Tim Worstall keeps turning up amazing new facts about DECC's 2050 calculator. He has been digging through the spreadsheets underlying the model and has got stuck:
I've looked around the DECC spreadsheet trying to find the price assumptions they make about natural gas and other fossil fuels. And I'm afraid I just can't find it, just can't find it at all. Cannot see what prices they have assumed, whether they've got a version that deals with the implication of having lots and lots and lots of very cheap natural gas or not.
And I have a very strong feeling that that is one of the possibilities that they should tell us the results of. For they are telling us that whatever we do is going to cost £200 billion or more in the coming years, £5,000 per year per household. And we know that building gas fired power stations is cheaper than almost any other form of energy generation. So if we are floating on that much gas and we can get it for something like the American price, might that not reduce the costs per household?
The lack of transparency in the 2050 model's assumptions is quite, quite extraordinary.
Can anyone else smell something fishy?