The new Net Zero Carbon by 2050 plan develops on Boris Johnson’s target (see my last post) of getting all UK power from non-fossil sources by 2035, with renewables dominating. Some of that output will be used to power domestic heat pumps, with £5000 grants on offer to help them spread, as detailed in a parallel Heat and Building plan. But hydrogen heating projects may also get support if they are proven to be viable. In addition, electric vehicles/chargers got strong support, with £620m in grants. And there was also support for one more large nuclear plant and for small modular reactors. There’s also an extra £625m for tree-planting and peat restoration and £100 m for Greenhouse Gas Removal innovation.
Business & Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said ‘The policies and spending brought forward in the Net Zero Strategy mean that since the Ten Point Plan we have mobilised over £26 bn of government capital investment for the green industrial revolution. Along with regulations, this will support 190,000 jobs by 2025, and 440,000 jobs by 2030, and leverage up to £90 bn of private investment by 2030. This will put us on an ambitious path to meet our Sixth Carbon Budget and our Nationally Determined Contribution, cutting emissions by at least 68% by 2030 on 1990 levels, and reaching net zero by 2050’.
However, there were criticism that there was not enough detail on the carbon savings, and in general that it did not go far enough, with insufficient attention to deployment. Boris Johnson’s introduction did seem rather vague and Panglossian: ‘For years, going green was inextricably bound up with a sense that we have to sacrifice the things we love. But this strategy shows how we can build back greener, without so much as a hair shirt in sight. In 2050, we will still be driving cars, flying planes and heating our homes, but our cars will be electric gliding silently around our cities, our planes will be zero emission allowing us to fly guilt-free, and our homes will be heated by cheap reliable power drawn from the winds of the North Sea’. But in the main report there were some solid commitments, even if they were not new ones - 40GW of offshore wind by 2030, including 1 GW of floating systems, targets already set in the 2020 Energy White Paper. Along with 5GW of hydrogen production by 2030, for a range of possible end uses.
In terms of green heating, for the moment, heat pumps are favoured, but hydrogen is in with a chance. The Net Zero plan says ‘we are setting the ambition that, by 2035, once costs have come down, all new heating appliances installed in homes and workplaces will be low-carbon technologies, like electric heat pumps or hydrogen boilers. We will take a decision in 2026 on the role of hydrogen heating’.
Perhaps stung by earlier stories about central heating boilers imminently being ripped out, the government are looking to ‘a gradual transition that works with the grain of consumer choice’. But ‘we expect a heat pump to be as cheap to buy and run as a gas boiler this decade’. They also say ‘we want to reduce electricity costs so when the current gas spike subsides we will look at options to shift or rebalance energy levies (such as RO and FiTs) and obligations (such ECO) away from electricity to gas over this decade. This will include looking at options to expand carbon pricing and remove costs from electricity bills while ensuring that we continue to limit any impact on bills overall’.
So, no sudden changes, but the expectation is that, by 2035, no new gas boilers will be sold and that the new £60 million Heat Pump Ready programme ‘will provide funding for pioneering heat pump technologies and will support the government’s target of 600,000 installations a year by 2028’. A long way to go on that and on converting the majority of UK 29 million domestic dwellings…although there have been some signs of support for change.
On new nuclear, the aim is to secure a final investment decision on a new large-scale nuclear plant by the end of this Parliament, with EDF’s proposed Sizewell C EPR being seen by some as a possibility, if Chinese finance can be avoided. The Net Zero plan says ‘to facilitate a decision this Parliament, we plan to establish the Regulated Asset Base model to fund new nuclear projects at a low cost of capital, saving consumers money’. A bit of stretch that last bit of framing. The RAB idea is that consumers will pay for construction via surcharges on their bills before it built, so they take the investment risk. In addition, the government is to launch a new £120 million Future Nuclear Enabling Fund, retaining options for future nuclear technologies, including Small Modular Reactors, with a number of potential sites including Wylfa in North Wales.
The commitment to nuclear is justified in part by the need to ensure grid security and stability, although the plan stops short of labeling nuclear plants as flexible: ‘To ensure the system is reliable, intermittent renewables need to be complemented by known technologies such as nuclear and power CCUS, and flexible technologies such as interconnectors, electricity storage, and demand-side response’. Well yes, and, as it says, ‘these flexible technologies can help to minimize the amount of generation and network capacity needed to meet our demand needs, for example, by matching new sources of demand to renewable generation both nationally and locally’. But it’s not clear how inflexible nuclear could do that- it’s more likely to get in the way of flexible balanced generation/consumption.
You might expect to see analysis of exactly how this type of balancing is envisaged in the plan, as well as more detail on the role of carbon capture and negative carbon options. However, apart from saying we needed more CCUS than the ‘one plant by 2030’ that had been proposed in the Energy White Paper, all we have are some generalised Sankey diagram-based 2050 scenarios and a very broad-stroke outline ‘indicative delivery pathway’ to 2037. Along with some mini-case studies of ongoing/planned projects, padding out an arguably rather technically thin report.
The Net zero plan had almost no mention of insulation, which some see as a vital first step to cutting emissions, and indeed as essential if heat pumps are going to work efficiently. The Heat plan was thankfully more developed, with some specific energy saving programmes, but, even so, Ed Miliband, Labour’s shadow business secretary, said its £3.9bn programme was still a ‘meagre, unambitious and wholly inadequate response’. He added: ‘families up and down the country desperately needed Labour’s 10-year plan investing £6bn a year for home insulation and zero carbon heating to cut bills by £400 per year, improve our energy security, create jobs and reduce carbon emissions.’
Green groups tended to focus on the omissions. For example there was nothing much in the plan on dietary change- a parallel report on that and other social changes was withdrawn! And how did all this stand up against the government's £27 billion road programme and its support for new coal and other fossil projects? And we will have to wait until next year for the plan for bioenergy.
It will be interesting to see how the Net Zero plan goes down at COP26. It is claimed to be able to get energy demand and emissions down dramatically by 2037, and more later, but it remains to be seen if it really will be possible for the UK to achieve all of that.
Comments
Post a Comment