Committee on Climate Change 5th Carbon Budget consultation
Future carbon reduction will clearly continue to be a significant challenge. Among the technologies available to decarbonise the power sector, almost all face considerable constraints.
Money continues to be spent on high unit-cost generation technologies with no clear pathway of demonstrated cost reductions, and with no criteria to assess when they will see subsidy support cut off if they fail to improve.
The impact of this is that, in the short term, less decarbonisation is achieved per pound spent than would be the case if cheaper technologies were preferred, while also failing to bring forward technologies for anticipated future deployment.
As well as these potentially missed opportunities with generation technologies, we also foresee significant currently untapped opportunities from energy efficiency.
To keep the UK on track with existing carbon budgets, and to meet a demanding fifth carbon budget, lagging energy efficiency policy will have to be put back on track.