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RUNCORN, England — Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a man in a hurry.
He arrived in No. 10 Downing Street with a promise that Labour would rapidly transform the U.K. energy system. Now, he has little choice but to crack on and try to make it happen.
That means more clean energy projects like wind turbines and solar farms, built all over the country. Constructing them will require “necessary changes” to things like U.K. planning laws, Starmer told an event on Thursday, as companies ramp up their work in the hope of meeting a pledge to decarbonize the domestic electricity grid by 2030.
That goal will only be met if the country phases out oil and gas in a few short years, so that power is generated almost entirely from renewable sources. It will be a “laser focus” for the Labour government, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said before the election.
To this end, his party is committed to doubling onshore wind, trebling solar power and quadrupling offshore wind by the end of the decade. It will need a vast new network of pylons and power stations, too.
The Conservative government was committed to the same target by 2035. But Labour’s flurry of energy announcements since taking office earlier this month have all been aimed at getting there five years sooner.
Even experts sympathetic to the 2030 goal call it a “moonshot.”
‘We have to move this forward’
At an event in Runcorn in north-west England, hosted at a wind turbine factory, Starmer showed off the next steps in his plan to create GB Energy, a new state-backed clean energy company.
Under plans unveiled on Thursday, GBE will partner with the Crown Estate with the aim of getting developers moving even more swiftly on something they are already doing — building giant offshore wind turbines on seabeds that effectively belong to King Charles III.
The idea is that GBE, which has been backed with £8.3 billion of taxpayer cash over the next five years to invest in green technology, will team up with the king’s estate to attract between £30 billion and £60 billion of private investment, and bring online enough power by the end of the decade to power 20 million homes, Labour says.
The Conservative Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho called GBE “a gimmick.” Labour claims it will eventually help bring down bills; the Conservatives say it will ultimately force them up.
Starmer told reporters he wants to make progress after a “decade of lost opportunity.” He pointed to the Labour government’s early decision to end the de-facto ban on building onshore wind farms in England, in place since the days of David Cameron, as proof.
And he had a warning for local campaigners who might want to obstruct the party’s green momentum by blocking projects on their doorsteps. His government will make the “tough decisions” to build often unpopular infrastructure like power stations and pylons, he insisted.
“It’s the failure to take the tough decisions, the running away from tough decisions, that has caused over a decade of lost opportunity,” Starmer said. By changing the way the U.K. builds, the drive for green technology “will apply everywhere, whatever the rosette on the constituency — because we have to move this forward.”
Without radical action, Starmer argued that planning delays for things like wind farms and electricity networks would mean it “takes 30 years before we get the power.”
“We’re not going to go on like that,” he vowed, adding: “The race has started. The work has begun.”
