This week, Iona and Paul Brown discuss the hidden costs of renewables, net zero, and the energy transition

Paul Brown is an engineer who has worked in various disciplines—mechanical, drilling, manufacturing, and now building software systems for engineering businesses.

He argues that the current approach to energy and environmental policy isn’t just unsustainable but it has put us on a collision course with reality.

We discuss the hidden costs of renewables, net zero , and the energy transition and the skewed political and economic incentives driving many countries towards unsustainable energy policies.

Solar energy is intermittent and it doesn’t synchronise with demand, so you need a place to store that solar energy when you’ve got excess energy.

You need a storage facility, a battery or a hydroelectric facility, that’s a cost associated with that.

And then you have to overbuild capacity again, which means that the subsidies are even more inefficient.

Solar and wind are supposedly cheaper and more efficient than nuclear and therefore we need to subsidise solar and wind and outlaw nuclear.

That just that reeks of a planned economy to me. It doesn’t sound like a product that’s actually more efficient and profitable and cheaper.