
When the history of the great Net Zero climate hoax comes to be written, pride of place will be given to the terrifying sixth mass extinction scare. Mainstream media barely question the idea that human-controlled climate is wreaking havoc with the life chances of millions of animal and plant species around the world. In November 2024, the Guardian reported that “as the planet warms up, scientists predict a series of ‘extinction cliffs’”. We are in danger of forgetting what the climate crisis means: extinction, was the cheerful article headline.
When the history of the great Net Zero climate hoax comes to be written, pride of place will be given to the terrifying sixth mass extinction scare. Mainstream media barely question the idea that human-controlled climate is wreaking havoc with the life chances of millions of animal and plant species around the world. In November 2024, the Guardian reported that “as the planet warms up, scientists predict a series of ‘extinction cliffs’”. We are in danger of forgetting what the climate crisis means: extinction, was the cheerful article headline. But a recent bombshell report from the UK Royal Society has knocked seven bells out of all this nonsense by showing that species-level extinctions related to climate change “have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years”.
It was further found that decadal extinction rates over the last 100 years had “significantly declined” for arthropods and plants, the two groups of organisms encompassing most known global biodiversity. Overall, it was found that extinction rates have increased over the last 500 years, “but generally declined in the last 100 years”. Past extinctions are said to “strongly suggest” that climate change is not an important threat to biodiversity. Such a finding is hardly the smoking gun that shows humans burning hydrocarbons of late have or are causing a sixth mass extinction.
How future generations will chuckle over the extinction sandwich boards paraded on a regular basis in the public spaces. The Swedish Doom Goblin screeching in front of the UN cameras, of course, but also David Attenborough stating that humanity was halfway through a new extinction. Current extinction rates, he has claimed, far exceed natural levels. Another BBC doomster was Chris Packham who said that it was not a sixth mass extinction event, rather it was a “mass extermination event”.
To try to understand the motives of some activists, the unfalsifiable computer model-driven claims that small rises in temperature could collapse the ecological system are a useful bandwagon to ride. While doing so, attention can be drawn to the real problems of habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species. It is these last two issues that the Royal Society authors draw attention to, noting that recent extinctions were predominately on islands, and were caused by the introduction of invasive species. The most common current threat is said to be habitat loss. Both these issues can, and are, being tackled away from any discussion about the role of trace gases in the atmosphere. The authors note that “some studies” conclude that 20-30% of all plant and animal species may be lost to climate change in future decades under “pessimistic climate scenarios”. Pessimistic is one way to describe the scenarios that appear on the media sandwich boards – invented, unscientific, politicised computer garbage is another.
Consulting the IUCN Red List of over 163,022 assessed species, it was found that the highest extinction frequencies were among turtles and molluscs. Neither have fared well on islands due to a number of factors such as small population size, predation and limited ranges. It was also found that freshwater fish were more vulnerable than marine species. Extinctions among these were said to be common and rare respectively, which was put down to differences in potential range size and distribution. Furthermore, many freshwater extinctions have been caused by dams. Many narrowly endemic molluscs were said to have been driven to extinction by the damming of Alabama’s Coosa River in the 1900s.
There are of course many difficulties in assessing the huge field of animal and plant extinction, which the authors readily acknowledge. But many statements based on rigorous analysis of data can be made. For instance, it is noted that a larger list of generally assumed plant extinctions suggests that extinctions peaked in the 1920s. This is said to agree with the authors’ own analysis.
One of the tragedies of modern environmentalism is that it has been captured for political purposes by those seeking to centralise power through the hard-Left Net Zero political agenda. Taking control of energy, and by extension the rest of industry and agriculture, by peddling unproven opinions that humans control the climate by burning hydrocarbons requires constant made-up scares of climate collapse and ecological disaster. But taking care of the planet, reducing habitat loss and protecting the natural world is a separate issue. Often it involves proper waste management as in the disposal of plastic. It is often noted that societies that have prospered by using natural resources such as hydrocarbons are those best able to clean up and protect nature.
There are few sadder sights than environmentalists turning blind eyes to the bat, avian and insect carnage of wind turbines, the digging up of Indonesian rainforests for EV battery enhancing nickel and the rape of the Amazon to provide balsa wood cores for the proliferating but highly unreliable windmills. Quite how 50,000 green activists justified ripping down 100,000 mature rainforest trees to help them run a recent COP conference in Brazil dedicated to preserving the rainforest must, alas, remain a complete mystery.
All these political acts are committed under a ‘settled’ climate science directive that allows scares to be invented seemingly to unquestioning order. When English Test cricket used to regularly shut up shop in mid-afternoon due to fading light and despite the floodlights being on to ‘protect’ the players, the legendary fast bowler Bob Willis used to ask, ‘Where are the bodies?’ When ‘national treasure’ David Attenborough next reads from his sandwich board script about a new mass extinction, a similar reply should come to mind.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
Electrification has become the default answer to almost every energy and climate question. Heat? Electrify it. Transport? Electrify it. Industry? Electrify it. In policy circles, electrification is often treated as a frictionless substitute for fossil fuels: cleaner, simpler, and largely inevitable. In this new report I take a look at what electrification would mean for the GB power grid, if it went ahead as planned. I also consider the impact of additional demand from AI data centres.
Kathryn Porter’s recent article on the plight of UK’s electrical grid at her blog: Electrification – can the grid cope?The excerpt below provides findings from her new research paper, available at the link above.
Electrification has become the default answer to almost every energy and climate question. Heat? Electrify it. Transport? Electrify it. Industry? Electrify it. In policy circles, electrification is often treated as a frictionless substitute for fossil fuels: cleaner, simpler, and largely inevitable. In this new report I take a look at what electrification would mean for the GB power grid, if it went ahead as planned. I also consider the impact of additional demand from AI data centres.
Electrification policy rests on optimistic assumptions
Across heating, transport and industry, electrification targets rely on a similar set of assumptions:
♦ that consumers will change behaviour rapidly, ♦ that costs will fall quickly and predictably, and ♦ that electricity infrastructure will expand smoothly to accommodate new demand.
The report tests these assumptions sector by sector and finds them wanting.
The good news is that electrification targets are unlikely to be met without some form of compulsion. In heating, rapid deployment of heat pumps is implausible under current conditions. Consumer resistance remains high, installer numbers are growing too slowly, and both capital and running costs are materially higher than for gas heating. Even where heat‑pump subsidies reduce upfront costs, households still face additional expenditure on larger emitters, pipework and insulation, as well as higher ongoing energy bills because electricity prices remain far above gas prices. These are not marginal issues – they are fundamental barriers to mass adoption.
Transport electrification faces a similar gap between ambition and delivery. Mandates for electric vehicles are running ahead of public willingness to adopt them, while grid and charging‑infrastructure constraints remain severe. These problems are magnified for larger vehicles. There is currently no credible fast‑charging solution for HGVs, and electrifying buses outside dense urban centres is far more challenging than policy documents typically acknowledge, particularly where vehicles do not return regularly to a single depot.
In industry, the constraint is both technical feasibility and economic viability. High electricity prices have driven deindustrialisation across large parts of the UK economy, reducing electricity demand far more quickly than electrification can increase it. In practice, deindustrialisation is the dominant trend, and a stronger driver of demand than electrification across the economy as a whole.
Across all three sectors, the modelling used by both NESO and the Climate Change Committee depends on behavioural and technological assumptions that are optimistic, weakly evidenced, and often inconsistent across scenarios. My report does not assume electrification will fail entirely, but it does find that current targets are unlikely to be met without significant compulsion, which brings its own political and social risks.
The system is under strain even without electrification
The bad news is that, even without electrification, the electricity grid is likely to struggle unless action is taken. One of the most important findings of my report is that the GB electricity system is already heading towards a serious adequacy problem even if large‑scale electrification largely fails.
Renewables cannot provide security of supply during prolonged low‑wind winter events, and reliance on interconnectors is risky when neighbouring systems face similar weather patterns. Meanwhile, just under 5 GW of nuclear generation is scheduled to close by 2032 at the latest, and around 12 GW of CCGT capacity is at risk of closure due to age and declining utilisation.
While Hinkley Point C and perhaps a small amount of new open‑cycle gas capacity may come online over the next five to seven years, this does not come close to offsetting expected closures. Under plausible assumptions, the system could face a capacity shortfall of around 12 GW on cold, low‑wind winter days.
In such conditions, meeting demand without rationing would be impossible.
Replacing or upgrading ageing gas generation is constrained by long lead times. New rotors typically require around 5 years, and entirely new gas turbines 7-8 years, reflecting global supply‑chain bottlenecks. These are physical constraints that cannot be resolved by market reform or policy ambition alone.
Britain is not alone in facing a potential problem with system adequacy. Norway, the Netherlands and Germany were all considered as part of the report and in each case, possible shortages are identified. Norway assumes that flexibility, demand response, or batteries will full the gap. The Dutch are less confident and intend to monitor the generation mix in neighbouring countries in the hope of persuading them to maintain enough firm generation to secure the Dutch grid on low wind days. Only Germany has explicitly identified a need to build more gas generation, although its target is likely inadequate.
Europe at night from space NASA 2016
Flexibility helps, but does not replace firm capacity
One of the report’s central findings is that electrification does not increase demand evenly. Heat pumps, EV charging, and industrial electrification all tend to concentrate demand in time (cold evenings, post‑work charging windows), and concentrate demand in space (residential feeders, urban substations, motorway corridors).
Annual energy numbers hide this – a system can look comfortable on a terawatt‑hour basis while becoming acutely stressed for a few hundred hours a year.
Flexibility features heavily in electrification plans with smart charging, demand response, batteries, and thermal storage. While flexibility can shave peaks, this only works where consumers tolerate loss of convenience. In many cases, policymakers ignore real-world constraints such as fire risks associated with overnight operation of domestic appliances, and noise restrictions within multi-occupancy residential buildings. Batteries are energy‑limited and cannot cover prolonged stress events. Many flexibility services depend on digital systems that introduce new operational and cyber risks. Flexibility may reduces costs at the margin, but it does not eliminate the need for firm capacity, resilient networks, or system strength.
Infrastructure challenges present further risks
In addition to the issues with reliable generation capacity, there are further difficulties with distribution and transmission constraints which arrive earlier and are also hard to fix quickly. Key points from the report include:
Local distribution networks were not designed for mass electrification of heat and transport
Reinforcement timelines are measured in years, and often a decade or more
Connection queues and “paper capacity” obscure real‑world deliverability
The report also identifies risks with aging grid infrastructure and the recently identified risks that premature closure of offshore gas pipelines may constrain gas supplies to the grid on cold winter days, limiting the gas available for electricity generation.
What this means in practice
Taken together, the findings point to an uncomfortable conclusion. The GB electricity system is likely to struggle to maintain today’s level of demand reliably, let alone accommodate the additional 7–10 GW of load in 2030 implied by current electrification agendas. AI data centres are therefore likely to pursue off‑grid solutions, not because of technological failure but because the grid is no longer perceived as sufficiently reliable for mission‑critical loads.
Large‑scale electrification of heat and industry before 2030 appears improbable, and likely remains so for several years thereafter. Without decisive policy action, the probability of regional rationing, blackouts and cascading grid failures rises materially.
To restore Britain’s energy security, government must pivot from aspirational modelling to credible planning.
This means:
♦ supporting life extension of ageing gas generation, ♦ accelerating procurement of new dispatchable capacity, ♦ reforming network investment incentives to prioritise resilience, and ♦ reassessing electrification timelines.
Net zero targets cannot be allowed to override public safety. Security of supply must once again become the foundational principle of UK energy policy.
The Carbon Economist recently published an article innocuously entitled ‘Outlook 2026: UK electricity – Today and tomorrow ‘. The Carbon Economist is an offshoot of the Petroleum Economist which has had a long and illustrious publishing history, providing oil and energy market analysis since 1934. It’s the subtitle that is striking:
Net Zero is not the problem for the UK’s power system. The real issue is with an outdated market design in desperate need of modernisation.
AI-generated image of the Renewable Energy delusion
The Carbon Economist recently published an article innocuously entitled ‘Outlook 2026: UK electricity – Today and tomorrow ‘. The Carbon Economist is an offshoot of the Petroleum Economist which has had a long and illustrious publishing history, providing oil and energy market analysis since 1934. It’s the subtitle that is striking:
Net Zero is not the problem for the UK’s power system. The real issue is with an outdated market design in desperate need of modernisation.
The author, Adi Imsirovic, currently is a guest lecturer at the Energy Systems MSc course at the Department of Engineering, Oxford University and is not some Just Stop Oil activist or an over-enthusiastic candidate for the Green Party. Imsirovic, who has 35 years of experience in oil trading, has held a few senior trading positions, including global head of oil at Gazprom Marketing and Trading and regional manager of Texaco Oil Trading for Asia. He was a Fulbright Scholar, having studied at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University. Adi has a PhD in economics and a Master’s degree in energy economics. He is also author of well-received books on international oil markets.
The ‘woke’ Oxford view
Dr Imsirovic’s thesis that “Net Zero is not the problem” deserves scrutiny not only because of his credentials and his publisher’s track record. The thesis, radical as it is, needs to be judged in the context of the tumultuous year since President Trump began his second term. In the past year, the Trump administration has exited the Paris Agreement and last week withdrew from the UNFCCC and IPCC among over 60 other UN-related and other organisations that may be working “contrary to the interests of the United States”. Crucially, the US has begun to stop funding all efforts including those by the plethora of environmental NGOs to achieve Net Zero. Last year’s UN annual climate jamboree, COP30 held in Belém, Brazil, ended in disarray without even the usual aspirational closing statement to end use of fossil fuels and hasten the so-called energy transition.
Yet here is an opinion telling us that Net Zero is not the problem. Dr Imsirovic’s ‘Outlook 2026’ sets out to perform an act of intellectual rescue. Faced with mounting public anger over Britain having among-the-highest electricity prices in the developed world, the article seeks to exonerate Net Zero, renewable subsidies and green levies, and instead indict “poor market and system design” as the true culprit.
It is a seductive argument. By conceding that prices are high while absolving the green transition itself, ‘Outlook 2026’ offers policymakers a comforting narrative: the problem is not green ideology but mere energy plumbing.
Yet this narrative collapses under scrutiny. Far from being an unfortunate side-effect of outdated market architecture, Britain’s electricity crisis is the predictable outcome of two decades of policy-driven distortions imposed in the name of decarbonisation. “Market and system design” in ‘Outlook 2026’ functions less as diagnosis than as alibi.
Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
The article begins with a curious argument.
The UK has some of the highest electricity prices in the world. It has become fashionable to blame this on Net Zero policies, green levies or the cost of renewables. But those explanations miss the point. Wholesale prices are only 30-45% of the retail price, not far from the share of various levies and taxes. The real cause lies in poor market and system design, not decarbonisation.
Wholesale electricity prices, ‘Outlook 2026’ observes, account for only 30-45% of retail bills, roughly comparable to the share of taxes and levies. Therefore, the report concludes, blaming renewables or Net Zero “misses the point”.
The implication of the statement that the wholesale price share of retail prices is roughly equal to that of “various levies and taxes” is not clear. It is not apparent that, therefore, the “various levies and taxes” don’t matter. Renewable subsidies are not just extra costs. They include Contracts for Difference, Renewables Obligation Certificates, capacity payments and more. These stem from policies that push weather-dependent intermittent power into a grid built for reliable (dispatchable) power sources and delivery.
The Renewable Energy Foundation estimates that the UK has spent approximately £220 billion (2024 prices) on renewable energy subsidies since 2002, with current annual costs running at £25.8 billion, now comprising roughly 40% of total electricity system costs. These are not marginal accounting artefacts. They are the dominant drivers of rising bills.
In a recent interview, independent energy consultant Kathryn Porter stated that people “have been sold a fairy tale about renewables making their bills cheaper”. Depending on natural gas, even with the high prices during 2022 caused by the outbreak of the Ukraine war, would have still saved the country £220 billion, equivalent to £8,000 per household. Without the drive for decarbonisation and so-called ‘cheap renewables’, the cost of electricity supply in the UK would now be 40% less.
What is “Market Design”?
‘Outlook 2026’boldly asserts that better “market design” can reconcile intermittent energy with industrial-scale reliability at lower cost. Time-of-use tariffs, dynamic pricing, demand response and local balancing are presented as silver bullets. Yet these concepts remain largely theoretical, supported more by modelling exercises than by real-world evidence. Dr Imsirovic states:
Most retail customers still face flat tariffs that bear little relation to time-of-day prices or grid conditions. As a result, there is no incentive to shift demand from peak, expensive and most polluting periods to less pricey ones, making electricity more expensive for everyone. … Demand response, dynamic tariffs and local balancing remain the exception rather than the rule.
Few advanced economies have implemented comprehensive time-of-use pricing for households, and fewer still have demonstrated that it materially lowers system-wide costs rather than merely shifting inconvenience onto consumers. The idea that households doing their ironing or washing at 3am or factories throttling output to chase cheaper electricity when the sun shines or the wind blows or when demand is low seems preposterous. This is a triumph of abstraction over lived reality. Electricity demand, particularly in modern industrial societies, is relatively inelastic precisely because it underpins everything else including the daily schedules of firms and households.
“Local balancing” is never properly defined. If it implies decentralised systems with local renewables plus backup, one must ask: backup of what kind, and at what scale? A typical combined-cycle gas turbine — the workhorse of reliable dispatchable power — operates optimally at scales of around 400 MW and up to 1,600 MW or more. Are local counties or towns to host their own gas plants? Or does “local balancing” in practice require vast new transmission infrastructure to smooth renewable intermittency across regions? The latter, of course, is exactly what Britain is already paying for, as grid reinforcement and new transmission line costs, as well as a host of subsidies, spiral under the Net Zero agenda.
The report’s assertion that wind and solar are now “the cheapest forms of new generation almost everywhere” is another familiar trope that collapses once system costs are included. Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) estimates are endlessly recycled by renewable advocates, but they exclude the very costs that make intermittent power usable in practice: backup generation, overcapacity, storage, curtailment, inertia, frequency control and transmission expansion. As documented extensively elsewhere, the Full Cost of Electricity (FCOE) tells a very different story from misleadingly low LCOE estimates.
Here is what Dieter Helms — a tenured professor at Oxford where Dr Imsirovic guest lectures — says in relation to ‘cheap renewables’:
Solar and wind are intermittent, low-density, geographically distributed generating technologies. No modern economy could rely solely upon them. There has to be back-up. This back-up is an additional cost of renewables. … To be clear, renewables don’t pay the costs of the intermittency they cause to the system; they don’t pay for the additional capacity needed to meet an expected peak demand; they don’t pay for the extra transmission and distribution networks required; and there need to be lots of wind turbines and lots of solar panels to replicate the power output (when the wind is blowing and the sun shining) of a gas turbine.
Good Market Design Exemplars
What are the examples of better “market and system design” countries?
Across the developed world, systems that pair renewables with flexible markets perform better. Germany shows that high taxes need not mean high inefficiency. France benefits from consistent policy and a stable, legacy nuclear base. California and the Nordic countries, through dynamic pricing and cross-border trading, manage renewable variability efficiently. The UK, by contrast, manages to inherit the downsides of both competition and control.
Germany, which the report curiously cites as evidence that “high taxes need not mean high inefficiency”, now serves as Europe’s cautionary tale of economic suicide. Despite spending over €500 billion on its Energiewende, Germany has shuttered nuclear plants, expanded coal use (including inferior local lignite) for capacity and reliability while energy-intensive industries are driven offshore. BASF’s relocation of major operations abroad is not an aberration; it is a rational response to structurally uncompetitive energy costs. To present Germany as a success of renewable-friendly market design is quite a head-scratcher given all the bad press on Germany as the ‘sick man of Europe‘ in the mainstream media.
Countries and states with the highest penetration of wind and solar – Germany, the UK, Denmark, California — also exhibit some of the developed world’s highest electricity prices, rising energy poverty and accelerating de-industrialisation. The report points to California and the Nordic countries as exemplars of flexible, renewable-friendly systems. Yet California’s electricity prices have surged alongside rising blackout risks, while its grid stability increasingly depends on electricity and gas imports and emergency measures. The Nordics, meanwhile, benefit primarily from abundant hydro and legacy nuclear — dispatchable, not intermittent, resources. Their success undermines rather than supports the renewable-centric thesis.
Correlation here is not coincidence; it is causation mediated through physics.
Techno-Optimism
Techno-optimism permeates the ‘2026 Outlook’:
The electricity sector today resembles computing in the 1970s. … Future households and businesses will generate, store and trade their own energy. … Power will flow in multiple directions, coordinated digitally rather than centrally dispatched.
Techno-optimism in ‘Outlook 2026’ reaches its apogee in the vision of households as “prosumers”, trading electrons via solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles in a digitally orchestrated “energy commons”. The language — “optionality”, “networked platforms”, “from mainframe to cloud” — will sound familiar to anyone who lived through the Enron era. The analogies have a familiar ring. They echo almost verbatim the rhetoric used by Enron in its sales pitches during the late 1990s — decentralised trading, frictionless energy markets, massive arbitrage opportunities. Then, too, we were promised fungible electrons and infinite efficiency gains through clever financial and digital engineering.
What Enron brutally demonstrated is that electricity is not software. It was always constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, scale economies and real-time balancing requirements. Then, as now, the language was seductive but the physics unforgiving. While Enron collapsed in one of the largest accounting fraud cases in business history, the stories it sold about a future of dispersed, “smart” electricity were siren songs for capital markets willing to buy into an imagined new energy Valhalla.
This vision reeks of ‘technobabble’, akin to the grandiose presentations of Enron executives in the early 2000s, which hyped fungible electrons and smart trading platforms before collapsing in scandal. It echoes the pseudoscientific techno-optimism of Parag Khanna’s TED-talk-style futurism, divorced from empirical reality and the immutable laws of physics and economics.
As Mark Mills has argued, this vision belongs to the “magical thinking of the new energy economy”. No modern industrial society has ever been powered by dilute, intermittent sources coordinated by household-level arbitrage. Batteries remain prohibitively expensive at grid scale. Storage does not eliminate intermittency; it magnifies costs and material dependencies.
The battery question alone should sober any serious analyst. Grid-scale storage sufficient to cover days or weeks of low wind and solar output — the infamous Dunkelflaute — remains prohibitively expensive and resource-intensive. Even optimistic projections rely on mineral supply chains dominated by China and energy-dense inputs derived overwhelmingly from fossil fuels. Storage does not eliminate intermittency; it merely displaces it into cost, complexity and geopolitical risk.
‘Outlook 2026’ refers to the “quiet return of direct current”, but this claim too suffers from similar overreach. Many devices do operate internally on DC, and niche applications — data centres, EV fleets, industrial parks — may benefit from local DC microgrids. But the suggestion that AC grids will become mere “backup” systems is fanciful. AC transmission persists because it is unrivalled for long-distance, high-capacity power delivery with manageable losses.
Edison did not lose to Tesla by accident; physics made the decision.
An Unserious Look at Britain’s Electricity Future
‘Outlook 2026’ remains unconvincing as a serious view of Britain’s electricity future. Its argument fails not because market design is irrelevant, but because it is subordinate. Markets cannot conjure dispatchability from intermittency, nor can software substitute for energy density.
Britain’s electricity system – as Germany’s and California’s – is expensive because policy has mandated the large-scale deployment of dilute, weather-dependent energy sources while simultaneously suppressing the very technologies — large coal, natural gas and nuclear plants under central dispatch — that provide reliability at scale.
To blame “system design” while defending Net Zero is to rearrange the analytical furniture in a sinking ship. The UK’s electricity crisis is not a bug in an otherwise sound energy transition. It is the bill coming due for two decades of policy that elevated climate symbolism over energy realism. The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned last week that “both climate change and the policies implemented to tackle it (Net Zero) are acting as ‘headwinds’ that are slowing down the global and UK economy”. This is quite the opposite of “Net Zero is not the problem for the UK’s power system”, the subtitle of ‘Outlook 2026’.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
From the “central committee told me to pay lip-service to China’s net-zero pathway” department comes this eye-roller via EurekaAlert:
Over the past two decades, global warming has continued to accelerate. In response to the climate crisis, the 2015 Paris Agreement established a global consensus to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 °C by the end of the century. Compared to the initial Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), most parties have submitted updated second-round NDCs since 2020. Against this backdrop, a critical scientific question has emerged: will the accelerating trend of global warming be effectively curbed by current climate actions?
This study, based on a global emissions scenario consistent with China’s net-zero pathway and the 2 °C target, employed the widely used Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2) to conduct more policy-relevant climate change projections. The results indicate that even if all parties fully implement the decarbonization targets outlined in the second-round NDCs, the current acceleration of global warming may still not be effectively curbed over the next two decades. The primary reason is the significant decline in atmospheric aerosol burdens co-emitted with greenhouse gases. Aerosols exert a cooling effect by reflecting solar radiation. A reduction in their emissions weakens this “umbrella” effect, thereby allowing the warming effect of accumulated greenhouse gases—previously partially masked—to become increasingly apparent. The warming acceleration induced by aerosol reduction is particularly pronounced in the Arctic and Eurasia during the Northern Hemisphere winter.
Climate action is crucial for achieving long-term sustainable development: reducing greenhouse gases emissions not only mitigates global warming but also decreases the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events, thereby reducing associated economic losses. Simultaneously, aerosol reduction helps improve air quality and has positive impacts on public health. However, in the process of advancing the net-zero transition, it is essential to consider the additional climate effect owing to co-reduced aerosols and the resulting risks. The study recommends integrating this factor into comprehensive climate policy assessments to more fully capture the long-term benefits and overall climate effectiveness of emission reduction actions.
Recent Court rulings temporarily pausing Administration orders for offshore wind projects to stop construction have created widespread confusion. The orders have not been rescinded merely paused while the Court assesses them. This is the American system at work.
Recent Court rulings temporarily pausing Administration orders for offshore wind projects to stop construction have created widespread confusion. The orders have not been rescinded merely paused while the Court assesses them. This is the American system at work.
Not surprisingly the confusion begins with the left-wing press.
Politico says “Trump suffers major losses in his war on offshore wind”
Reuters says “…another legal setback for Trump”
PBS says “…handing industry another victory against Trump”
And so it goes.
None of this is true since the stop work orders still stand. All that has happened is that the Courts are going to look at them at the request of the impacted industry. This is standard procedure. It is called a preliminary injunction pending Court review.
Of course, we are disappointed that this is happening but hardly surprised. When the Administration tells an industry to do something it does not want to do it routinely asks the Court to review the order and the Court stays the order pending that review. This is the “balance of powers” in the American system.
In this case the offshore wind industry had some serious arguments that the stop work order was hurting them. So the Administration has to have some good arguments for stopping them, which is what the Court will look at.
On the injury side my personal favorite is from Empire Wind off New York. They had a 3,000-ton steel offshore building coming in on a really big ship from Singapore (with lots of emissions). They needed to install this monster, but the stop work order prevented it. There was no place available on the East Coast with that kind of crane capacity to store it.
This building is where all the turbine cables come together combining their outputs to be sent ashore via the massive export cable. Surely this is a serious new hazard to navigation. Imagine a steel ship hitting it while it was fully charged. Perhaps a cruise liner with a thousand passengers or an LNG tanker. Hopefully the Court is considering this threat.
Dominion Energy had a slightly smaller big problem off Virginia. Their brand-new heavy lift crane ship was gearing up to start installing turbines. Dominion said it was costing $5 million a day to do nothing.
I have yet to see a written opinion on any of the preliminary injunction rulings but some of the quoted Judge statements are interesting. The one most likely to be true is that the Administration needs to be specific for each case.
For example, if radar interference is argued they need to say what interference with which radars and what difference that makes? I suspect the Administration has a bit of work to do here, but maybe not as classified Navy reports have been mentioned.
On the other hand at least one quoted Judge’s statement is seemingly ridiculous. It said the military objections were with wind facility operations not construction. Surely if we do not want operation we do not want construction.
Some of the industry arguments were equally ridiculous. For example that offshore wind was essential for grid reliability. Wind actually degrades reliability because you have to have a reliable generator sitting there ready to ramp up and down as the wind ebbs and flows which is not easy.
Empire Wind actually claimed to power 500,000 homes when it should have said “once in a while” because it requires sustained winds over 30 mph for full power which almost never happens off New York. Maybe ten days a year if that.
The basic point is that we now have standard Judicial review of a major Administrative order. There is no winner or loser at this point. It is the American balance of powers.
Stay tuned to CFACT to see how this actually plays out. Do not depend on the hyperbolically green mainstream press.
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