Utility Week

14 | JANUARY 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Policy & Regulation Green Industrial Revolution Vive la revolution? The infl uential Committee on Climate Change has called for a dramatic increase in the UK's decarbonisation eff orts. Does this mean that Whitehall slogans may actually turn into a call to arms? David Blackman reports. C hristmas came early for energy wonks in 2020 as the nal month of the year witnessed a ra of government policy announcements. Kicking o on 18 November, prime minis- ter Boris Johnson launched his 10-point plan for a green recovery (see overleaf). This was followed a week later by the publication of the National Infrastructure Strategy, which … eshed out the plan and heralded a major shake-up of utilities regulation (see "NIS proposes net zero duty for regulators", p17). The box of energy policy delights culmi- nated in the publication of the Energy White Paper, which nally emerged a er a two- year gestation. Amid the … urry of government announce- ments, another key document stood out – the recently rebadged Climate Change Committee's (CCC's) Sixth Carbon Budget. While not government policy, this docu- ment matters given the key role that the CCC plays in advising parliament on how the UK should go about meeting its carbon reduc- tion. One example of the CCC's in… uence is its recommendation to ban gas boilers from being installed in new homes, which in barely two months last year went from an idea mooted in one of the advisory body's reports to government policy. Framing the CCC's latest 400-plus page report is the headline recommendation that UK emissions should be cut to 78 per cent of 1990 levels by 2035. To put this in context, until summer 2019 the UK was targeting an 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050. Setting the steeper goal of "net zero" emissions by the midpoint of this century meant that the CCC had to work out how greater reductions could be achieved faster. The new 2035 target means, as the CCC's chief executive Chris Stark pointed out in a brie ng ahead of the report's publica- tion, that greater emissions reduction must be achieved over the next 30 years than throughout the previous three decades. This is without the massive emissions reduction windfall delivered by the switchover from coal to gas as the main fuel for generating electricity. One of the key points … owing from the CCC's latest report is that challenges, which could have been put o for longer or not even faced at all, have become more pressing. This greater urgency is re… ected in the CCC's conclusion that time will be called on natural gas in key areas by the middle of the next decade. New gas boilers should be banned from homes by 2033, a recommendation that the government hasn't entirely embraced in its white paper, which proposes instead that all domestic heating should be low carbon by the slightly later date of 2035. In addition, no gas- red power sta- tions should be generating electricity by 2035 unless they are tted with carbon cap- ture technology, says the climate change watchdog. And carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be a requirement for new gas power sta-

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