Visions and Blackouts
Trump's windmills and UK energy policy
When the global elites gathered at Davos for their annual gathering this month, they were eager to hear whether or not the US President would carry out his threat to invade Greenland. Relief when he said he would not go to war with Denmark and risk breaking up the NATO alliance was followed by bemusement as he launched into a diatribe against European countries for investing in wind power. The UK was singled out as deserving particular scorn, for building wind farms in the North Sea instead of trying to extract more fossil fuels from the depleted reserves beneath it:
“Because of my landslide election victory the United States avoided the catastrophic energy collapse which befell every European nation that pursued the green new scam, perhaps the greatest hoax in history. The green new scam, windmills all over the place destroy your land. Every time that goes around you loose a thousand dollars. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. There are windmills all over Europe … The more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses, and the worse that country’s doing. The United Kingdom produces just one third of the total energy from all sources than it did in 1999. Think of that, one third, and they’re sitting on top of the North Sea, one of the greatest reserves anywhere in the world, but they don’t use it, and that’s one reason why their energy has reached catastrophically low levels, with equally high prices.”
(Donald J Trump, World Economic Forum, Davos 21 Jan 2026)
Culture wars over UK energy policy exist not only within Donald Trump’s fevered imagination, they have become part of the political landscape within the UK as well. One of the Labour Government’s goals, to decarbonise electricity generation by 2030, has become a key battleground. Neither side in this debate is as out of touch with reality as the US President, but each side cherry picks information about cost and reliability to support its position. The more the debate evolves, the more attention is diverted away from the climate crisis that decarbonising electricity was supposed to address. Beneath it all, neither side is willing to confront the elephant in the room - a shared obsession with economic growth and denial of the damage this inflicts on the climate, and on nature more generally.
Labour’s lack of vision
The UK Labour Government won a landslide victory in the 2024 General Election, albeit on only 34% of the popular vote. Yet it has failed to do much that is meaningful with its majority. Policies are announced and then reversed with breathtaking rapidity, and the overall impression conveyed is, with a few exceptions, one of bumbling incompetence. If current opinion polls are any guide, Labour could come close to annihilation at this May’s local elections.
Partly, this is due to self-imposed ‘fiscal rules’ which limit the policy choices that the government can adopt. These rules are based on a failure to understand basic facts about sectoral balances in the economy (that public sector deficits are always balanced by private sector surpluses, for example). Fiscal rules aimed at ‘balancing the books’ wrongly treat the government as if it were a household, which serves only to provide excuses for choosing to cut back on public spending.
Partly, too, Labour’s failures in office reflect the lack of work it should have done in its long years of opposition, on what changes it might want to introduce and what would be needed to implement them. All too often, this reflected a desire to disappear down fashionable rabbit holes like ‘gender self-identification’ rather than to address the material reality of people’s lives (including their sex).
Arguably the main problem has been lack of a coherent vision. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has been more interested in pretending to be an influential global leader than in remedying the many domestic problems inherited from the previous Conservative governments. He has got away with it (so far) by surrounding himself with Cabinet Ministers who are, on the whole, scared of doing anything that might rock the boat, and who are more comfortable with light-touch technocratic regulation of the private sector than with introducing innovations to improve performance or with renationalising poorly performing privatised utilities
Starmer now recognises that most of the electorate wants action to improve living standards, but he can see no way of achieving this other than economic growth, the rewards of which he hopes will eventually trickle down to ordinary people. He doesn’t have much of an idea of how to promote that growth, though, except by removing ‘barriers to growth’ such as protection for wildlife habitats. Supporting ‘builders not blockers’ has become his favourite slogan.
Miliband’s vision
There is one Cabinet Minister, Ed Miliband, who has stood apart from his colleagues, pursued a vision, and worked steadfastly to implement it. It’s a vision that was part of the Labour Party’s election manifesto - ‘to make Britain a clean energy superpower.’ It’s not a vision I share. Like all ecomodernist visions, it ignores natural limits. Instead of challenging techno-capitalism, it aims to harness it so that aspects of the climate crisis can be addressed while business can continue as usual. The vision is framed as being integral to the pursuit of growth - an obsession that is destroying the living planet.
The chapter in Labour’s election manifesto titled ‘Make Britain a clean energy super power’ starts by proclaiming that “The climate and nature crisis is the greatest long-term global challenge we face”. That first sentence is the only mention of this metacrisis. In its place, elaboration of Labour’s ‘cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030’ mission emphasises lower electricity bills, less vulnerability to volatility in the global gas market, growth opportunities for clean technology exports, and the creation of well-paid jobs. It’s hard to escape the impression that the words ‘long-term’ and ‘global’ in the opening sentence were inserted to downplay both the urgency of the climate and nature crisis and the priority with which it believed it should be treated.
Labour’s description of its vision often falsely equates energy with electricity. Yet decarbonising electricity will do little to affect sectors like heavy industry, air travel, and shipping, which are hard to electrify (shipping is particularly significant as it is relied on to import the industrial products that are no longer produced in the UK because of de-industrialisation in the 1980s and high domestic fuel prices in the 2020s). In sectors where transition from fossil fuels to low carbon electricity is more feasible, such as home heating and road travel, expanding clean generation will fuel additional demand as well as replace gas generation.
There is a section on ‘Protecting Nature’ in the clean energy chapter, but this is about introducing well-meaning but small scale measures like new national river walks and forests. That the resource extraction needed to construct the new clean energy infrastructure will be massively damaging to wildlife habitats is ignored, as is the contribution to continued destruction of the living planet that would result from successful pursuit of the manifesto’s wider economic growth goal. And there is no mention, either, of the continued failure to select a suitable site for underground storage of radioactive waste from the nuclear power stations that form part of the ‘clean’ energy portfolio.
Miliband has pursued this vision with a vigour that puts his Cabinet colleagues to shame. Within months, his department published a Clean Power 2030 Action Plan to flesh out how it hopes to achieve the manifesto vision. There is even less reference to the climate and nature crisis here than there is in the manifesto. Instead, the main objective is energy independence. As Miliband stresses in his foreword, borrowing language from the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum: “by sprinting to clean, homegrown energy, we can take back control from the dictators and the petrostates”. It’s a message that draws a veil over the fact that most of the infrastructure needed to access the homegrown energy (solar panels, wind turbines, etc) has to be imported.
It is clear from the detail in the plan that another of the objectives, to lower electricity bills, can only be achieved in the long term - before that, consumers will have to pay for the new infrastructure and for the new grid connections that will be needed. The short-term pain is disguised by the language used in the plan. Clean energy investment, the plan explains, will build an energy system that is “affordable for the long term”, as it provides a “foundation that can bring down consumer bills for good”.
What is also clear is that, even if the planned outputs are achieved, the result will not be 100% clean electricity by 2030, but 95%. This is because although the plan includes clean sources of flexibility, like batteries, it continues to rely on unabated gas to balance the variability of wind and solar energy. As the Plan explains, “We will see a fundamental shift in the role of unabated gas generation, moving from generating almost every day of the year, to an important backup to be used only when essential”.
The Action Plan suggested that a subsequent Warm Homes Plan “will provide help for people, including those from fuel poor households, to live in better insulated homes with the ability to take advantage of new flexible home heating technologies.” But when that Warm Homes Plan was eventually produced, this January, it was clear that the emphasis has moved away from better insulation. This followed evidence of appallingly bad work done by many contractors. Rather than introducing measures to improve the standards of insulation work, it is clear that the main focus has shifted to providing grants and loans for solar panels, home batteries, and heat pumps.
Continued failure to tackle the low insulation standards of most UK homes reflects a preference for growing supply over reducing demand. The Action Plan also fails to take account of the risks of possible power cuts if the grid cannot cope during periods of peak winter demand. Another notable absence is any consideration of long term consequences of climate change for the UK such as the much colder winters that will occur if AMOC (the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation current) collapses as a result of continued rises in global temperature. UK winters will be particularly bleak without effective home insulation, either if there are power cuts or if AMOC collapses.
Blackouts
It’s symptomatic of the tribalism that infects political debate nowadays that most of the criticism of Miliband’s record comes from people who may still understand that the climate is changing, but deny there is a climate crisis. The headline for an article by Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail on 17 January gives some of the flavour - ‘Ed Miliband’s energy policy is madness on stilts. There is no higher priority than stopping him before he ruins Britain.’
Two reports this month were given front-page coverage in most of Britain’s right wing press, in the same week that it was confirmed that the three hottest years on record globally were 2023, 2024, and 2025.
The report that generated the most bizarre headlines is The Cost of Net Zero, written by David Turver for the free-market IEA (Institute of Economic Affairs). The Mail on Sunday’s heading on 11 January was particularly scary - ‘The staggering cost of Ed Miliband’s Net Zero drive finally revealed: £4.5 TRILLION, that’s more than the UK’s entire GDP.’ GDP is of course only one year’s output, while the £4.5 trillion figure is a measure of gross costs over 25 years of the energy that is needed to both meet expanding demand and reach Net Zero by 2050. It’s a figure that is not much greater than the expenditure that would take place over that period without Net Zero. The IEA report is slightly less unhinged than the newspaper headlines, but it does criticise official attempts to measure the difference between the cost of net zero and the cost of continuing with business as usual. This, it suggests, is “misleading”, because it “does not measure the gross cost”. There is a problem with the official costings, which focus on the low operating costs of wind and solar but play down the wider systems costs of the flexible capacity that has to be installed to match supply and demand when so much of the supply will vary with the weather. But confusing gross and net costs, as Turver, the IEA, and the right-wing media do, is not the solution.
The other report is Electrification - can the grid cope?, written by by Kathryn Porter for her Watt-Logic blog. It’s a much more solid piece of work. Porter concentrates on the period up to 2030, and particularly on the implementation challenges of attempting to meet the government’s 95% clean electricity target. She raises important questions about potential insecurities of supply on the path towards that target. One such supply insecurity is created if, as seems likely, the huge growth in electricity demand that is sought outpaces the likely growth in grid capacity, particularly when the energy-guzzling data centres required by AI are added to the demand. Another source of supply insecurity is the fact that the gas turbines the 95% clean electricity plan relies on to balance the variability of wind and solar are nearing the end of their life, and there will not be enough time to replace them. Porter’s analysis suggests that the risk of occasional blackouts, either local or system-wide, will become real sometime before 2030. Indeed, she shows that significant system stress has already been experienced, on 8 January 2025, when the System Operator came perilously close to running out of options when peak demand came close to exceeding the generating capacity that was available.
Responses to these reports by sources that are supportive of the government’s clean electricity mission are illuminating. Carbon Brief is a widely respected website that provides daily briefing newsletters and longer research briefs which are the go-to sources of relevant information for journalists, policymakers, and academics concerned with all things climate. It went to town demolishing the absurdity of the IEA report. But it did not address the important issues raised by Kathryn Porter. It didn’t even name her or reference her report, referring only to the report being “penned by an ‘independent analyst’ with links to climate-sceptic lobbyists”. Porter may have links to climate-sceptic lobbyists (though Carbon Brief don’t say what those links are), but that doesn’t necessarily mean her analysis in this report is flawed. Carbon Brief’s only response was to quote a reassuring statement from a Department of Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson, that the System Operator ”has been clear that the faster we decarbonise, the more secure we are.”
Back to reality?
Ed Miliband is yet to publish a draft Energy Independence Act, despite this having been promised in Labour’s election manifesto. As the title suggests, the emphasis is sure to be about where energy is produced, not how much is produced. But such an Act would be an opportunity to address some of the concerns about slow grid connections and lack of flexible generation that have become increasingly apparent. It would also be an opportunity to be more transparent about the immediate costs of energy transition, and who is going to pay for them.
I imagine that Starmer’s current concern to be seen as acting on cost of living challenges has led to pressure on Miliband to not publish anything that might attract more attention to the UK’s high energy bills. But failure to be transparent about costs and to tackle the blackout risk will have consequences. It’s not just that public opinion will become increasingly disillusioned with energy transition. Inaction that results in blackouts might encourage UK voters to believe in Trump’s deluded suggestion at Davos that exiting fossil fuels to slow global warming could be “the greatest hoax in history.”
Meanwhile the UK government, like governments throughout the world, will continue trying to boost the economic growth that is inching us ever closer to inevitable collapse.