Taking the Power back
As the coalition government enters its final year in office, UK Climate Change Policy is being placed in the crossfire of politicians fighting for voters. This threatens the development and profitability of renewable energy, one of the biggest factors that can ensure Britain’s low-carbon energy security. With the UK now feeling the effects of both climate change and an impending energy crisis, it’s time for the government, businesses and homeowners to take back the power and keep the lights on.
By Ellie Sellwood
Dale Vince, the founder, of Ecotricity, the UK’s biggest green energy company, didn’t start out planning to build a business worth an estimated 100 million pounds. Back in 1991, when he was living out of a van on top of a hill in Stroud, his biggest concern was generating enough electricity to keep his lights on and make a cup of tea. Now in 2014, he is the hippy who decided to ‘drop in’, the sole owner of Ecotricity and proud owner of an electric supercar.
“It was a five-year journey,” Vince says on the phone from the Ecotricity office in Stroud. “I was living in the trailer and I knew there was enough wind. It struck me that I could do more if I dropped in and went bigger.” So Vince dropped in and built Ecotricity’s first wind turbine, which was commissioned and started generating half a megawatt (MW) of energy on 13 December 1996. This project represented one of the first private schemes to take advantage of the UK’s Non Fossil Fuel Obligation commitments.
Fast forward to 2014, and Ecotricity is now a fully-fledged ‘green energy company’. The company’s website proudly states that “our mission was and remains to change the way electricity is made and used in Britain” because “conventional electricity is responsible for 30 percent of Britain’s carbon emissions – it’s our biggest single source as a nation – and therefore the biggest single thing we can change.” They work to invest their customers’ energy bills to fund the building of new sources of Green Energy, turning ‘Bills into Mills’ – energy bills into windmills. The company also says that in the next 10 years, they aim to become the seventh biggest energy company in the UK.
If you look at the success of Ecotricity it’s easy to see why the UK is often described as leading the world when it comes to reducing carbon emissions and mitigating the effects of climate change. But in Ecotricity’s case their success had a lot to do with the favourable conditions provided by the government in the form of Non Fossil Fuel Obligation commitments or subsidies, which Vince and Ecotricity used as a springboard to gain economic viability whilst bringing down carbon emissions in the process. Ecotricity represents one success story among these early projects and according to their website they are now able to share “the benefits of our work through our EcoBonds initiative – giving people the chance to share the financial benefits of the Green Energy revolution.”
In fact, in many ways the UK is world leading, as seen in its successful reduction of emissions of 15 percent over the past five years. It has even been named as a poster boy of climate change policy by Ángel Gurría, secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
In the latest Climate Change Performance Index (2014) the UK ranks fifth. The index “evaluates and compares the climate protection performance of 58 countries that are, together, responsible for more than 90 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions.”
There are currently no countries ranking in the top three, as “no single country is yet on track to prevent dangerous climate change”, so the UK ranks fifth, with only Denmark ranked above it in fourth. The UK has replaced Sweden in the rankings and has climbed 5 places from last year.
Without doubt, the current government started out strong back in 2010 with David Cameron introducing his new coalition administration as the “greenest government ever” and backing this up with an extensive list of green achievements. These included passing the first Energy Act on energy-saving; enacting Electricity Market Reform legislation; forming a Green Investment Bank and bringing about the Green Deal. Renewables also increased sharply to 11 percent of the electricity mix in 2012.
The coalition’s latest success came in April this year, when eight major renewable electricity projects were unveiled as part of the government’s electricity reforms. According to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) “by 2020, these projects will provide up to 12 billion pounds of private sector investment, supporting 8.500 jobs, and add a further 4,5GW of low-carbon electricity to Britain’s energy mix.” These projects have the potential to put the UK well on the way to meeting its renewable energy target of 20 percent by 2020.
DECC secretary Ed Davey said, “These are the first investments from our reforms to build the world’s first low carbon electricity market – reforms which will see competition and markets attract tens of billions of pounds of vital energy investment whilst reducing the costs of clean energy to consumers.”
However, recent developments in UK climate change policy threaten to significantly alter these conditions and make it harder for people and businesses to profit from future renewable energy projects.
This is because in the past month the coalition government has announced changes to subsidies for Solar PV (Photovoltaic) cells and the Conservative party has effectively said that there will be a moratorium on onshore wind power if they get into the government next May.
These statements have attracted criticism from green activists and leading green energy activists who see climate change being placed in the crossfire between the different parties warring for votes ahead of next year’s general election.
“It’s politics not economics driving UK climate change policy,” says Chris Wintle from Ecotricity. “It’s internal politics with politicians fighting against each other and this ineptness within the government is holding us back.”
One example is the recent development announced by the Department of Energy and Climate Change: from April 1st this year, the amount paid to those installing solar panels fell from 43p/kWh of energy generated, to 21p/kWh. In the three weeks that followed the solar photovoltaic capacity added each week fell to an average of 2.4MW – 87 percent down from the weekly average for the previous year’s average of 18 MW. When the government cut the subsidies homeowners and businesses became confused and no longer wanted to commit to generating solar power.
Greenpeace UK chief scientist Doug Parr told The Guardian, “solar is hugely popular in the UK, costs are falling faster than for any other energy source, and the latest technology is on track to beat nuclear on price. Sowing uncertainty for a key source of clean, homegrown energy, as ministers are doing, makes no economic, political, or strategic sense.”
This was also the case with the announcement made by the Conservatives about discontinuing the subsidies and development of onshore wind.
Gordon MacDougall, chief operating officer of renewable energy firm RES, told the BBC “this announcement is a blow for investor confidence and will cut the deployment of onshore wind - the lowest-cost renewable energy technology in the UK's energy mix. By undermining onshore wind before it reaches maturity and substituting it with more expensive low-carbon energy, the cost to the consumer will increase."
Sources from both coalition parties defended these developments by saying that there has been so much investment in onshore wind and solar energy that they no longer needed so much state support.
However, this substantial double blow to the renewable market comes at a time when demand for a strong climate change and energy policy is at an all time high.
Although many will argue otherwise, the floods that the UK saw this winter were a stark warning that the UK is not immune to the effects of climate change. It might seem like a distant memory with all the beautiful weather we’ve had recently, but it was only a couple of months ago that the television screens were awash with images of drowning houses and 6.000 homes were ruined, and many people are still not able to move back into their homes even now.
As a country we saw and felt the effects of heavy rains combined with strong winds and high waves in the form of widespread flooding and significant coastal damage. On the news we saw the widespread despair and disruption for weeks. According to the Met Office, “for England and Wales this was one of, if not the most, exceptional periods of winter rainfall in at least 248 years.”
Yet UKIP’s Nigel Farage, up to his knees in floodwater in the Somerset levels, famously denounced the connection to climate change, saying something along the lines of “well it’s just weather isn’t it.” But the Met Office has taken notice of the science, as recent studies “have suggested an increase in the intensity of Atlantic storms that take a more southerly track, typical of this winter's extreme weather.” There is also an “increasing body of evidence that shows that extreme daily rainfall rates are becoming more intense, and that the rate of increase is consistent with what is expected from the fundamental physics of a warming world.”
Unfortunately though, this flooding is projected by climate scientists to become a common feature of British weather for years after the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that manmade greenhouse gases were likely to push average global temperatures beyond the threshold of 2C of warming above pre-industrial levels, which scientists regard as the limit of safety.
This means that the efforts to reduce carbon emissions are more important than ever in mitigating the long-term effects of climate change.
Also, homeowners and businesses are no doubt aware of the steadily increasing cost of energy. Last year alone energy bills increased by eight percent and the average UK household now pays 1.350 pounds a year or the equivalent of five percent of their income on fuel. These hikes in prices are linked to the UK’s energy crisis.
The Energy Crisis is fast approaching as the UK closes down many of its ageing coal power plants as part of its electricity market reforms and in compliance with its international obligations to bring down carbon emissions. The problem is that, as yet, there is no other form of power plant ready to replace this deficit and so in recent years the UK has become heavily reliant on gas imports from Russia, Norway and Qatar. This is all most alarming given that researchers from Anglia Ruskin University recently found that the UK has just 5,2 years of oil, 4,5 years of coal and three years of gas left.
As seen recently, the UK government is placing its faith in fracking for the time being, an extraction technique that involves pushing pipelines deep underneath the ground to extract shale gas. Just last week the Queen in her annual speech, on behalf of the government, stated that the coalition will use the infrastructure bill to bypass existing trespass laws to frack underneath people’s property without their permission. This represents a desperate attempt to both keep the lights on and keep conservative voters happy.
Fracking might be a short-term solution, but in light of the UK now feeling the pressure of both climate change and the energy crisis effective policy action is needed sooner rather than later. Effective and comprehensible policy should provide the conditions that discourage new high-carbon investments, redirect innovation towards low-carbon growth and avoid the need for sharper changes in carbon prices and investment. The government can do that by making high-carbon investments such as those in coal or gas more expensive and making low-carbon innovation cheaper and thus more attractive.
This will have benefits domestically as homeowners and businesses alike will be able to participate in an effort that will both bring down emissions and stabilise energy prices.
In the international sphere, last week represented a big week for climate change with both President Obama and a top Chinese government adviser stating their commitments to reducing the emissions of their respective countries. James Dyke, lecturer in Complex Systems Simulation at Southampton University says that it’s about time since, “every country is a component and is an active participant even if they don’t want to be. Non-participation is still an act. Every country is a player in this game which is being played out on an international scale.”
We’re poised at a political turning point as climate change and energy are becoming central to international politics. If the UK strengthens its commitments to renewable energy it could well become the world leader and have a substantial amount of leverage within the EU and ahead of next year’s Climate Change Conference in Paris.
In fact, a spokesperson for the Confederation of British Industry states that the UK should use its potential world-leading position to reach a deal across Europe. If such a deal can be secured it will “put us in a strong position going into the international negotiations in Paris next year, helping to bring the rest of the world with us and trigger a global low-carbon market worth four trillion euros a year.”
In order to pave the way to this potentially huge low-carbon market, the government needs to commit to creating certainty in the form of a long-term guarantees of subsidies and incentives for homeowners, green entrepreneurs like Vince from Ecotricity and British industry leaders getting into generating green energy. It’s by no means the only solution to the problems we now face as a country, but it could go some way to securing a bright, clean, economically viable and secure green future for British energy.
Ellie Sellwood is an editor and journalist from the UK. She has worked as the editor of her student publication the Wessex Scene and as the co-editor of the ‘In The Danish Press’ section of Jutland Station. You can follow her on Twitter @EllieSellwood and find her portfolio here: https://elliesellwood.contently.com/ Photo by Michael Graham via Wiki Commons.
