‘Reaching net zero is like rebuilding post-war Europe’

Cutting emissions to net zero throws up an unparalleled range of challenges for the UK, the deputy chair of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has warned.

During a seminar at the House of Commons, organised by renewable energy investment fund Glennmont Partners, Baroness Brown of Cambridge outlined the steps that the CCC says the UK must take in order to hit the recently adopted target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

She said: “We have done one or more of these things in a 30-year period – we’ve never done them all at once. The issue is not whether we can do it but whether we can drive things hard enough to do them all at the same time.”

Mark Simon, chief executive of storage company Eelpower, compared the scale of transformation required to achieve net zero with the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War.

“This is like the rebuilding of post war Europe, it will touch everything,” he said.

“We’re not going to get there unless the grid and the electricity system is fundamentally different.”

But Simon stressed that a “very substantial amount of storage” will be required to balance the grid if wind power becomes the “dominant factor” in the electricity generation mix.

He said that new mechanisms must be developed to support flexibility on the grid because trying to shoehorn batteries into the existing capacity market is “not appropriate” while demand side response and electric vehicles cannot be relied on to prevent the grid becoming unbalanced.

But setting arbitrary dates for net zero is less important than working out how the target will be achieved, said Nick Screen, director of consultancy Baringa.

Responding to a question about the increasingly ambitious net zero target dates being proposed during the current general election campaign, he said that he is “not convinced” that this is “the right discussion”.

“It matters how we get there rather than just when we get there.

“Setting dates just help you get there any faster,” he said, adding that transmission and distribution system will have to evolve “rapidly” in order to facilitate the shift to decarbonisation.