By Paul Homewood
Electricity bills are set to soar even higher to pay for upgrading the local distribution networks.
The Telegraph has the story:
Household energy bills will rise to pay for a net zero upgrade of Britain’s regional power grids, Ofgem has announced.
The energy regulator on Wednesday published plans for a massive expansion of the local distribution networks that deliver power the last few miles from the energy grid to homes and businesses.
The plans, to be undertaken between 2028-33, will be paid for by households through extra levies on their bills.
It means sharp increases in the average network charges that every home pays. These charges have already risen from £238 in 2019 to £372 today.
The planned expansion of regional power grids will help the networks cope with the enormous increase in capacity that will be needed as the UK moves from using gas for heating to electricity, requiring much more to be transmitted.
The scale of the challenge is huge. Last year the UK consumed about 320 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity, but by 2050 the move to heat pumps, electric vehicles and similar new systems could double consumption to about 700GWh.
Full story here.
Independent experts such as Michael Kelly have been warning about this for years. Astonishingly the upgrade is being waved through without any costs being put on it all – surely an abuse of public money.
Kelly, I believe, talked about costs of £200 billion plus. The distribution network is estimated to be half a million miles long, dwarfing the high voltage transmission grid, which itself will cost £100 billion to upgrade.
I don’t believe there is any way that this network can be comprehensively upgraded in the short space of five years.
Where will all the electricians come from?
Where will the copper and other raw materials come from?
And how many roads can you dig up at a time?
And how much disruption will this cause?
According to OFGEM:
The electricity distribution system is at the heart of an unprecedented change in how and where electricity is generated and used. Enabling this transition to a more decentralised, cleaner and more digitally enabled electricity system is vital for wider economic growth, energy affordability and meeting net zero goals.
But then they get to the nitty gritty:
Providing the capacity and resilience to meet our future energy needs will require an increase in network investment and we are mindful of the consequence this will have for customer bills in the near-term. While we are confident that in the longer-term this investment will ultimately support a reduction in energy costs, we will remain focused on the affordability challenge facing many consumers. In setting the price control will seek to ensure that companies are only permitted to recover efficient costs so that the impact on bills is minimised.
In short – you will have to pay for Net Zero.