The UK’s energy bills were £22bn higher over the past decade than they would have been if Conservative governments had not cut “green crap” climate policies.
In 2013, then-prime minister David Cameron was infamously reported to have asked colleagues to “get rid of the green crap”, referring to climate policies supporting better home insulation.
His government later scrapped a “zero-carbon homes” (ZCH) standard for new-build homes, ended support for solar power and blocked the expansion of onshore wind.
The number of homes getting insulated each year is now 98% below 2012 levels, while the growth of onshore wind and solar remains far below previous peaks.
Carbon Brief’s new analysis updates figures published in January 2022, showing that the “green crap” rollbacks left UK billpayers more exposed to record gas prices during the energy crisis.
The £22bn added to energy bills since 2015 as a result of the rollbacks includes £9bn due to not having built more cheap onshore wind, £5bn due to poorly insulated homes, £5bn due to low solar deployment and another £3bn because new homes were less efficient than the ZCH standard.
In total, the UK’s gas demand is 99 terawatt hours (TWh, 14%) higher than it would have been if climate measures had been added at earlier rates, the analysis shows. This means the UK’s net gas imports are 31% higher than they would have been with more “green crap” in place.
‘Green crap’ cuts
In November 2013, a Sun frontpage reported then-prime minister David Cameron’s “solution to soaring energy price[s]” with the headline: “Get rid of the green crap.”
Cameron’s government, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, went on to make a series of changes, including cutting spending on energy-efficiency improvements and introducing the “green deal” efficiency scheme, later described by the National Audit Office as a “fail[ure]”.
The number of homes getting their lofts or cavity walls insulated each year plummeted almost immediately – by 92% and 74% in 2013, respectively – and has never recovered.
As of the latest figures for 2023, the number of homes getting these basic insulation measures each year is 98% lower than in 2012, as shown in the figure below.
If measures had continued to be added at the rate seen in 2012, an extra 7.9m lofts and 5.1m cavity walls would have been insulated by this year, leaving virtually no homes in the UK untreated.
In 2015, the Conservative administration then ended subsidies for onshore wind and introduced planning reforms in England that, together, were widely viewed as a “ban” on the technology.
Following a grace period for projects then already in the pipeline, the capacity of onshore windfarms being completed in the UK each year dropped dramatically after 2017, as shown below.
If onshore wind deployment had continued at the same rate as in 2017 then there would have been an extra 9.3 gigawatts (GW) of capacity by the end of this year.
Similarly, if solar deployment had continued at 2014 levels – which was well below the record rate in 2015 – then there would have been an extra 15GW in place by the end of this year.
Finally, the Conservative government in 2015 also scrapped the zero-carbon homes standard, which had been due to come into force the following year. As a result, around 1.6m new homes have been built since then with lower energy-efficiency standards – and higher energy bills.
Higher bills
The impact on bills depends on the cost of electricity and gas under the domestic price cap. The cap surged in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its decision to restrict gas flows to Europe.
While the price cap has fallen, it remains well above pre-crisis levels.
These changes are reflected in the figure below, which shows how much higher energy bills are as a result of having installed less insulation and fewer wind or solar parks.
Looking back over the past decade, getting rid of the “green crap” has added £22bn to UK bills, of which £19bn (84%) has come since the global energy crisis triggered by Russia.
In terms of gas demand, the UK’s less-well insulated homes now burn an extra 22TWh of gas each year, compared with what they would have needed if more “green crap” had been installed.
Similarly, the UK needs to burn an extra 77TWh of gas per year to generate electricity that would otherwise have come from additional onshore wind and solar capacity.
The estimated extra gas needed in 2024 – some 99TWh – is around 14% of the UK’s annual gas demand. Moreover, the additional demand due to getting rid of “green crap” means the UK’s net gas imports are 31% higher than they would have been, at 315TWh instead of 216TWh.
Methodology
Carbon Brief’s analysis of the impact of having got rid of the “green crap” is based on a series of assumptions about what would have happened if those policy measures had remained in place.
It aggregates the impact in terms of kilowatt hours (kWh) of gas that would have been saved by homes across the UK, relative to current domestic demand, as well as the amount and price of electricity that would have been generated from extra onshore wind or solar parks.
The analysis assumes loft and cavity wall insulation would have been added at the rate seen in 2012. Under this assumption, all remaining uninsulated lofts – and most cavity walls – would have been insulated by this year.
The analysis assumes that homes insulating their lofts or cavity walls would have reduced their gas usage from typical levels, by 6% or 12% respectively, based on analysis from University College London for the Climate Change Committee (CCC).
This gives similar figures, in terms of kilowatt hours (kWh) of gas saved, to the National Energy Efficiency Data-Framework (NEED), which reports the actual impact of home improvements in a sample of thousands of properties.
The analysis for the ZCH standard is based on figures for the actual energy use and floor area of new homes from the Home Builders Federation. This is compared with the recommended energy use per square metre under the standard, if it had been introduced.
Figures for energy use per home are combined with Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures on the number of homes built since 2016, when the standard was due to have come into effect.
The estimate for onshore wind assumes new capacity would have continued to be added at the same rate as in 2017, when 1.8GW was built. In total, this would have meant an extra 9.3GW being built by the end of 2024.
This capacity is assumed to have generated electricity at a load factor of 31% and cost of £46 per megawatt hour (MWh) in 2012 prices, based on a 2017 report from consultancy Baringa. The cost was converted to current prices using the Treasury GDP deflator.
(This is a conservative assumption for load factors. The UK fleet-wide onshore wind load factor is 26%, but newer wind turbines are larger and have higher load factors. The Department of Energy and Net Zero assumes new onshore windfarms have a load factor of 49%.)
The estimate for solar assumes new capacity would have continued to be added at the same rate as in 2014, when 2.6GW was built. This is below the peak year in 2015, when 4.1GW was added.
This would have meant an extra 15GW being built by the end of 2024. This capacity is assumed to have generated electricity at a load factor of 10% and at the same cost as onshore wind.
The energy savings and cheaper electricity that would have occurred with the “green crap” in place is converted to bill impacts in each year, based on the current and previous price cap levels, unit costs and implied wholesale electricity prices.
The post Analysis: Cutting the ‘green crap’ has added £22bn to UK energy bills since 2015 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Cutting the ‘green crap’ has added £22bn to UK energy bills since 2015
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
-
Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks
Plans to build Africa’s second largest oil refinery in ecologically sensitive region criticised as “environmental recklessness” -
Tanzania pushed African nations to oppose fossil fuel transition at COP30
While chairing the African group at the summit, the gas-dependent nation advised the continent’s ministers to block language on transitioning away from fossil fuels
Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
Uganda may see lower oil revenues than expected as costs rise and demand falls
Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
Why the global electrification agenda misses the point on Africa’s energy crisis
Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
Ugandan farmers use British court to try to stop East Africa oil pipeline
Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.
These extra capital expenditures, listed as “CAPEX”, add up to a total of £1.38tn over the 30 years of 2020-50. They are set against operational savings, listed as “OPEX”, of £0.90tn.
Added up over 2020-50, the combined CAPEX and OPEX figures come to a total of £478bn.
In addition to the annual sectoral CAPEX and OPEX figures, the CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet also has a line giving combined totals for each year. It appears that someone has added all of these numbers together, resulting in the savings and costs being counted twice.
This double-counted total for the cost of net-zero amounts to £957bn – as shown in the image below – and it appears to be the source of the claim in the Conservative booklet.
At the time of publication in 2020, the CCC said that the £478bn net cost of net-zero amounted to less than 1% of GDP over 30 years – and that the large investment needed would not only result in savings due to lower fossil-fuel imports, but that it would boost GDP overall, by around 2%.
In 2025, the CCC revised its estimates for investment costs and operating savings to £670bn and £562bn respectively, giving a net total of £108bn over 2025-50, or less than 0.2% of GDP.
Earlier this year, the committee said that cutting emissions to net-zero would cost less than a single fossil-fuel price shock and that doing so would have benefits worth £110bn per year.
Paper trail
The erroneous claim in the Conservative document is referenced to the CCC’s 2020 advice on the UK’s sixth “carbon budget”, which, as explained, does not contain the £957bn figure.