Energy and Climate Change Select Committee: UK not on course to meet renewable transport and heat targets

The Energy and Climate Change Select Committee has published a new report showing that the UK is not on course to meet targets on renewable heat and transport. Its recommendations for more action are very welcome, as are its calls for more to be done to understand the carbon impacts of biomass. However, calls for the use of more crop biofuels could put nature and the climate at risk. A more detailed analysis follows below.

Nothing happens all summer and then as soon as the schools go back, all the news comes at once, or at least that's how the past 24 hours have felt to me.

This morning the cross-parliamentary Energy and Climate Change Select Committee published a report on the UK's progress towards meeting its renewable heat and transport targets (12% and 10% respectively).

The report concludes that while the UK is on track in terms of its electricity target it is off course for meeting the heat and transport targets by 2020. This is a concern since the UK used the Paris summit last year to cement its international reputation on climate change, but has failed to back that up with significant action back home.

This new report signals that now is the time for the Government to set out ambitious plans for delivering its own climate change targets and the EU ones for 2020 that currently still apply. The Committee rightly says that it is possible for the Government to meet these targets and that it should recommit to them, or risk undermining its own credibility on climate change. If we leave the EU and Government chooses to renege on the EU targets, it will need to replace them with domestic 2020 targets for the electricity, heat and transport sectors in order for us to continue to reduce our emissions to meet our domestic climate targets. The Committee's report sets out some of the ways in which these targets could be met and analyses where Government policy to date has held back progress. 

The Government could implement some of these recommendations in its forthcoming Emissions Reduction Plan, which is expected in December. The newly integrated Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy can take the bull by the horns and set out an ambitious industrial, UK-wide plan for changing our energy and transport systems to make them truly low carbon and for meeting these targets.

Dead wood

However, as Bill McKibben wrote powerfully yesterday, the need for solutions shouldn't lead us down cul-de-sacs and to dead ends. One such dead end is burning huge quantities of trees for electricity. Such an approach can actually put the climate at greater risk than the fossil fuels that are replaced, since wood is more carbon dense than coal in a lot of cases and the carbon is immediately released into the sky. In its report the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee rightly calls for a review of the UK's Bioenergy Strategy on carbon grounds. We agree - while the Strategy itself (written in 2017) contains some sound principles, the policies that have been used to enact it are flawed and put both nature and the climate at risk. A review would offer the chance to overhaul these policies.

Tackling transport

The Committee rightly calls for more electrification of vehicles as a way to achieve our climate targets, such as measures that would incentivise greater uptake of ultra-low emissions vehicles. Alongside this, investment in reduce the amount of energy we use in the first place and increasing the energy we can store in batteries can help in both the transport and heat sectors. Our recent Energy Vision report called for more investment in these areas as critical for delivering emissions reductions in an ecologically sensitive way.

In harmony with nature

The focus should be on technologies that provide efficiency, emissions reductions and value for money in harmony with nature. In the heat and transport sectors, this means a combination of electrification, use of genuine wastes and residues and limited use of woody energy crops. However, large-scale, monoculture growing of crops for either heat or transport can put the environment at risk. Helping the hardest to decarbonise sectors, such as heavy industry and aviation, should also be prioritised. This can be done through careful prioritisation of the use of a limited biomass resource and through the most efficient kinds of technologies such as small and medium scale combined heat and power or district heating networks.

Are biofuels the answer?

However the Committee also suggests that the transport target could be met by using more crop-based biofuels, the contribution of which to the 10% target is currently capped at 1.5% in the UK. The EU and the UK both capped the contribution of these kinds of biofuels for good reason - the risk they pose to the climate and to the environment. Raising this cap and softening environmental safeguards is not the solution. The RSPB has long called for the 10% target to be scrapped but if maintained, it is essential that it is met by wastes, electrification and demand reduction, not by solutions that can actually cause more problems elsewhere. The call for the use of E10 (a high-ethanol blend) is also concerning. A new report this summer highlighted that ethanol-based biofuels deliver only minimal emissions savings or can even result in emissions increases relative to conventional fuels.

In conclusion, this report provides important overarching evidence that at this point in time the Government needs to do far more to protect its domestic credibility on climate change. While some of the proposed solutions could be risky or should be ruled out, the overall call for more action on renewable heat and transport is critical.