PAUL HOMEWOOD
As we guessed, it appears that most of Ed Miliband’s £21 billion bung to carbon capture projects will end up being paid for through our energy bills.
The Telegraph report that a senior civil servant has revealed that three quarters of the cost will be funded by levies on electric and gas bills. Although this will be spread out over a number of years, the overall cost to households would be over £500 each.
So much for Miliband’s lie that energy bills would be cut by £300 a year!
So far the carbon saving from the first £4 billion tranche of funding is only reckoned to save 2 Mt of CO2 a year
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Bill-payers face £520 hit to fund Miliband’s unproven carbon capture schemes
Bill-payers face levies of up to £520 to pay for controversial carbon capture schemes under Ed Miliband’s plan for clean power.
A string of projects backed by the Government are expected to cost £21.7bn over the next 25 years, including schemes that will store the emissions of new gas-fired power plants and some factories.
Ministers announced the investment in October without spelling out how it would be funded.
But a senior civil servant has now revealed that three quarters of the money is expected to come from levies paid by households and businesses through their energy bills.
It is not yet clear how the costs would be divided, but three quarters of £21.7bn is equivalent to £517 each across the country’s 31.5m domestic and non-domestic power users. This would be spread over 25 years.
Jeremy Pocklington, the permanent secretary of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, told MPs on the public accounts committee that the Treasury was likely to fund the remaining quarter of costs, although that remained subject to final agreements.
Discussing carbon capture spending, he said: “It is important to understand that about three quarters of that funding will come from levies and about a quarter will come from the Exchequer.”
Mr Pocklington said officials were “very conscious about the costs” to consumers and taxpayers but claimed that using carbon capture would ultimately remove the need for other, more costly investments in the electricity grid.
An “action plan” for reaching a clean power system by 2030, published on Friday, says carbon capture will ensure there are always “dispatchable, low-carbon” power plants available even as Britain becomes more dependent on wind and solar farms.
At the same time, the Government will keep “unabated” gas plants – those without carbon capture – in reserve as a last resort.
Carbon capture is also seen as essential to decarbonising industries that may otherwise struggle to go completely green, such as cement, steel, glassmaking and ceramics, with Mr Miliband claiming that the technology will bring “a new industry, a new generation of good jobs in our industrial heartlands”.
Mr Pocklington told MPs: “Our assessment is that carbon capture, as part of a wider suite of policies, is the most appropriate and the best-value way to meet our carbon budgets and tackle climate change.
“If you do not use carbon capture in some form, the other things that you are doing are more challenging than carbon capture. That is the key essence.
“For some industries – for example, cement, where there are very high emissions from essentially chemical processes – as yet we do not have another technology that works that will be able to capture the emissions reliably.
“So carbon capture has to play an important role in meeting our carbon budgets.”
He pointed to another report by the National Energy System Operator last month, which found that “if you want to create an electricity system with the lowest overall system costs, then [that] will include” the use of carbon capture.
Projects backed by the Government so far include the HyNet scheme in Merseyside and Net Zero Teesside, for which contracts were signed last week.
The Teesside project will involve construction of a new gas-fired power station that will have its emissions captured, liquefied and then stored in rock formations underneath the North Sea. It is expected to come online in 2028.
Supporters have argued that Britain’s geology and oil and gas industry – which has left behind a string of emptied wells – makes it an ideal hub for carbon capture, with the potential to do business with all of Europe.
But the £22bn state backing of carbon capture has proved controversial, with critics arguing it remains unproven and could simply prolong the use of fossil fuels.
The technology remains expensive and has not yet been proven at scale, meaning projects require large subsidies to remain viable.
Despite this, major energy authorities including the UK’s independent Climate Change Committee and the International Energy Agency have endorsed carbon capture as a critical part of plans for the world to reach net zero by 2050.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has been approached for comment.
Other plans to subsidise risky net zero technologies through bills have previously backfired on ministers.
Last year, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government abandoned proposals for a £118 “hydrogen levy” per year on household bills following a backlash.
There are 21.5m domestic and non-domestic electricity users in Britain.
The Telegraph: Continue reading
Featured image: Adobe stock
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