Renew Extra Weekly

 Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security & Net Zero did quite well in the October Budget , with a 35% capital uplift for 2025/26, although not much of that will go to new renewables-  just £134m to support the delivery of port infrastructure to facilitate floating offshore wind and backing for 11 green hydrogen projects in industrial sites around the country. That’s welcome, so is the £1bn for small scale local renewable projects.  But it’s still quite small compared to the main funding allocations for 2025-26, which went to Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage, a massive £3.9bn, and to nuclear, with £2.7bn for the initial phase of the Sizewell plant programme, plus, announced later, around £1bn for the winning Small Modular Reactors in the UK SMR competition .  However, there was also, as the first step in the Warm Homes Plan, a provision of over £1 bn in 2025, and to provide supply chain certainty, a guarantee of investment of an initial £3.4 bn towards heat decarbonisati

The latest World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency is very optimistic. In all the new IEA scenarios, growth in global energy demand slows thanks to efficiency gains, electrification and a rapid buildout of renewables. In the STEPS scenario, based on the current prevailing policy settings in countries around the world, the IEA claims that ‘clean energy meets virtually all growth in energy demand in aggregate in the STEPS between 2023 and 2035, leading to an overall peak in demand for all three fossil fuels before 2030, although trends vary widely across countries at different stages of economic and energy development’.  However, the IEA adds that almost everywhere ‘ electricity demand grows much faster than overall energy demand, thanks to existing uses, notably cooling, and new ones such as electric mobility and data centres’. It says that ‘by 2030, nearly every other car sold in the world is electric, although delays in the roll-out of charging infrastructure or in