Memo To Rayner & Milliband – You Should Talk About Energy for Housing
The UK Government last week laid out the domestic plan for its first year in office -prioritise housing and clean energy, in order to kickstart growth.
The duo in charge of these policies – Angela Rayner (housing) and Ed Milliband (energy), did not co-ordinate their announcements last week, and there is a feeling in energy circles that both policies may fall flat for the same reason – delays in generating clean energy to the places where housing is most needed.
Housing and energy are closely connected – you cannot build new communities until the power supply is in place. We know that there is currently a 10 year wait to connect new housing estates to the grid in some parts of the country, and a 10 year wait to connect a solar farm to the grid in others.
The government also launched its vehicle for its energy initiatives last week, Great British Energy, to be run by former Siemens executive Juergen Meier. it is going into the business of picking winners – but energy for housing does not appear to be in the list. £8.5b has been announced for it to co-invest with big industry players in the next generation of wind and solar farms. But these projects take years to start generating power. It took the best part of a decade to build the Hornsea 1 Windfarm, and that was AFTER planning permission was granted in 2014. So reforms to planning permission on which the government is currently consulting are unlikely to make much impact.
And the recent history of government energy deals shows the Civil servants charged with negotiations were ham-fisted and outmanoeuvred at every turn. The UK chair of French energy company EDF, Alex Chisholm, previously ran BEIS, the department that struck the deal for EDF to build a new nuclear power station in Somerset., as reported in the Guardian. “The agreement was made in 2016 with UK bill payers bearing the costs, which soared from an estimated £18bn to at least £31bn…. it is due to be completed in 2031 – about 14 years after EDF said it would be up and running.” In 2023, EDF was the leading company in the wholesale electricity generation market in Great Britain, with a share of 18.5 percent. The UK branch of the German company RWE ranked second last year, with a market share of approximately 17.5 percent
Data centres and EVs will gobble up all the new energy the grid can produce in this country for the next ten years.
Where does that leave the new housing starts that are so badly needed? How will they get their energy this year?
The big energy consumers will always need the grid, but for at least some new housing estates, electricity could be supplied from small local microgrids that do not need to be hooked up to the main grid …