Sometimes you can have too much net zero. Rewind to last year’s green energy auction and that was precisely how many bids there were for offshore wind farms: the result of the last government setting a cheapskate strike price that failed to adjust for supply chain inflation or a higher cost of capital.
Labour’s fixed that, in time-honoured fashion, by chucking more public money at the problem: lifting an already increased budget for annual top-up payments by £530 million to £1.55 billion. This time, though, it’s not a cause for criticism. Britain couldn’t afford another flop — particularly when Sir Keir Starmer has made a heroic, and almost certainly undeliverable, pledge to have decarbonised our electricity grid by 2030.
Anyway, among a record 131