He wrote to Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband to say that the Net Zero targets are an engineering fantasy because the costs are enormously prohibitive and the workforce needed is not available. He is calling for open debate on these issues and says engineering’s professional bodies are not acting responsibly in their silence.
In February, he joined NTD’s Lee Hall to discuss the UK government’s Net Zero fantasy.
To achieve Net Zero, the UK would need to spend around £1.4 trillion, have 40,000 civil and electrical engineers working full-time for 30 years, and three times as many skilled tradespeople, as well as a vastly increased amount of materials, he explained.
The scale of the project to expand the grid and rewire houses would be equivalent to one HS2 programme each and every year between now and 2050, requiring a significant workforce and materials that are not currently available.
“Everybody assumes it’s possible and they go along with the fiction, even people I know who know it’s not possible, they say ‘we’re going along for the ride’,” he said. “I regard that as unethical, and certainly unprofessional on the part of engineers.”
The current electrical grid is not sufficient to support the transition to net zero, with the need for additional energy to power heating and electric vehicles, requiring a potential increase in grid size of 2.7 times, nearly triple the size of the current grid.
Upgrading the grid and retrofitting
homes to support net zero would be extremely costly, with estimates
suggesting a cost of around £1.4 trillion for the grid and potentially
£2 trillion for retrofitting all 26 million houses in the UK....<<<Read More>>>...
