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Environmental policy

Environmental policy

A 2030 UK energy plan

07 Nov 2019 Dave Elliott
Image of wind turbines
The UK Labour party’s plan for net zero carbon emissions by 2030 includes the installation of 7000 offshore and 2000 onshore wind turbines. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/CappaPhoto)

At this year’s Labour party conference held just outside London in Corydon in October, a motion was adopted that called on the party to work towards “a path to net zero carbon emissions by 2030”. Labour then asked a group of independent energy-industry experts to identify a pathway to decarbonize the UK energy system by 2030. The resulting report, which was published in late October, is very detailed and quite radical. It identifies four overarching goals to transform the UK’s energy supply and use: reducing energy waste in buildings and industry; decarbonizing heat; boosting renewable and low carbon electricity generation; and balancing the UK’s supply & demand.

Thirty recommendations were made to meet those goals. They include installing eight million heat pumps as well as upgrading every home in the UK with energy-saving measures such as insulation and double glazing but focusing first on damp homes and areas with fuel poverty. The report also calls for the installation of 7000 off-shore and 2000 on-shore wind turbines as well as solar panels that would cover an area of 22 000 football pitches, so tripling the UK’s current solar capacity.

“Delivering these thirty recommendations would make the UK a pioneer. No other industrialized country has plans of a similar scale,” the report notes. “The scope and pace of change would bring challenges, but also first-mover advantages and would avoid costly high-carbon lock-in for the country’s infrastructure.”

Keeping on track

Specific recommendations for early action include a vast expansion of offshore wind to 52 GW while onshore wind would increase to 30 GW and solar energy to 35 GW – all contributing to the 137 GW boost in renewable capacity. The report also calls for an urgent UK-wide programme to upgrade existing buildings to “significantly reduce energy wastage and a shift to low-carbon heat”. All new buildings would have to be net zero-carbon.

The plan is a maximalist programme of renewable expansion and energy efficiency upgrades in all sectors. On the demand side, it aims to reduce the need for energy across the UK by a minimum of 20% for heat and a minimum of 11% for electricity, relative to current levels. On the supply side, offshore wind would be supplying 172 TWh by 2030 while onshore wind would contribute 69 TWh and photovoltaic solar being 37 TWh. But there is also 63 TWh from nuclear — with 9 GW assumed to be in place by 2030 — as well as 32 TWh from gas with 40GW of power plants in use.

For the longer term, there would be significant investment in research and development for marine energy — up to 3GW of tidal — and renewable or low-carbon hydrogen for heating and energy storage along with carbon capture and storage for some heavy industries (2.5GW). The aim is that by the late 2020s “these emerging technologies can be deployed, alongside current technologies such as nuclear, to the appropriate scale”.

This is a good report that faces up to many of the issues. Yet the new set of proposals avoid detailed programme costing.

That part could be a hint of support for small modular nuclear to keep nuclear at its current level and also for fossil-gas steam methane reformation for hydrogen production. But the report also mentions the electrolysis “power to gas” route: using green power to make hydrogen. Interestingly, it sees solar providing about 6% of UK heating with biomass contributing 5%. Yet it recommends not expanding solid biomass use for large-scale electricity generation. So, no more DRAX-type imported wood pellet plants.

Based on the proposed programme, the report claims that the UK could be on track to deliver a 77% reduction in energy emissions by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. It adds that looking beyond that zero-carbon electricity “could potentially be anticipated as early as 2034-2040, and zero-carbon heating [from] 2036-2040”.

Social benefits

The report says that there would also be substantial social benefits from the plan. By 2030, its recommended investment in the energy sector would lead to a net benefit to the economy of £800bn and create 850 000 new skilled jobs in the green industry. “The UK would build a unique skill and knowledge base supporting the kind of transition that many other countries will need to go through, providing a huge opportunity for the UK to demonstrate industrial leadership,” the report says.

The report adds that upgrading the housing stock has the potential to end fuel poverty that is currently affecting 2.5 million UK households. By 2030, these measures could also mean 565 000 fewer cases of asthma by helping to alleviate damp. Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy could also improve air quality resulting in 6200 fewer respiratory-related deaths each year by 2030. Overall, the report says, benefits to public health could potentially save the UK’s National Health Service £400m each year.

The proposals received a clean bill of health as technically credible from a range of academics and experts in the field and the sense of urgency was welcomed by Greenpeace. The detailed plan certainly does look interesting. However, there are some issues.  It doesn’t back district heating Networks (DHN), at least not yet. That is a change from traditional Labour stances that have seen urban DHN — along with Combined Heat and Power Plants — as important aspects.

The report says the deployment of DHNs would be constrained by the proposed building retrofit programme that will result in a “drop in heat demand by on average 25% which will further reduce the already marginal returns for DHN operators”. Yet DHNs are a good flexible infrastructure investment, able to use any heat source that comes along. And it has been claimed that for high rises, for example, plugging on to a DHN can offer lower cost carbon savings than often tricky-to-install and potentially risky retrofitted insulation.

 Nuclear retention

The report assumes that in its 90% low-carbon mix for 2030 nuclear capacity stays at the current level. But it also says it is “entirely possible to meet the 90% target without any new nuclear capacity”, though that would be “more challenging” due to the loss of low-carbon base-load and increased use of variable power. So, the report notes, more grid balancing would be needed via storage, interconnection, demand management or fossil fuel back-up. Though it adds, “the system will also benefit from cheaper generation technology such as wind & solar”.

The retention of nuclear is controversial. For example, far from helping to balance variable renewables, having nuclear on the grid may make the balancing problem harder to deal with since it is inflexible. By contrast, it can be argued that an increase in variable renewable capacity could reduce the balancing problem. There would be more green power available more often to meet peaks, thus reducing balancing needs and also an increased amount of surplus power at times, expanding the potential for power to gas electrolytic conversion to hydrogen. That could be stored and used to generate power again when there was a lull in renewable power availability.

This is a good report that faces up to many of the issues, nuclear apart. Yet the new set of proposals avoid detailed programme costing. That will be up to the Labour party to deal with if it adopts this plan. Rebecca Long Bailey, Labour’s shadow business and energy secretary, welcomed the report saying that it is “a major contribution to Labour’s plans to kickstart a Green Industrial Revolution”. Given that an election manifesto is now imminent, we will have to wait and see what is included in it.

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