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— What would CCC Chair John Gummer (aka Lord Deben) say to Grant Shapps about drilling in the Rosebank oilfield?
— DESNZ top official in front of a committee of MPs later today talking about investment in innovation and net zero tech.
— A new report sets out how grid constraints are leading to whole lot of wasted wind. MECUK asked the climate minister about it.
Good Thursday morning and welcome to POLITICO Pro Morning Energy and Climate UK. And of course happy Global Wind Day to all who celebrate. You’ll find plenty of aeolian-scented news below.
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ROSEBANK WARNING: A decision on the U.K.’s biggest new North Sea oil development, Rosebank, is expected within weeks. Campaigners have pleaded with Energy Secretary Grant Shapps to block the project. So what would John Gummer (known to his friends these days as Lord Deben), outgoing chair of the independent Climate Change Committee (CCC), say to Shapps if he was in the room when the decision lands on his desk?
Gummer guidance: Well, MECUK asked him. “I’d say to [Shapps] that if you go around the world, we have had a real reputation of leading in this area. [But] since there was any question of extending new exploitation of oil, we have perfectly properly been called hypocrites,” Gummer said. “We can’t ask other people to restrain their production if we don’t do it ourselves. There are no two ways about it.” More from our interview here.
Catch up: Rosebank is a planned new oil field 80 miles off the Shetland coast, majority owned by Norwegian state energy giant Equinor. It’s already passed several regulatory hurdles and is now with the environmental regulator, the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning (OPRED). OPRED are expected to send their report to Shapps soon.
Hot ticket: The project has become a lightning rod for climate campaigners in the U.K., with the latest protests held in Scotland over the weekend.
All part of the plan: When MECUK interviewed Shapps last week, he said he couldn’t comment on individual cases but added that “extracting oil and gas in the transition to net zero” was part of government plans under its fifth and sixth carbon budgets, which cover the years up to 2037.
Political battle: Given Labour’s pledge to ban all new North Sea oil and gas exploration, the Rosebank decision will likely spark another round of heated debate. Gummer’s words will be seized on by those who argue that giving the go ahead to the project — which could produce between 300 and 500 million barrels of oil in its lifetime — would seriously undermine the U.K.’s net zero ambitions.
PASSING THE TORCH: Gummer is set to stand down from the CCC at the end of June after an 11-year stint as chair. His successor is yet to be appointed, but Gummer said the vital quality required for the role was “independence.” “Above all your job is to keep the government’s feet to the fire,” he said. “They must never find you comfortable.”
Report incoming: The CCC are due to publish their annual progress report to parliament on the U.K.’s emissions-cutting efforts. Gummer gave a flavor of what we can expect. The U.K. has “extremely good targets,” he said, but is “failing, fundamentally, in delivering.” He singled out the U.K.’s efforts to cut emissions from home heating for criticism.
QUICKFIRE: Gummer also … said Labour’s North Sea oil and gas policy was a “step in the right direction” but questioned the realism of the Opposition’s target to decarbonize the power sector by 2030 … called on housebuilding firms to pay into a fund to support people to retrofit their homes … said Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion protesters were “a reflection of a very deep angst among very large numbers of people” and that government should respond to them with “real action” on climate.
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POCK AT THE PAC: Senior DESNZ officials, Permanent Secretary Jeremy Pocklington and Director for Climate Science and Energy Innovation Damitha Adikaari are being grilled by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) at 10 a.m this morning. They’ll be joined by science, innovation and tech department Permanent Secretary Sarah Munby and the Treasury’s Director of Climate, Environment and Energy Steve Field. The whole thing will be streamed here.
What’s on the table? The officials will face questions on how government plans to invest in the new technologies needed to reach its net zero targets — think hydrogen, carbon capture, energy storage et cetera. The meeting is based on a report from the National Audit Office (NAO), the government’s spending watchdog, published in May , which said ministers need to do more to secure value for money on a previous pledge of £4.2 billion for new net zero technologies between 2022 and 2025.
ENERGY BILL LATEST: There are more sittings of the Energy Bill committee scheduled for today at 11.30 a.m. and 2 p.m. You can tune in here. This is the part of the bill’s progress where MPs go through the technical detail, before it comes back to the full House of Commons at Report Stage.
For real Energy Bill geeks: Transcripts from the committee hearing earlier this week are now available here (including a shout-out for MECUK’s interview with Grant Shapps.)
DUELLING SPEECHES: Shapps and his Labour counterpart Ed Miliband both have speeches scheduled for today.
Shapps on investment: The energy secretary will speak later to around 40 business leaders on the U.K. Investment Council outlining ways to attract investment into the U.K.’s energy sector.
Miliband on wind: Meanwhile, Labour’s Ed Miliband is speaking at the Global Offshore Wind summit in London’s ExCel this morning. The shadow climate and energy secretary will lay out Labour’s plans to quadruple offshore wind — including floating platforms — to 60 gigawatts by 2030 (going further than the government’s 50 GW target). “It will mean lower bills, more jobs, energy security, and climate leadership. We are under no illusions about the scale of the task,” Miliband will say. He’s up at 9:15 a.m.
WINTER UPDATE INCOMING: At 8 a.m. today, we’re expecting National Grid ESO — the operator in charge of ensuring the grid system is balanced — to drop two reports, one giving their “early view” of electricity security of supply for the coming winter, the other a review of how the grid got on last winter. Keep an eye out for their findings.
DONE AT BONN: It’s the final day of the Bonn Climate Conference, technical talks that are meant to tee up COP28 in UAE later this year. Things haven’t gone so well, with delegates struggling to even agree an agenda for the meeting.
Chair’s chiding: During Monday’s plenary session, Pakistani chair Nabeel Munir ran out of patience. “What else could you have done with these manhours? Please wake up … it’s unbelievable. I come from a country where 33 million people were impacted [by flooding] — should I go back and tell my people that we were fighting for an agenda for two weeks? It’s like I am conducting a class of primary school.”
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NORTH SEA MAXING OUT: The International Energy Agency published its “Oil 2023” outlook report Wednesday, projecting that peak global oil demand is “still in sight before the end of the decade.” The report also noted that the North Sea oil sector is at the “frontline of the energy transition” with production volumes at U.K. sites expected to drop 6 percent per year to a 45-year low of 590,000 barrels per day by 2028.
Shelling out: But U.K.-based energy giant Shell, under chief executive Wael Sawan, said yesterday it will maintain its current rate of oil production up to 2030 and growing its gas business. More from Reuters here.
ACROSS THE CHANNEL: The EU needs to slash its carbon emissions by 90 to 95 percent from 1990 levels by 2040 if it’s serious about achieving its climate goals, the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change said Wednesday.
GRID PLANNING WARNING: Ofgem boss Jonathan Brearley has told Channel 4 that net zero targets can’t be achieved without speeding up planning for grid infrastructure.
Ofgem delay: Meanwhile, Ofgem said this week that plans to require all electricity suppliers to use so-called “half-hourly settlement” for their prices will be delayed for a year until 2026. Half-hourly settlement means using smart meters to set prices based on real-time demand, saving customers’ money, and helping toward net zero goals by cutting overall power use. Adam Bell of Stonehaven — a former government official and self-confessed energy geek — is not happy.
ONSHORE WIND PLEA: Former Levelling-up Secretary Simon Clarke has a piece in CapX calling on the government to hurry up and agree the new planning rules needed to lift the de facto ban on onshore wind. He warns that if ministers don’t act “the Labour party could attempt to amend the Energy Bill to impose their own solution.”
Finally, we need to talk about … Whether Grant Shapps has a future as a presenter on The One Show when he eventually hangs up his political boots. Also how small is that microphone!?
BLOWN IT: Britain wasted enough wind power to fuel one million homes last year because development of the electricity grid has not kept up with the growth of wind power, a new report from the think tank Carbon Tracker found.
BACKGROUND: The government has promised to go big on offshore wind (MECUK remembers a certain blonde former MP pledging we’d be “the Saudi Arabia of wind”) and currently has a target of 50GW of offshore wind by 2030. But industry leaders argue that investment in the grid is not keeping pace.
Border backup: The problem is particularly acute at the Scottish border, where a lack of sufficient grid infrastructure creates bottlenecks in transmitting wind power generated in Scotland to its closest neighbour. These bottlenecks meant National Grid ESO had to pay Scottish wind farms to stop generating power and ask gas plants in England to plug the gap on more than 200 occasions last year.
The price-tag: Last year, balancing the grid like this added £800 million to consumer electricity bills and increased greenhouse gas emissions by 1.3 million tonnes, Carbon Tracker estimate.
WARNING: The report said that if policymakers don’t sort out grid congestion — especially as wind power in Scotland grows — it could waste 20 percent of Scotland’s wind output and cost billions in compensation to wind farms through so-called “constraints payments.”
MINISTER SAYS: Asked about border bottlenecks at the Global Offshore Wind summit on Wednesday, Energy Minister Graham Stuart told MECUK the government is “very alive” to constraints payment costs and was keen to look into the option of producing hydrogen from the electricity that can’t go onto the grid.
Flexibility: “Hydrogen is another option,” the minister said. “We can look to have a system in which that [curtailed power] is converted into hydrogen and can be stored and used and provide flexibility within the system.”
INDUSTRY SAYS: “The electricity grid is not fit for purpose because investments are not increasing in step with the rapid growth of wind power,” said Lorenzo Sani, an analyst at Carbon Tracker and the report’s author. “Without significant improvement in the permitting timeframes for critical energy transmission infrastructure, the grid can’t support the government’s plans to decarbonise generation by 2035 or deliver on its vision of ‘affordable, homegrown, clean energy.’”
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