Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | OCTOBER 2022 | 9 Energy spring, when demand for power is falling, makes sense, he says: "You have to look at alternative means of providing support that are not quite so open ended. I just don't see that it is credible to maintain a freeze across the whole of business unfortunately." Energy independence Alongside writing a big blank cheque to households and businesses, Truss outlined a series of other steps to boost the UK's energy security, including an immediate halt to the ban on fracking. Taking a leaf out of her defeated Tory leadership rival's book, she adopted Sunak's campaign proposal for the UK to be energy independent, while bringing forward his date for achieving this from 2045 to 2040. Dr David Jo‡ e, head of carbon budgets at the Climate Change Committee (CCC), says the climate adviser's existing scenarios sug- gest that energy independence by 2040 is "probably just about achievable". The scenario that most closely matches the energy independence goal is the CCC's "tailwinds" pathway, which shows how emissions could be cut to net zero by 2042, eight years ahead of the government's statu- tory 2050 target for eradicating emissions. Under this kind of scenario, the UK could be producing about as much oil as it con- sumes, will still be a net importer of gas but potentially a net exporter of clean electric- ity by about 2040. He says: "That seems just about feasible." The tailwinds scenario relies on actions like strong energy e' ciency and low-carbon programmes, cars and vans being largely electri' ed by 2040 and greatly increased deployment of nuclear and renewable power, including the onshore solar farms that Truss spent so much of her Tory leader- ship campaign railing against. Jo‡ e says: "It would take an extremely ambitious programme across a bunch of sec- tors and even then, you can probably only just get to being energy independent. "It's basically pulling all of the levers to be able to get to being a net exporter by 2040." However, it is "unrealistic" to expect fracking to get "anywhere close to ' lling the gap" in demand for gas by that date, while North Sea production is only likely to fall over the next two decades as its fossil fuel reserves are exhausted, he says: "The only way to get to energy independence is to cut our demand for fossil fuels even faster. That means radical pushes for decarbonisation but it needs to be strategic. This needs to be a strategic priority, not just for climate rea- sons, but also for energy security reasons." Energy independ- ence is "absolutely" consistent with net zero, he adds: "It doesn't need new fossil fuel production in order to achieve that because ulti- mately we can gen- erate so much clean energy in this country that we could be a net exporter of electricity to a signi' cant degree if we chose to take that path." Adam Bell, former head of energy strategy at BEIS, agrees that electri' cation is the only route to UK energy independence, including eliminating most internal combustion engine vehicles o‡ the road by the end of the next decade. He says: "You can only real- istically do it through the massive expansion of o‡ shore wind and the conversion of big chunks of the econ- omy to running on electric vehicles. continued overleaf

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