The UK's low-carbon future is increasingly electric.

[edit] Introduction

Last week, the government’s advisory Committee on Climate Change (CCC) recommended that from 2025, new homes should not be connected to gas to reduce domestic carbon emissions. The CCC certainly doesn’t shy from its task of pushing government to achieve a low-carbon future, but it will be reaching for the tin hats since this would mean the end of gas boilers and gas cookers. But what the CCC is really doing is underlining, again, that the UK’s energy future is increasingly electric.

[edit] Hitting targets

According to the popular site MygridGB, generating a kilowatt hour (kWh)of electricity in the UK back in 2007 typically churned out 510g of carbon dioxide (CO2). By 2018, this figure had nearly halved to 265g kWh. Yet even with huge economic uncertainty ahead, the UK government is still working to a 2030 ‘super-target’ of 100g kWh. To get there however, we will need step changes in three key areas of UK activity, and they all rely strongly on electrical energy solutions.

Firstly, electrical energy will need to be ‘decarbonised’ far more than it is now, which essentially means moving from our huge reliance on gas to more renewables, along with increased energy storage and smarter grid systems, while keeping our nuclear generation capacity going. A Swansea tidal lagoon would also go a long way to produce the ‘low-to-no’ carbon energy we need.

Alongside this, we will need a significantly less carbon-intensive transport system. Despite considerable hype, the UK is still in the early phase of moving to electric cars though in 2018, 6% of UK car registrations were electric or hybrid (up 22% from 2017). While electric vans have yet to trouble the scorer, the future scope for electric vehicles, and a supporting infrastructure, is huge.

The third move that is needed if we are to achieve a super-low-carbon economy is ramping up energy efficiency. Too often eclipsed by high-cost projects, energy efficiency is usually the most cost-effective way of all to reduce carbon emissions, and it reduces operational costs. LED lighting – cited as a key reason why a growing UK population has reduced its overall energy use in recent years – shows that electrical and electronic technology, and not just stacks of insulation, can have a major role in achieving carbon reductions.

[edit] Solutions

Even when we consider alternative fuels, such as hydrogen, the commercial route to any sort of hydrogen economy will rely on electrolysis, driven by cheap renewable energy.

ECA recently issued two checklists, for members and commercial clients, which show 50 potential energy- and carbon-saving solutions, and the vast bulk of these are electro-technical. All this means that when it comes to achieving carbon and cost savings in UK buildings, transport and infrastructure, there will be numerous opportunities for our industry.

If you would like to know more about ECA’s policy and technical support in this area, or share your thoughts on the coming opportunities and challenges and how you think we can help, we encourage you to contact us on: [mailto:energysolutions@eca.co.uk energysolutions@eca.co.uk]

[edit] About this article

This article was written by Paul Reeve, Director of Business at ECA. It first appeared in March 2019 at www.eca.co.uk and can be seen here.

[edit] Related articles on Designing Buildings Wiki

• Articles by the Electrical Contractors' Association (ECA).
• Carbon emissions.
• Climate change act.
• Combined heat and power.
• Developing system intelligence for optimising building electricity networks.
• Electric vehicles.
• Electricity supply.
• Energy storage.
• Flexible electrical networks for a low carbon future.
• Green deal.
• Kilowatt hour.
• Kyoto protocol.
• Micro-grids.
• Power factor.
• Subsidy-free low carbon electricity.
• The Future of Electricity in Domestic Buildings.
• The future of UK power generation
• The use of batteries to store electricity for buildings.

--ECA