Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

The EU announcement today that Britain has to meet a mandatory target to produce at least 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 changes the entire energy equation for the UK. It renders the Energy Bill which received Second Reading in the Commons last night largely obsolete.

The crucial point is that the target relates to Britain’s total energy needs, not just electricity generation, but also transport fuel and heating. Since the contribution that renewables make to transport fuel is next to nothing and to heating is relatively small, the implication is that the UK will be required, if the target is to be met and it’s a mandatory one, to generate some 30-40% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Since the figure today is just 4%, that’s an 8-fold increase in only 12 years!

What that means is that the Government will have to deliver on their ambitious promise to provide 33GW from offshore wind-power by 2020, as well as kick-starting a range of new renewable and decentralised technologies in which Britain can take a lead, including wave and tidal power. It means building new power stations which with CHP can, as in Scandinavia, achieve 90%+ efficiency levels and can burn cleaner fuels like biomass as well as fossil fuels. It means switching from Britain’s current renewable obligation certificate system to feed-in tariffs which give fixed-price rather than variable support and have been pioneered so successfully in Germany. And it means a massive improvement in our currently lamentable performance on energy efficiency – the Government’s own Environmental Technology Support Unit has stated that a 20-30% improvement by both industry and individual households is entirely practicable and affordable.

There is a further implication. If we do all these things – and we’ve got to in order to meet the mandatory EU target – then we will not need any nuclear power stations. That has enormous implications for Britain’s future energy policy. The Government’s case for nuclear was always weak (largely based on the nuclear fixation of DTI/DBERR officials), and now even that weak case will not be necessary.

The Government’s claim was that nuclear was needed to keep the lights on and to help meet Britain’s climate change commitments, and they also said that there would be no public subsidies and that the nuclear waste problem was perfectly manageable. The evidence is that all four statements are far from true.

First, nuclear can’t keep the lights on because no nuclear plant can now be built in time to meet the 2017-2020 energy gap when 20GW of new capacity will be needed to replace obsolete nuclear and coal plants. Anyway nuclear stations regularly take twice as long to build and cost twice as much as was planned. The Finnish plant currently being built is already 2 years late after just 2 years building, and the cost overrun is already over £1bn.

Secondly, nuclear cannot slash our carbon emissions while delivering energy security because nuclear provides such a tiny part of our energy requirements – just 3 ½ % at present, and falling. Half of our energy demand is for heat, which is mainly gas-based, and the next biggest demand is for transport fuels, which are mainly oil-based. Electricity generation represents the smallest component of energy demand, and new nuclear would be only a small portion of that.

Third, it clearly is not true that there will be no hidden subsidies. Paragraph 3.73 of the Energy White Paper indicates that the Government intends to put a cap on the cost of decommissioning for nuclear operators, and the rest – which could still be huge – will be paid by the taxpayer. Paragraph 3.52 is the give-away: “If the protections we are putting in place through the Energy Bill prove insufficient, in extreme circumstances the Government may be called upon to meet the costs of ensuring the protection of the public and the environment”. And these circumstances will not be extreme because the costs of decommissioning after 150 years – the time between the start of a new nuclear plant and when the waste is finally put into a geological repository – cannot be estimated and are potentially exponential. The decommissioning costs of existing plant are already £75bn with a further £21bn required to dispose of the waste – that’s equal to 7% of Britain’s entire annual GNP.

Nor, fourthly, is the nuclear waste problem manageable. There are already 10,000 tonnes of long-life radioactive toxic waste in this country, and Government estimates it will be 500,000 tonnes by the end of this century, even with no new nuclear build. So where is all the old waste and new additional waste going to go? There has been virtually no progress at all in answering that problem since the last Conservative Government abandoned the search for a nuclear waste dump in 1997.

Against this depressing background, perhaps today’s EU announcement will now point Britain in a profoundly different and much more hopeful direction. It is after all a mandatory requirement.