The Green Transition: Can Labour achieve clean power by 2030?
Weekly analysis of the shift towards a new economy.
Dear Readers,
This week, with the first of the Spring bank holidays finally upon us in the UK, we have an early edition of The Green Transition. It’s Megan Kenyon here, standing in for Jonny Ball who’s taking a well-deserved break. He’ll be back next week.
Today I analyse the likelihood of success for Labour’s “Clean Power by 2030” policy. Spoiler alert: it’s not all about the money.
Let’s get right to it.
It’s not about the money
This week has been a big one for Labour’s promise of achieving “clean power by 2030”. On Monday, Keir Starmer headed to Wales with the shadow climate change and net zero secretary, Ed Miliband, to see a floating onshore windfarm. They were joined by Vaughan Gething, the new First Minister of Wales, to announce that, if elected, GB Energy — Labour’s proposed publicly owned energy company — will fund the construction of more floating onshore wind farms.
As they toured the facility, a new report from the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange suggested that Labour’s plans to decarbonise the grid will cost around £116bn over the next 11 years. Predictable commentary ensued. “Labour’s unfunded spending commitments just got bigger,” Bim Afolami, the economic secretary to the Treasury, told the Telegraph.
But what the Policy Exchange report — and its coverage in the press — missed out was that Labour’s green transition plans include a high level of private finance. The party has maintained that any initial public investment in the green transition will set the ball rolling to crowd in further private finance. This includes the now-scaled-back £28bn per year pledge. In February, the party said it will instead invest around £24bn in the green transition (around £5bn per year) over the next parliament.
Of course, this investment is going to cost us dear. The mission to achieve clean power by 2030 will involve wholesale systems change. But as Jess Ralston, energy analyst at the Energy and Climate Information Unit told New Statesman Spotlight, “clean power means energy independence…more British renewables means less expensive oil and gas, which will increasingly come from abroad as the North Sea continues its inevitable decline”.
Ralston pointed out there “moving to an energy system based on British renewables rather than foreign gas” has many economic benefits due to the latter being priced on international markets. And in the current turbulent international climate, the UK has already suffered the consequences of energy dependence. “The reality is that we’ve already been forced to spend a comparable amount, £150bn, on gas over just two and a half years of this [energy] crisis,” Ralston added, “If your aim is energy independence and lower bills, then decarbonising the grid is crucial whenever the target date is.”
And this point around Labour’s aim is an important one. Many in the sector warn that 2030 is going to be an extraordinarily difficult target date to meet. The difficulty, however, is not entirely a question of cost. Any government would probably be able to crowd in private investment for decarbonisation, whether their goal was 2030 or 2035. The bigger problems are systemic barriers, such as a lack of planning capacity. These have a knock-on effect on investment. The real question for Labour is not how much the party is willing to spend, or encourage the private sector to spend, on clean power by 2030. It is how Labour intends to improve the conditions that would make the success of that investment more likely.
In brief
The skilled route: In his first monthly column for New Statesman Spotlight, Danny Sriskandarajah, chief executive of the New Economics Foundation, explains why a National Skilling Wage could aid the green transition.
A little local difficulty: It’s not looking good for council climate action. Megan Kenyon reports on a survey from the Local Government Association which found that two thirds of councils don’t think they’ll meet their net zero targets.
Life in plastic, it’s (not) fantastic: Raffi Schieir, the co-founder of Prevented Ocean Plastics, talks to Spotlight about his key asks of government.
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The Green Transition is produced by Spotlight, the New Statesman's online policy section and print supplement. Spotlight reports on policy for the people who shape it and the business leaders it affects. Explore our in-depth reporting and analysis here.
Thank you for reading.
Please send any news or comments to: jonathan.ball@newstatesman.co.uk
I'm very suspicious of the scientific validity of this report. You've written " The emergence of Covid-19, and other similar zoonotic diseases (pathogens which jump from animals to humans) such as swine flu, bird flu, or Sars, can be directly traced back to our relationship with nature. Maintaining diverse ecosystems and healthy biodiversity is an important way of preventing this kind of crisis." However, animal to human movement of pathogens is largely unrelated to maintaining a healthy biodiversity - they are mutually exclusive. And the suggestion that the UK's environment is seriously degrading is contrary to everything I've read in numerous science journals over recent years. As we say in Australia, this doesn't pass the pub test.
"This is a gamble: half of Labour voters think that climate change is the most important challenge facing the world, just ahead of the general public." What happens to the Labour plans to "build, build, build" when it becomes clear to climate/carbon literate voters that 1.5m new houses in 5 years would emit more 'upfront' or embodied carbon than budgeted for the whole economy?