Miliband Draws Up Energy Road Map

The noises made during recent months by Alastair Darling and Ed Miliband over the future of Britain’s energy generation have now been properly articulated in a white paper, and while some white papers are wont to be short on specifics, this one runs to a whopping 228 pages.

The report is ambitious – 1.2m jobs created in low-carbon industries by the middle of the next decade, 30% of electricity being generated from renewables by 2020, 10,000 wind turbines by 2020. But amid the endless graphs, pie charts and pictures of children playing in meadows, the report has some pretty contentious points. The fact that the targets are reliant on carbon capture and nuclear energy is worrying – we’ve seen that the bickering has already begun between the public and private sector over nuclear investment, while carbon capture is a relatively unproven technology, and the “four demonstration plants” that have been announced will have a minimal impact. Energy security in the medium to long term is one of the major aims of the paper, and to be applauded – but will its ambition mean increased dependence on imported energy making up the shortfall in the short term?

On renewables, Miliband is admirably bold, effectively saying that well-off consumers and industry must help foot the bill for the implementation of renewable energy. Home energy bills are set to rise by as much as £230, as the Daily Mail splutters; Miliband repeatedly mentions looking after the vulnerable, which the Mail translates into an attack on the middle classes. Miliband also gives a veiled dig at anti-wind NIMBYs – “The biggest threat to England’s green and pleasant land is not the wind turbine, it is climate change”. And it’s good to see the Daily Express, a paper for whom a single traffic cone can conjure an entire page of editorial, really going after the big points of the report: “Parking in new eco-towns ‘could cost you £13,000′”. It’s a bad day for suburban bitterness!

One of the most surprising aspects is the promise of £60m for “marine energy”, funding projects in Cornwall, the North East and the Orkneys, as well as mooting the possibility of harnessing the Severn tide. It looked like the government had forgotten about tidal energy amid its wind obsessions of late – let’s hope the funding proves a stimulus for the private sector. As for biomass, the government seems less convinced, because of our inability to produce enough biological fuel on these shores.

As the Guardian notes, this massive report is “the energy strategy Britain has lacked ever since Margaret Thatcher gave up on coal.” It’s ambitious, probably overambitious, but aside from the emphasis on getting the middle classes to protect against fuel poverty, it’s difficult to see what the Tories would do much differently. We await the wearying, interminable stumbling blocks placed by everyone from local protest groups to the big cheeses of private energy to push these targets over into the 2020s, but for now we’ve finally got a detailed plan to go on.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Green Rush | July 16, 2009 11:49AM |