Slowly, one baby step at a time, Rishi Sunak is tip-toeing back from the brink of the green energy cliff. Such is our addiction to the belief that windmills and sunshine, with a dash of heat pump, will power our future, that he dare not risk any bigger strides. This week he provided a script for the King which must have been at least as hard for the Monarch to read as some of those parroted by his mother.
We are to have annual rounds of offshore oil and gas licences. This is not new, as they were routine in the glory days of the North Sea, but they will serve to put pressure on an incoming Labour government, which would have to take active steps to change the new regime. The waters round Britain are in terminal hydrocarbon decline, and new finds will be marginal at best, even if companies can be found to risk spending when the financial climate is as unpredictable as a wildcat well.
However, it is worth rehearsing why every drop of domestic oil is useful. We hardly care where the juice comes from, but the greenest argument is that the pollution from extraction in the third world is worse, thanks to slack local rules and extra transport costs. Domestic production means domestic jobs, and even a small contribution to world supply has a marginal impact on the price.
We must hope that the prime minister is looking at the bigger picture, and towards tackling the fantasy that Britain can become all-electric with wind from the North Sea (nowhere else is nationally significant) plus a side-order of nuclear. The projections are pretty stark. The legally-binding commitment to Net Zero by 2050 is already out of reach unless we are prepared to accept much lower living standards.
Still, there are some cheerful souls who think it can be done. “Could Britain’s energy demand be met entirely by wind and solar?” asks the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Yes! comes back the answer. A mere five per cent (sic) of the country’s land mass under windmills, solar on every rooftop and a magnificent contribution from offshore turbines, mostly floating, should do it.
This rosy picture ignores the massive cost of reconfiguring the national grid, and makes some heroic assumptions about how often the wind will blow. It also assumes that turbines are getting cheaper. In the light of the travails of the industry at Orsted, Vattenfall and Vestas Wind, they clearly are not. Without bigger subsidies, offshore wind development in the UK will come to a halt.
Of all places, The Guardian: summed things up neatly: “According to the consulting firm McKinsey, the global transition to net zero will require additional investments in fixed assets of $3.5tn a year until 2050. That’s about a quarter of all the tax raised worldwide. There is still no convincing mechanism for financing this in ways that reassure families, individuals, small firms and farmers that they are not going to be bankrupted.”
This may be because such a mechanism cannot exist. The PM’s latest baby step is calculated to embarrass Labour, but as Kier Starmer will discover, should he get the chance, the laws of physics and thermodynamics cannot be changed by wishful green thinking.
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