Utility Week

10 | 10TH - 16TH MAY 2019 | UTILITY WEEK Policy & Regulation Analysis T he past month has seen unprecedented attention paid to climate change in the UK. The central London protests by Extinction Rebellion captured the headlines, as did Swedish teenage activist Greta Thun- berg's visit to parliament last month. Then only last week, the House of Commons voted unanimously to declare a climate change emergency. It was perfect timing, therefore, for the publication by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) of its blueprint for reaching the zero carbon nirvana that the likes of Extinction Rebellion dream about. The remit for the statutory climate change adviser was to examine whether the UK's greenhouse gas emissions target could be ramped up to so-called net zero level. This would be an increase on the target of 80 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050, which has been the lodestar of UK energy policy since the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008. The answer in the CCC's 277-page report is that the more ambitious goal can be achieved without beggaring the UK. Net zero target The committee's core conclusion is that a net zero carbon target is achievable by the mid- dle of the century. The cost of getting there would be equivalent to 1 to 2 per cent of GDP, estimates the report. This is roughly similar to what the CCC reckoned reaching 80 per cent reduction would cost when this target was set a dec- ade ago. Plummeting costs of certain renew- able technologies, notably offshore wind and solar, means that decarbonisation can be achieved at a lower cost than was then envisaged. The committee's decision to stick with the 2050 end date will be seen as lily-livered in more radical quarters, like Extinction Rebel- lion, which has called for UK to decarbonise by 2025. Lord Turner, the CCC's first chair and cur- rent chair of industry grouping the Energy Transitions Commission, told a briefing ahead of the report's publication that the commission thought net zero could be achieved as early as 2045 with "real effort and some behavioural change". Chris Stark, chief executive of the CCC, told the report's press launch that it is "per- fectly possible" that the 2050 target date might be revisited, but for now it is the "cor- rect" date. According to Lord Deben, the commit- tee's chair, the body has taken a deliberately cautious view which doesn't rely on specula- tive technologies or solutions. He said: "You have to be realistic about how much change in people's behaviour you can expect or rea- sonably want." Dr Jonathan Marshall, head of analysis at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, tells Utility Week that 2050 is a "very prag- matic" target. While 2045 would have been "more ambitious", he points out that the CCC has factored into its calculations all green- house gases together with the UK's share of international aviation and shipping. Doug Parr, head of policy at Greenpeace, says he is "not disappointed" by the 2050 target. "Within the remit they were given and assumptions they are required to make, this was the outcome one might have expected." While the goal may be feasible, getting to net zero will be far from a stroll in the park. Driving down emissions will involve faster than anticipated electrification of transport and the decarbonisation of heating. The government's existing target that no new internal combustion engine cars and vans should be on sale from 2040 will have to be brought forward by five years at the "very latest" and "ideally earlier" , the CCC recom- mends, so that by 2050 "very few" petrol and diesel vehicles will still be on the road. Heating It also entails much faster progress on domestic heating. The government announced in last month's spring state- ment that by 2025 no new-build homes will be allowed to fit fossil fuel heating systems. The CCC wants to step this up, implying that the sale of gas boilers be banned outright by 2035, so that anyone replacing their boiler would have to install a low-carbon system. The CCC recommends that taxes and regulatory costs, which apply to gas and electricity, should be reviewed in order to better reflect the amount of carbon that both fuels use. Rebalancing these costs would strengthen the case for private householders to switch to electric forms of heating, it says. In order to allow supply chains to develop, the 2020s must see strategic deci- sions on the large-scale deployment of heat pumps together with much faster progress on the roll out of hydrogen for heating. The more stretching zero emissions target also means that natural gas will have to be Time for a climate crusade The CCC has published its report on emissions reduction – and has declared that net zero is both achievable and essential. David Blackman hears why it is time to rethink climate change targets.

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