Energy policy is, ultimately, a judgement call on the future. It is a suite of decisions tied to predictions about demand, supply, geopolitics, and public consent. Some decisions pay off for decades. Others unravel as the world shifts. Even ‘letting the market decide’ requires a strategy. Markets sit within infrastructure, taxation, and regulation. These, too, are political choices.
Renewable energy has become associated with one specific vision of the future: the need to transition to net zero. Because that case is sometimes made in moral rather than practical terms, some on the Right have viewed the sector as an example of the ‘madness of net zero stupidity’, evidence of the current government’s ‘eco zealotry’ and based not on science or economics but ‘a literal ideology’.
But technologies aren’t ideologies. The real question is whether – given what we can best predict today – wind should be a pragmatic part of Britain’s power mix. When we look through that lens, it is hard to decry wind as ‘woke’.
Let’s start from a clear-eyed view of the world we live in, not the world in which we wish we did
Let’s start with demand. AI, data centres and electric vehicles will see electricity use rise sharply. In such a world, a nation cannot simply ‘hope’ the global gas market behaves or pray that long-build technologies arrive exactly when needed.
Then let’s look at energy security. 17 per cent of Qatari LNG export capacity has been knocked out by Iranian strikes. Full exports could take five years to restore. No surprise, then, that interest in the North Sea has risen. The North Sea will remain important – for jobs, expertise (a third of the same supply chain is shared with wind) and resilience – but it is a declining basin. Even under industry’s most optimistic assumptions, it will only meet half of net zero gas demand by 2050.
More importantly, greater UK production won’t change prices. Gas was once regional – supplied by pipeline and priced locally. But Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) has turned gas into a global commodity. Britain now pays the global price for it whether it comes from Aberdeen or Algeria. That’s why the last decade has been one of volatility, driven by shocks beyond our borders.
Fracking seems unlikely to solve this. I say that as someone tasked with investigating it relentlessly in government. The geology is uncertain, the scale is unclear, and the public consent isn’t there. Even if it succeeded, it would not insulate us from global prices like in the United States. The UK is not a continent-sized energy island with vast reserves of gas and limited export capacity.
Nor are other alternatives immediately obvious. Small modular reactors have promise but are at least a decade away. Costs are also uncertain.
So, what can we build now? The answer starts with price. On normal – not crisis – gas prices, new onshore wind costs around £72/MWh and offshore just over £90/MWh. A new gas plant, once you include construction, financing, fuel and carbon, comes in closer to £150/MWh.
Even without carbon pricing, new gas generation still sits above offshore wind, while onshore remains considerably cheaper. And when gas spikes – as it repeatedly does – the gap widens sharply.
During the 2022 energy crisis, £44 billion was spent subsiding energy bills. By contrast, the fixed-price ‘contracts for difference’ (CfD) system – a Conservative-led innovation copied worldwide, whereby developers are paid a stable long-term price for the power they generate in return for paying back the difference when market prices rise – gave the nation a fixed-rate mortgage on its energy. When gas prices surged four years ago, homegrown renewables didn’t cost the taxpayer; providers paid millions back to consumers instead.
Of course, none of this is to suggest the system today is perfect. Electricity carries historic levies that make it disproportionately more expensive than gas. Government has already begun some rebalancing to make this fairer to consumers. Reforms to planning and supply chain policy could help reduce costs.
Constraint costs also remain an issue – but a transitional one. As the network is reinforced, those costs fall sharply. Even ‘free market’ Texas recognised this, proactively building transmission from windy regions to demand centres. And when analysts such as Aurora, Baringa and others model the full system – including balancing, capacity and networks – they consistently find a renewables-led mix the best value.
Indeed, we do not claim that wind is a silver bullet. The lowest-cost system sees wind and solar doing the heavy lifting; nuclear providing firm power; gas at the margins for backup; storage, hydrogen, hydro and interconnectors for smoothing variability; and a grid built for the 2030s, not the 1930s.
But if anyone doubts the impacts of a renewable-led system, look to Spain. A few years ago, gas dictated Spanish electricity prices three-quarters of the time. Today it is just a fifth, and Spain enjoys some of the lowest power prices in Europe.
So, strip away the noise and the choice is clear. We can keep leaning on globally traded fuels and accept the volatility that comes with them. We can place massive bets on technologies that won’t arrive until the 2040s. Or we can back a solution that works today, reduces exposure to foreign shocks, and is a growing industrial success story: 112,000 jobs by 2030 across 70 constituencies, from blades in Hull to cables in Hartlepool.
Let’s start from a clear-eyed view of the world we live in, not the world we wish we did. In that context, wind isn’t ‘woke’. It’s the most sensible move on the board.
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