London Climate Action Week is like Wimbledon for climate engagement, with 100,000 people coming together to share ideas on how we stop global warming. They did so just as temperatures in the city became truly frightening.
There was no escape from the heat, with everyone dripping, making their own paper fans and sharing stories of heat stress and a fear of what is to come. King Charles had his own battery-powered fan as he met participants at an event in St James’s Palace, where the UN secretary general called for us to pull the emergency brake before it was too late.
You would think with that evidence before us public backing for action to tackle climate change would once again be on the rise. What seems to be missing is a shared sense that there is a clear path forward that a large majority of our people can buy into and support. We need a plan that protects the next generation but also improves things in the here and now.
If there was one consistent message from the week, it was that the rapid electrification of our entire energy system could provide just such a way forward. Switching to electricity to help us move around, to heat and cool our homes and power our industry is the most effective way of cutting emissions, but it also brings immediate health, security and economic gains.
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A presentation by Michael Liebrich of an eight-point plan to Make Electricity Cheap Again seemed to sum up some of the best thinking about how we can make this electrification happen. When you apply his eight-point approach to Ireland you see we have real opportunities as well as barriers to overcome.
1. Remove taxes and charges – Ireland has relatively low taxes on electricity and needs higher taxes on gas but that is not easy to deliver politically. Our carbon tax is one of the best examples of how you can use such revenues to promote a just transition but the Government is backing itself into a corner, promising to reconsider the tax in the autumn, just when the nights get cold again. If they delay any increases in the tax then we should insist they also put a floor price on fossil fuels, so when international prices fall we can raise additional revenues to publicly fund what we need to do.
2. Smart grid build out – We start from a good place with a smart meter in every home, a competitive electricity market and one of the best broadband networks in the world. However, our regulatory system has not been fast enough in introducing the flexibility measures that could use those tools to help bring bills down.
[ Dublin data centre uses as much power as 200,000 homesOpens in new window ]
3. Locational pricing – This is not easy to do but our transmission system operator EirGrid has a plan for shaping our electricity future, which is heading in the right direction. They aim to bring big demand loads closer to the source of power so we don’t need as many power lines. That should also allow us focus on the ones we urgently do need such as the north-south interconnector and a new Dublin transmission grid.
4. Accelerate electrification – The ESB and our other energy companies are committed to taking this path. The problem is in Merrion Street where the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is insisting on restricting the size of our energy regulator, not realising that resourcing that office would unlock much greater investment from the clean tech industries we do have.
5. New flexible demand – Our uptake of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and heat pumps is growing rapidly and they can help us optimise the use of the local grid, while using power when it is cheapest and reducing peak demand when it costs a lot more.
6. Delay investment recovery – We could pay back big grid investments over 40 years with lower repayments at the start and a larger return later when the electrification plan has delivered a much broader customer base.
7. Political certainty – The Government has been retreating from the green agenda and the Dáil has just voted by 132 votes to 15 to pass the Critical Infrastructure Bill, which weakens our climate law. However, the Climate Change in the Irish Mind study conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency showed that Irish people are up for addressing climate change, no matter where we come from.
8. Cleanish power – Our emissions have halved in the last 15 years and could halve again in the next five if we deliver what is in our climate plan. A combination of renewables, energy storage, interconnection and using existing back-up power stations will give us what we need. Nuclear, green hydrogen and carbon storage may be technologies for the future but for the next two decades they would only make electricity more expensive, which is the last thing we need right now.
