Renewable UK, Indeed

Matt Oliver and Jonathan Leake write:

The UK’s wind farm trade body has called on Ed Miliband to “take energy out of the culture wars” by increasing North Sea production.

Tara Singh, the chief executive of RenewableUK, said the crisis in the Middle East demonstrates how Britain remains vulnerable to events overseas and would be “stronger, safer and less exposed if it produces more home-grown energy of every kind”. Writing for The Telegraph, she argued efforts should mainly focus on green energy but that it was also “entirely sensible” to support home-grown oil and gas as well as nuclear power.

The intervention is embarrassing for Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, who is resisting pressure to expand North Sea drilling even as the Iran war restricts global oil and gas supplies.

Since coming to power, Labour has largely banned licences for new drilling and expanded a 78pc windfall tax on producers – changes that critics say are speeding up the basin’s decline.

Ms Singh, a former energy adviser to the Government and oil giant Shell, said the Iran crisis was “a reminder of how exposed Britain still is to shocks far beyond our shores, especially when it comes to energy”.

She wrote: “I have seen that vulnerability up close. I worked on energy in No 10 when Russia’s invasion of Crimea sent prices surging here in the UK.

“I come to this debate with a simple view: Britain will be stronger, safer and less exposed if it produces more home-grown energy of every kind.”

She said Britain would still need oil and gas for the “foreseeable future”. She added: “So it is entirely sensible to support continued domestic oil and gas production in the North Sea.

“If we do not produce that gas here, we will not stop needing it. We will simply import more of it.”

However, she also cautioned that the North Sea was an ageing basin, “not a limitless national asset”.

Her comments come after Greg Jackson, the boss of Octopus Energy, Britain’s biggest gas and electricity supplier, also urged the Government to “use what’s available from the North Sea”.

Labour and Mr Miliband have rejected calls to ease their oil and gas crackdown after claiming that more drilling in the North Sea will not bring down energy prices.

However, critics of the policy argue that artificially constraining domestic production needlessly accelerates job losses and deprives the Treasury of valuable tax revenues.

It also leaves the country more reliant on imports with a larger carbon footprint.

Opponents of Mr Miliband’s approach also include Labour’s union backers, Unite and the GMB Union, as well as the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

However, Labour is under pressure from Left-wing activists [name them] and the Green Party to hold firm.

Pressed on why the Government was leaving “revenues in the ground” in an interview on Sunday, Mr Miliband denied he was blocking increased production for “ideological reasons”.

Speaking on LBC Radio, he said: “I don’t see it that way at all. As I explained, new licences won’t make a material difference. “Our reliance on fossil fuels is costing us, in Russia and Ukraine, tens of billions of pounds.

“I think the North Sea has produced important revenue, but our excessive dependence on fossil fuels has been a massive problem.”

Elsewhere on Monday, a new parliamentary report found Britain is set to miss out on around five billion barrels of oil and gas under Labour’s ban on new drilling.

The study, from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, looked at areas known to hold oil and gas resources but which have not yet been licensed for drilling, meaning they are now no-go areas for energy companies.

It found that there are more than 4.6 billion barrels of oil and gas in such areas, warning: “Under current policy, no new licences for O&G will be issued, meaning these resources would not be viable for extraction.”

Britain will still need gas well into the foreseeable future

By Tara Singh

The terrible events in the Middle East are, above all, a human tragedy. But they are also a reminder of how exposed Britain still is to shocks far beyond our shores, especially in the energy sector.

I have seen that vulnerability up close. I worked on energy in No 10 when Russia’s invasion of Crimea sent prices surging here in the UK. Later, working for Shell during the 2022 energy crisis – once again tied to Russia – I saw how quickly a global price shock could become an economic emergency. And now, having just joined RenewableUK as chief executive, I come to this debate with a simple view: Britain will be stronger, safer and less exposed if it produces more home-grown energy of every kind.

It’s time to take energy out of the culture wars.

Let’s start with gas. However fast we build clean power, Britain will still need gas well into the foreseeable future: to heat homes and power industry where electrification doesn’t make sense for households and businesses and to help keep the electricity system balanced. So it is entirely sensible to support continued domestic oil and gas production in the North Sea. If we do not produce that gas here, we will still need it. We will simply import more of it.

But being serious about the UK’s important role in gas also means being honest about its limitations. The North Sea is a mature basin, not a limitless national asset. Even on the industry’s more optimistic assumptions, it could supply around half of our oil and gas needs by 2050. It matters, but it is not a long-term answer on its own.

Nor should politicians imply that more domestic drilling will somehow bring back cheap energy. It will not. Britain buys and sells gas in a global market. More domestic production can support jobs, supply chains, tax revenues and resilience. What it cannot do is shield households from global gas-price shocks.

The same point applies to fracking. I am not ideologically opposed to it. In government, I tried and failed to get it moving. But in Britain, it does not have the community consent needed to proceed at scale, and that matters. Even if it did, it would not change the underlying reality that we are part of an interconnected market. Britain is not America. We are not sitting on a vast, self-contained continental energy system that can insulate us from world prices. We shouldn’t rule out fracking on ideological grounds, but let’s be honest that it is unlikely to be a silver bullet on its own.

As a longer-term answer, nuclear has an important place. It provides baseload clean power and strengthens the system over time. Any serious long-term strategy should include it. But nuclear is slow to build. It is part of the answer, but not the quickest or cheapest part – unlike renewable power. Let’s take forward the recommendations of the Fingleton Review, but be realistic about what it’s likely to achieve in terms of cost reduction. And we already have good-value, home-grown power – and that’s onshore and offshore wind and solar.

These renewables are now the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to reduce Britain’s exposure to volatile fossil-fuel markets, and any serious energy policy will continue to accelerate their deployment.

New renewable generation offers better value than new gas generation even when gas prices are not at crisis levels – onshore renewables are half the normal cost of new gas generation, and offshore wind 40pc cheaper. And once wind and solar are built, they are not hostage to the fuel-price shocks that have done so much damage to family budgets, the national debt and business confidence in recent years.

Renewables are also one of Britain’s best opportunities for industrial regeneration and economic growth, with the wind sector alone supporting around 55,000 jobs today and potentially more than 110,000 by 2030, many of them in places like Hull in East Yorkshire and Teesside in North East England, coastal Scotland and the Isle of Wight – making it a similar size to today’s oil and gas sector and, indeed, having many of the same supply chains.

So the argument is straightforward. Back domestic oil and gas, because Britain will still need gas, and importing more would often be worse. Be honest: the North Sea is finite, and more drilling will not deliver cheap energy. Keep nuclear in the mix, because it strengthens the system over time. But prioritise renewables, because they now offer the best route to lasting energy security.

Britain does not need the ongoing ideological argument about energy. It needs a practical one. We should back what works. And what works is more home-grown energy, with clean power leading the way.

Tara Singh is the chief executive of RenewableUK

Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Margaret Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

To equip us to fight a war if necessary, but primarily to keep us out of wars, we need a complete change of direction, beginning with the lifting of the ban on further exploration of North Sea oil and gas. We need to harness the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.