This year could be the most defining year in the UK’s path towards net zero carbon emissions, according to some of the country’s leading experts.
The new UK government set making ‘Britain a clean energy superpower’ as one of its five core missions. That is now starting to take shape with the publication of its Clean Power 2030 Action Plan aims to maintain a secure and affordable energy supply in an increasingly unstable world while creating new industries and investments across the country.
The goal is to achieve a power a system where unabated gas contributes less than 5% to the grid in a typical weather year and clean generation of power exceeds domestic demand.
And Sainsbury Management Fellows working in energy and sustainability believe that the next 12 months hold the key to its success and are vital towards reaching ambitious net zero goals beyond 2030.
Mark Futyan has more than 25 years’ experience in energy and has been focused involved in low carbon power technologies since 2005. He believes this new clean power plan is an essential first step towards decarbonising the wider economy.
He said: “It’s been quite a big deal with the new Labour government coming to power. They made it a key theme in their manifesto and came into government with a clear mandate that’s quite ambitious – the goal is that we decarbonise the power system in the next five years, and that’s not very long. It’s a pretty hefty challenge but for the first time, it’s a feasible plan.
“Gas represents a significant portion of today’s power generation mix. Wind and solar power make up around a third of power generated, gas one third and the rest from other sources, including nuclear. But by 2030 we have to squeeze that gas off and replace it with a lot more renewables Particularly offshore wind and solar which will need a big step up.
“We’re effectively rebuilding the energy system.”
Fang Fang has more than a decade’s experience in the energy sector and is now working on strategic energy planning in Scotland where much of the renewable energy in this new plan will be generated.
She says 2025 will be a year of ‘step change’ towards net zero, with the foundations being laid for future work.
Fang said: “My team currently focuses on the near term. We normally say 2025 until 2035. But we also try to build long term scenarios and understanding beyond 2035 until 2050.
“Well, we can see a number of changes. The share of electricity (coming from renewables) will increase more than three times from 2023 to 2050, and the energy system is going to get more complex as we start to see more inter-dependencies and also conversions between different energy generation, storage and consumption technologies.
“I would call 2025 a year of step change. Very likely, there will be a lot of exciting announcements and decisions that will be made this year.
“But beyond 2030, there will be a number of planning initiatives and projects. They will require input from local actors, including local governments, local communities and local energy technology providers and developers. Currently, the different energy systems are planned separately, so by moving towards a joint up whole system approach, hopefully this will ensure the investments are targeted when where needed and the process towards net zero and be accelerated.”
Both Mark and Fang see challenges ahead in the road to clean power and net zero, especially around the make-up of projects that will come to fruition during the next few years.
Mark added: “It’s not just about generating the power, we’re going to have to get that power to where it’s needed. At the moment, a lot of the old power stations are in the middle of the country, not too far from the demand centres. To deal with offshore wind and solar, we’re going to need a lot of storage – and we’ll need lots more wires.
“In the last 10 years, the country has built 2,000km of gridlines. In the next few years, we’re going to have to build 1,000km onshore and 4,500km offshore – this important part of the energy transition is sometimes overlooked.
“On the power generation side, the good news is that there’s plenty of projects to achieve the clean power targets – the problem is that there may be too many in some technologies or locations and these may need to be rationalised.
“If you add up everything under development in the grid queue to be built, we have about 700GW of projects but we only really need 200GW of supply and given that we’ve already got 100GW on the system already, we only need an incremental amount. If we break it down by technology, we have significant excess of energy storage in the pipeline but just about enough of everything else.”
Fang added: “From a network company’s perspective, the first challenge is really managing the connection queues. Previously, the connection requests have come in one by one. Maybe each year we'll have received seven or eight connection requests for the region, but now we receive nearly a hundred.
“So, then we need to figure out how we manage that. Which ones should we give priority to? Then we might give priority to one project, but then it will never mature. So that means we have to completely re-think how we plan our network, moving from a connection-by -connection approach to a more holistic long-term planning approach based on our understanding of current and future energy systems and key drivers for change.
“We also have to mobilise effectively - mobilising the capital required, mobilising the people. We're facing global competition for, for example, cable manufacturing, which will also affect the supply chain.”
Concluding, Mark said: “It’s an unprecedented engineering feat that lies ahead over the next five years, but it’ll make a huge difference to our energy system.
“Reducing gas and cleaning up the power is the first step towards net zero – but there’s more to do. Decarbonising the power system paves the way for the next challenges: decarbonising transport, heat and industry.”