Confessing to some in the Labour Party an interest in green issues can be enough to ensure a sad roll of the eyes, a quick look at the watch and a hurried excuse about the need to leave for another pressing meeting. And it doesn’t help if you add that you are particularly interested in the potential for renewable energy. Renewable energy – wind power, solar energy, energy from waste or energy crops – has been quietly rising up the government’s agenda. Indeed, its potential to help tackle our most pressing environmental challenges – the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, increase Britain’s energy options and, at the same time, create new jobs in manufacturing in rural areas and hard-pressed offshore industries – has become increasingly clear.
Despite President Bush’s refusal to implement the Kyoto climate change treaty, the pressure for further global action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions will not go away. The international Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that, globally, carbon dioxide emissions need to be reduced by 60 percent – or around one percent each year for the next 50 years. In the UK last year the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, confirming the need for 60 percent reductions, argued that whilst we would probably meet our Kyoto targets, we would struggle to meet our manifesto promise of a 20 percent target for reductions in CO2 levels on 1990 levels by 2010 – never mind the 60 percent target over the next 50 years – without further significant support for renewable energy.
So far our reductions in CO2 reductions have been largely achieved through the switch in the 1980s and 90s away from coal to natural gas: in environmental terms merely a one-off windfall. To make things more challenging still, the contribution of nuclear power to the UK’s energy mix – the one other major form of energy that doesn’t produce CO2 emissions – will soon begin to decline as the present generation of nuclear power stations come to the end of their lives. Indeed, the future of the nuclear industry, with its myriad problems, has been the dominant issue so far discussed in media speculation about the outcomes of the energy review launched by Brian Wilson, the Minister for Energy, just after the election.
What then of the potential for renewables? The eighteen offshore wind farm sites announced by Peter Hain just before the election are merely a start, given Britain has the offshore wind capacity alone to guarantee three times our energy needs. This is quite apart from the considerable further potential for offshore wind, energy crops and, further down the road, solar energy and wave/tidal energy too. The DTI estimate that 4,000 people are already employed working in Britain’s renewables industry for either the renewables ‘arms’ of international companies such as Innogy and PowerGen, or much smaller turbine generators. The consultants Energy for Sustainable Development estimate that an additional 90,000 jobs could be created over the next ten years in reaching the government’s ten percent target for electricity from renewable sources by 2010.
The contribution of renewables to Britain’s energy mix remains small: just three percent of electricity is generated from renewable sources, tiny compared to natural gas, nuclear and even coal. Yet a series of announcements from companies such as Scottish Power, Shell, PowerGen, plus an innovative partnership between Innogy and Greenpeace about new wind power projects in the UK, indicate the start of a modest take off for the industry. This is fuelled in part by the allocation of an extra £200 million for renewables development in the twelve months before the election, the start of the Climate Change Levy and the launch of emissions trading.
If our renewables industry is to fulfil its potential, then further substantial government commitment will be necessary. A extra £1 billion investment by the government could generate a total investment of £3,500 million in renewables, helping to develop a world class industry able to challenge the highly successful German, Danish and American programmes. A Sustainable Energy Agency could provide the leadership and focus to deliver the modernised energy markets and improved regulation needed to truly kickstart renewables’ contribution to a low-carbon future.
In short, renewables is where the knowledge-based economy meets the environment, where the market can deliver reductions in carbon emissions and where a new industry offers huge potential for new jobs and new income streams. With Tony Blair calling for ‘Britain to be a leading player in [the] coming green industrial revolution’ and renewable energy providing the power, for example, to the CIA headquarters in Washington and Gatwick Airport’s North Terminal, it is already really time the sceptics took note.