Are Jonathon Porritt and the Greens honest? Or are they liars and/or fools?

Two days ago on my car radio I heard Jonathon Porritt being interviewed on World At One by a sycophantically grovelling and depressingly ill-informed BBC supposed “journalist” about the Government’s decision to build a new nuclear power station. Porritt is a supporter of the Green Party, was formerly Director of Friends of the Earth and for decades has campaigned on environmental issues.

If I heard correctly, one of the absurd claims made by the great Greenie Porritt was that “the Government has put all its eggs in the nuclear basket”. Another was that nuclear power was much more expensive than the Greenies’ wonderful “renewable energy” – windfarms, solar, biomass, tidal etc. This was backed up by Caroline Lucas, member of Parliament for the Greens, who also shared her great wisdom with us saying, “This is a terrible deal for billpayers.”

So today, I’ll just try to refute these two common Greenie (IMHO) lies.

We currently get about 18 % of our power from nuclear power stations. Fifteen of our sixteen reactors will be closed by 2023, leaving just Sizewell B operating. Sizewell B provides about 2% of our energy and the new Hinkley Point reactor will provide about another 7%. So, when Hinkley Point is running in 10 or 11 years time, we’ll get just 9% of our power from nuclear. That’s half of what we get at the moment and doesn’t look to me like, as Porritt claimed, “the Government has put all its eggs in the nuclear basket”. Can Porritt not do simple arithmetic? Doesn’t he realise that 9% is half of 18%? Or was he just exaggerating to make a point? Or was he deliberately lying, hoping that none of the listeners would have the time or energy to get the real facts? Who knows? But this does suggest we can’t trust some of the things the great Greenie says.

Then there was claim number 2 – that nuclear would be more expensive than Jonathon Porritt’s and Caroline Lucas’s beloved windfarms and solar and biomass and tidal. Let’s test that. The wholesale energy price in Britain is currently around £44/MWh. The new Hinkley Point nuclear power station will be guaranteed £92.50/MWh – over double the current wholesale price. In comparison, producers of onshore wind power already get £100/MWh: offshore wind £155/MWh: solar £125/MWh….(see chart)

I didn’t include wave and tidal power as, at £305/MWh, they would be well off the scale of the chart. So, if my figures are correct, nuclear looks like being cheaper than the Greenies’ forms of “renewable energy” and if I heard Porritt correctly, he was being more than economical with the truth.

Though, of course, we don’t really need any of Porritt’s cherished but completely inefficient windfarms, or his ghastly solar farms in Britain where the sun seldom shines, or his ludicrously environmentally-damaging biomass. We’ve got lots of coal, there will be a glut of gas in a few years and new cheaper nuclear technologies will soon be feasible. But we’re committing economic suicide by increasing the amount of expensive “renewable energy” because our worthless politicians listen to people like Porritt and needlessly force up energy prices making our industries uncompetitive and destroying jobs.

However, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Jonathon Porritt is entitled to claim a baronetcy awarded to his father, becoming The Hon.Sir Jonathon Porritt, 2nd Baronet, but has so far declined to do so. So I guess Porritt has a few million tucked away somewhere. And Caroline Lucas will have her wonderful MP’s pension and will probably get a well-paid quango job and/or pushed up into the Lords if she’s chucked out of Parliament. They’ll probably live like multimillionaires for the rest of their lives. So why should they worry that their demented policies are bankrupting British companies and throwing British workers on the dole?