The government risks not meeting its ambition to decarbonise power by 2035 because it lacks a delivery plan, the National Audit Office (NAO) warned today.
With its attention focused on the recent energy crisis, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has made little progress with a long-term delivery plan for all electricity to be generated through clean energy sources, the watchdog said in a report.
With the government’s own net zero strategy predicting a 60% increase in electricity demand − due to modes of transport and heating in buildings switching to electricity from fossil fuels − decarbonising electricity has become the backbone of the government’s 2019 plan to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Switching to clean electricity generation has also increasingly become part of the government’s plan to ensure there is an affordable and secure domestic energy supply in response to the disruption to international gas supplies that has followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This lack of a delivery plan could be bad news for consumers. The NAO said the lack of a delivery plan risks diminishing the confidence of industry stakeholders, who have increasingly expressed concerns about how all the change and investment that is needed across the power sector will be brought together without a strategic vision.
It could deter external investors from providing funds for new infrastructure or lead them to increase the rates of return they require, “ultimately increasing costs for energy consumers”.
The NAO recommended that DESNZ needs to set clear measures of overall progress with interim milestones and that these should be reported annually to Parliament, along with an explanation of how this performance information has been used to determine any significant changes to its overall plan.
Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: “It is understandable that DESNZ and its predecessor BEIS has focused on dealing with the immediate energy crisis over the past 12 months. But one consequence of this is that it lacks a delivery plan for decarbonising power by 2035, which is the backbone of its broader net zero ambition.
“The longer DESNZ goes without a critical path that brings together different aspects of power decarbonisation, the higher the risk that it does not achieve its ambitions, or it does so at a greater than necessary cost to taxpayers and consumers.”