Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed Europe’s lack of energy security and sent prices soaring. Boris Johnson’s energy strategy, due next week, is billed as a response to this crisis. It aims to end the muddle of recent decades and set out how Britain, a net importer of energy for the past 18 years, can secure reliable sources of power for decades to come.
The centrepiece will be the aim to have a quarter of the UK’s electricity provided by nuclear power by 2050, up from 16 per cent in 2020. The prime minister loves a grand project as much as any Frenchman and has become an enthusiast for new nuclear. But with most of Britain’s ageing nuclear power stations due to close in the coming years, this will mean building a new fleet of reactors, the work of years, perhaps decades.
The No 10 plan is for a mix of classic big plants and small modular reactors (SMRs), to generate the power equivalent to eight traditional plants. SMRs are quicker and cheaper to build. They can be roughly the size of the reactor in a nuclear-powered submarine, so they also take up far less space. One option is to have a series of SMRs that each serve a town. Another option is to have one larger plant that combines several SMRs.
Government polling shows the British support nuclear power by two-to-one, but this hasn’t dispelled concerns about how voters will feel about living near a nuclear reactor. The PM has taken to joking that he wants “an SMR for every Labour constituency in the land”.
But who would build them? Only two groups have proper experience: the Chinese and the French (through EDF, majority-owned by the French state). In the Cameron-Osborne “golden era”’ of Anglo-Sino relations, the Chinese were thought of as nuclear partners, but are now regarded as far too risky. The only question about this judgment: why did the government ever think otherwise? Should any Chinese company, which is ultimately a tool of the state, ever be trusted to provide Britain’s energy? What might happen to these plants if the UK came to the aid of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack? This leaves EDF, but Emmanuel Macron has already tapped them up to build as many as 14 nuclear power stations, and there’s a limit to how much they can take on.
This has led to the idea of a British development vehicle that would buy a reactor design already approved by regulators “off the shelf” – the government has, for instance, already put over £200 million into Rolls Royce’s development of an SMR — and then project manage its construction. It’s probably the only way to build a significant number of new nuclear stations. Yet the government’s record on delivering big infrastructure projects on time and on budget hardly inspires confidence. And even if all goes well, these plants won’t be built for many years. Even Johnson, who is relentlessly Panglossian about how quickly things can be done, talks about 2030.
So what can be done meanwhile? Two quick options are onshore wind farms and fracking; the former has the potential to dent electricity bills before the next election. But I understand the official strategy, while not ruling these out, won’t push for them either. The problem is “politics, MPs and planning”, according to one of those close to the decision. Both onshore wind and fracking have vocal opponents in the Tory parliamentary party, so won’t happen.
Onshore wind’s fate was perhaps sealed when Chris Heaton-Harris, who led the charge against wind farms under David Cameron, was made chief whip. One Johnson ally tells me the problem with onshore wind is “the party hate it” and that the PM has had “people screaming in his ear” about what trouble would be stirred up if ministers changed planning laws to push them through.
It’s revealing, though, that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has been pushing it hard. Ministers there know that onshore wind is the most direct way to increase generating capacity in the short term. It accounted for 11 per cent of electricity in 2020, and with looser planning laws that number could be increased significantly.
This time last year, Johnson would have pushed unpopular plans through his party. Now, with partygate rumbling on, he’s at the mercy of his backbenchers. As one sympathetic source puts it, “he can’t face them down like you normally would with a majority of 80 because of his near-death experience with the letters”. One minister quips that No 10 has gone from treating the parliamentary party “like idiots” to “being the voice of the gods”. No 10 is now more interested in wining and dining MPs: they’re the only people who can throw him out before the next election.
But the invasion of Ukraine has transformed the energy argument, and failure to properly back onshore wind and fracking fails to match the moment. Europe is in an energy crisis. The German economy minister Robert Habeck has put the country in the “early warning phase” of a gas emergency, the first step to rationing, because Putin might cut off supplies. The supplies that are flowing are funding Putin’s war machine by about $500 million a day.
In these circumstances, the UK should surely be doing everything to boost supply, whether with onshore wind, fracking, more production of North Sea oil and gas, floating solar panels onto reservoirs and fixing them onto school roofs. We need a war-time effort and are instead getting a cautious approach that fears scaring the horses. It is as if people had been told to dig for victory but were allowed to keep their favourite shrubs.
If Europe’s security is in danger, it seems odd for MPs to shirk what’s necessary due to local concerns. If people don’t like the idea of onshore wind now, what will they think about a nuclear power station down the road in ten years time? As one weary Whitehall source puts it: “Energy requires infrastructure and that has to be built somewhere. If it is not offshore you are going to get nimby objections.”
This is a real worry. It is bad enough that a government with close to an 80-seat majority can’t change the planning system to get more houses built where people want to live, which would boost the economy as well as providing homes for families. But a failure to build the energy infrastructure to provide reliable and secure supplies would be quite another matter. The fatalism in Westminster is perhaps the biggest problem. Politics is about making and winning arguments: if MPs can’t shift public attitudes on this, they will be condemning us to being a heritage site rather than a 21st-century economy.
James Forsyth is political editor of The Spectator
