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The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change LightningMinion gave a speech about Labour’s green energy plan:

“As the person in charge of the UK’s climate change policy, my whole job in politics is to ensure that the UK meets its emissions reductions targets, set as a consequence of the Paris Climate Agreement calling for the global temperature rise since pre-industrial times to be limited to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. As a consequence of this, the UK’s current target is to reach net zero by 2050. António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, has, however, called on wealthy nations like the UK to move this target forwards to 2040, in recognition of the fact that our wealth allows us to act faster. This is why I drafted legislation to make 2040 our new net zero target. And it is why the government has invested in taking action now to drastically reduce our emissions.

I, in particular, drafted a strategy to decarbonise electricity generation by 2035, in line with the target set by the Labour Party’s Energy Act 2023. This target is fully achievable, and is the target which the Committee on Climate Change, or the CCC, has recommended we pursue.

The decarbonisation of electricity will largely be achieved by deploying green renewable energy technology at scale between now and 2035, with our plan calling for 3 GW of new solar and 3 GW of new wind installed each year up to 2035. Today, the main source of electrical energy is burning natural gas. By the end of this decade, gas will be increasingly displaced by renewables, which will generate 60% of energy in 2030. As a consequence, in 2030, 95% of the electricity system will be low carbon.

Solar and wind are, however, inherently variable; and so they cannot displace unabated gas power stations on their own. This is why our plan also calls for investment into low carbon sources of power which do not depend on suitable weather to run. One such method of power is nuclear power, and the government has committed to building 3 new nuclear power stations which will generate around 8 GW of power in total: Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C and Bradwell B. All 3 of these nuclear power stations will use modern Pressurised Water Reactor technology, which is the current main nuclear power technology. It has been proven to work, to be safe, and to efficiently generate zero carbon electricity. Funding of these projects has been started by the government now so that all 3 nuclear power stations can come online no later than 2035.

Another form of generation we plan to invest in is called low carbon dispatchable generation. It has low carbon emissions, and can be dispatched, meaning it can adjust its power output to respond to changes in demand. In our plan, this involves hydrogen and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS for short, with the latter having the potential to be carbon negative. What this means is that it could remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits. Up until 2030, the main use of funding in this regard will be to install CCS at existing bioenergy power stations, and to retrofit gas power stations so that they can be switched over to hydrogen. Then, between 2030 and 2035, more BECCS power stations will be opened, and gas power stations will be switched to burning hydrogen instead.

For generating energy from hydrogen to be feasible, we need to invest in building a hydrogen industry in the UK. A Labour government will draft a Hydrogen Strategy outlining how this will be done. In line with the advice of the CCC, to enable the decarbonisation of energy, hydrogen will initially be produced mainly via steam methane reformation, with the carbon this produces being captured and stored. This is called blue hydrogen, and is a low carbon way of generating hydrogen. Then, once the growth in renewable energy makes it possible, blue hydrogen will be phased out fully in favour of zero carbon green hydrogen, which refers to hydrogen being produced by electrolysis of water. The electrical energy required for this process will be sourced from excess green energy produced at times when the wind is strong and/or sunlight is strong. Thus hydrogen will act as a form of energy storage, and will in fact be the main way we will store energy in the future. Additionally, our plan will also see an 18 GW battery network rolled out by 2035 for more storage of energy.

The end result of this plan is that, by 2035, all of the UK’s electrical energy will be coming from low carbon sources. Another result is that more energy will be generated in total to enable the electrification of transport, heating and manufacturing to take place.

What about the other parties’ plans? The Conservatives I think have a pretty poor historical record of acting on the climate crisis, with governments they have been in having failed to take the ambitious action which Labour’s plan is now taking. This election, in particular, they have devolved to weird NIMBY-style fearmongering about onshore wind, and to spreading misinformation, claiming, without any evidence whatsoever, that the 3 new nuclear power stations we plan will use Advanced Gas-Cooled, AGR, technology. I have genuinely no idea why they are saying this - did some staffer see that the UK’s older nuclear power stations are AGR and infer from that using flawed logic that new nuclear power stations would also be AGR? I am genuinely confused.

What about the Lib Dems? They plan for 80% green electricity by 2035, instead of the government’s 100% target. This would breach climate change law, which says that coal power stations must close by next year, gas power stations must close by 2035, and no oil power stations may be opened. From where would they then plan to source the 20% high carbon electricity? They also plan to invest just 1 billion pounds each year into green energy, which I am not sure is even enough for their target. Labour’s plan, meanwhile, is investing between 15 and 20 billion per year. Their manifesto also spends more time talking about batteries than it does about green energy. If we fail to invest into green energy, however, as the Lib Dems plan to, then batteries will be pretty useless.

To conclude my speech, it is clear that Labour is the only party which can be trusted to deliver green energy. It was us who drafted the UK’s current electricity decarbonisation strategy. It is a Labour budget which is making mass investments into green energy. It is us who have the most ambitious and the most realistic plan to decarbonise electricity."