For years, the public has been told that Net Zero will create jobs, reduce energy bills, improve health and protect the climate.
What the public has not been given is something much more basic:
A complete account of how much the programme will require households, businesses, taxpayers and energy consumers to finance.
Not a theoretical estimate of future social benefits.
Not a model that deducts an assumed carbon value.
Not a ministerial announcement covering one department, one auction or one spending programme.
A proper financial account showing the money already spent, the payments being recovered through bills, the capital that must still be raised, the contractual liabilities already entered into and the major costs that have never been fully priced.
Our new standalone investigation, The True Scale of the Costs Associated with the Pursuit of Net Zero, begins that process.
It is deliberately described as a research base rather than a final national invoice. Its purpose is to record expenditure, capital mobilisation, contractual liabilities and required investment before deducting modelled savings, carbon values or avoided hypothetical costs.
True_Scale_of_Net_Zero_Costs_Standalone_Investigation_v0.1.pdf
That distinction matters.
Because a projected benefit does not pay today’s electricity bill. A theoretical future fuel saving does not finance a new transmission line. A monetised carbon value does not repay the construction cost of a power station, heat pump, substation or offshore cable.
Before politicians tell the country what the programme may eventually save, they should first tell us what it requires us to finance.
There is no single Net Zero price tag
The first important finding is that no honest investigation should simply collect every large figure it can find and add them together.
Annual expenditure, capital investment, future contractual liabilities and discounted economic modelling are different financial objects. Many of the figures overlap. Some cover the same assets through different accounting systems. Others are expressed in different price years or use different assumptions.
The report therefore separates the costs into four main ledgers:
Current annual financial flows.
The gross resource requirement of the latest carbon pathway.
Recognised contractual liabilities.
Costs and obligations for which no consolidated official total exists.
The investigation’s purpose is not to manufacture the largest possible headline. It is to identify the largest cost account that can be defended using official papers, audited accounts, regulatory decisions and transparent calculations. Figures must not be stacked without first testing for overlap.
True_Scale_of_Net_Zero_Costs_Standalone_Investigation_v0.1.pdf
That discipline makes the findings more serious, not less serious.
Four figures reveal the scale
The present scale of the programme is best understood through four separate figures.
Approximately £58 billion to £68 billion a year
The investigation identifies a current gross annual flow of approximately £58 billion to £68 billion.
This combines a selected support and system-cost floor of £17.698 billion with approximately £40 billion to £50 billion a year of Clean Power capital mobilisation.
It is not being presented as a fully reconciled national-account total. Some support payments and investment flows may relate to the same asset base. It is, however, a powerful indicator of the volume of money being directed through the system every year.
Approximately £1.205 trillion
The latest Carbon Budget 7 pathway data imply a calculated gross discounted resource requirement of approximately £1.205 trillion between 2025 and 2050.
This consists of £880 billion in capital and financing costs and an implied £325 billion of gross operating costs.
The Government’s published presentation contains a negative £120 billion net operating line because it includes £445 billion of modelled fossil-fuel savings.
Once those savings are placed in a separate benefits ledger, the underlying gross operating requirement becomes visible.
The calculation is therefore:
£880 billion capital and financing
plus £325 billion gross operating costs
equals approximately £1.205 trillion.
This is not a Treasury cheque. It is not nominal cash spending in one year. It is a discounted, economy-wide resource requirement over 25 years.
But it demonstrates the true scale of the pathway before theoretical savings are used to reduce the headline.
£116.181 billion of recognised gross liabilities
At 31 March 2026, official accounts recognised:
£113.928 billion of gross Contracts for Difference liabilities;
£2.253 billion of gross Low Carbon Hydrogen Agreement liabilities.
Together, these amount to £116.181 billion of recognised gross contractual liabilities.
These sums are not money already paid. Fair-value estimates can change with wholesale prices, inflation, indexation and discount rates.
But neither are they imaginary.
They represent expected future financial flows arising from contracts that have already been entered into. In the case of the hydrogen agreements, no producer payments had yet been made, but liabilities were recognised because qualifying production would create future support payments.
No official total for the unpriced remainder
The fourth figure is perhaps the most revealing:
There is no figure.
No official consolidated total exists for many of the wider consequences surrounding the programme.
These include household replacement costs, future electricity-distribution reinforcement, land rights, financing, lost tax revenue, food-production effects, resilience costs, decommissioning and replacement cycles after 2050.
The absence of a published figure does not mean the cost is zero. It means the cost has not been reconciled.
The annual cost floor is already £17.698 billion
The investigation constructs a deliberately narrow same-year minimum cost floor for 2024/25 using eight identifiable official expenditure or scheme lines:
Renewables Obligation: £7.700 billion;
Electricity balancing: £2.700 billion;
Contracts for Difference: £2.198 billion;
Feed-in Tariffs: £1.830 billion;
Capacity Market: £1.246 billion;
Renewable Heat Incentive: £1.209 billion;
Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund: £453 million;
Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme: £362 million.
Together, these produce a minimum identified floor of £17.698 billion in 2024/25.
Even this figure excludes capital construction, network investment, the Energy Company Obligation, smart meters, planning administration, land compensation, most household purchases, financing and decommissioning.
It is therefore not the annual cost of Net Zero.
It is the part of the annual cost that can already be clearly identified from a limited group of official schemes.
The latest accounts also show that some current payments are rising. In 2025/26, Contracts for Difference payments reached £2.924 billion, Capacity Market payments reached £1.612 billion and Renewable Heat Incentive expenditure was £1.218 billion.
A fully audited cross-scheme total for that year is not yet available because the latest Renewables Obligation and Feed-in Tariff reports cover the preceding scheme year.
Private finance does not mean free infrastructure
One of the most misleading assumptions in public debate is that expenditure ceases to be a public concern when the initial capital comes from a private investor.
It does not.
A network company may raise private finance, but regulated revenues are recovered through consumer charges.
A renewable generator may be privately owned, but support may be provided through levies, contracts or guaranteed revenue mechanisms.
A household may be required to purchase a new heating system or vehicle, but the fact that the payment does not appear in a departmental budget does not make it economically cost-free.
The report therefore distinguishes between public spending, levy-funded support, regulated network allowances, recognised liabilities and mandated private expenditure.
Different financing routes change where the cost first appears. They do not necessarily change who ultimately carries it.
In many cases, the payer is still the household , through taxation, energy bills, product prices, borrowing costs or compulsory replacement expenditure.
The capital programme is vast , and overlapping
The Spending Review allocated the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero £62.8 billion in capital and £7.6 billion in resource funding from 2025/26 to 2029/30.
Clean Power 2030 separately models around £40 billion a year of generation and transmission investment between 2025 and 2030.
Ofgem initially approved £28 billion under RIIO-3 and indicated that the network pipeline could reach around £90 billion by 2031.
These figures must not simply be added together because they overlap and use different accounting bases. But they show the scale of capital now being mobilised through public budgets, regulated charges and private investment requirements.
The critical issue is not merely who provides the initial capital.
It is how that capital is repaid, what return investors receive, how financing costs are indexed and how much is ultimately recovered from consumers.
A project financed privately today may become a long-term charge on household bills tomorrow.
The missing costs could be enormous
Some of the most consequential costs remain outside the published headline totals.
The report identifies major unresolved categories, including:
future distribution-network reinforcement;
offshore transmission and local substations;
constraint and curtailment payments;
reserve capacity and system-stability services;
long-duration storage;
land purchase and compulsory acquisition;
tenant and farmer compensation;
biodiversity and habitat obligations lasting 30 years or more;
household purchases of vehicles, heating systems and electrical upgrades;
interest during construction and inflation indexation;
decommissioning, recycling and site restoration;
changes in food production and import dependence;
the administration and enforcement of the new planning, spatial and nature systems.
The investigation also warns that domestic food effects, reduced farm-business value and the cost of maintaining strategic food resilience have not been reconciled into one national account.
This is particularly important for rural communities.
Land is not an empty platform onto which infrastructure can be placed without consequence. It produces food, stores water, supports businesses, sustains communities and has an environmental and strategic value beyond its market price.
When agricultural land is removed from production or burdened by easements, pylons, substations, energy crops, habitat obligations and access routes, the consequences do not disappear merely because they are not included in a departmental headline.
Benefits and costs must be reported separately
None of this means that benefits should be ignored.
A policy may create genuine health, environmental, security or economic benefits.
But those benefits belong in a benefits account.
The real-money account should record capital, financing, subsidies, levies, network revenues, maintenance, replacement, land, mitigation and decommissioning.
The social-appraisal account should separately record carbon values, air-quality benefits, natural-capital values, assumed fuel savings and avoided counterfactual costs.
Combining the two too early allows theoretical values to obscure the amount of real money that must first be raised.
A projected social benefit may help justify expenditure.
It does not create the cash flow that repays an asset.
This is now a democratic issue
The public is not being shown one programme.
It is being shown fragments.
One day it is a Contracts for Difference auction.
The next it is a transmission scheme.
Then a Warm Homes announcement, a hydrogen contract, a new nuclear settlement, a farm-payment reform, an Ofgem price control or an individual solar development.
Each decision may be presented as separate. Financially and physically, however, they form part of a much larger transformation.
The danger is that the country becomes committed through contracts, regulated assets, land agreements and long-term liabilities before the total consequences have been made visible.
By the time the complete burden becomes apparent, reversal may be legally, politically and financially prohibitive.
The investigation concludes that a genuine democratic mandate requires the gross financing chain to be disclosed before the policy is locked in , not afterwards.
Parliament needs a United Kingdom Cost Consequence Statement
Before further binding stages of the programme are approved, Parliament and the devolved legislatures should receive an annually updated United Kingdom Cost Consequence Statement.
It should contain:
a same-year gross expenditure account;
a schedule of long-term contractual liabilities;
a regulated-asset and consumer-repayment schedule;
an overlap matrix preventing double counting;
a four-nation land and farming account;
a household and business compliance-cost account;
a full land, food, mitigation and decommissioning account;
a separate ledger for benefits and avoided costs;
and a comparison with alternative energy pathways using the same reliability, security and emissions standards.
These are not unreasonable demands.
They are the minimum financial information that should accompany a programme capable of reshaping the country’s energy system, housing, transport, industry, farming, landscape and public finances.
The question Government must now answer
Our investigation does not claim that the four main figures can be added together.
It does not claim that £1.205 trillion is an immediate bill.
It does not pretend that every farming or infrastructure programme is wholly additional to Net Zero.
Its conclusion is more careful , and more difficult to dismiss.
The official evidence already demonstrates:
a selected annual cost floor of £17.698 billion;
approximately £40 billion to £50 billion a year of Clean Power capital mobilisation;
£116.181 billion of recognised gross CfD and hydrogen liabilities;
a calculated Carbon Budget 7 gross resource requirement of approximately £1.205 trillion before modelled fossil-fuel savings;
and extensive household, network, land, financing, fiscal and decommissioning costs for which no complete national total has been published.
These measures overlap and must remain separate. Together, however, they establish that Net Zero is operating at a trillion-pound scale while large parts of the final burden remain unreconciled.
The question is no longer whether the programme costs money.
The question is why a transformation of this magnitude has been allowed to proceed without a comprehensive, annually updated and publicly auditable national cost account.
Before more contracts are signed, more costs are placed on bills and more of the countryside is committed, Parliament must demand the full financial picture.
The British public is being required to fund this transformation.
It has the right to see the account.
Shane Oxer.
Hope to Save Our Countryside
SAY NO TO THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR LAND 
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