Ed Miliband’s Mission 2030

In his haste to reach his energy goals, the new Secretary of State, Ed Miliband, is demonstrating why he alone may be the biggest obstacle to clean power and net zero.

Today, Suffolk County Council wrote to Ed Miliband in the first step of potential Judicial Review (JR) proceedings into the approval of the Sunnica solar farm. This was a decision the new Secretary of State took in just three days after entering office, going against the recommendation of the independent planning inspectorate, the views of all local authorities and the representations of thousands of local residents. It has even emerged that the outgoing Secretary of State, Claire Coutinho, was poised to reject the scheme.

I’ve held responsibility for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects in Suffolk since 2018 and I’ve gone on record multiple times saying this was the worst scheme to ever come across my desk. It should have been refused. Worse still, in his child-like haste to approve the scheme, the Secretary of State made an embarrassing, clumsy and wholly avoidable error in failing to address how local authorities would be properly compensated for the work they must undertake discharging conditions associated with the scheme. In short, he left already stretched councils – and therefore local council tax payers – footing the bill for this work rather than the developer. It is such an obvious error that the four local councils had no choice but to commence legal proceedings and issue a pre-action protocol (PAP) letter to the Secretary of State. The action from the councils will likely not be the only potential JR and we can only hope that the project can yet be stopped in its entirety.

The Secretary of State’s actions speak to a wider problem. A major pillar of the Labour Party Manifesto at the recent general election was ‘clean power’ by 2030 – ie decarbonising energy generation in the UK. This moved the target forward from an already ambitious 2035 under the prior government. As I’ve written previously, 2030 is an unachievable goal and, in his desperation to get there, Ed Miliband will be forced into increasingly poor, uncoordinated and rushed decisions. Officials will already be telling him it is unachievable, the industry is telling him it’s unachievable and now it’s been revealed that this target will have to be met without material contributions from carbon capture and storage (CCS), new nuclear or clean hydrogen. There is a chasm between the 2030 goal and any credible prediction for energy generation in this country. Not a single pathway from National Grid Electricity Systems Operator (ESO) predicts net zero power by 2030. It is clear, Miliband and the new government must abandon the 2030 goal and they must abandon it now.

Photo by Nicholas Doherty on Unsplash

Writing things like this could see me painted as a climate sceptic. I am not, as those that know me well will tell you - I am far from one. I believe we should decarbonise energy generation in this country to the prior timeline, that we urgently need to deliver energy security and that – yes – a changing climate is a real and present danger. For those sceptically tutting at me and muttering ‘the climate has always changed’ and ‘without CO2 trees will die’, consider this; the biggest driver of mass migration and conflict in the coming decades will be a warming world and the fact that places that could once grow food, no longer can. Unchecked, it will make the waves of migration currently seen across western Europe look like nothing before. So, if you don’t take climate mitigation and adaptation seriously for any other reason, consider our borders and the already huge pressure on them.

It's because I take these things seriously that I find Miliband’s 2030 goal so dangerous. To meet our energy needs, the amount of energy generated in the UK will need to more than double, likely nearly treble, from a base of circa 120GW to over 300GW in 2050. That energy doesn’t just need to be generated; it needs to be transmitted to where it is needed. The scale of change required to do this is vast and to deliver change on this scale you need to carry people with you. Already we can see that the uncoordinated and piecemeal way that this is being done is having the opposite impact. Speak to communities in East Suffolk, particularly around Friston, Aldeburgh and Saxmundham and they will tell you that nothing feels particularly just about the way the UK’s energy transition is currently being undertaken. This isn’t the fault of the new government, for too long the way connection offers are made (see what I’ve written about the TEC register and new solar farms) has been opaque and iterative. What was proposed as a substation for two wind farms at Friston, Scottish Power Renewables EA1N and EA2, has become a hub into which a myriad of schemes are connecting. Planning consent was never sought for a hub of this kind, it’s just emerged over time. There is not, and will not be until 2026, spatial planning around energy generation. At the moment, projects just ‘plug-in’ to the grid where there is capacity to connect, and National Grid are legally obliged to make connection offers.

Look at this in tandem with the Norwich to Tilbury Pylon proposals. We have seen from National Grid ESO’s own report that in 2034 under-grounding the project becomes at least cost equal, if not cheaper. We know that offshore transmission technologies are developing and being deployed overseas and that, by the second half of the next decade, will likely be where we need them to be to alleviate some of the strain on communities like East Anglia. That is why I, and others, have called for the project to be put on hold while alternatives are explored. That pause, however, is not compatible with Ed Miliband’s new 2030 goal.

It's not just Norwich to Tilbury, there are so many schemes coming forward at pace that could be delivered in a better, more joined up, way if we paused for breath. Returning to the prior target of clean energy by 2035 does not put Net Zero by 2050 at risk, in fact 2035 is in line with the Independent Climate Change Committee’s recommendation to achieve that goal. It is an exercise in vanity from the new Secretary of State and one, for the sake of our communities, that we need to convince him to abandon. In November of last year, David Powell wrote for Climate Outreach on the need for public engagement and the risk of a Net Zero ‘backlash’, we are very much at that point.

Doing our energy transition badly, and in a few short weeks Miliband has demonstrated he is doing it badly, will turn people against it. Very few people I speak to, particularly in East Suffolk, are against clean energy but they see nothing ‘green’ in the piecemeal industrialisation of their area. To do it better, we need to slow down.

Today, the Daily Telegraph reported that the South East risks blackouts within a few years, partially due to an increasing over-reliance on wind and solar and the inconsistent level of generation they provide. Last year, FTI Consulting carried out a review for the former government highlighting this risk and, in analysis for Ofgem, found that splitting the country into regional pricing zones would encourage energy companies to generate power closer to where it is needed. They also found it would lower bills for consumers in every region. Such an approach would be music to the ears of communities in East Anglia, a region that will be responsible, under current plans, for generating upwards of 30 percent of the nation’s energy whilst using just 6 percent. The obstacle? Once again, it’s Miliband’s new 2030 date for decarbonisation and warnings, predominantly from the offshore sector, that big regulatory changes would make his impossible goal even more distant.

A shift back to 2035 would also make Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) a much more realistic part of the decarbonisation agenda. These can generate the same amount of energy as the 2,000 plus acre Sunnica solar farm on an area the size of two football pitches. Oh, and the sun doesn’t need to be shining. Currently, we are likely to see the first SMR trial from Rolls Royce online by the end of the decade. Too late for Mission 2030 but not too late for the prior 2035 goal. Add into the equation even smaller nuclear options, likely the size of a shipping container, and we begin to build a picture of much more sensibly constructed generation and distribution of energy around the UK. These innovations are just a few short years away and I’ve not even mentioned hydrogen and CCS in detail. Nor have I mentioned the increased cost, ultimately to bill payers, of chasing 2030 - you can find much commentary on that elsewhere.

Sitting where I do, at the coal face (we need to find a new decarbonised term) of all these schemes in East Anglia, and their impact on communities, it is clear that the biggest danger to decarbonisation, and by association Net Zero, is now the very man tasked with delivering it. His ‘bounce off the walls’ videos, excitedly running past wind turbines, may endear him to his well-heeled Guardian reading friends but they fill communities here in East Anglia with dread. We sit on the cusp of another industrial revolution. To deliver that, it is incumbent upon those leading the charge to deliver it well and to get the societal consent to make it possible. Any Secretary of State serious about clean power and net zero must carry communities with them. The first step is abandoning Mission 2030.