This article was written by John and originally published in The House magazine.
Depending on your point of view, ‘green technology’ is either one of those mythical creatures that would come to humanity’s rescue if only it could first be found and caught, or an unreachable obsession that’s always just over the horizon: science’s equivalent of unicorns or Moby Dick. And since long-promised technologies like nuclear fusion have been 5 years away for the last 50, it’s easy to see why cynics find it easy to carp.
But science deals in facts and evidence, not fantasy, so it’s really a question of when – rather than if – green technologies turn from twinkles in a lab technician’s eye into everyday household products. Renewable electricity is a good example, where the costs of solar and wind power have been falling for years as technologies and manufacturing techniques move forward.
Even so, progress in rolling out new technologies can still be painfully slow. In some parts of Britain, new wind and solar plants can’t be built until 2032 because National Grid can’t provide a connection to plug them in any earlier. Other still-unproven technologies are queued up, waiting for Whitehall’s stately, multi-step permitting bureaucracy to let them take the commercial risks their backers are already committed to anyway. And getting planning consent for infrastructure projects isn’t just painfully, expensively slow and ponderous; it also leaves too many local communities feeling as though the benefits of new projects are trousered by big businesses and their high-billing lawyers, who steamroller local democratic consent with clever legal appeals and leave nothing for local people at all.
What’s the answer to getting more of those new green technologies into our homes, cars and offices sooner?
- The Government wants to build lots of new green energy plants so we become an energy exporter by 2040: the Saudi-Arabia of renewable electricity. But unless we solve those very slow, uncertain, expensive and bureaucratically-cumbersome planning approvals, each renewable generating plant, power-transmission line or energy storage facility will cost significantly more than it should, and will take 5-10 years from the moment it has been commissioned before it is actually built and available to use. These inefficiencies don’t just make energy (and other utilities like water) bills more expensive than they need to be: they delay our path to energy independence and leave us more exposed to international gas prices for longer too. We need a new Infrastructure Bill to redesign our infrastructure planning approvals to reduce the time, uncertainty and expense which they currently require, but without eroding the democratic consent of local residents, so final decisions can be reached in weeks or months rather than years.
- It will be far easier to take planning decisions in weeks or months if we upgrade and modernise the electricity grid so local residents can be offered discounted electricity as part of the community consent for agreeing to one of the newly-commissioned pieces of energy generating, transmission or storage infrastructure. Not all communities will accept the offer, of course – that’s democracy – but the benefits of this new ‘local pricing’ ability would reduce the costs of the entire system too, cutting billions off the country’s energy bills every year.
- We’ve got to speed up those permitting processes for approving new energy technologies which can add years to getting new technologies to market. Contingent deals, where firms with new technologies could bid against established generators for the same contracts to provide power at a pre-set price from a particular date, providing they could satisfy the same environmental and safety standards as everybody else, would be far faster, cheaper, less bureaucratic and more nimble than the current multi-step approvals process. It would then be up to the new technology firms that won the contracts to deliver the promised power on time and on budget, but their shareholders and backers would carry the commercial risks if they failed, rather than taxpayers or bill-payers.
- Make the regulators and Ministerial officials subject to the ‘1-in-2-out’ better regulation rule, so the cost of any new red tape and bureaucracy they impose has to be offset by reductions that cut twice as much cost elsewhere, without diluting or reducing standards. The result will be lower costs and quicker rollout of new ideas to everyone, and it should stop us creating new bureaucracies that become just as bad as the old ones after a few years too.
Green technologies shouldn’t be either unicorns or Moby Dick. But perhaps they can help us all reach the end of a real-world rainbow if we can get them rolled out more quickly.