Britain yesterday laid out plans to boost its energy security and independence through investment in moving toward cleaner, more affordable energy sources.
Wholesale gas and electricity prices in Europe surged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year and the British government has been subsidizing household and business energy bills since October last year.
The plans included a raft of previously announced schemes such as funding for offshore wind, carbon capture and new green hydrogen production projects.
Photo: Reuters
It also pledged to speed up planning processes for solar and offshore wind projects, roll out more electric vehicle charging points, and encourage heat pumps in homes.
However, the government’s energy policy dealt a blow to those projects that were not immediately selected for financial support, including British power generator Drax Group PLC and its method of carbon capture — bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.
Its shares were down 10 percent.
“Transforming our energy system is no longer just about tackling climate change, it is also a matter of national security,” British Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said in a statement. “To protect ourselves from future price spikes, we need to accelerate the move to cleaner, cheaper, home-grown energy.”
British Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Grant Shapps said the new plan included 70 different policies that would improve energy security.
He told LBC Radio that households would not be penalized if they do not switch from gas heating to lower emissions heat pumps, something some newspaper headlines had said was possible.
The opposition Labour Party and campaign groups criticized the plan for not including new money, and failing to set out a response to Washington’s US$369 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of green subsidies.
Hunt told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday that the government would lay out its response to the IRA in the autumn.
“What was billed with huge hype as the government’s ‘green day’ turns out to be a weak and feeble groundhog day of re-announcements, reheated policy and no new investment,” Labour Party climate and net zero spokesman Ed Miliband said.
Over the past year, Britain has introduced windfall taxes on oil and gas as well as on renewables, which companies say stifle investment and in turn is likely to increase Britain’s dependence on imported fuels and derail its climate targets.
Oil and gas producers had called for floor prices to be applied to the windfall tax, and renewable power companies wanted better investment incentives, neither of which were featured in the plans outlined in advance by the government.
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
RSS