Most Tory MPs support Net Zero. They’re doubling down on it. They’ve convinced themselves that Net Zero is not only kinder to the environment, it will also bring down our energy bills. For that to happen we all have to insulate our homes, install a heat pump, switch to electric vehicles and install an energy rationing meter. You’re paying for it, naturally.

The theory is that we’ll be using the energy we don’t use to heat our homes to charge electric cars instead. You plug in your car at 6pm after work (for those lucky enough not to be still stuck in traffic), tell your charging app you need it at 80 percent charge by 8am in the morning and the car gets charged in cheapest possible way, and the grid will tank off your battery if it needs to during demand surges.

This is not by any means a new concept. They were talking about this back in 2007 in the belief that by now the EV revolution would be well underway. Still though, the case for electric cars is not made, thus the case for the smart grid is not made.

The immediate barrier is the impact for poorer households. The useful life of an EV battery degrades over time. It’s improving but it’s still the case that a new EV battery installation will set you back the better part of £10k. This mattered less when the average age of cars on British roads was quite young, but with the pandemic putting the brakes on new vehicle uptake in 2020, the average car on our roads is now the oldest since records began some 20 years ago. That is set to continue. As living costs rise, disposable income declines and car purchases are delayed – and consequently, so is the EV revolution. EV’s are not set to get any cheaper either. Lithium prices rose 478.3% between January 2021 and January 2022.

We are told that battery life is far less of an issue now, but the data doesn’t give us real world scenarios for an average car in its second decade of life. It is then when most of the problems will occur. Nor is there any data on what smart grid draining does to battery life.

Moreover, smart grid ideology (for that’s what it is) is contingent on everyone living to a statistically average routine which works on spreadsheets just fine, but it doesn’t account for how life throws curveballs at us all the time. Surge pricing will ultimately means the rich get to cook their dinner when they want it, the poor sit in their coats and wait to eat later. They haven’t factored in the effect of predatory surge pricing on shift workers either.

Net Zero, at its heart, is not about saving the planet or more efficient use of energy. It’s about changing your behaviour – moving us from a model where we cook dinner and use the washing machine when we want, to doing it when we can afford to. This is not progress.

Through subsidies they’ve incentivised the building of intermittent energy and penalised baseload by way of the CfD scheme, driving us towards a capacity shortage when the wind doesn’t blow, creating a whole new rush for short term top up generation which attracts an eyewatering price per MWh. This cost must be added to the cost of wind in order to fully appreciate how much wind energy really costs us. Green activists often quote the price per Mwh, but that’s not the price you pay.

It is this system that baked in a permanent capacity shortage. Demand management is sensible to shave unexpected peaks, but is not supposed to be a tool to manage structural, deliberately imposed shortage.

Green activists say that battery storage can plug the gap, but this is a fantasy. The majority of large-scale batteries are be able to provide power for 30-90 minutes. Several gigawatts of capacity can act as a buffer in the same way conventional power station inertia does, but it cannot keep the grid running over sustained periods when then the wind doesn’t blow and demand is high. As much as wind substantially contributes to rising bills, plugging the shortfall means relying on coal and biomass, and fossil fuels which are penalised with carbon taxes.

No amount of green NGO obfuscation changes the fact that every MW of a installed renewable energy capacity must have equivalent conventional backup. Intermittent energy cannot serve as baseload. The only way renewable energy can be considered baseload is when it’s predictable, thus the only viable renewable energy (ie not requiring subsidy) is imported wind and solar from Morocco, but this is transmitted over long distances and carried inherent security risks equal to that of oil and gas.

The fact of the matter is that there isn’t a cheap option – and perhaps there never was, but if there was, that window is now firmly closed thanks to three decades of policy neglect, where politicians favoured the eco-virtue signalling over the real world needs of the economy. We must now explore every possible option to bring down energy costs. UK gas fields could be supplying us on a long-term, fixed price contract. It probably won’t be enough to bring down our bills but may be enough prevent them rising further. We also need to rethink carbon taxes and our attitudes to coal. Modern coal burners are several times more efficient than the old stations we demolished. We should have replaced them on a one for one basis.

The Tories can bleat about “levelling up” but there is no chance of that without first getting serious about energy costs – and that means getting real about fossil fuels. We are not going to reach the Net Zero target and fossil fuels will be with us for a long time yet. The race to abolish them is an act of self-sabotage and nobody is following our “climate leadership”.

The renewable energy sector have always had very powerful lobby, and they’ve manipulated the discourse for years. Like the claim that Brexit was funded by shadowy Russian influences, they claim renewable energy sceptics are funded by “big oil”. They talk as though there weren’t big money backing the renewable industry, largely because of the generous subsidies and the elimination of risk. They’ve consistently lied about how much energy wind turbines actually produce, they lie about the service life of turbines and they lie about the cost to the consumer. They have well remunerated activists and advocates, and gullible MPs work directly off their briefings. It’s a constant game of misdirection and they’ll equivocate like a Rotherham social worker.

Net Zero advocates push for a whole range of sub optimal technologies which cannot survive without subsidy, that few would choose were there not deliberate market distortions in their favour. All of it is predicated on the assumption that government can subside heat pumps, insulation and electric vehicles, and that consumers can be endlessly milked – without ever adjusting their assumptions to take into account the effects of Brexit, Covid and global supply shocks.

The more you examine Net Zero, the more it looks to be a blend of middle class utopian high fantasy and eco-fascism, as the entire economy is deliberately steered toward the green industrial policy. You could be forgiven for thinking it was little to do with curbing emissions and is more likely the spasm of a shell-shocked establishment that believes it must do something in response to Brexit. To this day they still believe Brexit was caused by austerity, thus a redistributive industrial policy ensures we won’t vote the wrong way again. This is ultimately a form of socialism, and will have roughly the same consequences – power cuts, stagnation, mass unemployment and civil unrest.

It’s true that there was a policy vacuum in the wake of Brexit. The Brexit vote demanded a national stock take and a change of direction, but Net Zero has filled that void being that the Brexiteer cupboard was bare. The Tories don’t know what they stand for or how to deliver it, and in the absence of any big ideas, they’ve gone with the globalist meme of Net Zero. In that regard, Net Zero is not a departure from stultifying EU policy agendas. It’s an acceleration of policies that began with the Large Combustion Plant Directive and the Renewables Directive.

Though Boris Johnson has appointed Jacob Rees-Mogg as a Brexit opportunities minister, this is merely throwing a bone to the Boris fanboys who still think Johnson is getting Brexit done. Rees-Mogg himself is appealing for the public to write in with suggestions as to which EU regulations should be struck out. Were there coherent Brexit agenda he wouldn’t need to ask. Moreover, this is a non-job. Mr Rees-Mogg can sit there with his red pen and strike out piffling regulations, but nothing he does will be allowed to interfere with the flagship Net Zero policy. Yet again we’re being taken for fools by Johnson.

As Aris Roussinos writes in Unherd, in an article not dissimilar to those found on the UKIP website recently, “it will be necessary for the Conservatives to have some time on the Opposition benches to determine what they stand for, and what their vision of the Britain of the near future is”. Net Zero isn’t going to cut it and until the Tories have a notion of what Brexit is supposed to be for, it’s not going to translate into the revolution many of us hoped it would be. Boris Johnson has gone native.