A Spreadsheet Slip Doubled the Cost of Net Zero. The CCC Puts It at £108bn

Kemi Badenoch launched The Right Way at the Conservative conference in Birmingham on 4 October. The booklet states: “In 2020, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimated that its route to net zero would cost £957bn.” The CCC’s own spreadsheet from that year totals £478bn, a factcheck by Carbon Brief’s Dr Simon Evans found on 9 October.

In its 2025 advice, the CCC cut the net cost to £108bn between 2025 and 2050. That’s about 0.2% of GDP a year. Capital investment falls to £670bn, against £562bn in operating savings.

The same booklet pledges to repeal and replace the Climate Change Act, the 2008 law behind the UK’s carbon budgets. Parliament added the 2050 net zero target in 2019, under Theresa May. In her foreword, Badenoch writes that “Net Zero was legislated for before we had an economically feasible route to get there.”

How £478bn became £957bn

The CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet lists extra capital spending by sector, from power stations to heat pumps and electric cars. Those lines add up to £1.38tn over 2020 to 2050, against £0.90tn of operating savings. A separate row in the same table carries the annual totals. Adding that row to the sector lines counts every cost and saving twice, which produces £957bn.

Carbon Brief traced the figure to January. David Turver, a retired engineer, used it in a Spectator article and in a paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think tank. The Great British Think Tank repeated it in March, and it then appeared in the booklet.

“We don’t recognise this number,” a CCC spokesperson told the Guardian. “The committee has previously offered to meet with Ms Badenoch and talk her through our advice. That offer is, of course, still open.”

No answer from the party

The Guardian contacted the Conservatives and Badenoch’s office, and reported no response. By 12 October, RESET had found no Conservative reply in coverage of the error.

The institute published Turver’s paper on 13 January. Shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho said at the time: “It beggars belief that none of our ‘independent’ energy bodies can publish an accurate figure.” Turver argued that the CCC’s figure compares spending with a notional baseline. Using modelling by the National Energy System Operator, he put gross cash costs at £7.6tn. Carbon Brief has pointed out that gross totals of this kind treat gas boilers, petrol cars and the fuel they burn as free.

Costs against price shocks

In March, the CCC said one price spike on the scale of 2022 could cost as much as net zero’s whole net bill to 2050. Its analysis put net benefits at an average of £110bn a year to 2050, starting from 2029. If a 2022-scale spike hit in 2040, average household energy bills would rise 59% on a high-carbon path. On the net zero path, they would rise 4%. During this year’s Hormuz crisis, wind and solar saved the UK £5.9bn in gas imports.

A correction to the £957bn figure would be the first test for the party. The second is which estimate of the cost of net zero it sets beside its plan to repeal the Climate Change Act.