From Climate Scepticism

By Mark Hodgson

Emma Pinchbeck’s Net Zero Nirvana

Listening to the PM programme on BBC radio 4 this evening, I was somewhat taken aback by an interview conducted by Evan Davis. His interviewee was Emma Pinchbeck, the recently appointed Chief Executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC). As Cliscep readers will know, the CCC is charged under the Climate Change Act (CCA) with monitoring the UK government’s progress in moving the country to net zero, and it also produces “carbon budgets” on a regular basis, with a view to guiding the government of the day in achieving its legally binding obligations under the CCA. The seventh carbon budget is due to be published next month, and I have already written about the hell that it is likely to unleash on an unwitting UK public.

This evening the producers of PM, Radio 4’s flagship evening news and current affairs programme, seem to have decided to conduct a gentle interview with Ms Pinchbeck and to allow her to get away with a number of statements which – while not actually untrue – when taken together provided what I consider to be a very misleading impression of the road to net zero. Perhaps as alarmingly, I think the whole interview demonstrated significant complacency on the part of the CCC, or at least on the part of its Chief Executive. I won’t comment, by and large, on what annoyed me, save in one case where the misleading impression is just too significant for me to allow it to pass without comment. See how many statements you can find cause to disagree with. The interview is transcribed below (it starts just after 38 minutes in, here):

Evan Davis (ED): Now, 2024 – the year just gone – was the first year ever that wind power in this country became the single biggest source of electricity, overtaking gas. In fact, it was barely even close: 82,000 Gwh of electric power wind-gnerated – 82,000. 73,000GWh of gas-powered electricity. If you’re interested in where our electricity comes from for 2024, the league table goes – wind, gas, and then some way behind, imports, via connectors overseas, often from France, and then British nuclear. Those four make up the vast bulk of our electricity. Incidentally, that’s all about the generation of electricity. We also had some other figures today, on electric cars, and guess what? Britain overtook Germany last year to become Europe’s biggest market for electric vehicles – 382,000 battery-powered cars. That was up 20% on the year before. Germany had a massive fall, at a 27% fall last year. Let’s just talk about electricity, and wind in particular, with Emma Pinchbeck, the Chief Executive now of the independent [sic] Climate Change Committee, which advises government on climate change plans and net zero. And Emma was also Chief Executive of Energy UK till she got this job. Emma, is wind now always going to be the biggest source of our power now it’s sort of tipped over gas last year? Is that it now, for the foreseeable?

Emma Pinchbeck (EP): That’s a good question, about whether we’ll see the same this year coming. What we do know is wind is going to be the dominant source of power in our electricity system over the next decades, and whilst there’ll be some variation as the system changes, the story in the 2030s and beyond is that wind will be our big dominant source of electricity.

ED: What do we do about the windless days? Now they, I mean, obviously, it’s out in the sea [er, a lot of it isn’t] isn’t it, so I mean, how worried are you by the fact that it’s just not a very reliable supply all year round?

EP: I’m not very worried, but that’s largely because the National Grid aren’t very worried, and they’re the people whose job it is to keep the lights on. And that’s for a few reasons – firstly, wind in the time that I’ve been working has become much more reliable, in the sense that the wind turbines are bigger; as you said they’re out at sea, where there’s a lot more wind; they tip over at the slightest breath of wind, and that means that they can come on in more conditions. Secondly, we’ve got technologies available to complement and now, you mentioned gas, in the long run we’ll have to carbonise [sic] gas from the system to complement wind, but also things like nuclear, storage, other energy technologies. And lastly we’ve got smart technologies on the system now and better ability to predict things like weather patterns, which means we’re more able to run all those technologies together across the system. And all of that combined means that wind isn’t just good for climate change, in my current job, but in my last job, in the energy industry, when we were talking about it, it’s the cheapest, best way of running the energy system overall, so having a clean energy system is now a secure and cheap energy system.

ED: Yup. Tell me about that word “cheap”, because the one thing it doesn’t seem is that electricity, I don’t think you could say electricity is cheap, and I think we’re paying perhaps more for it than most other countries. I think from the tables I’ve seen, and it’s often very difficult to compare with complicated rates and the like, but, I mean, when do we get this so-called cheap, cheap electricity from, you know, home-grown sources, and all the stuff that’s been promised?

EP: Yeah, I’m very aware that when I come on the radio and tell people that electricity is cheap, and that wind is cheap, at a time when the price cap is going up again, it might feel counter-intuitive or that I’m simply making it up, but actually it’s largely the difference between what you’re paying on your bill, and the electricity at source in generation point is to do with policy choices and market design, and what the Committee have advised government to do is our top recommendation over the previous years, is to make electricity cheaper. And our primary recommendation within that is they move some of the policy costs put on electricity, off electricity, so around 20% of the price of electricity on the bill is, are, down to policy costs, and that ultimately is a political regulatory choice we would like to see changed.

ED: And if you burn gas directly – you burn it in your heating, for example – you pay less tax on that, less environmental levy on that gas you burn directly than if a power generator burns gas and puts it into the electricity grid?

EP: Yes. And the energy market is complicated. We could also talk about the fact, for example, that electricity prices still track the gas price, which means that while gas has been at record levels, electricity costs have also gone up. But I suppose the overall message people should take away is these new technologies are cheap, renewable electricity is cheap, passing that on to consumers should be a priority of government, and it’s certainly been a priority recommendation for the Committee.

ED: Do you need subsidies to get people to put wind out into the ocean? I mean, are we still giving guaranteed prices, Contracts for Difference, I mean is it still effectively underpinned by some kind of subsidy?

EP: Yes, we underpin it with a price guarantee from government through the Contract for Difference mechanism. Now, the good news about that is it operates as a sort of price control, in that when prices go above it and generators are making money, more money than expected, they pay back to government; when it goes underneat that, the government tops it up. The reason having a consistent price has helped for when you’re building giant skyscraper-sized wind turbines out at sea, is a lot of the funders of that in construction think that it’s still quite risky, and having a long-term business plan where you can talk to them about what the returns are like over twenty years helps them lock private inward investment. Overall, particularly through the period of the crisis those projects were paying back to the consumer, and of course having wind on the system avoids imported gas, which – particularly through the gas crisis – really helped with bills, and it, in the long run this should be a cheaper way of doing it even with the policy support in place.

ED: All right. Emma Pinchbeck, from the Climate Change Committee, on that fact that wind is the biggest source of our electric power. Thank you for that.

I quite like Evan Davis as an interviewer. He’s polite, clear (always a help when transcribing interviews) and pretty good generally at getting to the heart of an issue. However, I have to say that was a very soft interview, where in my opinion Emma Pinchbeck really should have been pushed a lot harder on many of her claims. I said at the outset that I would take issue only with one particularly egregious part of the interview, so I will – I will leave you, dear reader, if you are so minded, to comment below as to the bits that bothered you.

For me, the spin put on the Contracts for Difference subsidies was the most annoying part of the interview. Emma Pinchbeck said that “[o]verall, particularly through the period of the crisis those projects were paying back to the consumer…”. Now I don’t believe that is true. They paid back only in 2022. Overall, the wind energy companies have received, and continue to receive, massive taxpayer subsidies (by the way, I love the fact that she said projects were “paying back to the consumer”, but that when payments went to the energy companies, they were paid by the government, not the consumer – where does she think the government gets its money from?). Great PR-speak. It’s just like the way costs are never costs, but are always described as investments.

As it happens, Net Zero Watch has today issued a press release about the Contracts for Difference scheme, and they say:

…subsidies paid to renewables under the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme hit new highs in 2024. The previous record, of just under £2.3 billion, was set in 2020. That figure was surpassed in the last few weeks of the year, and, by the time the full year’s data is available, the total is likely to hit £2.4 billion…

…The Office for Budget Responsibility is expecting subsidies under several other schemes – the Renewables Obligation Scheme, the Capacity Market, and the Warm Home Discount – to also break records in 2024–25.

The press release is accompanied by a graph, which demonstrates pretty conclusively that only in 2022 did the taxpayer receive a payment from the wind companies under the CfD scheme, and that the refund was less than the payments made to the wind companies in every other year. Worse than that, in most years, the taxpayer has shelled-out substantially more than that single years’ paltry refund and those payments are now reaching record levels.

One last point – at the end, when there was no time to pursue the issue further, the best she could do in answer to the question about why our electricity bills are so high, was to opine that in the long run this should be a cheaper way of doing it. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.