By favouring expensive and sometimes untried technologies it is setting itself up to do not much at all
. But as well as becoming more self-sufficient, Britain must reach zero net greenhouse-gas emissions by the year 2050. That entails decarbonising electricity generation while producing far more of it. Most homes will have to be heated by electric heat pumps rather than gas; and cars must be powered by batteries rather than oil. At the same time Britain must try to make energy cheaper.
The document is Johnsonian not only in its bombast, but also in its reliance on targets and vaguer “ambitions”, many of them reassuringly far in the future. The government’s ambition is that Britain will have 50 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030—almost five times as much as today. Its aim is to have up to eight more nuclear reactors, and up to 24GW of deployed nuclear power by 2050. It expects that some of the new ones will be, a new technology being developed by Rolls-Royce.
These choices have puzzled and disappointed greens, who argue that suppressing demand through energy-efficiency measures and building wind turbines on land are among the cheapest, quickest ways of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. But the big problem is not that Britain will end up spending more money and cutting emissions more slowly than it needs to. Rather, by favouring expensive and sometimes untried technologies it is setting itself up to do not much at all.
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