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Electric ‘superhighway’ delayed in blow to Miliband’s net zero plans

Global shortage of high-voltage cables and converters risks Eastern Green Link 1’s delivery date

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/26/electric-superhighway-delayed-blow-milibands-net-zero/

A £2bn electricity “superhighway” linking England and Scotland is facing delays in a blow to Ed Miliband’s clean power plans.

Eastern Green Link 1 risks missing its target completion date because of global equipment shortages. The project involves a 120-mile cable being built between Scotland and north-east England that is capable of transmitting enough power for 2m homes.

The upgrade is meant to ease grid bottlenecks and is seen as one of the most vital enablers of plans laid out by Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, for a “clean” power system in 2030.

Without it, officials have warned that the cost of “constraint” payments to wind farm owners – where turbines are paid to switch off because the grid is too congested – risk ballooning by almost £900m per year.....

Kathryn Porter, an independent energy analyst, said: “To achieve the Clean Power 2030 target we must build twice as much grid infrastructure in the next five years as we delivered in the past decade. “But supply chain constraints make this an unachievable goal, particularly when we note that the lead time for some transformers is now four years.”.....

(continued)

Asked about the time he spent with Mr Joyce during the summit and if the US official used it as an opportunity to attack climate policies and promote the country’s fossil fuels, Mr Miliband said the Government had been seeking to find “common ground”.

“On the United States, the Prime Minister has shown absolutely the right leadership on this, which is President Trump is the duly elected president of the US, elected on a clear mandate,” he said.

“We are the duly elected government of the UK, also elected on a clear mandate. Obviously there are some differences but there is also common ground,” he added.

“Part of our job is to find that common ground, to work together with the US on those issues and they’re the discussions we had at this [summit].”

Mr Miliband later cited the growth of nuclear and geothermal energy as a shared interest with the US, despite the country coming at it “from a different perspective”.

“The fundamental thing here goes to what the British people expect of us,” he said, adding it is to “stick to the mandate on which they elected us”.

“They also expect us to reach out and seek to find common ground and that is what we’re doing.”

Energy Secretary hits back after US delegation claims staunch climate policies ‘harm lives’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/25/ed-miliband-tells-net-zero-critics-bring-on-the-fight/

Ed Miliband has urged opponents of his net zero policy to “bring on the fight” after the Government’s climate push faced criticism from the US.

Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, said at an international energy summit in London that the Government “is not for bending” on net zero after a US delegation criticised Labour’s staunch climate policies.

Tommy Joyce, Donald Trump’s envoy, told Mr Miliband at the meeting that net zero policies “harm human lives” and undermine “health, wealth and opportunity”.

Mr Joyce, America’s assistant energy secretary, said climate zealotry was a threat to economic and national security.

“There is no national or economic security without energy security, and energy security is not possible without access to secure, affordable and reliable access to energy,” he said.

It follows other recent attacks on Government climate policy, including from the Conservatives, who say the 2050 net zero target is too ambitious, and Reform UK, which wants to scrap it altogether.

But speaking after the meeting, Mr Miliband rejected the criticism, saying that international cooperation on renewables and cutting climate emissions “makes all our countries stronger”.

He added: “The critics will not shut up, I’m sure. But the critics need to know, if they want to fight about this, this Government says bring it on. Let’s bring on the fight.

“Let’s have the argument and any day of the week, any hour of the day, any month of the year we will have the argument between cheap, clean renewables that give you energy security, lower bills, the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century, against their case to say no to all that.

“To stick simply with expensive, insecure fossil fuels which gave us the cost of living crisis, which ruined family finances, which ruined public finances, which ruined business finances, and they will say no to these huge job opportunities that are on offer.

“So whether it is political parties or other forces that want to take on net zero and the clean energy transition, they need to know that this Government is not for bending, this Government is not for buckling, this Government is standing firm.

“And, you know what, I think the British people are on our side on this.”

At the summit, Sir Keir Starmer also pushed back on net zero critics, reiterating the Government’s commitment to clean energy as “the only way” to ensure energy security and bring down bills over the long term.

However, the US stance on the clean transition also overshadowed some of the consensus.

Https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/rachel-reeves-well-rip-out-insane-environment-rules-that-block-growth-m3pk3xqs2

Rachel Reeves has said the government will “rip out … absolutely insane” environmental regulations that are preventing wind farms and homes from being built across the UK.

The chancellor told a panel hosted by the International Monetary Fund in Washington that green rules were “well-meaning regulations that come in for the right reason … that end up stopping good things from happening”.

“We have gone too far in regulating for risk and we’ve forgotten about regulating for growth and we need to turn the pendulum back,” she said. “Regulation in the UK holds us back and we are ripping that out.”

Reeves said ministers have had to veto investment “because of sea bream swimming in a part of the North Sea, or there are some spiders which are unique to this area, which means you can’t build the thousands and thousands of homes that we need”.

“We’ve spent £100 million in the UK building a bat tunnel to go alongside the high-speed rail link between London and the north of England, because otherwise the bats would not be able to cross the road.

“It is absolutely insane, the costs that are added to essential infrastructure investments.”

So poor interviewing indeed. Not the right thesis.

Nobody hates Miliband more than i do, but he was right indeed in what he said in that interview. By introducing EPL, Conservative and Labour Government stole from us, not directly from the consumers.

Https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables-energy-transition/571544/miliband-touts-low-carbon-power-as-solution-to-energy-security/

and

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/24/net-zero-harms-human-lives-trumps-envoy-warns-starmer/

The easiest way to secure any kind of future is to give producers confidence that decisions will have some longevity

https://www.ft.com/content/2db9f792-4d35-48b3-88a1-770b22a72429

Few companies enjoy volatility, but it is the avoidable kind that most chief executives really loathe. Yet that is what the UK continually serves up when it comes to North Sea oil and gas.

A government consultation on securing the North Sea’s “energy future” closes next week. As the UK moves towards cleaner energy sources, the aim is to avoid the kind of industrial shock that accompanied the closure of coal mines and steel works in the eighties and nineties.

Consultations on the “future” of any industry can give the impression there is plenty of time. Trouble is, a future where domestic oil and gas production plummets might be approaching faster than expected.

Brent crude prices may have regained some poise after dropping below $60 a barrel earlier in April at the peak of tariff turmoil, and are still comfortably above the estimated cash flow break-even price for fields in UK waters. Yet they are still down by a quarter in the past year. And price is just one layer of volatility that is disincentivising companies from drilling for remaining North Sea barrels.

UK oil and gas production peaked at the turn of the millennium. The industry experienced a small revival in the second half of the last decade, which ended when the Covid pandemic caused prices to sink. Now the UK’s uncertain fiscal and regulatory regime also threatens to hasten the end of production. An “energy profits levy” (EPL), first introduced in May 2022, has since been extended and raised multiple times. The headline tax rate on oil and gas producers now stands at 78 per cent, once all levies are totted up.

No company wants to pay more tax. Admittedly several companies have already found creative ways to reduce their tax bills by merging UK portfolios and making use of historic tax losses. Even so, it is volatility in the sector’s tax treatment that makes forecasting difficult.

There are other issues: the industry is also awaiting the outcome of another consultation that could affect how emissions from new schemes are assessed.

All of this is music to those who want a swift end to fossil fuel production, of course. But policies on technologies such as carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) — which could safeguard some North Sea jobs — have also been chopped and changed over the past 20 years.

There are some encouraging signs: contracts for the UK’s first CCUS projects were finally signed in December. Other blockages, such as “skills passports” to enable workers to move more easily between industries, are also being looked at. Still, the easiest way to secure any kind of future for the North Sea is to make decisions that both fossil fuel and clean energy producers are confident will have some longevity.

On zonal pricing : The problem really lies with trying to build an electricity grid that is over-reliant on intermittent wind and solar energy. So long as we try to do that we are going to have a huge problem matching supply to demand. Zonal pricing does nothing to address the mismatch in temporal patterns of electricity generation and consumption; it only tries to tackle the geographical mismatch. The claim that it will save us money is fanciful; what would save us money is not trying to rush through net zero targets when we have neither the technology nor the infrastructure to sustain them.

Panmure Liberum director and oil and gas research analyst Ashley Kelty, wrote: “The RNS suggests that there is multi-TCF prospectivity across these blocks, but trying to find any actual details eludes us.”

The group behind the duo of assets bid $8,400,000 across both PSCs which has awarded geological and geophysical (G&G) studies and 2D seismic acquisition and processing.

This makes them “exploration plays with light commitments,” according to Kelty.

In a stock market update, the firm wrote: “The announcement marks EnQuest’s entry into Indonesia, a country that offers a broad range of growth opportunities that span the full upstream lifecycle.”

However, it is “too early to tell” how EnQuest’s expansion into the country will impact its overall balance sheet.

“The entry into Indonesia opens up a new geography for EnQuest and builds on the recent move into Vietnam,” Kelty explained.

“This could offer some long term potential, but in terms of the scale of the upside it remains too early to tell.”

https://www.energyvoice.com/oilandgas/571451/enquest-moves-into-indonesia/

Would none of the Labour cheeseheads start to take notice of the fact that companies' activities are moving and taxes will be paid abroad?

Miliband forced to ban Chinese ‘slave-trade’ solar panels

Opposition from Labour MPs has forced a ban on panels linked to Uighur slave labour, putting about 40% of Britain’s solar industry at risk

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/miliband-forced-to-ban-chinese-slave-trade-solar-panels-qlb79xln9

Solar panels linked to Chinese slave labour will not be used by Britain’s state-owned energy company after a government climbdown that could threaten its net-zero ambitions.

In a major policy reversal, the energy minister Ed Miliband will introduce an amendment to legislation that will force GB Energy to ensure “slavery and human trafficking is not taking place” in its supply chain.....

Https://www.ft.com/content/86e67dbf-f66e-44c6-92bf-2ab3cbbe6703

The economics of natural gas supply would not normally feature front and centre in an election campaign. Yet the soaring cost of electricity in Australia has opened up a new seam in debates over who will form a government in May’s vote.

Peter Dutton, the rightwing leader of the opposition Liberal party, has spent the past year pushing energy policy to the fore. His party initially threw its weight behind nuclear power to undermine the Labor government’s “reckless” policies on renewable energy.

He backed that up with a pledge to temporarily reduce petrol excise — from 50.8 Australian cents a litre to 25.4 cents. But it was an interventionist plan to force gas companies to divert up to 20 per cent of supply to the domestic market that took centre stage in the debates.

Dutton’s premise is that creating a domestic gas reserve would lead to lower energy bills for consumers — a key pain point for voters heading into the election. The Labor government has introduced subsidies on electricity bills to alleviate further household pain but a wider debate about energy supply is shaping up.

The situation goes beyond bill shock. Australia’s east coast — where most of the population lives — has been warned of blackouts in the future. Meanwhile the country’s energy companies have for the first time started to contemplate buying gas on the open market to secure supplies.

Https://www.energyvoice.com/oilandgas/571410/windfall-tax-continues-to-hit-wider-aberdeen-economy/

Businesses across the north-east of Scotland have raised concerns about the continued impact the windfall tax is having on the region’s employers.

In Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce’s (AGCC’s) first Quarterly Economic Survey (QES) of the year, 83% of the 123 regional businesses that answered said ‘taxation’ is a bigger issue than it was three months ago.

Russell Borthwick, chief executive of AGCC, argued that the windfall tax, or, Energy Profits Levy (EPL), “was sold as a short-term measure – but its long-term effects are now being felt far beyond the offshore sector”.

He added: “The north-east is an interconnected economy. If exploration and production slow down, so does manufacturing, hospitality, transport, professional services – the whole regional supply chain.

“This survey shows that the EPL is no longer just a tax on oil and gas profits – it’s a tax on confidence, growth and jobs in the North-east.”

Only 32% of the businesses that answered AGCC’s questions are directly involved in the energy sector, the chamber said.

This was an issue raised by Big Partnership director Zoe Ogilvie in the back half of last year as she warned job losses will not be contained to oil and gas firms if fiscal policy in the UK doesn’t shift.....

At the time of the last survey, the AGCC boss said: “The Labour government came to power promising to grow the economy and be a friend of business.

“Six months in, the reality is feeling very different for firms across the UK, and many of the challenges appear to be magnified for companies operating in the north-east of Scotland.”

“Because we have chosen, politically, to accelerate the decline of traditional North Sea activity more quickly than it needs to happen and before we’ve got scale, investment, projects and jobs in renewables, we are creating a void where people are going to lose their jobs and where companies are going to fail,” he said.

Canada's top candidates talk up fossil fuels as climate slips down agenda

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87pev3jpyyo

Pollsters claim that the British public ‘overwhelmingly supports’ radical policies to tackle climate change. Are they sure?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/22/nigel-farage-is-right-net-zero-is-the-new-brexit/

(continued)

There is a final impact on the public finances that is most maddening of all. The UK public balance sheet will not have been short of requests in the current spending review. From schools to roads, from prisons to hospitals, there are arenas where public capital is essential to plug clear market failures and underinvestment, but energy is not one of these failures. The private sector is highly proficient at funding all parts of the energy market from generation and through transmission to storage. The very real risk is that the spending review spreads scarce capital budgets too thinly. The funding for Great British Energy looks like an unnecessary fiscal folly.

Allowing private investment and reinstating a tax rate that incentivises domestic energy production would be a highly symbolic sign of pragmatism in a dangerous and volatile world. It would also send the strongest possible signal that the government is credible about economic growth.

(continued)

Over this same period the UK has moved from being a net exporter of energy to importing more than 40 per cent of its energy needs. Our energy market has become reliant on events outside its direct control. By contrast the US has gone on exactly the opposite journey. Having imported a peak 32 per cent of its energy needs as recently as 2004, it is now a net exporter. The inverse symmetry of these two trends is nothing short of remarkable.

Two countries whose economic growth paths, for good and for ill, have tracked these energy market trends. This is not solely a story of the old economy and heavy industry. Energy-hungry technology companies will increasingly gravitate towards low-cost energy markets. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all recently signed contractual terms with the US nuclear industry, such is their conviction of the need for power for data centres and AI processing capacity. It turns out that the intangible economy has very tangible needs and wants.

There are two aspects to the hiatus on North Sea exploration that appear deeply irrational to investors.

The first is emissions. Investors fully recognise the global imperative to decarbonise but in reducing domestic supply of oil and gas the UK is, in fact, adding to carbon in its energy mix. It does this by increasing its reliance on dirtier foreign imports. Approximately a third of the UK’s gas demand comes from imported liquefied natural gas from the US and Qatar. At 79kg of carbon per barrel of oil equivalent (BOE), this has almost four times the carbon intensity of UK production at just 21kg/BOE. The processes of liquefaction and transportation across the seas are both carbon-intensive. A straight replacement of imported LNG by domestic supply would diminish the UK’s total carbon footprint and reduce the offshoring of UK emissions.

The second irrationality is the perverse fiscal implications of limiting North Sea exploration at a time of tight public finances. Reduced domestic production raises decommissioning charges for taxpayers, estimated at £24 billion over the next decade, and reduces Treasury tax revenues. The Laffer curve, where a hypothetical cut in the tax rate generates more in tax revenue, is often cited in UK economic discourse with little empirical support, but at 78 per cent — the marginal tax rate on North Sea energy profits — we are in clear Laffer territory. At a time when the government is facing fiendishly difficult decisions on public spending and tax, leaving tax revenue on the table is an odd approach, to put it mildly.

Despite the UK government recently having opened a consultation on the future of the energy profits levy beyond 2030, the chancellor’s leadership of the growth mission and sound public finances will have a hollow ring if that tax persists in its current guise beyond the autumn budget.

The 78% tax on energy profits and a shift to reliance on energy imports are damaging the UK’s balance sheet

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/economics/article/uks-mad-energy-policy-is-a-potent-deterrent-to-foreign-investors-rcdqf78kx

Conducting economic policy in a time of war — both a military one and a mercantile one — is a huge challenge for any government. Ideological tenets that were forged in opposition, and at a time of near-zero interest rates, get ditched. They are replaced by pragmatism out of necessity. This has been the experience of Labour since it came to power last July.

In opposition, Labour could flirt with the magic money tree and modern monetary theory; in government, the global bond markets have demanded adherence to fiscal discipline. In opposition, Labour could lionise the international aid budget; in government it has cut that budget further to fund the UK’s creaking defences. In opposition, downbeat commentary about the UK economy and criticism of the US president were irrelevant; in government, such comments have consequences.

Political activists to the left of the Labour Party see this pragmatism as a strategic misstep and a betrayal. Their argument goes that it exposes the lack of a differentiating economic vision from the Conservative Party and is a gift to Reform. Investors in the UK see pragmatism as an attractive trait amid an increasingly unstable world order. The prime minister and chancellor deserve credit for their approach. The question now being posed is how far does such pragmatism extend?

In particular, one policy comes up again and again in meetings I have with investors who are looking to put capital to work in the UK. That policy is our approach to energy security.

It is hard to overstate quite how mad the UK’s energy policy looks to outsiders. Investors are scrambling to redirect their capital into other countries after years of over-allocating to the United States. This is a generational opportunity for a British economy that has run an investment-light model for 40 years — and yet, when marketing these islands as an investment destination, many investors struggle to square the government’s primary mission for economic growth with a penal 78 per cent tax rate on energy profits and a commitment to no new licences for the UK’s North Sea continental shelf. That approach looks like an irrational own goal. It is an impediment to economic growth and prosperity that is hiding in plain sight.

Let’s put some data to this, data that is readily available to investors taking a fresh look at the UK economy after a long hiatus. The latest information released by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero suggests that industrial energy costs, after tax, stood at 26p/kWh. This is by some distance the highest across the EU and the G7. In the US the equivalent rate is 6.5p/kWh. Twenty years ago, these prices were the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

Gas-generated electricity is expensive in Britain because of the way we are using it. Gas is increasingly being used for short-term back-up, often at short notice when wind and solar fall short of forecasts. It should not be a surprise that owners of gas power stations charge a lot more per unit for switching on their plant a few hours a week than they would do were it running continuously.

The problem is compounded by idiotic Marginal Cost Pricing, where the price for all electricity, generated by whatever means, during each half hour period is set by the most expensive form of electricity – which is usually a gas plant being used for a short burst of power. It is rather as if I went to the supermarket wanting a dozen bottles of Prosecco, but when I get there I found they only have 11 bottles. I take them and put one bottle of vintage Veuve Clicquot champagne in my trolley to make up the 12 – and when I get to the checkout I find myself being charged for 12 bottles of Veuve Clicquot.

There is a further contributor towards high gas prices in Britain: we are becoming ever more dependent on imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), which now accounts for a quarter of gas imports. This is necessarily more expensive because around a tenth of the energy contained in the gas is consumed in the liquifying and regasification process.

If gas power is really so expensive as Miliband makes out, how come the US has so much lower electricity prices when it generates a higher proportion of its power from gas than the UK? In 2023, 32 per cent of Britain’s electricity came from gas, compared with 43 per cent in the US. And yet UK industrial users are paying an average of 25.85 pence per kilowatt-hour for their electricity (including taxes), compared with the equivalent of just 6.48 pence in the US.

By the way, the US also generated a markedly lower percentage of its electricity from wind and solar in 2023 – around 15 per cent – than the UK (34 per cent). If we followed US policy of encouraging energy self-sufficiency through fracking of shale gas, didn’t have the cost of subsidising wind and solar plants and backing them up at short notice, didn’t have to pay wind farm owners billions in ‘constraint payments’ to compensate them for when they are generating too much power to be fed into the grid, and didn’t also face the cost of reconfiguring the national grid for dispersed wind and solar farms, we could be enjoying US-style energy prices, too.