Battle for GB Energy turns into an energy culture war

Aberdeen is the obvious location but it's too close to Big Oil for the Milibandistas

The twilight of Big Oil? (Photo by Maria Lupan on Unsplash)

It is arguably the most ambitious industrial project undertaken by Britain since the industrial revolution. Ed Miliband wants to ‘cleanse’ the UK energy grid by 2030. This will involve nearly quadrupling the capacity of offshore wind from 15 gigawatts to 55 gigawatts, according to The Economist. Yet it takes ten years just to get a wind farm through the dense thicket of regulation that impede such developments. GB Energy, Labour’s “publicly-owned national clean energy champion” is expected to cut through the red tape and drive this epic venture in partnership with private capital. Keir Starmer has promised to reward UK families by slashing UK heating bills in the process. 

Erecting offshore wind farms is only half the battle to achieve this historic break with oil and gas. The electricity grid will have to be upgraded to accommodate all the electricity generated by massive offshore and onshore wind turbines. That will involve huge investment of trillions, mostly from the private sector and, as this author has pointed out, mobilising the engineering skills of energy companies that have been developing North Sea Oil over the last half century. Companies that have been largely demonised by Labour MPs as climate destroyers and reapers of fossil super-profits.

The obvious place to locate GB Energy would seem to be Aberdeen, centre of Scotland’s world class energy industry. That’s where the engineering know-how resides and where project developers in the sector have been located for decades.  But a bitter row broke out between the Labour Party and the industry about whether Aberdeen was the right home for GB Energy - or whether the city should be punished for being too close to Big Oil. This has exposed many of the contradictions at the heart of UK energy policy and the red-green ideology that informs it.