Welcome to zero. I am UKTUA thrated this week the UK's big bet. I read a lot of headlines about climate change and I know you do too. Together they paint a dire picture because climate impacts are growing and wore leaders are stepping back from bold action needed to tackle climate change. It's something that we talk about on this show with some frequency. But last week I saw
something that bucked the trend. The UK submitted new climate goals for twenty thirty five to the United Nations, and they are among the boldest and most ambitious in the world. The UK has long been a climate leader. It created the first climate change law for a large economy all the way back in two thousand and eight. It built
an independent watchdog in the Climate Change Committee. It's twenty thirty five goal, we'll see an eighty one percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions relative to nineteen ninety levels, and now it has a plan to reach clean power by twenty thirty So how is it that the UK is making big bets when everybody else is stepping back. The best person to help us understand that is Chris Stark.
He used to run the Climate Change Committee and now runs the newly created mission controlled Task Force for Clean Power. He is the Labor government's man to make sure that the UK reaches ninety five percent clean power by twenty thirty. It's a tough goal, and even tougher when you're trying to do it while reducing energy prices. But even as Chris focuses on this ambitious goal, Labor's leaders are sending mixed signals. They want to open new runways and expand
airports across the UK, including at Heathrow. They might even sign off on new oil fields in the Nazia. All of that is going to add complication to Chris's job, so we had a lot to talk about. I spoke with Chris at the British Library in London at the Energy Transition Acceleration Forum curated by the Carbon Trust. Welcome to the forum and welcome to the Zero Podcast again.
Chris.
It's nice to be back with you again. Asha.
Now let's start with the big picture before we get to the goals that you are going to have to achieve while you're working for the government. We spoke about a year ago and you at that time told me that the climate census in the UK cannot be taken for granted.
Since then, Donald Trump is back in the White House.
The typically climate forward labor government has been at times deprioritizing decarbonization.
So would it be fair.
To say that now the climate consensus globally cannot be taken for granted? And what should climate forward leaders like you and many of those in the audience be doing at this time.
So I stand by my comments to you a year ago. It's amazing, that's only a year. Actually, that's incredible. It's been quite a year. The climate consensus is not something you should ever take for granted. And the best example of that is that in the last year we've seen some of the most extreme weather events that we've ever seen, probably the most extreme year ever in terms.
Of recorded history.
But it doesn't connect automatically to desire globally, from at least from our politicians globally, to do more on climate mitigation. Interesting question whether it might lead to more of a focus on client adaptation and resilience, I said, Rale. I suspect it will, although I suspect we'll probably end up calling it something else. But I sort of feel I want to challenge some things that you said. I mean I do think we are a climate forward government here
in the UK. And the difference I suppose is that we are not in the world of setting you know, new targets, only that we actually want to demonstrate that you can deliver against those targets. So the reason I do this job is because fundamentally, having been the person that advised on the targets for the country for the last well I've been at this there for more than ten years. If someone offers you the chance to come in and help deliver them, I feel you've got to
sort of take that up. So the Clean Power a bit of this is just stage one, right, it's sort of base camp. And once we're at base camp, we can start sending the mountain. But that mountain is going to be largely driven by electrifying our economy, as I'm sure.
We'll discuss this in this discussion, but cleaning up.
The power system is I think the very best way for us to demonstrate that as a government we are even more committed to our climate objectives because we're focused now on delivering them.
So the Clean Power Mission, and let's define it, because it's ninety five percent clean power and five percent on abated gas.
It's been more than six months since you started.
One of the important pieces of advice I ever got at the start of my career from my Linel manager was that you know, take six months to understand the job, but by the end of it, you should know what you're doing.
So how confident are you? That's how you confident?
Are you that the UK can reach the clean power goal by twenty thirty and what have you done so far to reach that conclusion?
So I am confident.
I mean I'm not recklessly confident, but I am confident because I think I want to just make this point that what we've committed to do is really right on the edge of what we think is possible. So I acknowledge that we call it a mission for a reason. It is an actual mission, and just to make the point that you know, governments can have a few missions,
they can't have hundreds. And I think it is really important that we selected this one as as something that has the support of the whole government right up to the Prime Minister'd say it also has the support of other parts of government in the UK as well, including notably our devolved governments. You're right to define it so what we've done in the first six months, we have not wasted. I feel I'm coming up for seven months now. I don't feel I've wasted a single day in that time.
Even over Christmas. We have moved lightning fast to try and define what we mean quickly and then move into quite an exciting period where we also define the policies that we think will be needed to deliver it, to allow me to start this year moving into genuine delivery mode.
Now, let me just.
Briefly cover those things. So the challenge of clean power. The reason I do this job is because when I was at the Climate Change Committee, I spent a very happy period of my life working with some of the world's best analysts looking at how you could decarbonize a whole economy by twenty fifty. The last time we did this was for the sixth Carbon Budget Assessment. We're about to see the CCC's seventh Carbon Budget Assessment.
I'll be a keen reader of that when it comes.
But last time round we did something that I don't expect the SECC to do this time, which we had five different scenarios, all of them complete scenarios with integrity within them, and they're all very different by design because we wanted to it was the first time the country had a net zero target. We wanted to demonstrate there was more than one way to skin a cat, so we looked at five different ways to hit that goal.
One thing you can do when you've done something like that is look across the five and you can see there's some common factors to those scenarios, quite a few actually common facts is one of them is that there is a point when you can see you've got a clean power system. But the second points that is that
you shouldn't be overly purist about what that means. So the kind of fundamental of what we're trying to do in the UK is based on that analysis, and we've basically asked our Energy system operator it's called NISO in the UK, to give us their view of how you
fulfill a target like that. Basically in a world where we expect to have gas in the power system, right, so we are in a very unique moment where we can use gas as a backup, flexible backup and progressively reduce the amount of gas that we're burning each year in the power system to the point where by twenty thirty. End of twenty thirty, we're going to take the whole year, but by the end of twenty thirty we might need it.
We can get that belief five percent in that year, and I've called that herculean.
I stand by that.
That was what I said before I come into this job, and it's that sort of effort that you need to make it happen. Now we should talk about all the things that need to be on to do that, but we define that quickly and then produce an action plan around that, and here we are at the start of the year now implementing it.
So the accent action plan is detailed, that's available for anybody to read.
There are some big numbers in there.
There's two times as much onshore wind that needs to be built by twenty thirty, three times as much solar, lots of more energy storage, a lot more transmission, five times as much flexibility on the grid on the demand side, which we should talk about. But the main thing you take from it is that you're going to have to build for a rapidly changing system, and that means it's
going to be expensive. The estimate is about two hundred billion pounds of investment going towards the mission towards decarbonizing the grid, but also expanding the grid. And given the financial pressures that the government is facing, how do you think that investment can be secured and how much of that will the government be on the hook for.
So let me again challenge a word that you use.
It expensive is a word that's doing a lot of it's doing a lot of heavy lifting in that question, and I don't regard it as expensive. So let me briefly explain why I think that we need to get ourselves what we're only trying to do here. Yes, I'm trying to clean up the power system and tremendously important
that we do that. But I think even more importantly than that, we are preparing for a period after twenty thirty when we're going to need to seriously grow the power system because we expect the end use of transport uses and the industrial uses and domestic heating and cooling to become electric. And we're in a period now where the demand for electricity before twenty thirty is probably fairly flat. So if you can clean up the power system quickly, you will be in the right place to then grow
the power system after that. So that expense, as you called it, is basically a down payment on that. We are investing in a clean power system that we know we're going to need into the twenty thirties. Now, the mission twenty thirty is enormous challenge. We've got another one after that, hopefully at a more measurable measured pace, to grow the power system, probably by fifty percent, possibly even
more than that, might even double by twenty fifty. So we are basically getting ahead of that by encouraging that investment. And that two hundred billion you referred to is what happens if you roll up the investments in storage, in generation, and in networks that we think we need for twenty thirty. That prepares us and that is not a cost directly to the consumer, at least not initially, so we will recover those costs from the consumer or from the taxpayer.
These are choices over a very long period.
So we're in a moment where if you walk with me on this, we can get the investment done early. We can benefit in terms of the benefit to the economy from that investment. We buy ourselves an enormous amount of additional energy security with that investment, and the costs to the consumer come after that over a very long period match the game a reduction in the costs from
not burning fossil fuels in the power system. So if we play our cards right, bring that all together, we get an enormous economic return, we get a huge climate benefit, we get energy security, and we don't have that cost to the consumer that lots of people worry about. And
I am confident that can be done. I'm also confident that the kind of power system you get at the end of that, with long term contracts for renewables particularly, brings down what we call the wholesale price of electricity and translating that into a lower cost for the consumer is a really nice challenge to have.
I think so Clean Power Mission obviously says on the tin what you're doing, but if you read the announcement, it's clean power mission with cheaper electricity prices. Right, It's not just about decarbonization, it's about lowering electricity prices.
And now we've seen in.
Elections around the world that when governments don't address these pocketbook issues around energy prices, they get booted out. In my own analysis, I have not seen a single country where there is high electricity prices and high electrification rate or just the absolute amount. And so isn't there a risk in the plan that you've laid out, which is going to require to build a lot more gas power plants as a way of managing the intermittency that comes with renewables.
Of course there's storage that will be included. But isn't there a risk with even.
More gas power plants even if the reliance on gas is going down, that the prices of electricity may rise. The UK has among the highest electricity prices already, they could become costlier. How will you deal with that scenario?
So I am sure we can bring down costs to the consumer. I don't know exactly what the price of electricity will be in twenty thirty because a lot of
it is so dependent on globally traded gas. And actually that's the secret here is that at the moment, even though we have very extensive power system renewables, power system, gas sets the price very often in the wholesale market, and that price of gas, but in the last few years has been at historic high, quite astonishing levels over the last two or three years, and it continues to be the reason why eltricity prices are high in this country.
I don't know what's going to happen to the gas price if the gas price fell, so too with eltricity prices, But in a sense, I don't want to be wedded to that uncertainty any longer.
So there's two aspects to the energy security point.
I think one is the actual energy security that comes from having some homegrown power, especially from renewables, also some nuclear in.
There with storage.
You know.
That idea of being more self sufficient that I could put it that way, and less dependent on those goal markets is one aspect of energy security. The other one is the energy insecurity that comes to the consumer from the requirement to be on this you know, very unpredictable gas price roller coaster. And we buy ourselves quite a lot of insurance by doing what we're trying to do with the clean power to the clean power goal. And the crucial point is that if you want to displace gas,
you've got two things to do. One is to build out more of those long term renewable contracts and clean power contracts that we will sign over the next few years and reduce the points over the course of the year when gas sets the price, and that's essentially what
we're doing. And the other thing that we can do is bring on a set of technologies that provide a similar service to a gas fire power station when you need it, and they are typically the sort of low carbon flex that you need in the power system or long duration energy storage technologies. So those moments when you absolutely have to turn to gas at the moment, and the reason we are able to accommodate renewals is because we have.
That gas fleet. We also could do with moving to a new set of technologies that sort of displace the market power of gas at that moment, and we will do that too. So there's lots of.
Reasons to think that the consumer price can come down, but you've got to deploy these things at scale quickly to see that happen. And that two hundred billion that you referred to is but north of forty billion pounds of capex each year between now and the end of twenty thirty is the investment in that grid that supports that and those technologies, and that is the secret. Now, let me just agree with the premise of the question.
You're absolutely right to say that our success depends not just on building stuff, but also in the consumer seeing the benefit of that. I think there's a broader story beyond just consumer prices about the economy and people in the communities hosting infrastructure scenes and benefit from that too, And you might extend that into of public consent for these things. These are the things that keep me awake at night, so I'm restless to get that sorted.
Those consumer issues.
I would really like to see us move to where we were seeing the electricity price in particular come down, because the rest of the story on decarbonization rests on a cheaper electricity price.
Ultimately, if you want people to take a.
Heat pump, if you want people to move to electric car, if you want industries to move to electrified technologies, the best possible policy is a cheaper electricity prize.
After the break, more from a conversation with Chris Stock And if you've been enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps other listeners find the show. In trying to get to cheaper electricity prices, one thing that you have to do a lot of is to build transmission so that you are not paying to shut down wind power in the north when there is demand in
the south. Last year those payments added up to one point eight billion pounds from the Great Operator just to shut wind power in the North down. But there is a lot of opposition to transmission, just to building in general. How do you maintain support for the transition and for building when people are not willing to allow for building or you know, there's anger being stoked to try and stop transmission from being built.
So a few things on this. The first thing is we've got to do genuine consertation for those communities. So I mean, this is not a plan that will ride roughshod over those communities, but there are going to be some difficult decisions I had about location of infrastructure, so I don't think I conduct that. I would say though as a country as a whole, what holds us back is the fact that we haven't built stuff quickly enough.
So my feeling, certainly from the ten years plus I've been looking at this, is that there's a frustration commonly expressed that we just haven't gone and done the job. So the sort of top line here is we're going to build things in this country, and that is the measure of success. The barriers to that are actually pretty extensive, and they're often barriers that the government itself puts in place.
Some of them are really justified, some of them less.
So we need to push through those barriers and make sure that we have the minimum of delay in getting infrastructure in the right place of the country that we need. But the kind of next part of this, I suppose is that if you buy that idea that we're going to build it, I think you've also got to take people with you on the value of doing this in
the round. And the ultimate test of whether wee I'm successful or not is whether people see the value of the power system that we're creating, either in their bills or in the energy security that I talked about. And the very final thing, I'll make it very quickly. There is a story out there. You do read it that we're somehow going to carpet the country and pylons and wind farms.
Absolutely not true. We are not going to do that.
So I think the other part of the story is bringing some rational discussion to that. It's actually quite that's very few parts of the country that will see development. Most of the grid investment is offshore. So I think we can do this in a way that sort of by support as long as we are truthful and honest than direct about what we're trying to do and the impacts that will bring.
So global electricity demand rise, as we saw is about three percent expected to be in countries like India and China, they've seen seven to ten percent electricity demand rise for now over two decades.
And they know how to build and the UK does not, as.
You've talked about, even if we take the public opposition out, so offshore building for example, you know the North to sell transmission lines that need to be built, they take about five years together. So by the time you plan for a transmission grade offshore today, it won't be working for you for your clean power plan by twenty thirty. So what is the government doing to try and speed up construction when there isn't public opposition to those projects?
So we have a plan in this country that predates me doing this job, has been developed already and needs to get through the planning system in some shape or form. I'm sure they'll be changes to that plan with they're minor. And just to make that point, this is the story I wish more people knew, and I'm going to make sure that everyone hears it. We have now a really good piece of analysis that shows us that there are eighty eight projects.
We need network works, as we call them.
Some of those are links of cable, some of them are substations, converted stations, eighty eight of them which deliver us the per system that we could build by twenty thirty that would be very very clean. Indeed, so that the sort of network that we require of the eighty of them are essential for that twenty thirty target. They are already in an advanced state. So we will build those projects and support the transmission owners to get them
built by twenty thirty. And I'm confident about that because they are ready to go, and there are armies of
people ready now to get going on that. So I think this is the reason I am optimistic about it, because if you can build that kind of network, connect to it the generation that we need, and do one more thing, which is where I think we are being genuinely ambitious and might say radical, which is to go into the queue of projects waiting to connect to the grid and actually curate it, so you know, connect the projects that we know are ready and which deliver a
strategically what we need for twenty thirty. Doing that kind of surgery to the grid. Q the support of NISO in this country is the other thing that we've done with that, and essentially that allows me then to bring on the generation the storage projects that we know we can have on the system by twenty thirty connected to
that grid that we're going to build. Now, that is a story of building it to time that we will also want to tell other countries around the world that we have done, because that will overturn decades of inertia, which is a term you shouldn't use in the power system, but decades of decades of what we would like some inertia in the persistem definitely, But that is a brilliant story.
It's a far better story to tell than you know, the latest ambitious goal for twenty fifty that we're setting, because we're actually getting on with building stuff now and that is I think going to need to be the challenge that every other country faces into too.
So when last year we spoke, you were heading the Climate Change Committee.
You were an independent watchdog.
You could look at the government and tell them what they're getting right and what they're getting wrong. Now you are in government and you know Labor Party was very ambitious on climate when it was in the opposition. That messaging has certainly become mixed over the six months that they've been around. Right, we heard from Rachel Reeves who wants to build the third runway on Heathrow but also expand airports around the country, which has been criticized by
environmental groups. There are rumors that you know, Starmer might not oppose the extraction of oil and gas in the Nazia at Rosebank or Jackdaw. When this government downplays the bold action that's needed on climate, doesn't that make your.
Job harder and how are you going to achieve your mission?
Well, I don't think as a government we are downplaying the importance of our claim objectives. And you can use the word but I mean again, I'll go back to what I said earlier. I think the challenge is to get stuff done on this. I mean, the best possible response to the critics to say that you've walked away from climate objectives, to say no, we're actually doing it. You know, on Heathrow, for example, there is room to manage he throw with under a carbon budget. Ed Miliband
has said just that. So we are maintaining commitment to our legal goals here. I don't doubt it becomes more challenging as you bring more emissions into one setor you've got to work harder somewhere else.
But that's the point of a carbon budget.
And you know, I'm very sure there's a government still committed to climate. I wouldn't do the show otherwise. Funnily enough, I'm also committed to climate. I'm absolutely sure Ed Miliband is too. I think interestingly, the Prime Minister is the other strong advocate for climate. He's had two very successful visits to a cop now speaks really eloquently on the need to do all this and I think sees the
opportunity for global leadership on climate. So every decision we take as a government is measured against that and we're ambitious, but mainly that ambition needs to be expressed through or desire to get stuff delivered.
Now. I think so last question a global question, because you are saying that if you agree that the global consensus on climate cannot be taken for granted, there are certainly big economies starting with the US that are starting to pull away from climate commitments. So you hear noises from Argentina, from Russia, from New Zealand, of all places. There is a vacuum that is being created right now and it's getting stronger as we go into COP thirty
later this year for real leadership on climate. Do you think the UK can fill that and how exactly?
I do think that.
I don't think we can entirely fill it, And of course I regret what's happening in other countries. I mean, it's the US decision to pull out of Paris is something that is course we regret that. I mean, you need the bigger the club, the better. But you have to hope. I suppose, and I don't know if it's just that. I don't know if it's a hope or a prediction that over the next periar it will be the technology that the advances and the fact that the
fundamental economics of the clean transition take hold. That's where I think we can show leadership, so our willingness to do difficult things to build that infrastructure that we talked about, to stay committed to a clean power system that is going to be dominated by renewables.
That's the fantastic story for us to.
Tell you, and as we build that out, I hope we're also to show the benefits of that. The non climate benefits of that system are in a sense where I think we deliver the most obvious leadership.
We can say we did this for lots of reasons.
It happened to benefit the climate, but it brought a host of benefits beyond that to the country, and in the end it becomes irresistible. I mean, I think we're on the bus now with these technologies. The question is only how quickly we travel.
And I'm extremely.
Happy for the UK to take a lead on that for the next few years. And I'd like to demonstrate that we're doing the right stuff because we're going to regret it. Others will regret it if they don't fall a suit. Thank you, Chris, thank.
You Action, thank you for listening to zero. And now for the sound of the week. That's the sound of a live electric cable being repaired by workers in a helicopter wearing Faraday Cage suits. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with someone who's worried about Pylon's marring the Skyline. You can get in touch at zero pod at bloomberg
dot net. Zero's producer is might Leraw. Bloomberg's head of podcast is Sage Powerman, and head of Talk is Brendan newman Our. The music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Will Mathis, arn Chen, Amon Farat and Jessica Big. Thanks also to the British Library. I'm the Common Trust. I am Akshatrati Back soon.