Starmer’s green vision simply isn’t serious policy making

This column has plenty of respect for Sir Keir Starmer. He’s in the process, albeit with plenty of assistance from the Tory party, of taking his Labour Party into power just five years after they were eviscerated at the polls. He’s pragmatic, steady and has a moral compass that points due north. It’s unlikely he knew how lucky he would be; but he’s consistently put himself in the best position to take advantage of that luck. On Monday, he was giving a speech on energy in Scotland and, as the most expensive of his policy pillars, it’s worth looking at. 

As with so many of the Starmer’s speeches, it’s workmanlike stuff- no one could claim that heights of oratory are hit. Nevertheless, on the surface, it feels bold. Starmer’s vision is of a future where our country is fuelled by nuclear, wind and solar with fossil fuels banished, energy security secured forever and every household £1,400 better off every year. At the same time, Starmer’s government-funded GB Energy will lead a £100bn jobs and technology miracle which will allow the UK to compete with the US’s Inflation Reduction Act and the pesky EU. 

First of all, Starmer is not wrong in all of what he says: we are approaching a generational shift in energy that will see the world try to wean itself off – fairly gradually – fossil fuels and the UK can and should play its part. The IRA is a serious economic threat to the UK and nobody at Westminster should underestimate the danger it poses to the UK’s interests. There is unquestionably a role for the UK government within the global energy transition and Starmer is right to lay out his ideas for that transition. He’s a serious man and these are seemingly serious policies. Unfortunately, they are – sorry about this – total bollocks. 

First of all, the UK already has a good energy transition policy. It may have been written by a government that Starmer doesn’t like but he would have done better to have read it before coming forward with his own ideas and acknowledging that we’re not starting from zero here. 

Second, Starmer talks about quadrupling, offshore wind and tripling solar power. That would take the UK’s installed capacity to well beyond 100 GWs. Maximum demand for electricity in the UK is roughly 45 GWs so we would end up having way more capacity than we could ever need. We could sell that power into the European grid, but given the EU’s own energy plans, it’s much more likely that electricity will go to waste which is not much of an investment case and if it’s not much of an investment case, it can only mean one thing – that power will become more expensive. 

Thirdly, and just as importantly, when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine in the UK, it tends to be the case for the whole country – or, at least, we don’t have wildly different weather in the North Sea and the Irish Sea. We’re not big enough to have two totally opposing weather systems working differently across our islands. The likelihood then is that Starmer’s 80 GWs of installed capacity will be feast or famine – as our 20 GWs of current wind capacity is today. 

Fourth, Starmer’s policy makes even less sense when he talks about nuclear: his speech yesterday didn’t explain what his policy is but let’s assume that he thinks nuclear can provide the baseload power that’s needed when renewables aren’t working. Except that it can’t: nuclear power is or isn’t. Unlike gas or coal power stations, you can’t turn nuclear up or down so any capacity in the grid from nuclear will always be there. And if you have installed a grid that is 100% nuclear, you don’t need wind or solar. The only reliable baseload power we have today is from gas and coal. 

A braver politician who wants to rely on renewables and nuclear would make the case that it can only be done through mass scale electricity storage – which doesn’t yet exist – and by reducing energy demand especially at night but that doesn’t appear to be a vote winner for anyone. Accordingly, and regular readers will have guessed what’s coming next already, this means that Starmer ends up getting baseload power from, of course, gas. How many times does it have to be said that there is no path to net zero or a renewable energy future that doesn’t include fossil fuels and gas in particular? 

There are other significant flaws in Starmer’s vision: he complains that the UK doesn’t manufacture enough of the kit needed for renewable energy but doesn’t seem to understand why that might be and what the cost might be to UK taxpayers if he insists on British Turbines for British Wind Farms. He has nothing to say about the rare metals required for solar panels and electric cars and how they’re mined, where they’re mined and who dominates their trade. 

His oil and gas policy sounds simple but is being caveated at every turn. Starmer mentions the need for grid connections in passing but doesn’t mention transmission lines at all and both are as key to energy policy as energy generation itself. Incredibly, this is a speech on renewables that doesn’t mention the need to research and improve energy storage and reduce demand. In the end, you cannot avoid the conclusion that this simply isn’t serious policy making by Starmer and Labour.

So much for the criticism. What should he be doing instead? It’s all about regulation and stimulus, stupid. The Labour government to come has no more idea about how to create and run a £100 billion national energy company than any governments that have run national industries in the past. Better then to create the right fiscal incentives, tax structures, planning regulations and employment regulations that will allow the UK to compete for capital versus the US and the EU. 

And the capital that does come to us will flow into the areas where it’s needed and not into the unnecessary quadrupling of our wind power. The Tories are a shameful shambles right now; but Keir Starmer and Labour should reflect on the fact that the Tories energy policy is infinitely more serious than their own. As my old maths teacher would have said, “must do better”. 

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