The UK has become “a victim of its own progress in reducing emissions,” economists say.
Britain plans to completely phase out fossil fuels by 2035. The United Kingdom wants to produce electricity only from renewable and nuclear sources. As British Prime Minister Boris Johnson emphasized, the energy transition will make the UK less dependent on imports.
Great Britain is one of the largest consumers of gas in Europe, and the degree of dependence of the British electric power industry and thus the entire economy on this energy carrier is very high. Now the world is in an energy crisis and Britain tolerates it worse than other European countries. Correspondent.net tells the details.
Britain’s energy transition
According to the plans of the government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, by 2035 the UK will completely phase out fossil fuels and will only produce electricity from renewable and nuclear sources. He spoke about this on October 4.
Fossil-fueled electricity production in the UK has dropped to unprecedented lows as coal plants close and more funds are invested in wind and solar power. Now more than half of the country’s electricity is produced from low-carbon sources.
However, the British economy is still heavily dependent on gas. So, in the first quarter of 2021, according to the British Association of Oil and Gas Companies OGUK, 35 percent of the country’s electricity was produced using gas.
For comparison, in Germany, which is the largest European consumer of natural gas and the most important export market of Russian Gazprom, this figure was half that in the same period – 16 percent, according to the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems.
And in France, the share of gas does not even reach six percent – the second largest EU economy relies mainly on nuclear energy, it follows from the data of the Energiefirmen portal. On average, the share of gas in the electric power industry of the European Union was 20 percent in 2020.
In the United Kingdom, 85 percent of homes are heated with gas, in Germany 48 percent, and in France 39 percent of the residential sector is heated by gas.
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British Minister of Enterprise, Energy and Industrial Strategy Quasi Quarteng on October 4 announced plans to further reduce the share of fossil fuels in energy production and set a specific timeline for the transition to an all-green energy.
“We won’t have fossil fuels by 2035 [в производстве энергии]… I hope we will exclude not only coal, but also gas, “the minister said.
Johnson stressed that the development of renewable and nuclear energy sources will reduce the UK’s dependence on imports.
“Advantage [энергетического перехода] is that Britain for the first time will no longer depend on hydrocarbons from abroad, as well as on “capricious” prices for them and the financial risk they pose to consumers, “he said.
Two weeks earlier, amid a sharp rise in natural gas prices, the largest companies in the UK asked the government to abandon it. Representatives of the British giants wrote a collective letter calling for the elimination of gas from the national energy system by 2035.
The 13 companies that signed the document include Britain’s Nestle, telecommunications company BT, and Thames Water. In the text of the letter, they argue that “It is time for the UK to announce the end of the use of gas fuels” and to prohibit the generation of energy without emission capture installations.
Company representatives are asking the country to once again set an example to the whole world in abandoning fuel that is harmful to the planet – the United Kingdom was the first to shut down coal-fired power plants, and the rest was obliged to offset carbon emissions.
An all-party parliamentary environmental group has calculated that the transition to clean energy by 2035 will require $ 19.1 billion to be invested annually in wind and solar projects. At the same time, such investments will turn out to be more cost-effective – the population will pay less bills and will not have to depend on imported electricity.
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So far, the British cannot fully rely on renewable energy. Calm weather makes it difficult to get enough energy from wind farms, which was one of the reasons for the energy crisis in Europe.
To prevent citizens from being left without electricity, in early September, the government was forced to launch one of the two remaining coal power plants in the country. Note that in April-June, Britain lived almost 68 days without coal production at all.
Why Britain is harder to deal with gas shortages
The global energy crisis has triggered a wave of bankruptcies among UK energy suppliers. Three more companies – Igloo Energy Supply, Enstroga and Symbio Energy – announced their closure, Bloomberg writes.
As a result, 233 thousand customers will have to look for a new electricity supplier. Igloo officials say the company is no longer possible in the current energy retail market due to “incredibly high gas prices” – natural gas prices in the UK have quadrupled over the past year.
Together, the three suppliers served about one percent of buyers in the market, according to UK energy regulator Ofgem.
Since the beginning of August, five utilities have already ceased service in the kingdom. Because of this, about 1.7 million customers were forced to change suppliers during this time. Quarteng expects several more companies to go bankrupt this winter.
A feature of the crisis in Britain is the small number of underground gas storage facilities. This is a consequence of the ability to exploit large fields off its own shores in the North Sea, in contrast to the countries of continental Europe, which for decades have consistently built up significant capacities for long-term storage of imported gas.
The total capacity of UGS facilities in the European Union is approximately 80 times that of British storage facilities. Moreover, over the past decade, the European Commission, under the impression of the gas crisis in the cold winter of 2009, when Russia interrupted gas transit through Ukraine for two weeks, worked to unite the gas transportation systems of the EU member states.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, the lack of natural gas storage in the UK exacerbates the risks of a global fuel shortage and raises concerns that energy reserves may run out in the event of a cold winter.
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The storage shortage is a reminder of the need to closely monitor the decarbonization of the economy, the WSJ notes.
After the closure of one of its largest enterprises in 2017, Britain can store natural gas reserves that will last only a week, according to analysts interviewed by the WSJ. For comparison, in Germany, storage facilities hold reserves for three months.
The jump in energy prices makes Britain “a victim of its own progress in reducing emissions,” write economists at the Dutch bank ING Groep NV.
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