Ask yourself this: would you be happy with equity capital tied up in an industry whose operational performance is poor, which is addicted to subsidies paid by increasingly unhappy taxpayers, and which runs on dodgy finances? Probably not, but welcome to the UK’s wind power industry.
Of course, this is hardly the official line. That tells us the UK is on its way to being a global superpower in generating cheap electricity from its inexhaustible supply of wind. Thus earlier this month, the government – via its sententiously-labelled Department for Energy Security and Net Zero – published updated estimates for the future costs of generating electricity in an industry increasingly dominated by renewables technology. Such estimates are “a fundamental part of energy market analysis”, says the government department, and are “important when designing policy to make progress towards net zero”.
True enough, yet the government’s estimates of future costs for wind power were immediately labelled “a fairy story” by Net Zero Watch, a pressure group consistently sceptical about the real costs of waging war on greenhouse gas emissions.