Cancun Craziness Continues!

Britain should revert to central planning for electricity says the UK Independent Climate Change Committee and seeing central planning worked so well in the old USSR who would argue with these learned twits. Putting electricity generation in the hands of the government would avoid the necessity of such ridiculous things as balance sheets and profit and loss accounts and business planning. Just keep raising taxes and charges and she'll be right mate!!

Britain needs to go back to old-style central planning of its electricity market, with the Government deciding who builds power stations where, so that it can take on the world’s toughest target to cut its emissions of the greenhouse gases causing global warming, the independent Committee on Climate Change tells the Government today.

The only way of getting the £150bn worth of new low-carbon energy generating plant – whether offshore windfarms, nuclear power stations or loaw-carbon and gas plants – will be for the Government to offer contracts with guaranteed prices for the electricity, the committee says.

All this for only 1.2 % of GDP or 29 billion pounds annually by 2050 -  a snap at that price!

This massive investment, which would be largely a mixture of offshore windfarms, nuclear power plants, and coal and gas stations fitted with very expensive carbon capture and storage technology, can best be secured by the Government tendering long-term contracts for low-carbon capacity, the committee says.

To achieve the required generation central planning will use offshore windfarms which do not work in a power grid without pumped storage,coal stations fitted with mythical carbon capture and some nuclear stations which will actually  do some real generation.

It also should be possible to rehire some of the central planners from Russia who have been unemployed for a while.

 ....£29bn annually....divided by the approximately 25 million households in the country,  comes out at £1,160 per home. Lord Turner’s estimate that the bill would be “less than” one per cent makes this a potential upper limit, but it is still a strong indication that household energy bills will have to rise steeply to pay the bill for combating climate change.

Over a thousand quid extra on the average power bill for a system that will not work reliably - I think the voters will have  a problem with that.

Under the Climate Change Act, the Government is not bound to take the committee’s advice – but it is bound to listen, and it is subject to the committee’s criticism in its annual reports.

Given the track record of this government so far this may not be the out it could be.