The UK’s government must find a way to lower energy costs if it wants to accomplish its climate change goals, a report by the Climate Change Committee said this week. The CCC is the official advisor to the government on all things net zero.
“Making electricity cheaper will help people feel the benefits of the transition and speed up the uptake of clean electric technologies, such as heat pumps and electric vehicles,” the advisory body said, stopping short of suggesting how exactly this could be done.
It then went on to note success in EV sales and heat pump installations—both of these considered essential ways of advancing the low-emission economy and giving up hydrocarbons. Yet both are heavily dependent on government subsidies, which raises the question of their financial sustainability. The bigger problem, however, is that even with subsidies, wind and solar are weighing on people’s budgets.
The CCC therefore recommended that “the Government needs to do more to ensure people see the benefits of climate action in their bills. Given increasingly unstable geopolitics, it is also important to get off unreliable fossil fuels and onto homegrown, renewable energy as quickly as possible,” according to the interim chair of the body, Piers Forster, who went on to declare the era of hydrocarbons over.
The UK has the highest electricity costs in the developed world. The government and pro-transition advocates are summarily blaming natural gas prices. However, there are many other countries equally exposed to international gas prices, whose end-user electricity prices are significantly lower than they are in the UK.
Transition critics have pointed out that the massive subsidies for transition technologies is the real culprit as they often come in the form of additional taxes on businesses and households. Evidence for this came earlier this month, when the Starmer cabinet said it would remove the green energy levy on industrial consumers in order to reduce their energy costs and improve competitiveness.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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