‘I am determined that we meet the commitment on which Labour was elected and reach net zero by 2050.’ So said UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham - although still not coming off the fence on the oil and gas issue (see my last post). But he was adamant that ‘the climate crisis presents us with an enormous challenge and possibility. In the coming years, we need to change the way we travel, the way we build homes and the way we produce energy. I have long seen the green transition as the best chance we will ever have to reindustrialise Britain.’
However, he said, ‘I believe there are two routes we can follow. There’s the traditional Whitehall way: make people pay for the change with more regulation and higher costs, and allow private companies to reap the rewards. Or we can pursue a different route: help people make the change by creating jobs, lowering bills and bringing power back to them’.
And he strongly backed the community energy ‘peoples power’ approach being developed by Great British Energy, which has just launched £30 million funding to kick start a ‘community power revolution’, the first down-payment on up to £1 billion, announced earlier this year, aiming to support over 1,000 local and community-led clean energy projects across the UK. They will be owned by community energy groups or local authorities, so that local areas can reap the full benefits, from reduced bills for local services to ensuring profits from the clean power generated flow back into towns and villages, rather than just to energy companies.
Certainly, Burnham pushed the idea hard: ‘There are fine examples in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland of community energy schemes, which keep the lights on, the local economy moving and the benefits close to home. These projects work and we want to take them nationwide’. That’s very good news. But will it be enough? There are some good ones around, but by their nature, local community projects are often going to be relatively small, individually. Burnham said ‘This investment means villages, towns and cities can harness the natural resources around them with solar panels on libraries, publicly owned windfarms, hydro schemes in their rivers, or whatever else works for them’.
That’s fine and the scale might expand with local council involvement, for example in large urban projects, although there is also plenty of scope for expansion in rural areas at village and town level, as happened in Germany, where thousands of locally owned/controlled community and municipal energy projects and co-ops have been seen as a key part of its energy transition. But that has not been without its problems and limitations, and with the best will in the world, in the UK it will take time.
Nevertheless, being optimistic, National Grid has an ambitious scenario with community renewables reaching up to 1.5GW in England by 2030. Scotland, more enthusiastically, has a target of 3GW of locally owned renewables by then, while Wales is aiming for 1.5GW by 2035. If anything like that is possible it would be good news, but then we are also faced with Labours backing of large multi GW nuclear projects and also possibly of more oil and gas drilling projects. We still await Burnham’s decision on the latter. After the by-election perhaps? Always assuming that the Greens are seen off!
Meanwhile though, it seems that the Labour administration has faced up to some other immediate energy issues arising from its longer-term energy plans. For example, the National Grid needs serious attention if it is to cope with the planned expansion of renewables, but there have been strong objections to plans for new pylons in some areas. In response, the government has now backed a local ‘pylon compensation’ scheme. Thousands of households living near new or upgraded National Grid power pylons are set to get money off their electricity bills. Payments will start next year, with those living within 500 metres of an initial set of 43 projects expected to get £2,500 off their electricity bills over 10 years- in most cases automatically. In addition, there have been move to redesign pylons in some areas.
It’s also good to hear that, following government pressures for action on youth employment and training, National Grid has unveiled a commitment to support 5,000 young people who are not in employment, education or training to develop skills and access career opportunities in the energy and infrastructure sectors. There is something of skills gap in the renewable energy field, so that is good news.
Labour does seem to be trying to deal with practical issues, but at times it seems it is bedevilled by big communication issues on its plans and policies. For example, the House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee say the Government has focused too heavily on emissions targets and the term ‘net zero’, rather than explaining practical benefits. It says the message that renewable energy could reduce exposure to global price shocks and strengthen the country’s resilience needed to be communicated more effectively.
Well yes, and we arguably are not getting anything very sensible from the likes of Reform on any of the big climate and energy issues. However, arguably, it also doesn’t help when Labour ministers make statements like that attributed to Minister for Energy Michael Shanks, who reportedly said that ‘Fusion has the potential to provide virtually limitless clean energy while supporting more than 10,000 jobs across the UK by 2030’. That’s in 4-years time. Possibly the silliest prediction (and sentence) I’ve seen for some while - see the recent FT overview. But then Labour does seem obsessed by all things nuclear. We have not yet heard from Burnham on this, at least not recently. Though he did reportedly tell the GMB union Conference in 2010 that he was ‘in favour of nuclear power because I think we need energy self-sufficiency going into the future, recognising that renewables could never do it on their own.’ Is that so? And at whatever cost?
In my next post I will look back at the Energy Return of Energy Invested metric, which some (but not all) see as indicating that renewables are a much better bet than nuclear, delivering much more carbon free energy than is needed to build them.
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