By Paul Homewood
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is off on one of his rants against fossil fuels yet again.
In his latest Telegraph article, “Right-wing wokeism can’t stop green tech winning the global energy war”, he reprises exactly the same arguments he has been using for years:
- CAPEX is pouring into renewables, because they are profitable
- Renewable energy is cheaper
- Solar power is going to take over the world
- Battery storage is coming down in price
- The world is being weaned off fossil fuels
- China is leading the way on renewables
If green energy is the future, as he claims, then obviously there is no need for renewable subsidies, mandates, bans or all of the other laws and regulations being applied to enforce Net Zero
And simply comparing unit costs of solar power with fossil fuels is not something any competent economist would do. As we know, that does not address the indirect costs associated with wind and solar power.
That is why even DESNZ admit that the UK will need to maintain a full working fleet of gas power stations at immense cost, for use when the wind does not blow.
AEP also still does not seem to understand that solar power in the UK and other northern latitude countries is virtually worthless in winter. It would cost trillions to provide battery storage to store enough electricity to cover for this. That leaves us with wind power, which is also highly intermittent and costs more than gas power.
The world is not galloping towards a green future, as AEP imagines, wind and solar still only accounted for a paltry 6% of the world’s energy in 2023:
BP Energy Review
He uses the example of Pakistan, which he pretends is moving fast to solar power. It is not – solar energy only made up 0.3% of the mix in 2023, while fossil fuels contributed 81.9%:
BP Energy Review
As for China leading the world on renewables, suffice it to say wind and solar only accounted for 8.0% of their energy in 2023, well below the UK figure of 12.9%.
He still does not get the fact that the world cannot run on intermittent renewable alone, no matter how cheap they might appear on future. The rest of the world worked this out a long time ago. It is only dinosaurs like AEP and Miliband who are still living in the world of twenty years ago, when Big Government thought it could dictate how the world ran.
I have great difficulty understanding why the Telegraph keep paying for AEP to write this drivel week after week.