So, today Civitas has published a great new report, publishing the "realisistic" costs of Net Zero. Apparently, it’s a whopping £4.5 trillion, or £6,000/home/year. Wow. However, how do these numbers stack up? (tl;dr: no. but stick around for the 🧵, because it's fun). 1/12

Overall, the £600 figure is reached by rogue assumptions, misassignment and double counting. We need a robust debate about energy costs, as it is complicated, policy and essential to our economy. But this sort of contribution falls well short of what is needed.

What is more, if we are citing Ofgem's numbers, here, let's go the whole hog. The £60 is the gross addtion, when netted against savings, the impacts are much lower, and lower than doing nothing (see curtailment above.) https://t.co/Qfc21IekpT

The report says Ofgem approved £8.9 billon, then in December a further £10.3 bn. Adding £134 to bills. Oh dear... the first number was the draft recommendation of Ofgem for the next regulatory period, 2026-2031. The second number... an update, not an addition.

And finally, the grid. We are indeed spending a lot to upgrade our networks. The report notes that we plans to spend around £80 billion to upgrade the grid. This is a lot (we can argue about designs and why so much another day). But then we get a bit confused...

So the idea that we have £400 per household (sorry, "equivalent" - no, you still can't do that) is based on some pretty poor misreading of the history and economics of the system.

If you can build a new CCGT, as the report implies we should, for less than the price it says offshore wind really is, I have a pile of magic beans to sell you.

Also, comparing costs of generation of different technologies is tricky. The flaw in this analysis is that we are comparing CfD costs - which include capital costs - with the short run costs of gas plants

But to claim the Capacity Market is due to renewables is grand revisionism. The CM was introduced to solve the "missing money problem", when the markets were not incentivising new build capacity, well before renewables played a significant role on the system.

Curtailment costs - where grid can't handle the power generated - are rising but to "attribute these costs to intermittent renewables" is pushing things a bit far. Actual costs of curtailment (if not cause) are driven by the cost of the replacement gas.

Moving on. Next up, we have the "additional costs of renewables". We have two main sources of system costs: balancing costs and curtailment. Balancing Markets makes sure we have supply and demand equal at all times. TBF, the report notes the BM existed before renewables.

Furthermore, we have not had all the AR7 results yet (bring on Monday), so the report assumes the "Adminstrative Strike Price" - i.e the maximum price is achieved. Something which has happened never. So again, impact is going to be lower. Let's see what happens.

Is £79 even right? Well not according to the report itself! It rightly points out that £33/MWh reference price is well below the actual market price. So likely to be lower impacts than we think. Even so, the reports authors go for the maximum impact (which are gov figures, tbf).

First up, £79 from CfD costs. Careful wording here: the "budget figure amounts to the *equivalent* of £79". If we assign all costs to the domestic consumer we get there. But this is not what happens "The full burden of these costs will not fall on households", the report admits.

First, sniff test. £600 to domestic bills. Seems a lot. There are 28m home in GB, suggesting costs of £16.8 billion. Domestic demand is only 1/3 of total, taking us to over £50 billion. A year. In AR7. That's ~50% of total electricity costs. Something smells. What's going on?

I've not posted here for a long time, but like Apollo Creed, I've been provoked back into the ring. The new GWPF report, saying that renewables secured in the latest CfD auction (AR7) will add £600 to energy bills needs addressing. A🧵with gifs. Yes, I know how Rocky IV ends

.@neso_energy has announced that its methodology for developing the first Strategic Spatial Energy Plan (SSEP) has been approved by the Secretary of State and @ofgem 🎉 The SSEP will provide the first high-level blueprint for Great Britain's energy infrastructure from 2030 to

Well that was unexpected.

While I don't know exactly what happened, and we should wait for the full investigation, let me explain exactly what happened here from my comfy armchair. I'm not a power system engineer, but I've seen some charts on the Internet 🧵

Just a guess, but I suspect we are about to discover a surprising number of hitherto unknown experts on power system frequency stability and cascading relays.

No doub there will be lots of pepole jumping on solar/wind/renewables as the cause. Rumours of cyber attacks abound. We don't know. As Jeremy says, this is unprecedented, let's wait until we have some facts before pointing fingers...