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By Jess
Shankleman
Rishi Sunak is
being slammed by his climate advisers for making
net zero harder to achieve in Britain after his
recent policy retreats. The prime minister says
he’s trying to protect consumers navigating out
of double-digit inflation.
Sunak argues the UK
is overachieving on its green goals and can
afford to slow down on renewable energy,
efficient boilers and home insulation. The
independent Climate Change Committee disagreed
Thursday, saying the shifts risk sapping enthusiasm at
next month’s United Nations climate talks.
Here are some areas
where the country is falling behind previous
pledges to tackle global warming:
Wind
The UK has long
been aggressive in building offshore wind farms,
targeting 50 gigawatts of capacity by 2030. Yet
it’s now expected to fall short of that goal by
nearly a third, according to BloombergNEF.
Last month, there wasn’t a single
bid to build an offshore wind project in
the government auction for clean-energy
contracts. Developers blamed policymakers for
setting electricity price too low, saying it
wouldn’t cover higher supply-chain costs.
The government did
announce it was lifting an eight-year ban on
building onshore wind farms, but industry trade
association RenewableUK says
not much is really expected to happen. That
market ground to a halt after the 2015
prohibition, and it’s unlikely to pick up again
because the red tape remains, spokesman Rob
Norris said.
“The ‘new wording’
in the National Planning Policy Framework has
actually barely changed,” he said.
Solar
Despite being among
the cheapest forms of power, only 14.6 gigawatts
of solar capacity had been installed by the end
of 2022, putting the country significantly off
the mark in meeting its target for 70 gigawatts
by 2035.
To be successful,
the UK needs to add 4.3 gigawatts of solar
annually, the CCC said.
At issue is a
creaky infrastructure that creates significant delays in getting grid
connections. Some solar farms and
large-scale rooftop projects expect a two-decade
wait, which makes them financially unviable,
the Solar
Energy UK trade association said.
Upgrading and
expanding the electricity grid will be costly. Improving
the onshore network alone may require as much as
£240 billion ($294 billion) in investments by
2050, according to a government analysis last
year.
Heat Pumps
Decarbonizing home
heating is one of the steepest hills the UK has
to climb to reach net zero because the housing
stock is warmed predominantly by gas and, in
some cases, oil boilers. The government target
is to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by
2028.
But the UK is being
lapped by fellow Europeans in that contest.
France installed almost 622,000 heat pumps last
year and Italy almost 514,000, while the UK
managed just over 55,000. That puts Britain at
the bottom of the European league table for
installations per capita.
The MCS Charitable
Foundation says France
may be further ahead because it has a stronger
electricity supply industry with a huge nuclear
power fleet. By comparison, the UK has a large
gas lobby.
Home Insulation
Key to rolling out
more heat pumps is improving the energy
efficiency of homes, yet the UK lags in that
area, too.
During the past
decade, a range of energy-efficiency measures
such as home insulation have been botched or
abandoned under successive prime ministers.
Insulation rates remain well below the peaks of
delivery achieved before then-Prime Minister
David Cameron torpedoed progress in 2013 by
ordering officials to “cut the green crap.”
Even as gas prices
soared last year to crisis levels,
home-insulation rates remained way behind what
the CCC says is needed for the UK to meet its
carbon budgets. Without further policy
interventions, energy efficiency investment will
remain in the doldrums, the adviser said.
Carbon emissions
In June, the UK
made it cheaper for companies to emit carbon
dioxide by releasing a glut of permits on its
carbon market, sending prices plummeting by 50%.
Since the UK left
the European Union, it has run its own carbon
market. During the past six months, their prices
have diverged, with the UK market trading at a
steep discount. As a result, the UK plans to burn
more coal and gas this winter and sell it
to the rest of the continent.
Emissions from the
UK power sector reached a six-month high in
September, BNP Paribas strategist
James Huckstepp said.
More sources of
fossil fuels are coming online. Last month, the
government approved the $3.8
billion Rosebank oil and gas field to be
developed by Equinor ASA and
Ithaca Energy Plc.
And in July, it
endorsed opening its first deep coal mine in
30 years: the Woodhouse Colliery project
in Whitehaven. That will commit the UK to
emissions from coking coal, for which there may
be no domestic use after 2035.
The CCC said the
decisions ultimately would increase the UK’s
pollution while having little impact on energy
prices.
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