15 anti-green policies announced since the Tories came to power

UK energy secretary Amber Rudd (left) with Prime Minister David Cameron.

Since the Conservative party took complete control of the United Kingdom’s parliament three months ago they have revealed their true colours on energy policy and outraged many environmentalists. The party under David Cameron, who five years ago promised “the greenest government ever”, is now firmly headed in the opposite direction.

The basic trend seems to be a preference for large scale projects, offshore as opposed to onshore wind, wholesale and widely unpopular support for fracking, the oil industry and nuclear power. The biggest losers are energy efficiency in the home, onshore wind and solar power.

This is in complete contrast to the wishes of the British public, as identified by consistent polling, which is against fracking and for renewable energy.

In March 2015, in the government’s own survey, nearly four-fifths of the public (78 per cent) said they supported the use of renewable energy to provide the UK’s electricity, fuel and heat. This was broken down into offshore wind (73 per cent), biomass (63 per cent), onshore wind (65 per cent), wave and tidal (74 per cent) and solar (81 per cent). On fracking, only 24 per cent have said they support it and only 39 per cent support nuclear energy.

But the U-turn in policy is consistent with the Conservative tendency to listen to lobbyists from the nuclear and oil industries and to vocal campaigners from within rural conservative MPs’ constituencies who dislike wind turbines. At no point within the previous government did Chancellor George Osborne entertain lobbyists from the renewable energy industries.

British energy policy has long suffered from a lack of consistency, frequently lamented by the industry, which says it needs predictability in order to plan investment. Delays and about turns characterised the last years of the Labour government up to 2009 and much of the five years of the Coalition period when power was shared by the Conservatives with the greener LiberalDemocrats.

Here’s a list of the 15 anti-green policies announced since the Tories came to power:

1. it has scrapped Renewables Obligation subsidies for new onshore wind farms and larger solar farms from next year
2. it has launched a tax raid on renewable operators by extending the Climate Change Levy, intended to be a tax on fossil-fuel generators to include renewables, which will result in a substantial amount of lost income for clean energy companies. For example, Levy Exemption Certificates account for just over six per cent of onshore wind generators’ revenues
3. it has tightened planning rules for the onshore wind energy sector and hinted that onshore wind farms will not be eligible to participate in any auction for price support contracts
4. it has postponed to an unspecified date the next contract for difference (CfD) auctions for large renewables projects, leading to speculation it will not be undertaken this autumn as planned
5. it has scrapped a policy that by 2016 every new home should be zero carbon, which has been in place for eight years and which the industry has been preparing for on the (debatable) grounds of affordability
6. it has axed the domestic energy efficiency programme, the Green Deal, following disappointing take-up rates due to the fact that the interest rate at the start for borrowing finance was set way too high, at eight per cent (in Germany a similar, successful, scheme has an interest of late of just over two per cent)
7. it is ending subsidies for small solar farms from next April under a consultation that will affect those with a capacity below 5MW accessing the Renewables Obligation (RO)
8. it is cutting support for smaller renewable energy installations, ending a pre-accreditation process under which solar PV and wind projects above 50kW and all hydro and anaerobic digestion (AD) projects may confirm the level of support they can secure through the scheme once they have planning permission and a grid connection. This will particularly affect corporate and community renewables projects
9. it is to sell off up to 70 per cent of the Green Investment Bank, launched in 2012 with £3.8 billion of public sector money and designed to profit from investment in new green infrastructure. The move was attacked by Tory Ben Goldsmith, chairman of the Conservative Environment Network, which numbers prominent Tory supporters and MPs among its members, who called it “one of the Coalition government’s few great, green achievements”
10. it has reduced the incentive to buy a low-emissions car, charging the dirtiest and the cleanest the same rate of vehicle excise duty from 2017 in an effort to raise more tax revenue
11. it is announcing plans to fast-track planning applications for fracking when local people and local authority planning departments decide against a scheme, even in sites of special scientific interest and national parks. Recently Lancashire Council rejected two planning applications from shale gas developer Cuadrilla
12. it has scrapped a target set by the coalition government to keep increasing the proportion of revenue from environmental taxes
13. it has removed the guaranteed level of Renewable Obligation subsidy for coal or other fossil fuelled-power stations if they wish to convert to burning biomass fuels
14. there has been no funding for solid wall insulation since 26th March 2015
15. it is to continue with support for nuclear power with an announcement expected this week on Hinkley Point C.

More money needed for the new Green Deal

The ″greenest government ever″ must put serious money behind this scheme to let householders eco-renovate and repay their loans from their savings on fuel bills.

The UK's domestic properties need to be renovated to a high energy efficiency standard at a rate of 700,000 a year in order to have renovated them all by the year 2050. We need to do this because there are 28 million homes in the UK which are responsible for 27% of our greenhouse gas emissions, most of them will still be standing by then, and they need to be treated to make a contribution to meeting our national targets of reducing these emissions by 80% by 2050. ['The 40% House', Boardman et. al., 2005, and The Low-Carbon Strategy, 2008 (Oxford Environmental Change Institute)]

It would be alright if we knew exactly what it is that we have to do. The problem is that there are many areas of uncertainty, not least of which is the embodied energy of the materials used in construction. Unless we know this cannot estimate the carbon balance of the measures we are proposing to take and know that we are really saving carbon.

There also needs to be agreement on what measures these are to be - and they will be different for each type of property. There is an appalling lack of experience in this country of monitoring and measuring the efficacy of sustainable refurbishments that have already taken place to see how effective they have been.

One thing we do know is that they often don't live up to expectations, whether it is because of poor workmanship leaving, for example, gaps in insulation or whether it is that the occupants of the treated houses do not behave in a manner predicted by the architects and continue to turn their heating up.

Retrofit for the Future is a government-sponsored project that is hoping to find the answers to some of these questions for the social housing sector. I shared a panel with Neil Morgan, the project director, at the recent Greener Homes & Buildings show and he gave an outline of a number of research projects they are backing. One of these projects - by Anne Thorne Architects - showed that they are going for the demanding Passivhaus standard, which is more or less the standard that we are going to have to aim at in every case.

Neil gave some costs: they are allocating a budget of £120,000 per property for a sustainable renovation. Of this perhaps £60-£70,000 will actually be used for the renovation itself, the rest might go on overheads, sorting out the supply chain issues - which are right at their infancy and help to increase costs - dramatically, and post-occupancy monitoring and evaluation.

The government announced in the new energy bill that it would institute a Pay As You Save scheme to support households that wanted to carry out eco-renovation. No figure has yet been put on the loans that will be available to householders but before the election the Tories were touting the figure of £6,500.

This is about one tenth of what Retrofit for the Future is allocating. In Germany where similar pioneering work was done quite a few years ago costs in the region of £20-£40,000 per property were common, and another figure that has been offered is around at least 10% of the value of the house.


In other words, £6,500 is going to be nowhere near enough.

Everybody working in this field is advocating that whenever any work is done on a property the opportunity should be taken to renovate it to the highest possible energy efficiency standard to reduce the electricity and heating cost demands. These measures will of course pay for themselves in the future.

In other words if you are having workmen going into your house or scaffolding being put up, it makes sense to get them to do other jobs that need to be done while they are there rather than to get them back later. It would be more expensive if you were to do that and a valuable opportunity would be lost. For example if the roof is being replaced it makes a good idea to put solar water heating panels on it at the same time or at least put the pipes through the insulation and the roof so that they can be added easily later when a budget permits without having to tear apart your earlier work.

The danger is that in an era where savage public spending cuts are to be made then the amount of money that is going to be loaned to householders will be nowhere near enough, and the work will not be done to the sufficient standard. Another opportunity will have been wasted to help not only the UK reach its carbon emissions reductions targets but also for householders to reduce their ongoing energy costs.

Demand reduction is the best investment. It also means that we have to build fewer power stations and there is less likelihood of the lights going out in the future.

The Tories' mad energy policy

With the relief that EON decided not to build its coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth last week, it is with dismay that we also heard the Tories policy which is to initiate the building of 5 GW coal power stations as soon as they take office.

Labour may not be much good, but the Tories would be a disaster for energy policy. Railroading big business interests through planning to an even greater extent than Labour, under the pretext of environmentalism.

There's perhaps one good policy and that is the right for every community hosting wind farms to keep for 6 years the business rates generated.

It is the fact that local communities have felt ripped off by big developers not caring about their interests that has held back wind farms in this country.

But a real revolution would be for community owned wind farms to be massively supported as they have been in Denmark for many years, as a result of which there has not been the level of public antipathy towards wind farms that there has been here.

It is the stop-start nature of British energy policy under the NFFO policy that has created this antipathy because only the big developers could stay the field and community developers were squeezed out.

The other Tory policies are to give every household in the country £6,500 to upgrade the energy efficiency of homes; and publication of the planning guidance needed for new nuclear power stations.

The first is limited: some homes will cost more to upgrade than others, and the financial support should be in the form of loans that are paid back on the property from the energy savings created.

Housing authorities also need support to do a mass roll out of renovations of particular districts and streets at the same time which is more cost effective.

It is my argument that we can do without nuclear power because it is not cost efficient and the timescale is too great. The figures produced by the nuclear industry cannot be trusted. Taxpayers will end up supporting the industry to an extent that we can afford even less now than we could before.

"Clean coal" relies on carbon sequestration which is an unproven technology that will be incredibly expensive to implement.

EON gave as their reason for not going ahead with Kingsnorth a reduction in electricity demand. If electricity demand is further reduced by a mass roll-out of energy efficiency making everybody's bills cheaper (hooray!), then why would we need to build all these power stations anyway?

The catch 23 of electric cars

Ah - is it so that we can have an electric cars? But that's robbing Peter to pay Paul! - it's a more efficient use of fossil fuels to burn them directly in a car than it is to burn it in a power station and use the electricity to drive a car.

Why? The output from a coal-fired power station fitted with carbon sequestration is around 10% less in efficiency than one without - so you will only get 20-25% of the original energy in the fossil fuel from such a power station at the plug in your wall.

By the time you have factored in the conversion factors inside the engine of the car converting that electrical energy back into motor energy, you will be lucky to get 10%. Whereas around 50% off the energy in petrol or diesel goes straight into transmission.

The only way of implementing electric cars that makes any sense is if they are fuelled from renewable electricity generated locally to the charging point to minimise transmission losses. That means building more solar, tidal and wind.