Labour’s Low Carbon Promise

By Paul Homewood

https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/

Amongst all of the promises in Labour’s manifesto at last year’s election was this:

Amidst all of the rhetoric about Brexit, Jeremy’s magic money tree and the fact that most thought Labour would get annihilated, very few paid much attention to this pledge, despite the fact that it was judged so important as to merit it being one of the “first missions”.

In fact, it was not suddenly pulled out of the air. Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband made a similarly crazy promise two years ago to totally decarbonise electricity by 2030.

So is it possible to carry out this pledge and what would be involved?

Let’s start by looking at the current situation, as it was in 2016. (BEIS data is not yet out for last year). Figures exclude imported electricity:

Mtoe	Electricity	Non-Electricity	Total
Gas	26	51	77
Oil		68	68
Coal	8	4	12
Bioenergy	10	4	14
Nuclear	15		15
Wind/Solar/Hydro	5		5
Total	64	127	191

Low Carbon	30	4	34

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/energy-trends#2017

So currently low carbon supplies 34 Mtoe, or 18% of the total.

There appears to be little prospect of any meaningful reductions in energy consumption, as government projections confirm. Given Labour’s claim that they will grow the economy, particularly the industrial sector, and its refusal to tackle immigration, energy consumption is likely to grow.

Electricity

Let’s start by looking the electricity sector.

The Committee on Climate Change, hardly backpeddlers in these matters, built three main scenarios into their Fifth Carbon Budget for 2030:

The High Nuclear option looks like a non starter. Out of the existing nuclear fleet, only Sizewell B, with capacity of 1.2 GW, is due to still be operational. We can add Hinkley Point C to that, with its 3.2 GW.

To reach 11 GW would imply another two Hinkley Point size plants. There is no prospect of this happening by 2030 at the moment, with suppliers hardly queuing up to bid.

Hinkley Point is going to take about 10 years to build, and you can add several years of planning approval, contract negotiations and arranging of finance to that for any new projects.

Even if we can get the plants built, there is the little problem of cost. The index linked contract price for Hinkley is already up to £97.14/MWh. At that sort of cost, two more plants would add about £2.6bn to subsidies paid for by consumers. Given that Labour say they want to reduce energy bills, this would seem to be a strange way of going about it.

High CCS is also off the table at the moment, as the process still has not been proved to work or be economically viable at the scale needed.

Even if it should proved to be viable, there are two other big problems:

1) Cost – CCS, by its very nature, would add considerably electricity generation costs.

2) Although new CCGT plants now have to be built “CCS ready”, all of our existing fleet would need to be retro-fitted. There would be no incentive for existing owners to spend this sort of money, when their plants have little life left anyway and they are being squeezed by subsidised renewable operations.

Labour of course also have plans to nationalise the whole lot anyway, in which case the taxpayer would be on the hook.

That just leaves us with the High Renewables scenario. We can note that, according to John Gummer’s wizards, this will still need 98 TWh of gas-fired generation. (Gas is currently running at 143 TWh). Interestingly, gas generation is actually slightly higher under the High Nuclear option.

98 TWH would equate to 18 Mtoe.

Non Electricity Use

Gas

Gas consumption, other than for electricity generation, is currently 51 Mtoe.

Domestic use accounts for 52% of this, with the rest split between industrial and other final users. Some of the latter is for heating, but some is also used in industrial processes.

The Manifesto gives no explanation of how a Labour government would go about reducing any of this consumption, other than promising to insulate 4 million homes.

Oil

Oil consumption was 69 Mtoe in 2016, of which 77% goes for transport. The rest is split between industry, domestic and others.

Government projections forecast little change in this by 2030. Although some uptake of EVs along with greater fuel efficiency will act to reduce demand, this will be offset by more cars on the road and greater consumption for aviation.

Summary

Plugging in all of the above numbers and assumptions, we end up with something like this for 2030:

Projected Primary Energy Consumption in 2030

These numbers tally pretty closely to the government’s own projections here.

Low carbon would only account for 24% of the total, a long way short of Labour’s 60% pledge. So where would they make up the difference from?

The Manifesto contains little in the way of hard information as to how this might happen:

1) Labour will insulate four million homes as an infrastructure priority to help those who suffer in cold homes each winter. This will cut emissions, improve health, save on bills, and reduce fuel poverty and winter deaths.

I’ve always believed that people use better insulation primarily for warmer homes, and not to save money, as even the manifesto partly recognises.

Any energy savings will be minor, and likely more than offset by greater consumption as people become better off, (something Jeremy assures us will happen under his rule!)

2) Emerging technologies such as carbon capture and storage will help to smooth the transition to cleaner fuels and to protect existing jobs as part of the future energy mix.

As already pointed out, there are a number of reasons why CCS will make little contribution on the timescale claimed.

It would certainly be highly dangerous to base your energy strategy on the technology being successful.

And that’s about it, other than a few platitudes about nuclear and tidal power.

The manifesto lays down these three principles: