“There is no green energy revolution: pretending otherwise makes us poor”, By Bjorn Lomborg
“The myth that the green energy transition is inevitable and will make cheap electricity for everyone is one of the most dangerous self-delusions of the global elite.”
There is no green energy revolution: pretending otherwise makes us poor
Fossil fuels are still what sets the world to work – and that is not changing any time soon
25 January 2025 6:39pm GMT
The myth that the green energy transition is inevitable and will make cheap electricity for everyone is one of the most dangerous self-delusions of the global elite.
Despite two decades of policy attempts, fossil fuels in 2022 still meet 81 per cent of global energy needs, down from 81.2 per cent in 2000.
On the most optimistic trend, fossil fuels will still supply two-thirds of all energy in 2100.
Yet, Western governments that have most enthusiastically pursued these expensive policies have received plaudits from multilateral organisations, climate activists and the media, who all mistake spending money with achieving results.
After decades of nearly unrestrained green efforts, electricity costs in the UK, Europe and progressive US states like California have soared.
The United Kingdom is paying a heavy price for leading the world on the climate agenda: its inflation-adjusted electricity price, weighted across households and industry, has tripled from 2003 to 2023, mostly because of climate policies.
It need not have been so: the US electricity price has remained almost unchanged over the same period.
UK and US inflation-adjusted electricity prices
US price per kWh
UK price per kWh
45¢
33.3p
35p
40¢
35p
35¢
25p
30¢
UK
25¢
20p
20¢
15p
11.6p
15¢
10p
US
10¢
5p
5¢
0p
0¢
1990
2000
2010
2020
International Energy Agency
The total annual UK electricity bill is now £90 billion, or £59 billion more than if prices in real terms had stayed unchanged since 2003. That is equivalent to wasting 2.1 per cent of GDP each year. This unnecessary increase is so costly that it is twice the entire cost of UK primary education.
Had prices stayed at 2003 levels, an average family of four would be spending £1,882 on electricity – which includes indirect industry costs. Instead, it now pays £5,425 per year.
There is a strong, clear correlation between more solar and wind, and much higher average energy prices.
Indeed, no country in the entire world has combined significant solar and wind energy with low electricity costs. Data from the International Energy Agency shows the average electricity cost in a country with little or no solar and wind power is about 10p per kWh. For every 10 percentage points of additional solar and wind, the cost increases by more than 4p.
The unsurprising result is that the UK and Europe are struggling to compete. European businesses pay triple US electricity costs, and nearly two-thirds of European companies say energy prices are a major impediment to investment. More than 30 million Europeans are energy poor.
We are failing to transition away from fossil fuels because of green energy intermittency and unreliability. They require almost one-to-one backup power systems to ensure grid stability, and that typically comes from fossil fuel-based generation. Taxpayers end up paying for two power systems.
It’s logical to ask why we don’t solve this problem with batteries. To make an impact, batteries would need to supply energy not only through the night when there is no sun, but in winter when there is higher usage, less sun and long periods of low wind.
Currently, the UK’s batteries would power less than 13 minutes of its consumption. A Royal Society study found that to meet all electricity needs with solar and wind, storage would need to be at least 10,000 times bigger.
With batteries, this would cost £15 trillion, or about five times the current UK GDP. Factoring in the need to replace batteries every 15 years, the cost would be one-third of UK GDP each and every year.
Fossil fuels remain indispensable for fertilizers, steel, cement and plastics and for energy-intensive sectors like aviation, shipping and heavy industry. Global energy consumption is increasing by 2 to 3 per cent each year, with innovations such as fracking driving down the cost and increasing the availability of fossil fuels.
Under President Trump, the US – already the world’s leading oil producer – is set to abandon costly green policies and expand fossil fuel production further, while the growing economies of the Global South will continue to increase demand.
At the same time, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, electric transportation and large-scale data centres require even more energy.
Policymakers need to invest more in research and development to overcome the major flaws in today’s green energy. It is time to reckon with the reality that green energy is not yet ready in the UK or elsewhere.
The delusion that we are on the verge of a green revolution is both manifestly untrue and incredibly costly, as it perpetuates misguided policies that ignore the need for real innovation and undermine global competitiveness.
Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus and a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
Bjorn - you need to check the claim on current electricity costs vs 2003 inflated. The numbers look way too high. Makes it too easy for others to say the article lacks credibility.
The overall point that renewables doesn’t result in cheap electricity is true. Simply put, as more intermittent renewables are installed to supply the remaining power provided by fossil fuels, the utilisation of renewables must fall as production is curtailed in periods of high supply (absent an endless export capability). Since renewables are almost entirely upfront cost, a falling number of units produced due to increasing curtailments drives up the per unit cost of generation. This is before thinking about network stability etc issues.
Fossil fuels, all the hydrocarbons on earth from Fossil remains, should have peeked years ago, but somehow they keep coming back from the dead, hummmmmmmmm