Planning and supply chain issues will put pressure on the key government policy, which needs to succeed to prevent ongoing contributions to the climate emergency. The strategy, set out last month in the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, is also aimed at providing secure and affordable energy, and creating new related industries with thousands of skilled workers.
It is difficult to overstate the change required in the next half-decade. Recent Carbon Brief analysis found that 58% of UK electricity came from clean sources in 2024. That was the highest ever level – but way below the 95% target set for 2030.
Achieving that will require huge investment. The Action Plan targets 43-50 gigawatt (GW) capacity of offshore wind (up from 14.8 GW), 27-29 GW of onshore wind (up from 16.1 GW) and 45-47 GW of solar power (up from 17.4 GW). It also calls for 23-27 GW of battery capacity (up from about 4 GW), 4-6 GW of long-duration energy storage (up from 2.8 GW), and development of carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) and hydrogen technologies.
Such significant infrastructure deployment will require a huge upgrade to the grid – twice as much transmission network will need to be built than in the last decade, according to a recent report by the National Energy System Operator (Neso), and as much offshore wind capacity will need to be contracted in the next one to two years as the last six combined.
The Neso report found that the government’s target is “achievable”, but “several elements must deliver at the limit of what is feasible”. Professional Engineering spoke to energy system experts in key policy, research and industry organisations about the chances of success.
‘You can’t afford any slippage’
“The target is challenging but achievable,” said Matt Rooney, head of policy at IMechE. “The government have given themselves some breathing space by defining ‘clean power’ as a 95% decarbonised grid. The last few percent will be the most difficult – and expensive – to decarbonise.”
Success is going to be a “real challenge” with current policies, agreed Barnaby Wharton, director of future electricity systems at trade organisation RenewableUK, but “if you can do everything in the Clean Power Action Plan really quickly, then we should be able to get there.”
That will involve making swift changes to planning policy and getting projects started as soon as possible, he added, including everything that is currently in the pipeline. “You can’t afford any slippage,” he said.
“If I was a betting man, I would say that this is a bit of an outside chance,” said Stuart Bradley, principal engineer at the University of Warwick’s WMG. The failure of the 2023 Allocation Round 5 Contracts for Difference (CfD) auction to attract any bids from offshore wind developers was a big setback, he said. There are also “significant constraints” on grid capacity to bring electricity from planned offshore wind projects onshore, he added.
“I have to say, though, if we extended it to 2032, I reckon we'd do it… we are actually accelerating now. But we do have to catch up, and we do have to have that political backing as well, to carry on with the CfD allocation rounds and to carry on building, and unblocking some of those constraints.”
Gas here to stay?
The new system will also involve an expected 35 GW of gas reserve capacity (down slightly from 35.6 GW, which accounted for 28% (88 TWh) of electricity generation in 2024), meaning an ongoing future for the UK’s current largest source of electricity.
“We will see a fundamental shift in the role and frequency of unabated gas generation, moving from generating almost every day of the year, to an important back-up to be used only when essential, with generation decreasing as we move towards 2030,” the Action Plan said.
Although ongoing use of the fossil fuel might seem to stretch the definition of ‘clean’ power, experts agreed it could be a useful helping hand to meet the 2030 goal.
Keeping the capability will reduce the short-term demands for large-scale storage, said Rooney. “Maintaining a strategic reserve of gas power stations makes rapid decarbonisation of the power grid by 2030 more achievable and less risky, while having only a small effect on overall UK territorial emissions. Resources that would have been deployed going for 100% decarbonisation can be better used in other parts of the energy system.”
Challenges around energy security will remain when wind and solar handle the bulk of generation, said RenewableUK’s Wharton. “You need to rely on some sort of firm, flexible generation, which at the moment is going to be gas. We're not going to get rid of that; we can't move to a truly zero-carbon power system in five years,” he said.
“You could always do more to ultimately eliminate all those emissions. But that is going to take new technologies, in a longer time frame.”
The residual gas power that will be used in 2030 depends on broader factors such as overall electricity demand and the level of electricity imports, added Frankie Mayo, senior energy and climate analyst at Ember.
Recent analysis by the clean energy thinktank also found that biomass generation could be reduced to just 2% of total electricity generation in 2030, down from 13% in 2024. This could lower bills and reliance on imports while helping to reduce emissions, Ember said.
Biomass includes the large Drax power plant in North Yorkshire, which burns wood pellets from the US and Canada. The government hopes carbon capture and storage could be installed at large biomass plants, although it is so far unproven at the scale and efficiency required.
Capturing emissions is only “part of the story”, added Bradley from WMG. “We also need to look at things like certain particulates,” he said. “I think if maybe more of the biomass came from the UK, rather than from Canada and the US from waste from the wood industry and furniture industry… there’s probably more of a moral case for it.”
Planning for success
Experts agreed that planning issues pose the biggest challenges to success. The planning system will need to move faster than ever for projects to achieve their potential impact.
A 2024 report by the National Engineering Policy Centre made several recommendations for rapid decarbonisation, including strong central leadership and governance with engineering at the forefront. It also called for a more flexible, “digitally enabled” system and a more proactive approach to procurement.
An international supply chain means that some energy components, such as wind turbine jacket foundations, are built elsewhere and shipped to the UK. “If we possibly can, we need to be able to encourage some of that supply chain to reshore and to cut down on the amount of carbon emissions that are associated with shipping things halfway across the world,” said Bradley.
The skills gap could be another major challenge, with persistent demand set to be compounded by the impending retirement of a fifth of the workforce between 2023 and 2028. “We have a skills gap from graduate engineers downwards all the way, all the way through; we lack people to weld, we lack people to manufacture steel,” said Bradley.
With five years to go, government and industry will have to move quickly to meet the ambitious target.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.