The Prime Minister and Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, are negotiating for Britain to rejoin the EU’s internal electricity market, which treats the 27 countries of the EU and Norway as a single borderless power grid.
The EU will only let Britain back into the system if Sir Keir agrees to the bloc’s ambitious targets for renewable energy, which would require the UK to decarbonise not just electricity but also heating and transport rapidly.
In practice, it would mean Net Zero targets would need to be doubled.
Claire Coutinho, the Shadow Energy Secretary, accused the Prime Minister of “surrendering control of our energy system to bureaucrats in Brussels”.
She said: “UK ministers will be forced to reduce emissions regardless of what it will do to people’s energy bills or the competitiveness of our businesses.”
It comes as Labour seeks to forge closer ties with the EU, with MPs debating in recent weeks whether Britain should return to the customs union.
The plans would also aid Mr Miliband’s ambitions to decarbonise the power grid, allowing the UK to import foreign electricity when low wind or sunshine cuts output from wind and solar farms.
The EU’s demands emerged in a document placed without fanfare on the Cabinet Office website. The plan is both technically challenging and politically sensitive because it would make UK energy policy subject to EU jurisdiction.
It stated: “The Electricity Agreement should… set an indicative global target for the share of renewable energy in the gross final consumption of energy in the United Kingdom. To ensure a level playing field, the global target should be comparable to that of the European Union.”
The EU’s target is that 42.5% of all its energy should come from renewables by 2030, with an aspiration to reach 45%.
This is roughly double the UK’s current level of 22%.
Mr Miliband has set a target to decarbonise Britain’s power generation by 95% by 2030, but electricity accounts for only 20% of UK total energy consumption, so this will never be enough to meet EU demands. Transport, heating and industrial energy account for 75% of the UK’s total energy consumption.
At the moment, the UK gets about 75% of its total energy from oil and gas, a level that has hardly changed in decades....<<<Read More>>>....
