When it comes to realism and logic, whom would you trust more: engineers or politicians?
This is an especially pertinent question when all the governments in the Western world are committed to ‘net zero carbon emissions’, but it is the energy providers and manufacturing companies who have to try to meet that improbable target.
Many of those businesses say what the politicians want to hear — especially when they are provided with vast subsidies in the process.
But, last week, two of the most knowledgeable and involved spoke up to provide the facts rather than the gloss.
The first was the former chairman of Siemens Energy, the German industrial behemoth that is the biggest manufacturer of wind turbines in the UK.
Joe Kaeser, whose old firm lost almost £4 billion in 2023, largely because of problems in the offshore-wind business, ridiculed the fashionable notion that wind power is ‘cheap’, saying: ‘I think the net zero targets are…
