Minister reveals timetable for clean growth strategy

Document will be published before Dieter Helm’s cost of energy review

The publication of the long awaited clean growth strategy will precede Dieter Helm’s cost of energy review, climate change minister Claire Perry has revealed.  

At a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference yesterday, Perry outlined the timetabling of the government’s upcoming energy policy announcements.  

“The sequencing will probably go clean growth strategy, Helm review, industrial strategy,” she said.

Perry defended the delayed appearance of the strategy, which her predecessor Nick Hurd said was near publication in the spring, on the grounds that she did not want it to be “just a discussion about carbon budgets.”

She said that clean growth strategy, which is designed to outline how the UK will meet the emissions reduction targets in last year’s fifth carbon budget, would incorporate a discussion of the role of CCS (carbon capture storage) in decarbonisation.  

“We will be looking at CCS and how can innovate on that.”

Perry also said that she wanted to better understand the barriers to greater use of waste heat from public buildings

“Having (district) heat networks working properly would be great.”

But she warned there was no ‘magic bullet’ to decarbonise heat, which she predicted would be harder than electricity.

Perry said that the decarbonisation of heat, which accounts for just over a third of UK carbon emissions, would have to be carried out through a ‘whole series of small but important steps’.

And in a bid to dispel arguments that green policies have fuelled increased power bills she said the clean growth strategy would incorporate evidence showing how households’ fuel costs have dropped due to measures like energy efficiency.