Helm Talks - energy climate infrastructure & more

The net zero electricity targets in the UK are fast-approaching. On current policies, there is little chance that we get there by 2035, let alone Labour’s 2030. UK energy infrastructure is not designed around intermittent wind, intermittent solar, active demand management, around electric car charging, air conditioning and heat pumps and decentralised home generation. A radical system change is re...

The government would have us believe that not only can we get to net zero in electricity by 2035, but that it won’t cost very much. All the green investment needed will be paid for through borrowing, and the returns on that investment will pay back the initial outlay and the interest. The problem with this approach is that it is not us, the polluters, who pay for the damage we have caused to the e...

The science on climate change is pretty clear and not new. The latest IPPC report is pretty dire in its predictions, but our understanding of the science is not new – it has been around since the 19th century. Alongside this science and increasing understanding, however, is what is happening on the ground – a different universe altogether. This podcast looks at this reality, and why now is the tim...

What role can the UK seriously can play in tackling climate change? The “delusion of grandeur” we have been led to believe is that we can do it all. This delusion is falling away – when it comes to green technology, the UK is not the envy of the world in the twenty-first century. The US is positioning itself to play a major role in this, through its Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and the I...

Getting to net zero is necessary but it will not be cheap. Everyone is clamouring for government subsidies: steel, battery factories, offshore wind, farmers, and customers and SMEs hit by high energy prices, as well as new nuclear power, CCS offshore, and hydrogen. The great gas price crisis is already easing, but not the demand for state support. It’s a lobbyists’ dream. Both main political parti...

Keir Starmer, Leader of the Opposition, has come up with his five missions to match Rishi Sunak’s five pledges. But taking a look at two specifically – the highest sustained economic growth in the G7 and zero carbon electricity by 2030 (not just net zero) – are these missions both credible and deliverable? While there are some positives – in particular a longer-term horizon and a focus on infrastr...

What was privatisation really all about? Its advocates thought private sector meant efficiency, versus the failing, inefficient, public sector entities. But now looking at our neighbours in Europe - for example, in water - the evidence does not suggest that we have achieved the promised nirvana. UK utilities are not the envy of the world. Two more profound features of the past 30 years of privatis...

While each of the current challenges in our core services (NHS, Royal Mail, water, rail, etc) may have has its own explanations, causes and proposed fixes, together they ultimately add up to a systemic problem. Sticking plasters are not going to deliver the decent services a civilised society should expect to have. It’s not that we don’t know how to fix these problems, but rather we are not prepar...

With a lot of investment required for UK infrastructure – in water, in broadband/fibre, in the wind farms, the electricity grid, in heating conversions, and in electric transport - a massive amount of money is needed, but where is it going to come from? Savings are necessary to pay for the investment, but we are no longer a nation of savers, and we therefore have to rely on the savings of foreigne...

As the International Energy Agency forecasts another gas crisis in 2024, let’s look at the facts. There are three reasons why the IEA’s fears may not materialise. First, on the Russia–Ukraine position, it was Russia that decided to turn off the taps, and it can choose to turn them on again. There are good reasons why it may do so, not least because its economy is suffering seriously. Second, LNG (...

Greta was right. COP27 has not made serious progress on mitigating climate change. Instead of concentrating on addressing the failures at Glasgow to set nationally determined contributions (NDCs) matching the 1.5˚C target, COP27 has been all about the past, about reparations for loss and damage. More pious words, 36,000 attendees and a new fund are not going to make much impact, and in the meantim...

26 COPs to date have not delivered, so why will COP27 (or even the next 27 COPs) be any different? It won't and here is why. It's all about the money, and the money is all about who pays for the pollution – the stock put up in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, and the continuing emissions being added now. The $100 billion per annum promised at past COPs (but never actually fully deli...

Whenever there is a fossil-fuel price shock, there’s a great temptation to think that the higher prices are here to stay, that this is the ‘new normal’. It happened after the great OPEC shocks of the 1970s, and in the run-up to the oil price peak in 2014. All the usual suspects who benefit from higher prices are at it again now: “prices are going to stay high” and “we’re in for a decade of high pr...

The sound of Russian gunfire and the alarm has gone off on energy security. The retreat from the net zero strategies is all too apparent: keeping coal-fired power stations running, increasing the coal burn, drilling for more oil and gas and even considering opening a new coal mine, cutting fuel duties and subsidising household energy, and supporting large energy users. The simple illusion that bui...

Faced with sharply rising household energy bills, there is great political consensus that this is a good time to bash the companies with a windfall tax. Prices have gone up, companies are benefiting from the troubles in Ukraine, and governments are in the business of redistribution. There are two questions: first, what exactly is a windfall; and second, why have windfalls emerged? Windfalls arise...

How do we pay not just for the immediate costs of energy, but for the full transition to net zero? Right now the UK economy is around 80% dependent on fossil fuels, just as it was back in 1970 - and much the same as the rest of the world. We have 28 years to get this down to a residual, all of which needs to be sequestrated. We have the 2050 net zero target and the 2035 target for net zero for ele...

From April, the average household will be paying around £2,000 a year for their energy. By October it may be closer to £3,000. Many will struggle to pay. This price does not reflect the true energy costs, which are lower. Consumers are paying too much. Whilst the price of gas has gone up, this is only one part of energy costs. Energy costs from nuclear and from renewables have not increased. The c...

What would sustainable agriculture look like? It would be zero carbon consumption or better, deliver food sustainably whilst preserving and enhancing natural capital (including the soils and the peat), offset carbon emissions elsewhere, and pass the assets on to the next generation in good shape. What we have now is no carbon price, no carbon border adjustments, and no overall plan for land use, i...

The reasons why energy prices have shot up are well known: the Russians and extra demand in the Far East when it comes to gas, exacerbated in the UK by the lack of storage, the scale of the intermittent renewables, and the fast-track exit from coal. The UK government assumes that this is all very temporary, that gas prices will fall back by the autumn, and that the temporary storm can be weathered...

Energy price crises are usually triggered by external events. But the UK has been hit particularly hard by the global gas price increases, and for mainly home-grown reasons. This is the first net zero energy prices crisis and, unless action is taken, there will be many more to come. There are two main reasons: the energy system is not designed to handle the intermittency of the renewables; and the...

30 years after privatisation, the electricity model looks to be in deep trouble. In addition to the collapse of 25 suppliers, and the knock-on increases in bills that customers will have to pay for what has, in some cases, been very poor management, and, in regulation, serious failures to scrutinise the businesses, several thousand people have been cut off from the distribution networks for over a...

Is COP26 the “real deal”, marking the point when we “turned the corner” on climate change, or is it what Greta Thunberg calls “blah, blah, blah”? To succeed, COP26 would need to slow down and stop the increase in carbon in the atmosphere – something all the previous COPs have failed to do. For the last 30 wasted years, that concentration has gone up by roughly 2 parts per million per year, includi...

The gas crisis is very predictable and has caught the government and the regulators asleep at the wheel. Virtually no storage, suppliers without proper contractual cover, and a flawed model of competition have left the UK exposed to the intermittency of wind without proper back-up and with customers picking up the bill. Russia, low wind output, old-fashioned twentieth century wholesale market pric...

Why are electricity prices going up? Why is the price cap being reported raised by Ofgem? Do prices really have to go up, or should they be coming down? The answer given by Ofgem and the industry is that the price of gas is going up. That’s true. But gas is only one part of the generation of our electricity. In fact, our electricity is increasingly coming from renewables, with some contribution fr...

It's about time the government and the regulators took a good hard look at so-called green and renewables-only electricity contracts. Consumers – you and I – might want to do the right thing, and buy only low-carbon electricity so we reduce our carbon footprint. But none of us – unless we really are off grid and use no diesel or gas back-ups – actually consumes only renewable energy. Why? Because...