The Conservative government has been cutting back on some green policies, with, for example, the date after which the sale of new petrol and diesel cars are banned being shifted from 2030 to 2035, the energy efficiency task force being shut down and the Hydrogen levy being abandoned. These and other green policy changes will have impacts and they have attracted some strong reactions.
Although the conservatives have nevertheless still maintained support for renewables, they have had problems with the deployment of heat pumps, and also planning issues with on shore wind and large solar farm, and even the much vaunted off-shore wind programme has gone a bit amiss. So it is not surprising that Labour thinks it can take a lead in pushing green energy policies. Ed Miliband, shadow secretary of state of climate change and net zero, announced plans to double onshore wind, treble solar and quadruple offshore wind as part of his speech at the recent Labour Party conference- although these targets had actually been established earlier, as had its ‘Green Prosperity plan’ and the idea of making the UK and energy superpower.
However there is now a bit more detail. In a new policy statement, Labour says would ‘rewire Britain’, building ‘the clean energy grid the country needs’, claiming that this would unlock £200bn of private investment. It says that a grid transformation is essential ‘if the UK wants to cut energy bills, deliver energy independence, and grow our economy. As businesses seek to move ahead in the industries of the future, the queue for grid connections is growing out of control, with more than £200bn worth of privately-funded projects now stuck. New grid connection dates are now being offered for 15 years’ time, in the late 2030s.'
So, the statement said, Labour ‘will remove the barriers to facilitate the largest upgrade to national transmission infrastructure in a generation, bringing cheaper, cleaner power, energy security, and jobs to every corner of the country. Every household and business in Britain will feel the benefit of this plan, which will contribute to Labour’s plan to cut £93bn from UK energy bills by 2030’. The plan will also end ‘the farcical situation in which taxpayer’s have often had to pay up to a staggering £62m per day (ONS) to renewable developers simply to turn off their energy generation, because the grid cannot deal with the capacity’.
Crucially, Labour’s plan ‘will put GB Energy, Labour’s new publicly-owned energy company, to work in coordinating the transmission operators to launch a super-tender which will procure the grid supply chain that Britain needs. This will ensure we are at the front of a global queue, that we cut costs for billpayers, and that we provide a clear demand signal to manufacturers to build up their supply chains here in Britain, creating jobs. On top of that, to deliver the investment, capacity, skills, and urgency to build the grid we need, Labour will open up new grid construction to competitive tendering, with GB Energy looking to bid into that competition to build or co-build that new grid where necessary’.
These policies will cost money- and the leadership may not be able to carry them out, at least not in the early stages. The £28 bn at one time talked about as being earmarked for the green policies seems to have evaporated at least for now. But Deputy Leader Angela Rayner did recently say that Labour plans to use a fund of up to £500m a year over the first five years of government to provide grants to incentivise companies developing clean technologies like offshore wind, onshore wind, solar, hydrogen and carbon capture. Though, like the Tories, she also backed nuclear: ‘The UK has been a global leader in nuclear energy’ and ‘there is a real need for us to protect that, it will play a key role getting towards net zero’. But that’s likely to be a very expensive long-term programme, with, on past performance, cost escalation and project delays being likely. Something the Labour leadership may find hard to swallow when push comes to shove and large amounts tax payer subsidy and customer cash are called for.
The Labour leadership certainly seem not to share the massive grass roots party and union support for radical energy nationalisation, which would also be likely to very costly in the short term. But Labour’s commitment to GB Energy, based in Scotland, as a publicly owned company, may offer a way forward – if they win the election, whenever that is.
There are of course plenty of things that can go wrong, for example with Labour’s new local planning and regulation approach, with emission zones clearly being a politically sensitive topic, as London’s Labour Mayor discovered. He abandoned the planned Zero Emission Zone after the backlash over the extension of the ultra-low emission zone.
James Alexander, chief executive of the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, told Politics Home that, more generally, ‘one of the challenges is we don’t know what the state of the economy will be or when an election will happen, so neither party is really setting out clearly what their propositions would be.’ However, Nick Robins, professor in sustainable finance at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, was quite positive: ‘There’s a lot in the green prosperity plan to welcome, particularly around how it focuses on using the transition to deliver decent jobs, strengthen local clean energy initiatives and retrofit the country’s housing stock. The proposals to create Great British Energy and a new national wealth fund could prove transformational. But more detail is needed to see how they will connect with existing public finance institutions and partner with the private sector’.
*I missed the last two posts in this supposedly weekly blog series, since I was in Spain, attending the birth of my first grandson. No apologies for that (he’s lovely), but we should be back on track with the weekly Renew extra now!
Comments
Post a Comment