Is Clean Power By 2030 Achievable?

As the only member of Keir Starmer’s cabinet to have effectively returned to his old job, it’s unsurprising that Ed Miliband hit the ground running as energy secretary. His Clean Power Plan, setting out bold targets to decarbonise the energy sector by 2030, was welcomed by both industry groups and green policy advocates.

“I come back to ambitious but achievable as the overarching narrative for this,” says Stuart Dossett, senior policy adviser for the Green Alliance think tank.

Britain’s electricity supply has already seen the mainstreaming of wind and the death of coal since 2010. The Clean Power Plan’s targets are similarly transformative, but on a much tighter timeframe: by 2030, clean energy should account for 95 per cent of the country’s electricity generation, with big expansions of wind and solar power, and gas confined to the margins. 

One notable line in the Clean Power Plan makes clear its rejection of laissez-faire ideology: “In this plan, we are accepting government’s central role in steering the creation of this new energy system.”

Much of this “central role” manifests as regulation and funding, but there is also Great British Energy, billed by the government as “a new, publicly owned, clean energy company”. More a state-owned investment unit than a big nationalised utility, it will co-invest with private firms in generation assets like wind farms, as well as potentially owning them outright.

“The co-investment aspect, I think, is something that the energy industry is quite interested in, because it could help to unlock newer technologies, things like tidal or floating offshore wind, which are traditionally more expensive just because they’re newer,” says Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. “If GB Energy co-invests with the private sector into those sorts of technologies, then there’s a real possibility that they might become cheaper.”

Labour has moved swiftly to drive up wind capacity, scrapping the Tories’ effective ban on onshore wind power and putting more funding into the ‘contracts for difference’ (CfD) system that underpins how clean energy is sourced. CfDs, which are tendered through auctions, guarantee a set price for electricity over 15 years.

The shambolic fifth CfD auction round, held under the last government, saw no bids from offshore wind developers. Labour hugely increased the budget for the sixth auction round last year, resulting in a record-breaking number of projects securing contracts.

But even that won’t be enough to meet the government’s targets. “The last auction round procured about nine gigawatts in total of offshore wind, onshore wind and solar,” says Dossett. “We need to be procuring about 25 gigawatts of those three technologies combined – so that’s 25 gigawatts in each auction.”

I think we have to accept that you can’t please everyone all of the time

The Clean Power Plan and subsequent announcements by the government establish the central role of planning reform in driving up generation capacity and transmission connections. Onshore wind farms have been brought into the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) system, enabling ministers to swiftly approve them instead of getting bogged down in local planning committees.

Labour MP Luke Murphy sits on the Commons energy security and net zero committee. “I think we have to accept that you can’t please everyone all of the time,” he says, speaking in a personal capacity. “That’s why I welcome the judicial review reforms, which, yes, still gives people the opportunity to exercise their right to challenge, but doesn’t allow people to abuse the system.”

He says community support could be secured by the prospect of lower bills by way of zonal pricing, which the government is currently considering. Currently, the price of electricity is set nationally by the price of gas, even when most of the supply is from cheaper renewable power. Zonal pricing would allow electricity prices to be set by renewable power in parts of the country that aren’t using gas – expected to be those areas that generate a lot of renewable energy, such as northern England.

“Clearly, that’s a complex thing – you can’t just do that overnight, you have to work that through with industry,” he says. “Some of the challenges are about the questions around the certainty for developers and investment, but I think the counterargument to that is that you see [it] successfully working in other countries.”

There’s also the challenge of finding enough workers to build this infrastructure, at the same time as the government pushes for 1.5 million new homes in five years, all while maintaining a tight immigration regime for electoral reasons.

“I don’t think we have the workforce at the moment and the skills necessary,” says Murphy. “We benefit from the fact that we have a huge number of very applicable skilled workers in the oil and gas industry already. And there is an opportunity there. And I know that there are renewable firms offering people positions and moving [them] across [from oil and gas].

“We need to make sure that we’re providing the right support to do that, looking at things like skills passporting, which the government’s already looking at. Lots of governments have talked the talk on ensuring that technical education is valued as much as academic, that we’ve got enough apprenticeships coming through the system. I think we do need to make sure the government is focusing on that.”

But aside from building new windfarms and pylons is the lower profile agenda of “clean flexibility”. This is key to pushing gas to the margins by ensuring renewable energy – whose supply fluctuates with changing levels of wind and sunlight – can meet customers’ patterns of usage. At present, these patterns are met by gas.

The Clean Power Plan targets a quintupling of short-term battery capacity, to store renewable energy when supply is high and demand low so it can then be used when supply is low and demand is high, with planning reform and prioritising grid connections central to achieving this. A smaller increase in long-term battery capacity is also envisaged.

But a lot of lifting will have to come from demand management. Some of that is about drawing energy usage away from peak times, either through discounts on energy bills at non-peak times or through “smart appliances” that operate when energy demand is low.

Murphy warns against expecting too much from consumer behaviour.

“Some people switch their energy supplier, but others don’t,” he says. “I don’t think we should rely on that hyper-engagement from consumers in order for them to get a fair price and a fair deal.” He suggests AI could optimise people’s energy use instead, both in terms of selecting tariffs and operating appliances.

The flip side of demand management is reducing the need for energy. That’s where home insulation comes in. But Dossett notes that the National Energy System Operator’s (NESO) report on how to meet the 2030 targets is based on household insulation measures being rolled out at around twice the pace of Labour’s Warm Homes Plan.

Insulation was the big loser when Labour slashed its green investment spending pledge before the election. Much now depends on whether the upcoming Spending Review delivers long-term funding for insulation, rather than the damaging stop-start schemes of the last 15 years.

Significant funding has already been pledged for carbon capture and storage (CCS) schemes – when the government committed £22bn to CCS late last year, critics said it could have been better spent on home insulation. The head of Octopus Energy recently said there were no examples globally of cost-effective CCS.

“Carbon capture is a technology that the energy industry has been talking about for 20 years,” says Ralston. “There’s been a lot of talk about it, and not very much large scale trials to even prove that it’s possible. So it’s quite a big bet. And no guarantee, of course, that it will ever work.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero said: “As shown by independent analysis from the National Energy System Operator, clean power by 2030 is achievable, and can create a cheaper, more secure energy system.

“Our Clean Power Action Plan sets out how we will deliver a new era of clean electricity, with the most ambitious reforms to the country’s energy system in a generation.”

One thing that can be said for the Clean Power Plan is that it is, at least, a plan – a thought through plan with money and momentum behind it. That’s more than can be said for certain other policy areas.

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