Fantasy policy in Whitehall

A little while ago, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero posted a highly amusing response to a Parliamentary question from Dame Andrea Jenkyns about offshore windfarms, namely the performance of the fleet in recent years (its capacity factor – the output as a percentage of the maximum theoretical output), and the department’s predictions of how that performance will change in the next few years.

Here are the results, as presented by Andrew Bowie, one of the junior ministers in the department. As you can see, his civil servants reckon that the fleet output is going to soar. In two years’ time.

UK offshore wind fleet capacity factor – fleet actual and DESNZ prediction.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the preposterousness of this claim. There is no plausible deniability here, DESNZ is simply assuming away the problem of the extraordinary costs of Net Zero by imagining that everything is going to get far, far better in the very near future. You can guarantee that by 2025, those elusive gains will have slipped just a couple more years into the future.

It’s not so much “the grown-ups are back in charge” as “the fantasists have taken over”.