Net Zero and Defence… Two Sides of the Same Coin

‘Net Zero’ is currently getting a bum rap and being blamed for everything that seems to be going wrong in the UK at the moment.  Certainly, it is up there as a bogeyman along with immigration as far as the right-wing media is concerned.  However, maybe it is time to reassess renewables and clean energy technologies, writes Martin Wright, Chair of the Renewable Energy Association.

It is perhaps an understatement to say that the current shifting of the geopolitical tectonic plates is shattering all our trade assumptions and bringing the discussion of defence and energy security to the fore. Usually this involves direct defence spending in the form of defence hardware, warships, aircraft and tanks, and the military. However, just important is the supply chain, sovereign capabilities, and crucially our energy system.  The latter is key to society being able to function.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, we took a ‘peace dividend’ and privatised the electricity industry in late 1990. Since then, the focus has been keeping consumers bills down and seeing security of supply through the lens of multiple suppliers and the globalised supply chain. Inevitably, this has meant that redundancy was viewed as inefficient and taking account of the potential for a hostile action except perhaps for a cyber-attack dropped down the priority of design criteria. Not anymore…. We are relearning a number of lessons of history.

The Government is once again being reminded that its first duty is to protect the nation and the sovereignty.  Indeed recently the sale of Chemring (a key defence contractor) to a US investor was stopped, so the penny is dropping…

We are an island. LPG carriers can be sunk. Under sea pipelines blown up. Cables can be cut and power stations destroyed by ballistic or cruise missiles. Moreover, we have neither the Navy nor the air defence in anything like the scale we need to be confident that these things could not happen. These vulnerabilities are a function of our geography and are therefore timeless. Indeed, the one battle that Winston Churchill was most afraid of losing during the Second World War was the Battle of the Atlantic.

We require a resilient, robust and above all defensible energy system. The good news is that we could very rapidly create one, one based on renewable technologies that harvest home grown resources. Imagine if every home had solar panels and a battery and that through the Internet homes could be linked locally to form local virtual power stations. Imagine that instead of relying on a couple of days supply using the Rough Gas field (connected by a subsea pipeline) we instead could install underground storage at nodal points around the gas transmission system and at each CCGT. This could produce a highly distributed, robust defensible system. It would help decouple the UK from volatile fossil fuel markets that remain at the mercy of geopolitics. What’s more the investment would help grow the economy, create the jobs of the future, and provide long term investor returns.

Finally, deterrence is not just about having nuclear weapons. Ukraine has shown us that they are so dreadful, they are unusable except in extremis and in which case all bets are off. Real deterrence is based on having credible armed forces, an industry that can outproduce and out innovate any potential aggressor, and an energy system which is so distributed and interconnected that it is impossible to destroy.

Every day it seems that things that we have taken for granted for the last eighty years are being turned upside down. Even if the current incumbent in the White House leaves prematurely, nothing will return to seemingly more comfortable world of 2024. Some may not like Net Zero, but we may just see what its technology could do to defend our Island…

Martin Wright is Chair of the REA, and Executive Chairman of Gravitricity.