Renewable Subsidies Set To Top £100 Billion This Year
If you asked the public how much subsidies for renewable energy have cost over the years, they might guess a few billion, maybe even ten billion or so. But I very much doubt anybody would say £100 billion. Yet that is exactly what the cumulative cost of these subsidies will have amounted to by the end of this year.
Since 2010, when costs began to mount up, the bill has already risen to over £90 billion for the three major schemes, Renewable Obligation (RO), Contracts for Difference (CfD) and Feed in Tariffs (FIT). And that figure does not even include indirect subsidies, such as providing standby capacity, grid balancing and constraint payments.
Last year CfD subsidies were at a record high of £2732 million, and RO costs also set a record of £6883 million. Both are projected to go even higher this year. Add in another couple of billion for FIT, and the bill stands at close to £12 billion for the year, all of which gets added onto our electricity bills.
https://dp.lowcarboncontracts.uk/dataset/actual-cfd-generation-and-avoided-ghg-emissions
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-trends-section-6-renewables
It is little wonder that we have the highest electricity prices in the developed world.
But where was the Parliamentary authority for these subsidies, which have all been imposed by government diktat? On what legal basis have successive governments imposed what is in effect a tax on its citizens?
Take Renewable Obligations, for example, which have already cost bill payers over £70 billion. These were originally introduced by the DTI in 2002 via a Statutory Instrument, about which the Parliament website says:
“Statutory instruments are the most common form of secondary (or delegated) legislation.
The power to make a statutory instrument is set out in an Act of Parliament and nearly always conferred on a Minister of the Crown. The Minister is then able to make law on the matters identified in the Act, and using the parliamentary procedure set out in the Act.”
In other words, a Minister can use an SI to make law, without the need for an Act of Parliament. The original legal authority was embedded in the innocuous sounding Utilities Act 2000, a wide ranging bill designed to regulate the gas and electricity industries. It was never the intention of that Act to empower Ministers to levy tens of billions from bill payers in order to pursue their perverted political agenda.
And in 2010 the scheme was extended from 2027 to 2037, by which time the bill will probably have doubled, again using an SI.
There was certainly never a democratic mandate for any of this. At no stage were the public consulted, never mind given the opportunity to vote on renewable energy policy, Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act or Theresa May’s suicidal Net Zero law.
But we are all paying the bill.
More Bad News For UK Motor Industry
Stellantis have confirmed that their Vauxhall van plant in Luton will close in April, despite pleas from Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds’ pleas for a rethink.
Stellantis, which also owns Citroen, Peugeot and Fiat, previously said rules imposed to speed up the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) in the UK were the main reason for their decision. Under the government’s Zero Emission Vehicle mandate, 16% of the vans Vauxhall sell this year must be electric. If they sell less, they face a fine of £18000 for every non-compliant diesel/petrol van.
Because buyers show little interest in electric vans, Vauxhall are being forced to cut back production of non-electric ones in order to avoid the fines.
But now even worse news has hit the UK motor industry, with BMW announcing that they are pulling the plug on a £600 million investment upgrade of its plant in Cowley.
The upgrade was to enable production of a new generation of electric Minis there. BMW say that the investment has been “paused”, but it looks unlikely that it will ever go ahead. Demand for electric cars in general, and Minis in particular, remains weak, and clearly does not justify BMW’s grandiose investment plans.
It was a different matter entirely two years ago, when they announced their investment, with the BBC reporting:
“German car giant BMW has announced plans to invest hundreds of millions of pounds to prepare its Mini factory near Oxford to build a new generation of electric cars.
Production of two new electric Mini models is due to begin at the plant in Cowley in 2026.
The move is expected to safeguard the future of the facility, as well as that of another factory in Swindon.
More than 4,000 people currently work across the two sites.
BMW already make electric Minis in China, mostly aimed at the Asian market, and have plans to make the electric Countryman in Germany. It is therefore highly likely that the Chinese factory will end up supplying most of the electric Minis bought in the UK.
This, of course, puts the long term future of the iconic Cowley plant is doubt. Although many Minis are exported, particularly to the US, it is hard to see how Cowley can be viable without a UK market for its petrol and diesel models, which will of course disappear in five years time, thanks to Ed Miliband’s 2030 ban on new sales of them.
The Government is currently consulting with the industry about how the ZEV mandate is implemented, but it is absolutely clear any changes made will be purely window dressing. Meanwhile the Unite union is warning about thousands of job losses if the Government continues down its path. And a new study says vehicle manufacturers are predicted to miss ZEV new car sales targets by over 345,000 units by 2028, which would equate to fines totalling £5.1 billion.
With China already exporting cheap Evs to Europe, the UK motor industry sits between a rock and a hard place, thanks to the suicidal Net Zero agenda.
