Utility Week

22 | NOVEMBER 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Policy & Regulation Analysis 2035: a date with destiny? The target of making the energy system emissions free by 2035 is now official government policy, but how realistic is it? And what needs to be done to achieve it? David Blackman asks the questions. F or energy policy watchers, there was a mystery hanging over the Conservative party conference. The Times reported that Boris Johnson would use his leader's speech, which rounds off the annual shindig, to announce an accel- eration of the government's timetable to decarbonise the grid. But when the prime minster delivered his keynote speech, there was no mention of the pledge to cut emis- sions from electricity generation to zero by 2035, leaving many industry figures scratch- ing their heads. By the end of the week, a-er the confer- ence had finished, the Department for Busi- ness, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) finally cleared up the confusion by making a formal announcement that the government is committed to the 2035 target, first called for by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) last year in its Sixth Carbon Budget. So whether Johnson chose to own the issue or not, it is official government policy now – and it is bold. Big on ambition Guy Newey, strategy and performance direc- tor at the Energy Systems Catapult, says: "The 2035 target is extremely ambitious; it's right at the edge of what's deliverable from an engineering point of view. "This is going to become an enormous delivery challenge for the government, the system operator and Ofgem." It is a view echoed by BEIS's former head of energy strategy Adam Bell, who has recently become head of policy at consul- tancy Stonehaven. "Getting to 2035 means dramatic increases in the capacity of all low- carbon technologies," he says. The 2035 target will mean having to "dou- ble down" on deployment of renewables, which will replace gas as the "backbone" of the generation system, says Josh Buckland, a former No 10 adviser on energy policy. The UK's existing mechanisms for plan- ning and procuring wind and solar power will have to become slicker, he adds And the UK will require at least one more big nuclear plant alongside Hinkley Point, says Buckland: "At the moment, nuclear is the most significant gap to fully decarbonise the power system." According to Tim Lord, formerly BEIS director of clean growth and now a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change: "You don't need tens of gigawatts [of nuclear] but it is a low regrets [option] to build at least one more plant. But if you are going to do it by 2035, you have to get on with it." Bringing forward the decarbonisation of the grid to 2035 has the most immediate implications for the UK's fleet of gas-fired power stations, which remain the country's biggest single source of generation. "The government commitment to 40GW [of offshore wind] by 2030 will move us a long way but still needs to deal with the intermittency of those renewables," says Owen Bellamy, lead power sector analyst at the CCC. Getting rid of unabated gas, which will be the only major source of emissions on the grid a-er the 2025 coal phase-out, will be "more challenging", he says. "You could switch from coal to renewables and gas. Moving away from unabated gas means hav- ing to develop low-carbon alternatives for the role that gas plays on the system." The need for back-up generation The most challenging phase of this switcho- ver will be at the latter end of this decade when the retirement of the existing nuclear fleet will create a requirement for gas back- up plant, says Buckland, who is now a part- ner at public affairs company Flint Global. The working assumption of policymak- ers has been that a number of unabated gas power stations will be retained, even if they are idle most of the time, to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar power. Buckland says: "There will have to be residual gas power on the system to manage through those periods." There may even need to be some new unabated gas to meet short-term pressures, Buckland adds. "It would be bold to ban gas and I would expect in the near term some gas to come forward in the capacity market. It's not realistic that there will be no new

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