There is a Great Grid Upgrade going on. It has its own website. From there you can find a link to a childish and patronising video explaining why it’s great. How much misinformation can you spot?

Lowering energy bills

Power from the wind and sun is much cheaper than imported gas. Progress towards green electricity is the most effective way to ensure energy affordability, with home-grown renewable power expected help to lower energy bills in the long term.

I call that one out. It’s becoming tiresome to acknowledge that the marginal cost of electricity generated by the wind and the sun is cheaper than gas whilst also having to point out that by the time whole-system costs are considered, gas remains much the cheaper option. There are many aspects to these extra costs – a few of these include subsidies; curtailment costs (£500 million so far this year alone, and counting); inefficient running of despatchable power sources such as gas-fired power stations, which have to ramp up and down on demand to accommodate the vagaries of unreliable renewables which are given the unfair advantage of primacy in the system; battery storage projects (however limited their utility); the costly difficulties of accommodating the intermittency; and of course, things like the Great Grid Upgrade itself, which is only necessary because of the dispersed nature of wind and solar farms. The Great Grid Upgrade website, funnily enough, doesn’t mention the cost of the Great Grid Upgrade, though it does tell us that it comprises seventeen major infrastructure projects. Bear in mind that this is only in England & Wales. The costs of similar activity in Scotland has to be added on as well. Admittedly, some of this cost would be necessary by way of updating existing networks, but the bulk of it is attributable to accommodating renewables. National Grid tells us as much itself:

To carry this clean energy from where it’s generated – like out in the North Sea by wind turbines – to homes and businesses, we need to build new electricity transmission infrastructure, as well as upgrading existing infrastructure.

According to the Guardian (and the information seems to be broadly confirmed by other sources) this is going to cost £77 billion up to 2030. £35Bn of that is to spent in England and Wales by the National Grid; north of the border SSE is budgeting up to £31BN, while Scottish Power is looking to spend (of course the Guardian uses the word “invest”) £10.5Bn. That’s roughly £2,850 per household. On current estimates. We all know, though, that such estimates usually turn out to be under-estimates. In return, we are told that this should help to reduce the amount of money paid to renewable energy developers to turn off their projects when renewables risk overwhelming the power grid. Apparently ScottishPower estimates that this could [weasel word] save households up to [more weasel words] £167 on their energy bills by 2030. In other words, renewables are already adding – via constraints payments alone – around £167 per annum to consumers’ bills, but if we pay another £2,850 or so per household to accommodate renewables’ geographically scattered nature, then we might remove that part of the increased costs of renewables from our bills – but in the meantime, as more and more renewables developments bombard our beleaguered countryside – those costs might go up before – if – they go down. Genius! Next?

More clean energy for all

The Great Grid Upgrade will enable the electricity grid to carry more clean energy to communities in every part of England and Wales, helping us all reach net zero faster.

First of all, I call out the hijacking of the word “clean” in connection with renewables. To my mind, renewables are neither clean nor green. They are blighting huge areas of the UK’s countryside, damaging peat, killing birds, bats, insects and sea life, devastating local communities, taking agricultural land out of use and destroying wildlife habitats, necessitating hundreds of miles of pylons, and the latest imposition on long-suffering communities is a tsunami of battery energy storage system BESS planning applications. Apart from the fact that BESS won’t remotely deal with the intermittency problems of renewable energy sources, they are also associated with many environmental problems. There are numerous reports dealing with the danger of battery fires and issues associated with mining for their necessary constituents, but I will cite a single study from just over a year ago, as it makes the case against BESS (whilst trying to be supportive) pretty comprehensively:

While the integration of battery storage systems offers numerous benefits for the renewable energy sector, it also brings forth significant safety and environmental concerns (Abaku, & Odimarha, 2024, Familoni, Abaku & Odimarha, 2024, Fetuga, et. al. 2023). The operation, maintenance, and end-of-life disposal of batteries pose risks to human health, property, and the natural environment. Safety hazards such as thermal runaway, fire incidents, and chemical leakage can have catastrophic consequences, necessitating stringent safety measures and protocols (Abaku, Edunjobi & Odimarha, 2024, Familoni, Abaku & Odimarha, 2024, Igbinenikaro & Adewusi, 2024). Additionally, the environmental impacts associated with battery manufacturing, resource extraction, and disposal raise concerns about sustainability and long-term viability (Fan et al.,2020).

Then there’s the claim about all this helping us to reach net zero faster. The patronising video even claims that achieving net zero is pretty much the National Grid’s job. The implication – especially from the video – seems to be that we have to achieve net zero because of climate change. More than that, we have to accelerate our progress towards it – because of climate change. No explanation is offered, however, as to how this will affect climate change, given that every year the rest of the world adds more greenhouse gas emissions than would be saved in their entirety if the UK achieved net zero tomorrow.

Energy security

The Great Grid Upgrade will connect clean energy that’s produced right here in the UK, making our energy supply more self-sufficient and less reliant on imports.

There’s the “clean” energy claim again, but this time with the additional benefits of self-sufficiency and a lesser reliance on imports. One of the problems with this is that intermittency means that by the time the grid is mostly reliant on renewables, we will inevitably be dependent on imports via the interconnectors to keep the lights on (as in fact we already are today). Those interconnectors are subsea cables, as are the cables from the vast swathes of offshore wind farms on which we are to be made increasingly reliant. Then there is the subsea cable from the Vking Energy Wind Farm on Shetland (which seems to be switched off as much as it is working, this far in its life) to the Scottish mainland. All of these subsea cables are weak links in an increasingly uncertain world, a world in which our Prime Minister seems to be preparing us for war.

That this is highly problematic is recognised by Parliament. MPs and Lords are examining threats to undersea cables in an inquiry launched on 24^th January 2025 by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS). Bizarrely (or perhaps inevitably, given Parliament’s unwavering belief in net zero) the Committee seems to be more concerned about internet cables than anything else, though I would argue that if a hostile state switches off the country’s electricity supplies, that will be at least as problematic. I suggest that everything the Committee says about internet cables applies with equal validity to undersea electricty cables:

Although the Government has taken steps to improve maritime security in recent years, concern is growing about both the capability and intent of hostile states. Defence Secretary John Healey told MPs last week that the UK was monitoring Russian spy ship Yantar, which he said was mapping critical underwater infrastructure.

A number of cables in northern European waters – including those providing links between Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and the Shetland Islands – have been severed over the past few years. Over 50 Russian vessels have been observed around areas of high cable density in the Baltic Sea. Further afield, concerns have been raised about Chinese sabotage—particularly around Taiwan.

The inquiry will explore the UK’s ability to defend our subsea infrastructure, and how this might change in the coming years as technology develops.

Making the UK increasingly dependent on undersea cables for our electricity supplies doesn’t improve our energy security. It undermines it.

Jobs and economic boost

By the end of the decade, National Grid will support over 55,000 more UK jobs, and be contributing £14.5bn a year to the UK economy.*

That asterisk takes us to a footnote which simply advises us that the claimed jobs numbers and contribution to the UK economy are from “National Grid and Oxford Economics May 2024. Economic contribution is based on gross value added (GVA)”. No link is offered, and despite the wonders of the internet I have been unable to find the research to which this footnote refers. Suffice it to say that in the absence of justification for the claims made, I remain highly sceptical about them. After all, the promised green jobs haven’t yet materialised and to date much of the money spent on net zero is leaching out of the country to foreign-owned companies, many of whom use foreign staff in their construction work.

Conclusion

At the end of the video, one of the two presenters, in contemptuously dismissing the claim that net zero is “a scam”, laughs and throws away his prop (a card with questions on it that are revealed as sticky strips are peeled away). “Scam”, he snorts. Of course it’s not a scam, he means to suggest – how could anyone be so stupid? I agree. Scam is the wrong word. It’s dangerous, it’s based on a logical misconception, and it’s deranged. Although it’s not a scam, it’s already costing us all dearly, and it will cost us a lot more – both financially and environmentally – before the nightmare ends.