DECC's coal confusion: A shot in the foot

Q: What’s the similarity between the Department of Energy and Climate Change and Nick Gardner of indie band San Cisco?

A: Both show a recent propensity for shooting themselves in the foot.

For Gardner, the scene last year was a dirt road in Western Australia; a few too many bumps in the road, a jolt on the gun, a self-administered wound.

DECC’s latest mishap came on what should be its safest piece of ground – the coal phase-out.

Last year, having (jointly with Treasury) taken a blowtorch to the government’s low-carbon support measures, and struggling to find something that could bolster its ‘greenest ever government’ credentials ahead of the Paris climate summit, Secretary of State Amber Rudd announced in her ‘energy reset’ speech that all of the UK’s coal-fired power stations would close by 2025 at the latest.

Cue ringing applause – not only from green groups but from energy experts who believed the announcement would stimulate investment into various essential elements of the UK energy system, in particular new gas-fired power stations designed to keep the lights on at times of peak demand.

And Ms Rudd – and indeed David Cameron – had something concrete on which to base their claims of climate leadership before, during and after Paris; a coal phase-out to wave in the face of those sanctimonious Germans who, for all their wind and solar, remain overly reliant on the brown stuff.

Holes in the phase-out

Those of us who listened carefully to Ms Rudd realised that the phase-out commitment was less concrete than you might have guessed from the headlines.

Firstly, it would only happen if ministers were satisfied there would be no threat to energy security. And secondly, the pledge was to phase out ’unabated’ coal, not all coal.

What none of us realised is that we would now be having a debate about what ‘unabated’ means.

Yet as The Independent reported on Thursday, that’s what Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom appears to be encouraging. According to leaked minutes of a recent meeting [pdf link], she is encouraging coal barons (who knew the UK still had any?) to go away and have a think about what they would like ‘abated’ and ‘unabated’ to mean. They’ll feed their thoughts into the consultation on how to do the coal closures that DECC was supposed to launch in the spring but which now appears stuck in the pre-EU referendum ‘too difficult’ tray.

While Ms Leadsom hasn’t revealed exactly what she has in mind, the logic appears to go something like this:

• ‘abated’ usually means ‘stations fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS) equipment’
• CCS captures perhaps 90% of carbon emissions, not all
• so, could any other way of using coal that reduces emissions by 90% or so be considered ‘abated’?

Could ‘abated’, for example, mean that biomass-burning power stations could use up to 10% coal? Given that coal is conventionally thought of as a baseload technology, could ‘abated’ mean ‘stations operating for less than 10% of the time’?

It seems vanishingly unlikely that we will get any answers to this before the referendum, given that Amber Rudd and Andrea Leadsom have positioned themselves in opposite camps in this increasingly poisonous battle. Political pundits seem to believe that at least one of them and in all probability both will be moving jobs after the referendum, whatever the result.

Black vs gold

It’s striking to compare DECC’s approach to the coal and solar industries. Coal is unequivocally becoming an industry of the past, while the International Energy Agency and others see solar playing a major role – perhaps the major role – in energy systems of the future.

Ms Leadsom appears to have been highly sympathetic to the coal industry, encouraging them to engage in what ‘unabated’ means, asking her officials to intervene with the Environment Agency on behalf of a company seeking to open a new mine, and discussing options for re-skilling the workforce.