Countering Net Zero Myths

[This is a slighting longer and fully referenced version of a blog of the same title]

Jonathan Swift wrote [1] “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”, and never was that truer than with the debate over the Government’s plans for Net Zero by 2050.

You will hear claims that Net Zero is the cause of higher electricity prices; that the lights won’t stay on during windless winter days; or that it will cost more than we can possibly afford.

None of which is true. We’ll show you why.

The fact is that once we have finished scaling up the renewables infrastructure we need - electrifying our transport, heating and industrial consumption - from then on our energy comes for free. We will no longer need to rely on finite, planet warming, air-polluting fossil fuels because the energy will come from renewables (mainly wind and solar).

So the faster we act, the sooner people and the planet can benefit (contrary to what you may have heard, the UK Government actually needs to move faster, not slow down [2]).

What’s not to like about an effectively infinite supply of energy, clean air and independence from volatile markets? Even those that deny global warming ought to like that!

Why are energy prices currently so high in the UK?

It’s a very good question. Well, it’s certainly not because we are not drilling enough oil and gas of our own: the UK’s reserves of fossil fuels are dwindling, but any we do produce will be sold on international markets to the highest bidder. Renewables in 2024 were over half of our electricity production, while fossil fuel’s share of the power sector has fallen to 32%, most of which was gas [3].  And because the UK has so little in the way of gas storage left, we tend to buy on the spot market and so the price spikes (due to events around the world beyond our control) are worse than in other countries that have strategic reserves of gas.

‘why is UK electricity so expensive if renewables are so cheap?’.

It’s a great question and once again, gas is the villain

The price of electricity on the UK grid is set by a complex ‘marginal cost pricing system’. Let’s explain it simply.

Every half hour, the price of electricity is set by the most expensive unit delivering power to the grid. The power exchange accepts bids in price order, from lowest to highest, until demand is met, in what is known as the ‘merit order’: sources of electricity with the lowest marginal cost of generation (typically renewables) are the first bids to be accepted, and sources such as gas-fired power stations are the last.

A fuller discussion of the reasons behind the UK’s high electricity retail prices (including other, lesser factors, such as levies) is available on CarbonBrief [4].

It may have been a sensible system for a grid with fairly competing resources but as we move to a grid dominated by renewables it makes no sense at all for gas to be calling the pricing shots. The electricity market and pricing mechanism needs to be reformed, but we don’t know when, and as citizens we should be lobbying for it to happen sooner, not later. Consumers and businesses will all benefit, and it will boost the take up of electrified forms energy consumption.

To slay another myth, the price of electricity is not due to huge subsidies given preferentially to renewables. Despite the desire to develop clean energy, fossil fuels have continued to receive more support than renewables, as a report revealed in 2023 [5a]. Fossil fuels have received £20bn more UK support than renewables since 2015. In 2024, fossil fuels received 11.5 times more in subsidies than renewables [5b].

We also burn a lot of fossil fuels in our homes and our cars, unaware of the health risks this poses. By moving to heat pumps and electric vehicles (EVs) we can benefit from clean electricity, and a much more efficient use of energy.  This is another reason for reforming the electricity market as renewable generation continues to increase, to finally eliminate our dependence on oil and gas.

Can we keep the lights on when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine?

The UK has the largest pumped storage hydroelectric facility in Europe, Dinorwig in Wales, that was built to deal with sudden drops in power generation, like a nuclear power plant going off grid, and there are plans for more such facilities.

The UK is also rolling out a lot of battery storage, and these have the benefit of being able to be both large and small to support the network at local, regional and national levels. Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) technology is already making an impact in the UK, Australia and elsewhere [6] demonstrating the resilience that can be achieved in a well designed grid:

“Recently, a major interconnector trip sent the UK’s grid frequency plummeting. At around 8:47am on a morning in early October [2024], the NSL interconnector linking the UK and Norway, suddenly and with no warning, halted … with immediate and potentially disastrous impact on the UK’s electricity grid … battery energy storage systems (BESS) answered the call. Across NESO’s network, 1.5GW of BESS assets came online to inject power into the system, bringing frequency to strong levels within two minutes.”

Far from renewables infrastructure causing a blackout, it prevented it.

As the infrastructure scales up, additional storage will be added, to deal with rare extended periods of poor sunlight and low wind. The Royal Society has provided recommendations [7] on how to handle such extreme episodes.

Other factors come into play in an electrified economy. Cars that require electricity to charge up, can also discharge electricity back to the grid when needed to help balance supply and demand. This is an example of so called ‘flexibility’. With the combination of storage, flexibility and intelligent management of the grid, we do not need to be worried about the lights going out.

Won’t the path to net zero in 2050 be unaffordable?

Considering the capital costs, the Government estimates of the full life-time costs of renewable generation (wind or solar), per unit of energy produced, is about 1/3rd of that for gas turbine generation [8].

So how fast can we scale up renewables and what will it cost per year? The Climate Change Committee estimates [9] that reaching net zero requires only a small percentage of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP):

We estimate that the net costs of Net Zero will be around 0.2% of UK GDP per year,

on average in our pathway, with investment upfront leading to net savings

during the Seventh Carbon Budget period.

Much of this investment is expected to come from the private sector.

How much is that? Government’s Net Zero Strategy estimates the UK will need a total of up to £60 billion per year in low-carbon investment by the late 2020s and 2030s, but that 90% of this will come from the private sectors (so up to £6 billion from the public sector and £54 billion from the private sector).

To give you an idea of the tax payer cost of net zero a year (£6 billion is the CCC estimate), it is less than what the country spends on fizzy drinks a year (about £10 billion [10]).

When considering this question, we also have to consider the cost of inaction. How much will gas cost in 2050? If we wait until fossil fuels run out or they become too expensive as they become scarcer and harder to extract, how will the economy fare then? Do we want to be reliant on increasingly volatile international oil and gas markets having control over our energy supplies, which might trigger an energy crisis, as happened in the 1970s?

Do we have a responsibility to act?

The UK ought to be making its contribution to reducing carbon emissions, to try to reduce the impacts of global warming that are now very apparent. One must ask, is ignoring these impacts affordable?

People say “but we are only 1% of global emissions”, although we are currently about 4.4% of cumulative (historic) emissions [11], and surely we owe a debt to countries with lower historic emissions and certainly lower emissions per person. We also ignore the benefits of being a first mover and developing the capabilities to exploit renewables, and then to export that technology to developing countries, to help them plot a different path. Just as East Africa decided to not invest in fixed-line telecommunications and moved to mobile technology, helping to revolutionise the rural economy. The same can be true of energy. Kenya is a case in point, that is rapidly developing green energy resources [12].

Since renewables are already the cheapest form of energy, the question is why would you want to keep burning fossil fuels which cost more, pollute the environment and threaten our collective security?

We believe the evidence clearly points to an imperative to strive for net zero. Despite the negative messages from parts of the media that it has been alleged [13] are heavily influenced by fossil fuel interest (eg. GB News), public opinion in favour of net zero remains high [14]. Solar, Offshore wind and Onshore wind are the clear favourites in terms of sources of energy.

The issue is that people are being told a lie. The lie is that we must make a choice

between the  real and urgent cost of living concerns and the need to reach net zero.

This is a false choice. The reality is that we should address both concerns.

There are many items on the UK’s spending inventory that far, far exceed the costs of reaching net zero.

In many cases, as with a move to electric vehicles and heat pumps, the key thing Government needs to do is simply to provide consistent policies that the private sector can then plan to deliver on. They need to be confident that there will not be another flip-flop as we have seen before.

Getting to net zero requires several things - from Government, from businesses / industry, from  communities and from individual householders / citizens. It is perfectly achievable, as the Climate Change Committee has laid out. We just need to stop listening to the naysayers, stuck in the last century, and get on with it.

By 2050 we’ll look back and ask ourselves, what took us so long?

Notes and References

1 - Jonathan Swift, The Examiner, 1710. (There is no evidence for the similar saying attributed to Mark Twain “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”, but C. H. Spurgeon, in Gems from Spurgeon (1859) did write “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on).

2 - Progress in adapting to climate change: 2025 report to Parliament, Climate Change Committee, 30 April 2025. https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/progress-in-adapting-to-climate-change-2025/

3 Energy Trends: March 2025, Accredited Official Statistic, UK Government, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-trends-march-2025

4 - Factcheck: Why expensive gas – not net-zero – is keeping UK electricity prices so high, Carbon Brief, 20 May 2025. https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-why-expensive-gas-not-net-zero-is-keeping-uk-electricity-prices-so-high/

5 - Subsidies comparison:

6 - The role of BESS in keeping the lights on, Kit Million Ross, Solar Power Portal, 30 October 2024. https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/the-role-of-bess-in-keeping-the-lights-on/

7 - Large-scale electricity storage, Royal Society, September 2023. https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/large-scale-electricity-storage/large-scale-electricity-storage-policy-briefing.pdf

8 - Electricity Generation Costs 2023, Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, November 2023 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6556027d046ed400148b99fe/electricity-generation-costs-2023.pdf

9 - The Seventh Carbon Budget: This statutory report provides advice to the UK Government on the level of the Seventh Carbon Budget (2038 to 2042), Climate Change Committee, 26 February 2025.

10 - Soft Drink Production in the UK - Market Research Report (2014-2029),

11 - CO₂ emissions, Our World In Data, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

12 - Doing development differently: How Kenya is rapidly emerging as Africa’s renewable energy superpower, Rapid Transition Alliance, 1 November 2022.

13 - GB News Owner’s Hedge Fund Has $2.2 Billion Fossil Fuel Investments:

The broadcaster has regularly platformed climate science denial and attacks on net zero since it launched in 2021, Sam Bright and Joey Grostern, Desmog, 30 October 2023. https://www.desmog.com/2023/10/30/gb-news-owner-hedge-fund-paul-marshall-wace-fossil-fuel-investments/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

14 - Opinion Trackers, https://climatebarometer.org/climate-barometer-trackers/