New gas power plants are part of the pragmatic energy solution

The government has been briefing overnight that the energy secretary Claire Coutinho will address an energy transition conference at Chatham House, which, cough, your columnist will be attending. Coutinho – don’t shoot the messenger – will say that, despite a commitment to being net zero by 2035, the government is to commission a handful of gas power plants to replace older stations.

Looking at the comments leaked to His Majesty’s Daily Mail, Coutinho will apparently say: “Without gas backing up renewables, we face the genuine prospect of blackouts… There are no easy solutions in energy, only trade-offs… If countries are forced to choose between clean energy and keeping citizens safe and warm, believe me, they’ll choose to keep the lights on. And so, as we continue to move towards clean energy, we must be realistic.” 

Well, we can certainly give one cheer for this rhetoric. Whatever else we might accuse this government of, this is a welcome statement of the bleeding obvious. Even Ed Miliband, Labour’s shadow energy secretary, accepts that there is a role for gas even in a net zero economy and can hardly go in studs up on the government’s change of stance. This is made clear by Labour’s equivocal response to the news, on the one hand, telling the Daily Mail that gas, at least in some form, will be required for decades but, on the other, telling the Financial Times that the government’s position is “desperate nonsense” without saying why this is so. 

Labour’s NGO outriders will be similarly hamstrung both by the fact that they cannot suggest any credible solutions to the intermittency problem of renewable power or that the UK’s position both in renewable power and emissions reduction remains top of the class. Only this week, Carbon Brief announced the surprising news that the UK’s carbon emissions are now the lowest they have been since the reign of Queen Victoria. 

In the same announcement, Carbon Brief said that burning fossil fuels met a record low 33 per cent of the UK’s electricity needs in 2023 while coal-fueled power was both at its lowest ever and remained on track to be switched off later this year. For context, the situation right now (according to iamkate.com) is that, over the past week, renewables have provided around 38 per cent of the UK’s power; natural gas has provided 30 per cent; the rest has come from nuclear (15%), biomass (7%) and imports from France and their nuclear fleet. This has led us to the improbable situation that the UK electricity sector is now responsible for less emissions than farming. 

So far, so good. But as today’s announcement suggests, it’s what’s next that’s the real problem. How much further can this government – and the likely incoming Labour government – go on the journey to net zero if we accept that the last steps are always the hardest and, as Coutinho makes clear, governments and their voters will always prioritise their own needs over anyone else’s. Luckily the answer is easy in the UK’s case: carry on doing exactly what you’re doing right now which is to blend a mixture of clear-eyed pragmatism (today’s announcement) with making the very best of the UK’s natural resources (wind farms everywhere) while waiting for the engineering geniuses to create an effective battery system that can bridge the intermittency of renewables. 

That last piece of the puzzle will be very tricky and it’s not the simple solution that it sounds as anyone who has a combined solar and battery system in their home will tell you. Battery technology has advanced tremendously in recent years (thank you, Elon Musk) and is moving at pace but it still has a very long way to go to become the full solution we want it to be. There’s also what we might call the Conway problem (after Sky News’ Ed Conway who has highlighted this issue) around the use of specific metals within batteries. 

There are other options available to Britain in its attempt to wean itself off of fossil fuels. The most promising is the Moroccan-UK power project which would see 3.6GW of reliable wind and solar energy a day travel from Morocco to the UK via 4000km (2485 miles) of sub-sea cables. But even this amazing and ambitious project – and it really is – cannot provide guaranteed, constant power in the same way that gas and nuclear power stations can. And this, of course, is the conundrum that today’s announcement and Labour’s response recognises: we’re living in a (partly) fossil-fuelled world and that won’t change any time soon. 

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