Green energy plan costs ten times its benefits

A story tucked into the Telegraph Business News (Aug 10th) deserves the widest circulation.  The government’s Renewable Energy Strategy, published last month, gives figures for both the costs and claimed benefits of the plan (of which the largest element is, of course, a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power).
 
The plan, according to the government, will cost around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years.  But the benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion.  That’s not per annum.  That’s over the whole period.  So the costs will exceed benefits somewhere between eleven and seventeen times.
 
The government claims that the loss (of around £65 billion) will be compensated by the “non-monetary benefits”.  Yet those benefits were presumably estimated and included in the proposed “benefits” of the plan.  That is what eco-economists do when they estimate the notional cost of CO2 emissions.
 
These figures illustrate the massive and disastrous costs of the government’s plans.  British industry will be using the most expensive electricity in the world, while the French benefit from prices probably only a third of ours, with electricity from nuclear power (which, if it matters, also produces no CO2).  We are of course pursuing this daft plan because our masters in Brussels have told us to.
 
This sounds like a worst-case scenario.  But it gets worse still.  The government’s plans for building wind capacity are, according to industry sources, entirely fanciful and unachievable.  So rather than getting very expensive electricity, we risk getting none at all.  Expect power outages and rolling black-outs.  This is where our green obsessions are taking us.