Andrew Montford

Boris’s wind power pledge won’t be cheap

(Photo: iStock)

Boris Johnson likes a big announcement. Back in his days as London mayor, he told us he was going to build a new airport on an island in the Thames estuary and a tree-lined ‘garden bridge’ further upstream. Although not as hare-brained as his more recent plan to build a bridge to Ireland, neither of these schemes ever came to anything.

Much of the government’s announcement today of a major green spending spree gives the impression of having been conjured up with the same lack of any serious intent, ‘smart cities’ being an obvious example. However, some of it looks positively alarming.

Take home insulation, for example. It sounds so simple and so easy, but as study after study has shown, the cost of retrofitting the existing housing stock is wildly expensive – the cost would run to trillions – and it might even be cheaper to knock down the whole of the UK’s housing stock and start again.

Hydrogen is frequently touted as the answer to all our problems, but this is mostly a case of pulling the wool over the eyes of the unwary. Hydrogen is a way of moving energy about; it is not a source of energy itself. In other words, to make the stuff, you need a real source of energy, which currently means natural gas. But if you are going to burn gas to make hydrogen, you are going to get carbon dioxide given off in vast quantities, and so you need operational carbon capture equipment.

Unfortunately, carbon capture and storage has only ever worked for coal-fired power stations, and even then it’s still commercially unviable. Getting the technology to work on plant burning natural gas remains a pipe-dream.

But, say the renewables enthusiasts, we can also make hydrogen through electrolysis of water, with all the electricity coming from our rapidly growing fleet of offshore windfarms.

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