We're more than half of the way through the 'year of the election' and now we're finally starting to get a sense of what climate policy is going to look like in the UK and around the world. Whether that's the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) which will affect any business with significant operations in the EU, or the knock on effects we'll see here in the UK. 

In this blog, we'll take a look at the new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband's vision for his current term, and how that will affect UK industry.

What Is The Energy Trilemma?

In his recent keynote at the Energy UK Conference 2024, Ed Miliband focused on the idea of the 'Energy Trilemma':

First, this is my argument today, back in 2008, debates were shaped by the energy trilemma – the trade-offs between affordability, security and sustainability.

 

The trilemma helped promote the idea that while fossil fuels might not offer sustainability, they did offer security and affordability to the country.

 

Our mission today is shaped by the reality that, for Britain, this old paradigm has disintegrated. 

 

The experience of the last 2 and a half years has shown us that fossil fuels simply cannot provide us with the security, or indeed the affordability, we need – quite the opposite.

 

Second part of my case is that the trilemma has been replaced by a clean energy imperative: the drive to clean energy is right not just on grounds of climate, which we all knew back then, but also energy security and affordability.

Whilst our instincts (and probably yours if you're here on our website reading this!) will probably assume that Ed's claims are correct, let's quickly 'fact-check' the claim that renewables and nuclear now beat fossil fuels in all three:

Affordability

Back in 2008, there was a genuine point here. Unless you were geographically lucky enough to have access to local hydropower or geothermal, renewables were probably much more expensive than fossil fuels. However, as Ed suggests, this has quickly changed. Improved technology and economies of scale have massively reduced the cost of wind and particularly solar.

To see how remarkable the price decrease has been, lets take a quick look at the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for solar and wind compared to some benchmark boundaries for fossil fuels:

Safe to say, the landscape has changed a lot since 2008. The question of affordable energy is now one of subsidies, grid infrastructure and security, which we'll chat a bit about in the next section.

Note: I've decided to omit nuclear from this graph, as the levelised cost of energy of new projects is much higher than renewables and fossil fuels. There are seperate arguments as to why nuclear (particularly in conjunction with renewables) are potentially a key part of a countries net-zero strategies. However, to avoid this short blog becoming a short book, I'll largely park nuclear for the remainder of the discussion!

Security

If you've had to pay any energy bills anywhere vaguelly near Europe in the past few years, you'll have probably noticed how volatile a reliance on imported energy can be.

This alone can be catestrophic, as we saw during the cost of living crisis, where a scarcity in (and subsequent price gauging) of imported fossil fuels drove energy bills through the roof. To highlight this, here's a graph of the average gas prices in the UK over the past decade: 

This has since split the argument into two camps, an expansion of domestic low carbon sources of energy or an expanded drive towards north sea oil & gas reserves. 

However, from an energy security perspective, there is little sense in putting all of our eggs in one unsustainable basket. We'll be somewhat reliant on oil and gas for the coming years, so it makes sense to diversify our sources of energy by expanding renewables and our grid capacity, rather than doubling down on energy sources that cause far larger emissions, and far larger negative externalities. 

Sustainability

Okay, we've left the most obvious one to the end. It should be fairly obvious now that renewables and nuclear beat fossil fuels on these grounds, I mean, I've literally referred to them as 'low carbon sources of energy' in this blog. But just as a quick comparison here is the emission intensity of some key sources of energy.

How Many People Work In The Renewables Sector?

So, it's pretty clear that both from the data and Ed Milibands rhetoric that the UK is going to make a shift towards renewables energy, but how many people currently work in the industry?

Well, currently around 6 million (at least in the countries included in the graph below!) people work in the renwables sector globally (in contrast to around 11-12 million in the oil & gas sector).

As the world inevetably decarbonises, we should expect these scales to flip. In his keynote, Ed Miliband then went on to comment on the state of the UK renewables job market:  

The Climate Change Committee progress report published 2 weeks after we came to office said we were way off track to meet our 2030 Nationally Determined Contribution: with just one-third of the emissions reductions required backed by credible plans.  

 

And I’m afraid, this is something we need to work on together,  Britain has underdelivered on promises of clean energy jobs.

 

Germany has almost twice as many renewable jobs per capita as Britain.

 

Sweden almost 3 times as many. 

 

Denmark almost 4 times as many.

 

As other countries race ahead to lead in the industries of the future, Britain must not be left behind.

Beyond these countries, as we can see in our first map, the UK still has proportionately less renewable workers than the USA, China and Australia. However, this likely won't last for long, especially if the UK aims to hit it's 2030 Nationally Determined Contribution of reducing economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by at least 68% compared to 1990. 

Conclusion

It's clear the UK is going to invest heavily in renewables, and your business is likely to be doing the same to both save money and reduce it's environmental impact. This may have a huge impact on your company's footprint and net-zero strategy, so if you’d like some support, check out our Calculate page or BOOK A CALL with us to learn more.