A new year – but old policies

Renew Extra 4th Jan 2025

Given the UK’s tight economic situation, there were some concerns about backsliding on renewables and watering down plan to fully decarbonise the power grid by 2030 after PM Starmer said, at the end of last year, that the target was now to have ‘at least 95%’ clean power generation by that year, i.e. lots more renewables plus some new nuclear, but not totalling 100%.

………………..Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband said nuclear power was vital, and that led some to speculate that Labour might condone higher power bills to pay for Small Modular Reactors, although he didn’t go quite as far as the Tony Blair Institute report which pushed new nuclear hard and said that the impacts of Chernobyl and Fukushima, ‘while serious, have been significantly overestimated’. The report was dismissed as ‘mostly tosh’ by Johnathon Porritt.

Certainly it did feel a bit backward looking, whereas, according to Emma Pinchbeck, one time head of Energy UK and now chair of the Climate Change Committee, private investors were keen to see ambitious new approaches to energy and climate change being backed by the government.

It is true that some ‘big tech’ companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, may be looking at Small Modular Reactors and some other nuclear techs, but the bulk of global funding for new energy tech is still going to renewables- and the big IT companies investment in SMRs/AMRs may just be a speculative, but possibly doomed, side bet.

………………………overall, the government does seem to be trying to get it right on pushing ahead rapidly with renewables, even if it is still a bit trapped in what some see as a nuclear dead end and also by its arguably misplaced optimism about CCS. Certainly Dr Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK, said ‘any money earmarked for carbon capture and storage- which is expensive, impossible to make zero carbon and fails to detach electricity prices from the volatile international gas market – would be better spent on the renewables, grid and storage infrastructure that will actually deliver clean power’.

………………………………………………………..based on a Royal Society study last year, it was concluded that, although the UK would need a lot of energy storage capacity, ‘a system based entirely on wind and solar, supported by large-scale hydrogen storage, and a possible mix of other storage options……….. would not be expensive.’

And more recently Dale Vince, Labour-supporting Ecotricty founder, said ‘we can secure a cleaner, cheaper energy future without nuclear’. He noted specifically that the cost of Hinkley Point C had ‘ballooned to £46bn’ after it was ‘originally priced at £18bn’ and argued that ‘if Hinkley Point C is anything to go by, Sizewell C really should have rigorous financial scrutiny.’ Certainly Hinkley Point is running late. It is now scheduled to be complete in 2031, after EDF’s former chief executive Vincent de Rivaz had originally said it would come online by Christmas 2017.

…………………..Clearly he feels we would do better to get on with the new green energy technologies. He is not alone. Hopefully 2025 will see more of that, and less backsliding. https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-new-year-but-old-polices.html