Green power to energize British industrial growth
It was over a year ago that the lights went out at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The embattled government department was buried in the newly formed Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, raising fears within the lowcarbon economy that green growth would slide off the agenda under the Conservative government, according to The Telegraph.
Instead, the energy industry’s position at the center of the department neatly reflects its central role in the government’s plans to boost industrial productivity.
In the coming week, the government’s clean growth plan will bring together a kaleidoscope of closely interrelated sectors through the prism of economic productivity. And the pattern that emerges will be decidedly green. The plan will have its roots in low-carbon power, but its boughs will extend into the wider economy and the government’s industrial strategy.
The far-reaching ambitions are immediately necessary to avoid falling short of legally-binding pledges enshrined in the 2008 Climate Change Act. But they are also strategic in the long term: by keeping green growth at the heart of an industrial strategy, ministers believe the benefit will ripple across the economy and clear the way for a sustainable future.
The aim of the industrial strategy is to rebalance the economy by driving growth in the areas where the UK has potential to become a world-leading exporter of skills and technology.
Claire Perry, the climate change minister, was tightlipped at the Tory party conference about what to expect when the strategy paper is published in the coming weeks. But unlike the industrial strategy of the seventies, it’s not about picking winners, she said. Instead it will align industries with the power to boost Britain’s flagging earning power. These areas will need to build on government funding and bring in private investment. They will also need to “outlast the vagaries of the political cycle”.
She none the less hinted at a potential return for carbon capture and storage (CCS) — technology that fell from favor two years ago as the government scrapped its £1 billion competition for developers able to trap and store the carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.
The government is reimagining the technology in an industrial context with far broader implications for industry and energy. A clean, green British industry is vital for the UK’S plans to meet its carbon reduction objectives. By clustering CCS projects in areas, such as Teesside in northeast of England, factories will be able to work together to strip harmful carbon dioxide from their emissions, which can then be piped into permanent storage under the seabed.
The aim of the industrial strategy is to drive growth in areas where the UK could be a world-leading exporter
CCS also presents one of the more affordable means of tackling another major area of carbon emissions for the UK: Its heating. Switching the gas grid to run on hydrogen rather than carbon-rich methane could slash emissions from heating with minimal investment needed to upgrade the country’s existing pipeline network.