The obesity of the energy department, Part 2

Yesterday, I showed the potentially huge salary savings available in DESNZ, the Whitehall energy department, simply by scrapping Net Zero.

However, most of DESNZ’s spending is in the form of grants and payments to vendors. In order to get a feel for the Net Zero savings here, we can refer to DESNZ’s reporting of payments over £25,000. The data is issued a year in arrears, so the latest information is a year old

I looked at the data for August 2023 and found total payments of £1 billion. Then, by selecting only lines that had an “expense area” obviously related to Net Zero, I was able to isolate the potential savings.

Area	Amount £
Carbon Capture Usage and Storage	1,743,615
Hydrogen and Industrial Carbon Capture	1,916,890
Energy Markets & Analysis	656,472
Energy Security & Resilience	93,060
Industrial Decarbonisation, Emissions Trading	913,462
Clean Heat	27,222,704
NZ Buildings - Domestic	31,769,245
NZ Buildings - Portfolio & Affordability	29,180,891
NZ Buildings and Industry DG Office	26,530
Non-Domestic Affordability	74,449,667
Smart Meters	504,308
Total	168,476,843

Recall that this is only for a single month. Over a year, we might expect 12 times as much, which would be £2 billion.

Added to the salary savings identified in Part 1 of this two-part series of posts, we have a total of £2.75 billion per year.