The UK Labour Party secured a landslide victory in the country’s general election held last Thursday, ending 14 years of Conservative rule and potentially reshaping the UK’s future energy landscape while hastening decarbonisation.
In its pre-election manifesto, the Labour Party pledged to “work with the private sector” to triple solar and quadruple offshore wind capacity by 2030 as part of its push to achieve net-zero power emissions by the same year.
The party has also promised to reverse England’s de facto ban on onshore wind projects and more than double the UK’s onshore wind capacity to 35 GW by the end of the decade.
But most notable is the party’s pledge to launch Great British Energy, which it described as a “publicly-owned clean energy company” which would “deliver energy security” to the UK.
Call For Transparency…
Industry stakeholders, however, have criticised the plan for a lack of transparency around GB Energy’s role in the UK power sector and how it would be structured.
Tom Smout, a senior analyst at Aurora Energy Research, told Montel that GB Energy is “still a big unknown” and industry players “don’t have clear timelines” but the “latest noises from Labour appear to be that GB Energy will invest directly in projects, rather than having a distinct regulatory role”.
Now, with Labour on course to take more than 400 of the UK’s 650 parliamentary seats, incoming prime minister Keir Starmer has been handed an unprecedented mandate to implement his party’s green energy policies, which for the most part have received cautious welcome from renewables lobbies.
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