Britain will “double down” on investments in renewable energy as a way of achieving energy independence while weakening Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed this week. But in a newspaper article sketching out a revised energy strategy, Johnson also called for additional fossil fuel exploration in the British isles, as well as further investments in nuclear power, leaving some commentators nonplussed.
Writing in the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, Johnson noted that “Putin’s strength—his vast resource of hydrocarbons—is also his weakness. He has virtually nothing else.”
He went on: “If the world can end its dependence on Russian oil and gas, we can starve him of cash, destroy his strategy and cut him down to size.”
Johnson argued that renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, offered the best path to achieve this, saying his government would “double down on new wind power” and “do more to exploit the potential of solar power,” which is “remarkably cheap and effective.”
Renewables are “invulnerable to Putin’s manipulations,” Johnson went on. “He may have his hand on the taps for oil and gas. But there is nothing he can do to stop the North Sea wind.”
Not mentioned in the piece is Johnson’s upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia, through which he intends to further secure Britain’s supply of crude oil. The trip is especially controversial given the kingdom’s recent mass execution of 81 prisoners, highlighting how powerful petrostates often have less-than-dubious human rights records.
Yet on both counts, Johnson appears to be loosely aligning U.K. energy policy with that of the EU, which last week revealed a plan to drastically reduce its dependence on Russian natural gas through a range of measures, from accelerating the transition to renewable energy to diversifying its energy supplies.
The renewed commitment to renewable energy is consistent with the image of the U.K. portrayed in the run-up to the COP26 climate summit hosted in Scotland in November. At that time, British politicians did what they could to cast the country as a “climate leader,” dedicated to ending reliance on fossil fuels.
Since then, however, the Johnson administration’s stance on climate-compatible policies has appeared to waver, with the government in recent months approving new licenses to extract more oil and gas in the North Sea. That course of action appears to fly in the face of admonitions from the International Energy Agency that there must be no new fossil fuel exploration if the world is to reach net-zero carbon emissions.
So, while Johnson’s endorsement of renewables won cautious approval from energy and climate researchers, some expressed concern that the Prime Minister was also calling for more oil and gas exploration, which he claimed would provide “more domestic energy resilience.” He also claimed that the country would “need hydrocarbons to make hydrogen—the low carbon fuel that has perhaps the greatest potential of all.” On social media, commentators noted that hydrocarbons were not necessary for the production of green hydrogen, which is obtained by the hydrolysis of water, and that Johnson had paid no attention to the critical issue of energy efficiency. On Twitter, Juliet Phillips of climate change think-tank E3G summarized these concerns, saying: “Great to see PM make case for renewables … but can’t overlook it also pushes for new UK o&g + blue hydrogen, & no reference of green homes. Need to see shift in energy supply strategy.”
Johnson’s support for green energy is not to everyone’s liking, though: some British Conservatives claim that transitioning away from fossil fuels will prove too costly. In Britain, as in the U.S., the fossil fuel industry wields powerful political influence. Conservative-led lobby groups such as Net Zero Watch, which consistently declines to reveal its sources of funding, have mounted a round-the-clock assault on climate policies in the pages of national newspapers, including the Telegraph. Conservative voices have also led a campaign to restart shale oil and natural gas fracking, which is currently banned in the country, claiming that additional fossil fuel production would bring down domestic energy bills.
Addressing a British audience, Johnson tacitly refuted the claims of such campaigns, saying: “Green electricity isn’t just better for the environment, it’s better for your bank balance. A kilowatt from a North Sea wind turbine costs less than one produced by a power station running on gas shipped to the UK from overseas. And if a quarter of our power wasn’t already coming from renewables, your bills today would be even higher than they already are.”
In a broader context, fossil fuel-aligned groups appear to be swimming against the tides of public opinion, technological progress and global development. Three quarters of Britons are worried about climate change, while some 81% report they have made lifestyle changes to help tackle it. And studies show that renewables are now the cheapest way to generate electricity, with solar power offering the “cheapest electricity in history.”
Elsewhere in his comment piece, Johnson hinted that the U.K. would exploit tidal power, hydro and geothermal power, before going on to call for “big new bets on nuclear,” claiming that the country needs “baseload energy—power that can be relied upon even when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.”
While nuclear power seems popular among both government ministers and opposition politicians, the contention drew immediate criticism from some experts who argue that nuclear power fails to answer most of the big questions posed by the energy transition: nuclear power plants typically take decades to build and are extremely expensive to operate. As a result, they say, there is a lack of evidence to support nuclear as an effective policy option for reducing fossil fuel dependency.
Even advanced small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), a developing technology long hyped by the U.K. government, could prove a dead end: new research from the U.S. Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis branded an SMR project as “too late, too expensive, too risky and too uncertain”—supporting contentions that pursuing SMRs will simply “jeopardize attempts to mitigate climate change.”
“Johnson claims that the current crisis shows there is a need for “big new bets” on new nuclear in the UK. It would certainly be a massive gamble,” said Phil Johnstone, a research fellow at the University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit. “If the challenge is to rapidly reduce demand for gas and to ease the financial burden on energy consumers, then new large nuclear reactors of designs that have been plagued by technical problems, considerable delays, and cost overruns as well as untested small modular reactors, are not the answer. Neither of these options will contribute to alleviating the pressures of the current crisis with the urgency needed and will not be ready until well into the next decade, if ever.”
Johnstone said government money would be better spent on improving energy efficiency in homes and buildings, adding that while nuclear power tended to under-deliver when it came to addressing energy supply issues, “renewables have tended to surpass expectations.”
