Though there are green shoots, government plans fall short of making the UK an energy superpower

Editorial: Consumer-oriented and modest in outlook, the government’s Green Day, as it was styled, didn’t really feel all that green

31 March 2023 (Dave Brown)

According to the energy secretary, Grant Shapps, defiant fan of TikTok and a man with an unusual thirst for publicity, he is simply “gradually doing things. I’m not some eco-warrior in this”.

Indeed so. He is always keen to show the media around his home and show off his energy-saving gadgets and offer useful tips. His green energy strategy is likewise very much consumer-oriented, and relatively modest in its goals. For that reason, the government’s Green Day, as it was styled, didn’t really feel all that green.

Gone, it seems, are the bombastic ambitions of Cop26, only 18 months ago, and with them the boosterish rhetoric of Boris Johnson, whose green faith was his only redeeming feature.

In comes a new, almost timid approach to what the King, in his remarks in Germany, rightly calls the continuing “existential challenge” of climate change and global warming.

If there is an impending climate disaster, and the experts seem more pessimistic about that after the war in Ukraine forced a switch to fossil fuels, then neither the chipper Mr Shapps’s demeanour nor his policies suggest much urgency about it.

That’s not to say that the Green Day announcements are trivial or completely complacent. The move to encourage wary homeowners to adopt heat pumps rather than traditional gas boilers should make a difference, even if it will be too slow.

There is still understandable reluctance to adopt these technologies because of their unfamiliarity, as well as their cost, and (in some cases) impracticality. People who live in older houses, terraces and flats will find it much more difficult to make the switch than those in newer homes with space for the necessary equipment and who have the means to pay for it.

Renters, too, may find the financial and real-world consequences of having a heat pump installed problematic, given that these pumps work best in homes that are well-insulated, and there was little sign of any fresh initiatives to remedy Britain’s often architecturally distinguished but draughty and leaky Victorian terraces and interwar semis.

Mr Shapps’s political problem is that even the most well-meaning steps to combat the climate crisis can provoke huge consumer resistance. Making gas relatively more expensive than electricity is an obvious vote loser, but it could be a much more attractive proposal if electricity tariffs were made radically lower.

The fastest and easiest way to do that is to license more onshore wind farms. But, under Nimbyist pressure from shire Tories, the government remains stubbornly opposed to them.

The government is to be applauded for its dedication to making the nation’s cars zero emission, but the policy of banning the sale of new petrol and diesel-powered vehicles by 2030 to 2035 and replacing them with battery electric vehicles (BEVs) may no longer be the only way to do this.

The industry has warned it may not be deliverable in production terms – the infrastructure is woefully inadequate, and BEVs are still pricey, new or used.

The EU has just announced a change to a more technologically “agnostic” approach, which allows for the possibility that green, synthetic “e-fuels” might have a role to play as well as BEVs – provided the new fuels, which may also include hydrogen for onboard fuel cells, can deliver personal transportation that is as sustainable as a BEV.

Such technologically agnostic solutions to the problem of heating homes and workplaces might also provide different alternatives to both the traditional gas or oil-fired boiler and heat pumps. In both cases, it would also mean that the relatively affordable existing boiler and car designs can be adapted and thus keep the cost of living down.

Yet the government’s cogitations on these are taking far too long. It is ironic that it is the supposedly sclerotic EU that is being more creative than the UK in finding new consumer-friendly (and voter-friendly) solutions to the challenges.

The mistake seems to be demanding specific technologies (BEVs and heat pumps), to fulfil an agreed goal, rather than setting targets and allowing market forces, industry and science to find the means to meet them: batteries; hydrogen; solar; tidal; small and large scale nuclear; air and ground heat pumps; combined heat and power systems; synthetic fuels – let a thousand flowers bloom.

Such a policy framework might actually help the UK redress its lack of scale and expertise in many of these fields, and avoid expensive errors in what might turn out to be dead-end ideas.

Though there are signs of that creative, pluralistic approach in Mr Shapps’s strategy, it falls far short of what is needed to make the UK the energy superpower once promised by Mr Johnson – the “Saudi Arabia of wind”, as he put it.

The strategy does the right things, but not at the scale nor the speed required. Given the UK’s economic problems, it is perhaps not Mr Shapps’s fault that there is as yet no British answer to President Biden’s huge £369bn package of tax credits and other subsidies for green technology; nor to the parallel bold moves envisaged by the European Union.

The vast subsidies that will soon be available for the widest range of green schemes in the US and EU threatens to destroy the remains of Britain’s car industry, its power generation business and much else besides, as companies and investors eye the far more lucrative state-guaranteed returns available in the US and continental Europe.

The response of the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is to conduct some further consultations and to attack Joe Biden for leading a “distortive” global subsidy race, arguing that the long-term solution to the threat of protectionism was “not subsidy but security”.

Mr Hunt may be right about that, but he is not going to change any minds in the White House, the US Congress – or, for that matter, the European Commission and the Chinese politburo.

Without any wish to be partisan, there is a feeling that the initiative in these matters, as in others, is falling to the Labour Party. By around this time next year Rishi Sunak, Mr Hunt and Mr Shapps may not be running energy policy.

The polls certainly indicate that the voters think it is time for a change, and after 13 years of hugging huskies, campaigns against plastic straws and the dumping of too much raw sewage into too many rivers, it does also seem time that the UK got more serious about its energy policy and the climate crisis.

In fact, and contrary to Mr Shapps’s view, the UK probably does need some sort of eco-warrior, such are the stakes for the economy and the environment.