It’s becoming painfully clear that Labour’s ‘clean power’ revolution will fail to deliver on its promises

The game was up when Ed Miliband didn’t come to the House to deliver a statement.

This is a man who loves to preach about his Clean Power project, and yet on Tuesday when the National Energy System Operator (Neso) finally published its analysis of his plans to decarbonise the entire electricity grid in just five years, he was nowhere to be seen. The Telegraph has the story.

If you read their report, you can understand why.

It makes for very difficult reading for an ideologue who spent the general election claiming he would cut household bills by £300 by delivering “100pc clean power by 2030.” Instead, it makes clear that even with a “Herculean effort” – the words of the chief executive of the Neso – the best-case scenario is that costs remain the same.

Even this broken election promise – it’s certainly not £300 off bills – is only achievable in a fantasy world where several impossible things magically happen at once.

First, Mr Miliband would have to rewrite the planning system, overcome global supply constraints and community dissent to build twice as many pylons and cables in the next five years as we have built in the last 10.

As even his own “head of mission control”, Chris Stark, acknowledges, “all planned transmission network projects must be built on time.” If Ed doesn’t deliver then consumers will be on the hook for billions of pounds in constraint payments, where we pay wind farms to simply switch off and sit idle.

Despite building more offshore wind than any other country bar China, we would need to contract as much offshore wind capacity in the next one to two years as in the last six combined.

As we have seen in the most recent auction round, which Mr Miliband bumped up, this approach is already driving up bills. Just last week the Institute for Fiscal Studies said that green levies, which people pay on top of their electricity bills, would rise by an extra £120 per household.

In a world where we are contracting vastly more wind power at breakneck speed, this will only go up. And even worse, the Neso report states that all of this upheaval would only cost the same as the current system if gas was priced at 100p per therm and if the carbon price rises to £147 per ton of carbon dioxide (tCO2) in 2030.

The problem? That forecast of gas prices is at the upper end of what Ed’s own department thinks is likely. Their central forecast is 70p per therm, and the current carbon price is just £38 per tCO2.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), the global energy watchdog, actually predicts that a global oversupply of gas is set to spark “fierce competition” in the market and depress prices.

Even in a world where we unfeasibly build everything on time, despite going at a speed never before seen in this country, while battling with global supply constraints and shortages of skilled workers, Ed’s plans would only make sense for bill payers if he triples our carbon price, and gas prices are 42pc higher than his own departmental forecasts.

Read the full story here.