Net Zero Jobs

Going Green Isn't Providing Employment. It Just Wrecks the Economy/

This week’s trucking surprise is that I think that I’ve inadvertently supported one of the great Net Zero lies promulgated by Red Ed Milliband. I'm mortified. Please allow me to explain myself.

Much of my work involves collecting containers from ports and delivering them to their final destination. This week I had two trips of about half a day each to a solar farm construction site. The conversion of agricultural land to solar park is so lucrative for landowners that there were two being built in the area. That's not a criticism of the landowners; as Jeremy Clarkson has demonstrated it's bloody hard to make a profit on agriculture so an offer of £1,000 plus a year per acre, index linked and effectively government backed for 25 years is impossible to ignore and imprudent to refuse. Net result , I spent a day working in the green economy. No doubt Red Ed has included me in the alleged green jobs bonanza that net zero will bring to the UK.

The Green Jobs Scam

Red Ed and his acolytes (Torsten Bell included) made much of the employment bonanza that net zero brings in the campaigning for last year's general election. Torsten even mentioned 25,000 new jobs while campaigning in Swansea West, where the local community was reeling from the loss of steelmaking in Port Talbot. (Those who build philosophical ivory towers have no interest in reality).

We all know that the solar panels are mostly made in China, so there are no UK manufacturing jobs associated with the solar farm I delivered to. The galvanised steel frames might or might not be UK made. My load was large, heavy electric connectors – the big green boxes you see in solar parks. There looked to be a lot of design and engineering (reed value) in them. They were made in Spain, so no UK jobs. Three of the four guys rigging the load to be craned off were British. I don't think the crane driver was. The vast concrete stands that the box stood on will have been locally produced, although it's quite likely that the cement in it was imported. (As I headed south over the Dartford Crossing I again saw the four vast Hanson owned cement silos adjacent to Purfleet docks. That’s where much of the cement required for concreting over the Southeast is unloaded.)

The supervising engineer was British, as was one digger driver. The rest of the twenty or more ground works crew were Bulgarian subcontractors. The site administrative team was a mix of East Europeans. So perhaps 20% of the labour was British. It's going to take an awful lot of solar farms to offset the 2,700 jobs lost at Port Talbot – let alone deliver the 25,000 promised jobs.

Cooking The Books With Heat Pumps

As even Rachel from customer service realises, net zero is expensive and Red Ed's impossible timelines will cause economic disaster. The government’s enthusiasm for net zero may be waning. Inevitably the other colossal intellect in the cabinet, Angela Rayner, is weighing in to keep Red Ed's dream alive by suggesting that from next year all new build homes will be required to have a heat pump. In doing so Ange has achieved the impossible and made Rachel from customer service look like a mathematical titan.

Ange is committed to building 1,500,000 houses in the next five years. Call it 300,000 a year. (that's ambitious in itself, the last time the UK built that many houses was in 1970). Last year the UK built just short of 218,000 homes; Ange is already behind the curve.

The houses built in 1970 were probably heated by town gas (a combination of methane and hydrogen obtained from coal) as the conversion to natural gas only completed in 1977. Gas is a known technology and last year's build will almost all have had gas heating. People understand it, builders know how to install it and architects know how to design for it. Crucially, the infrastructure exists to deliver gas efficiently, reliably and safely.

Last year just 60,000 homes had heat pumps installed. That figure is not going to increase by 500% overnight, any more than house building can increase by 50%. There are supply chain constraints and a shortage of qualified labour. Ange, like Red-Ed, is in la-la land.

Electrons Are more Complicated than Gas

Heat pumps need electricity. They are simply a fridge running in reverse. While power cuts thaw your freezer they'll freeze your living room if you rely on heat pumps. As the temperature falls they need more electricity as they have to pump harder to extract the same amount of heat from the colder air. Notwithstanding well designed houses with lots of insulation and a high thermal mass, as the temperature falls heat pumps require more electricity. That has to come from somewhere and, inevitably, the time that it will be most needed is the evening peak.

While it may be possible to manage demand (with or without consumer consent) via smart meters the base figure is that 300,000 average homes on a cold night will increase UK electricity demand by 2GW (taking the maximum draw of a UK domestic heat pump as 30 Amps).

That’s over half one (still unfinished) Hinkley Point nuclear power station or 20% of the UK’s interconnectors. (Of course, if it’s cold and dark in the UK, it probably is in France and Belgium too, so European electricity might not be available and will be expensive if it is). The UK is already operating at close to zero reserves at peak demand on cold, dark, still nights. So where will the electricity come from? If Ange wants it in a hurry then her only choice is to get some fossil fuel power stations built. They would probably be gas, which today still provides about 30% of our electricity.

So Ange’s plan will need to use gas to convert to electricity to fun the heat pumps that have replaced the gas boilers. The heat pump mafia will say that makes sense as the heat pump is more efficient, which is true in part. However air sourced heat pump efficiency falls as it gets cold. Depending on the configuration and model at temperatures of under -5C a heat pump may require as much electricity in as it gives out in heat. Given the losses in converting gas to electricity (say 40%) and transmitting that electricity to the heat pump (perhaps 10%), the heat pump could actually be using more gas to heat the house than a gas boiler would on the really cold nights.

Heat Pump Subsidies

Heat pumps are more complicated than boilers and therefore more expensive. Currently a gas boiler costs under £1,000 and an equivalent heat pump is around £8,000 (both figures exclude installation costs). To boost take up the government has been subsidising heat pumps to the tune of £7,500 per house.

That extra £7,500 (plus installation) will go on the price of the newbuild home. Call it £15,000 in total, a 6% increase on the £250,000 price of the on the average new build semi in Telford - rather more on the £185,000 semi in Hartlepool (ONS data). The already unaffordable house just got even more out of reach of Generation Z. They may be cheaper to run (depending on the electricity price) but that’s no comfort to the person who can’t afford them.

If Ange intends to subsidise the newbuilds the new-build heat pumps at £7,500 each her housebuilding pan requires another £2 billion a year. Of course, the government has no money of its own, so it’s borrowing the money from the bond markets. Your grandchildren will have to repay the borrowed price of the heat pumps in someone else’s house while you and your children pay the interest.

Heat Pump Jobs

What about the jobs impact on the housing construction?

Sure, the sparks on site will be a little busier installing higher capacity electrics to the heat pump. No doubt the plumber will be as busy installing the heat pump as he would have been installing the central heating. The gas installation team won’t have any work on the housing site – they might have work at the power station, or they might share the future of Port Talbot steel workers.

The heat pumps themselves may well be UK made now – some UK boiler manufacturers are building production lines here. How many they will employ and what proportion of the market they take will depend on price and specifications, as is normal. But for every heat pump that is installed one less boiler will be. The employment will net out and any uplift depends more on the umber of houses built more than net zero.

Whether the market reaches Red Ed’s target of 600,000 heat pumps a year in the next three years (it’s currently 60,000 a year) remains an open question. Half of that target could come from Ange’s new builds. The other half can only come from retrofits to existing houses.

Retrofitting heat pumps is more complicated. For a start the existing heating system must be removed. In the UK 20% of the housing stock is over 100 years old; designed for coal heating and modified 50 years ago to run on gas or oil. . Cavity walls only started being introduced in the 1930s and building standards in the 1960s. At least 20% of houses have solid walls. It’s entirely possible that the best return on investment for many homeowners is insulation, not a heat pump.

But of course dogma trumps reason in the world of Red Ed. Has he asked Rachel from customer service for the extra £2.3 billion a year in subsidies? Has she asked the bond markets, or your grandchildren?

The Bigger Picture

Ultimately all commercial activity has just three cost drivers – labour, materials and energy. (Much of the cost of materials is the labour and energy of extracting and transporting them, but someone got paid for the ore, wood or other material per se.) If energy costs rise the cost of everything rises so prices will rise too. There comes a point when a high energy prices render manufactured products uncompetitive with similar products manufactured in another countries with lower energy costs, as any steel worker knows.

The awful truth of the drive for net zero is that it has increased electricity prices. Wind and solar are more expensive than gas or nuclear, not least because they need gas and nuclear plants to cover for them when the weather doesn’t match demand. The price of gas has a minor effect, the adoption of wind a major one, as the chart below (derived from government DUKES data) shows.

The price of electricity (blue line) should more or less track the price of gas (brown line) as most electricity is made from gas. If renewable energy was cheaper the increasing proportion of renewables (the green line) would reduce the price of electricity. Instead we see the electricity price trebling as the proportion of renewables increases while the gas price remains more or less constant. That graph describes the lunacy of net zero, yet you won’t see it on the BBC.

The increasing price of electricity is a direct consequence of the imposition of renewables. That increase hits all industries – including the much touted AI and data centre industry (Which between them use some 2% of all electricity today, forecast to reach almost 10% by 2030. ) They won’t be built if they can’t be run at a profit – the net zero delusion may yet crush the UK’s nascent AI industry. With that goes this government’s hope of fixing the NHS and delivering growth.

Net Zero Costs Jobs

It’s not just the missing 25,000 “green” jobs that are a problem. With a working population of some 35 million the green 25,000 is just one tenth of one percent; that’s a rounding error. What about the jobs that are being lost due to energy costs and other government policy failures?

Last August the “consensus” forecast for the UK (then under Starmer’s fresh new management) was economic growth of 1.1% in 2024 and 1.3% in 2025. The ONS now thinks the economy grew by just 0.8% in 2024. The OBR has trimmed its growth forecast for 2025 to just 1% and the Bank of England reduced its growth forecast to a mere 0.75% The UK economy is not in good shape.

There are probably economists forging careers on arguing whether this is due to the government’s debt, President Trump’s tariffs or (that old favourite) Brexit. However all of them would agree that operating an economy with an increased energy price renders it uncompetitive and that uncompetitive industries do not create employment. My chart above demonstrates unequivocally that renewable energy is expensive. It therefore causes job loss and with them economic stagnation. More expensive electricity hits consumer and business spending – money spend on essential electricity isn’t available for the discretionary spending that creates growth. Net zero is killing our economy.

Which is not to say that there are not some jobs in the green sector. Far from it, as the chart below (from experimental ONS data ) shows.

It’s notable that more people are employed in environmental charities than in delivering green energy. Spreading the idiocy takes more people than building the infrastructure , I guess. I also suspect that water quality is a job that has little to do with green energy and everything to do with the delivery of potable water, a concern since the industrial revolution. Similarly, dealing with waste is hardly a green job – “where there’s muck there’s brass” and all that. Most manufacturers are for ever seeking to recued the cost of ownership to their customers - energy efficiency being one way of doing that. The significance of green jobs is being institutionally overstated.

Ending The Lunacy

The challenge, costs and complexity of net zero is not hard to work out. I approached it during covid as something to do and ended up writing a book about it. All the data is easily available, mostly on government websites. It all demonstrates, as my first chart does, that net zero is economic lunacy. That probably explains why no other country is as hell bent on it as we are.

The deranged idea of Ed Milliband (at the time a failed Labour leader) was imposed by Theresa May and expanded by her self-absorbed successor (no doubt egged on by his eco-nut wife). Neither Truss nor Sunak had the sense to ditch it and now it’s part of Labour dogma.

No mainstream media organisation dares to question the roll out, let alone the feasibility or even the need. Red Ed and the climate alarmists have completely penetrated the British political establishment in a way that the KGB could only dream of.

Just one political party, Reform UK, opposes this madness. That may have something to do with their astonishing electoral rise. It may also have a fair bit to do with their origins in the real world of the UK, not the ivory towers of Oxford, Whitehall and Westminster. It also gives them one easy to implement path to delivering he growth that has eluded so many governments. Sacking the net zero concept will almost immediately reduce energy prices: an immediate economic boost at zero cost.

There is hope.

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