Though the UK is busting records left, right and centre, Tuesday’s renewable energy auction achieved only half the annual offshore wind capacity needed for the rest of the decade if we hope to meet green energy targets. So a rapid scaling up is needed.
And even if we do secure enough renewable energy projects, we cannot get it to people’s homes.
Take the residents of Shetland, an island off the north coast of Scotland, who live right near a brand-new offshore wind project called Viking. It’s in the windiest part of the UK, and its 103 turbines can produce enough energy to power half a million homes. However, this energy will be transmitted not to the 20,000 people who live in the cold, windy isle – and who therefore pay some of the highest prices for energy in the UK due to needing the heating on more – but down a cable to homes in the rest of Scotland.
Much of the electricity the UK creates cannot be used. This is because our grid – a series of cables crisscrossing the country – has for decades not been properly updated to take enough renewable electricity. It needs to get from the turbine, to a connector, to a cable and then into your home.
This means that windfarmssometimes create so much energy it cannot be transmitted or used, particularly somewhere as windswept as Shetland. The government currently pays them to switch off and therefore not overload the creaky old grid. So, in the few weeks since Viking became operational, the taxpayer has paid £2m to switch off.
A large reason for a lack of grid infrastructure, other than it being part of the general lack of building and investment in this country over the past decade or so, comes from a British hatred of pylons. People don’t want them near their homes. Down to Earth readers in other countries that have electrified faster and perhaps have a different attitude towards infrastructure may find it baffling, but many communities here have been fighting – hard – against having pylons in their communities.
This, incidentally, was the reason for the onshore wind and solar bans I mentioned above, which Miliband has overturned. The previous Conservative government put those bans in place as people didn’t want the infrastructure near their homes.
A reason given by many is they feel these large structures give no benefit to them. Dotting pylons across farmland to transmit energy to large urban areas feels unfair to some who live in rural areas, and the people paying over the odds to heat their draughty homes on Shetland look out of their windows at a giant windfarm supplying people on the mainland.
So giving people a stake in this could be a way to get them to agree to and even learn to like the infrastructure that we need to get this electricity on the grid. Local pricing, which would mean we no longer subsidise windfarms to switch off and instead get them to sell energy dirt cheap to nearby people when it’s really windy, would mean the people of Shetland benefit. They may even go from paying the most for their energy to paying the least.
Greg Jackson, the CEO of Octopus, which has become the biggest electricity supplier in the UK, thinks this is the way forward. He recently told Carbon Brief: “If today we had regional pricing, every region would be cheaper than it is because we’ve been reducing waste. But, more than that, Scotland would be the cheapest electricity in Europe. These are important because as soon as people can see that renewables can lead to cheaper energy, we get public support for renewables – as we should – and it becomes a much more efficient system. We’re not putting a cost on everyone’s bills to pay for waste, which is what happens today.”
For those near pylons, there needs to be another solution. A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Emma Pinchbeck, the CEO of Energy UK, who is tipped to be the next leader of the UK’s Climate Change Committee.
She thinks that communities should get benefits if they live near green energy infrastructure – the energy firm could fund a new sports centre, for example, in return for permission to build pylons. Pinchbeck explained: “Where you’re asking people to host a load of infrastructure for other parts of the country to benefit from cheaper energy bills, you can acknowledge that they are carrying more responsibility for the transition.”
However we do it, the markets need to change if we are to decarbonise our economy and meet net zero. At the moment, the pricing still isn’t right in the energy auctions to incentivise enough companies to bid for renewables, and building the grid infrastructure is still slow and cumbersome.
But, as I said to begin with, we should be clear that the UK has turned a corner. Renewables are being built faster, and the technology is always improving. Windfarms are about twice as effective at creating energy as they were a decade ago and we are erecting more of them all the time. We just need to be able to get that wind on to the grid, into peoples homes – and stop paying them to switch off.
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