Miliband’s empty energy promise

Though not quite up there with history’s great political texts, Ed Miliband’s letter this week to the director of the ESO, which runs Britain’s national grid, is a rather important document. It reveals – or confirms – that Labour has committed itself to decarbonising Britain’s electricity system by 2030 without really having any idea of how that can be done. Miliband described this letter as a ‘formal commission… to provide practical advice on achieving clean power’.

That is all very well, except shouldn’t Miliband have sought this advice months ago, before pledging to achieve net zero on domestic energy by 2030? This week was supposed to be the big reveal: we would learn how this target – considered unreachable by many – is going to be hit. But Miliband, it seems, doesn’t have the first idea as to how the country can decarbonise the grid, still less by 2030. His agenda and the decarbonisation deadline are starting to look like a ludicrous bluff.

The ‘embodiment’ of Labour’s agenda was supposed to be a new company: Great British Energy. ‘A new home-grown energy company,’ Keir Starmer promised, ‘like Orsted in Denmark and Vattenfall in Sweden.’ There was much talk about where it would be based, and this week we found out: in Aberdeen.

The conceit is that the project will mop up all the jobs that will be lost in the oil industry. Except that GB Energy will not be a company generating energy at all; it is instead a name given to an investment scheme.

A few weeks ago, Miliband trumpeted that GB Energy would partner with Crown Estates to create up to 30 gigawatts of new offshore wind developments by 2030. He was so excited that it seemed unfair to point out that the Crown Estate had already set that target in November under the Tories.