The UK’s Clean Energy Strategy – and the greens are back
The UK government’s just-published Clean Energy Strategysupposedly leads the way to the low-carbon future that the 2008 Climate Change Act calls for. But all it actually does is dust off all the old, shop-worn green remedies (smart meters, smart grids, EVs, hydrogen, bioenergy, carbon capture and storage etc.) and present them as new solutions. The plan is to bring these solutions to reality by throwing money at them – by my reckoning at least £20 billion over the next few years – in the expectation that “investment” and “innovation” will deliver the desired outcomes, although the odds are strongly against it. In short, the greens are back in the saddle, and as a result the UK still lacks a workable energy plan.
The Clean Energy Strategy document (hereafter the CES) runs to 163 pages and often goes into considerable detail, which makes it difficult to synthesize in a single post. A simple way of gauging where the emphasis is placed, however, is to do word counts using key words and phrases. The results of my word/phrase counts are shown in the Table below:
Efficiency gets the most mentions, and improved energy efficiency is indeed worth pursuing, particularly when at least some of the recent reductions in UK emissions have come from more fuel-efficient vehicles, better-insulated buildings and the replacement of incandescent lights with LEDs (and also from people turning their thermostats down to lower their skyrocketing energy bills – an outcome of the same energy policies that the government now advocates more of. But I don’t propose to get into that here).
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