UK Trapped In A Green-Energy Cul-De-Sac

Try to cover up the chronic energy policy mistakes made in the name of climate theories by doling out vast sums of borrowed money to the struggling customers. That’s the current UK approach. Why should anyone be content with putting the exchequer ever further in the mire to keep futile net zero dogma alive?
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Often I have referred to the situation that the UK, Germany, California, and others have set themselves up for as “hitting the green energy wall,” says Francis Menton (via Climate Change Dispatch).

But now that the UK has actually gotten there and has begun to deal with the consequences, I’m not sure that “hitting the wall” is the best analogy.

A better analogy might be “driving into the green energy cul-de-sac.” After all, when you hit a wall you can probably just pick yourself up and turn around and be on your way.

In the cul-de-sac, you are trapped with no evident way of getting out.

You might be in there for a long time. This is where the UK finds itself today.

For well more than a decade, they have been aggressively and intentionally pursuing the green energy fantasy. The Net Zero emissions target was made mandatory by legislation in 2019.

They have built hundreds of wind turbines and solar panels, while at the same time closing almost all of their coal mines and coal power plants. That has left them largely dependent on natural gas to back up the intermittent renewables.

They have plenty of natural gas right under their feet in a large shale formation, but for years they dithered about allowing fracking to produce the gas, and then in 2019 they imposed a blanket moratorium on fracking.

With production from their North Sea gas fields declining, they must buy gas on the European market. And although they don’t buy much gas directly from Russia, the European market has been driven to great heights by the cutoff of Russian supplies.

Result: average annual residential energy bills in the UK, which were around £1,000 ($1,152) as recently as earlier this year, went up to about £3,000 ($3,455) this month, and have been projected to go as high as £5,000 ($5,758) by this coming April absent some sort of government intervention.

And only now has it become apparent that there is no good exit strategy.
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Here’s one more idea: hand out hundreds of billions of pounds of subsidies to utilities to bring the costs to households down below the £5,000 annually otherwise projected.

This will assure that the private sector has no incentive at all to work to alleviate the crisis and that the crisis persists essentially forever, as public debt explodes. Of course, this is the “solution” they are actually putting into place.

So they are in a cul-de-sac. And on top of everything else, they can’t even muster a solid political majority for trying to get out.

Full article here.
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Original Manhattan Contrarian article here.