From Ambition to Action: A Delivery Plan for Cleaner, Homegrown Energy
Seagreen, SSE's latest offshore wind farm – the largest in Scotland and the deepest tethered in the world. It can power up to 1.6m homes.
Alistair Phillips-Davies, Chief Executive
| SSE
Chief Executive of SSE plc, Alistair Phillips-Davies, outlines recommendations from the company's delivery plan to invest in and build clean energy infrastructure.
The next UK Government has a historic opportunity.
It can build a Britain where clean, secure, homegrown energy drives economic growth, supports families, and leads the world in tackling climate change, or it can lose the global race and stay dependent on expensive imported gas and the regimes that control it.
We know what the public want. Polls consistently show overwhelming support for cleaner, homegrown energy. Not only because it is cheaper, or that it disarms those who want to weaponise energy against us, but because decarbonising means we can look our children in the eye and say this/our generation was part of the solution.
SSE is the UK’s clean energy champion, and we take this role extremely seriously. We have plans to invest £18bn in the next 5 years and over the next decade that number could reach up to £40bn, creating and supporting tens of thousands of good green jobs from the Isle of Wight to Shetland. In the process, we are building more offshore wind than anyone else in the world; transforming our electricity grids, at a local and national level, to enable widespread electrification; and pioneering new technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen storage that will keep the lights on when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow.
Whichever Government is formed after the next General Election, they will not have long to deliver on ambitious targets that have been set by all political parties to ramp up renewables and decarbonise the power sector. They will need to turn ambition into action and come up with a clear, actionable plan to deliver.
The size of the prize here is enormous, but getting there requires partnership between government, communities, workers, investors and many others.
The good news is that we have the tools we need to accelerate the transition to an energy system that is both cleaner and more resilient. To that end SSE has produced a delivery plan of policy proposals for cleaner, homegrown energy that sets out how the next UK Government can hit the ground running. We hope this document proves useful to all political parties as they continue to develop their positions.
Read From Ambition to Action: A Delivery Plan for Cleaner, Homegrown Energy here.
At the core of our plan is a central aim: how to make the UK the easiest place in the world to invest in and build clean energy infrastructure? In our delivery plan we look to answer this question with specific policy proposals that could help meet this goal in areas where SSE can best play a role. These are based on four key pillars for the energy system in Great Britain:
- Accelerate Renewables: Unleash our world-leading offshore wind potential and make the UK a renewables powerhouse.
- Transform the Networks: Fast-track investment in electricity networks to turbocharge green economic growth across all regions.
- Build New Flexible Capacity: Revitalise UK industrial heartlands by pioneering clean, flexible energy technologies and green industries.
- Ensure a Just Transition: Build UK supply chains and deliver the benefits of the net zero transition for people and nature.
This plan is not fixed, and many recommendations can be adopted prior to the next election to help keep the country on track to meet longer term targets. We look forward to working with our stakeholders to build on these proposals and help make the 2020s a decade of delivery.
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