The Costs of Offshore Wind Power: Blindness and Insight

27th September 2020

21/09/2020 by John Constable, Professor Gordon Hughes - 21 min read.

In this important contribution to our series on post-Brexit Britain Professor Gordon Hughes and Dr John Constable take on the entire green energy movement in arguing that the widespread view about the falling costs of renewable energy is wrong. They view official government projections of energy costs and hence prices as disgracefully inaccurate. Energy costs will be an important element in the UK's future economic competitiveness and, if the authors are correct, energy prices are in for huge price rises.

The dramatically falling costs of renewables are now a political, a media, and conversational cliche. However, the claim is demonstrably false. Audited accounts show that far from getting cheaper, wind power is actually becoming more expensive. The failure of the British civil service to detect this fact and, hence, to protect the consumer and taxpayer from the consequences of the looming failure of the renewables sector raises important questions about the analytic competence of the Whitehall machine.

Read the full article HERE