If at first you don’t succeed…keep digging

Simon Evans, from Carbon Brief, has just made one of his regular attempts to convince us he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Regular readers will recall that Evans is the man who claimed, ludicrously, that you could get power 9 times more cheaply from a windfarm than you could from a gas turbine.

To get this result, recall, he took electricity prices at the peak of the energy crisis, denominated in Euros, and then compared them to wild predictions of wind farm costs denominated in Sterling. Having this pointed out to him was a bit embarrassing I imagine.

Undeterred, Dr Evans' latest foray into the world of high finance is an attempt to school an eminent economics professor on…economics. If at first you don’t succeed, eh?

Evans has taken issue with Gordon Hughes’ latest article in the Telegraph, which makes the (you would have thought uncontroversial) point that Labour’s £28 billion spending pledge (now an ex-pledge) would have hit the public very hard.

Unfortunately, Evans’ grasp of the issues doesn’t seem to have become any stronger in the intervening months. He says:

[Hughes] claims, without evidence, that decarbonising UK electricity costs £28bn/yr”

…and goes on to suggest that the figure is for decarbonising the whole economy.

Hmm. Evans probably wants to take a look at the Royal Society’s recent report, which said a decarbonised grid would cost £37 billion per year. (It’s actually more than that, because, as the Royal Society lead author admits, they haven’t done their demand modelling correctly).

Evans goes on to say that “electricity investment is not based on public funds”. Well no, but the £28 billion was what Labour said they wanted to spend. Moreover, if the government spent nothing at all and the investment was all private, it would still have to be paid for by consumers.

The Green billionaires who fund Carbon Brief are not getting their money’s worth are they?