Remember how ‘green jobs’ were going to transform the UK economy, creating new opportunities for well-paid careers which would sweep away the dirty, old economy jobs? It is been blown apart by the industry of the moment, Artificial Intelligence, or AI. Suddenly, it doesn’t look quite so clever to build an industrial future based on green energy when AI is gobbling up investment.
It should have been obvious all along that the public were not going to vote for policies which made them poorer
Enthusiasm for AI, however, is running headlong into the government’s net zero policies, leading to a growing cabinet schism. AI might look modern and clean, yet it is as voracious an energy consumer as all those heavy industries which are being driven from Britain’s shores thanks to high energy prices. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres are already consuming 1.5 per cent of the world’s electricity, and this is forecast to grow to 3 per cent by 2030. In the US, the figure is already 4.9 per cent. If Britain wants to be a big player in AI, it is going to have to find significant quantities of power, and reliable power.
The trouble is that UK energy policy is not proving up to the job. Thanks to renewables and a grid which is inadequate to handle them, we have expensive, intermittent electricity. Plans for large data centres tend to include their own power supplies. Elsham Tech Park in North Lincolnshire, for example, is projected to consume a maximum of 1 gigawatt – around 3 per cent of average UK energy demand. Plans for the centre include a 50-megawatt gas power station and an astonishing 650 back-up diesel generators, each one of them consuming 2.5 megawatts, or as much as 25 diesel cars.
Needless to say, this is not what Ed Miliband wants to hear. As energy secretary, he attempted to block a huge data centre on Teesside, promoting an alternative plan to use the site for BP green hydrogen plant. But BP withdrew and Keir Starmer, who favoured the data centre plan, got his way. Since then, the cabinet schism has only grown wider. A growing number of ministers are reported to be losing patience with net zero policies which are hastening the decline of established industries and thwarting the growth of new ones.
The latest battleground is over the National Energy Systems Operator, the quango set up by Miliband to plan and manage the grid. Some are calling for the job of planning the grid to be brought under more direct government control so that connections to data centres can be prioritised (and while we are at it, why not connections for other industries, too?). Miliband, although no longer energy secretary, is believed to be opposed, and Andy Burnham, not for the first time, is reported to be sitting on the fence.
An unnamed cabinet minister is reported as saying that the working classes are, ‘falling out of love with net zero’, adding that it is hard to them to relate to a policy which is costing them a job and their summer holiday. The reality is that the UK public never really were in favour of net zero policies; they were happy to tell pollsters that they agreed with them when they didn’t really know what net zero would entail. The more the implications become clear, the more people start to react.
It should have been obvious all along that the public were not going to vote for policies which made them poorer. Yet for years, the holy grail – and pointless target – of achieving neutrality in UK territorial greenhouse gas emissions was allowed to crush all other concerns. Finally, the tide appears to be turning.
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