Chartering the green revolution

Ed Miliband’s 1,000-page opus is big on aspiration but short on detail, say industry chiefs, and Labour’s low-carbon dreams will remain just that without investment.

Ed Miliband, the former Cabinet Office minister and confidant of Gordon Brown, was given one of the hardest jobs in government. Chosen to head the new Department for Energy and Climate Change, he was tasked with charting a path to revolution.

New Labour has long spoken of a future in which Britain would be ringed by thousands of windmills, turning in the breeze to create pure, pollution-free power.

Dirty old coal-fired power stations would bury their harmful exhaust deep underground; underwater turbines would draw energy from the tides. Our homes would be kitted out with smart meters to give us by-the-minute updates on our energy use and carbon footprint.

The vision was there. What was missing was the detail, and it was up to Miliband and his team at the cutting-edge energy department to provide it.

Last week, he revealed the fruits of that labour. The documents comprising the latest iteration of the government’s plan for a green future weighed in at more than 1,000 pages.

They contained a few firsts. The government finally admitted in stark terms that energy bills will have to rise – by 17% for business and 8% for households – to decarbonise the economy.

It broadly laid out how the £150 billion investment required over the next 20 years will be distributed (offshore wind looks like the biggest winner).

Every government department was given a carbon budget. More than 400,000 “green jobs” are expected to be created and no fewer than half a dozen quangos will be set up to oversee the transition to deliver an 18% cut in carbon emissions from present levels by 2020.

Industry, however, was sceptical. It has seen targets come and go before. This is Labour’s fourth energy white paper since Creating a Low Carbon Economy was published in 2003. It is by far the most comprehensive but many of the hardest questions remain unanswered.

Solar at micro level, payments to homeowners to feed power into the grid could stimulate investment in solar photovoltaic (PV) The current scheme is not nearly generous enough. “It might stimulate the market but it’s not going to push it toward the explosive growth rates seen in countries like Germany,” said Leggett.

With solar PV, the UK could be generating 5% of its electricity needs by 2020. The EU intends to generate 12% of all its electricity from PV by 2020. The government’s Renewable Energy Strategy, by contrast, assumes that solar PV will contribute only about 2% of the UK’s renewable electricity by that date.

Recognising the size of the task, the government has relaxed a previously recommended timeline for achieving the transformation. The independent advisory Committee on Climate Change said this year that the power sector should remove virtually all emissions by 2030. This has now been pushed to 2050.

What is certain is that it is all going to be very expensive – and we will be footing a big chunk of the bill, either through public subsidies or higher energy bills. The government predicts an 8% rise in household energy bills, and 17% for industry.

Source - The Telegraph