A wind farm in Graincourt-les-Havrincourt, France
Credit: PASCAL ROSSIGNOL /REUTERS
Boris Johnson’s £12bn proposal for a “green industrial revolution” has been accused of paling in comparison to efforts already underway with up to four times the funds in France and Germany.
The prime minister’s 10-point plan includes a pledge to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by the end of the decade, pumping £1.3 billion into charging points for electric cars.
Another £1 billion will be spent on making homes and businesses more energy-efficient, with half earmarked for new large- and small-scale nuclear power stations and the other half for electric batteries and hydrogen cooking and heating.
Mr Johnson has called it “one of the most innovative and ambitious programmes of job creation we have known”.
Not everyone agrees, however.
Shadow Business and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband described the plan as a “disappointment”, saying it failed to “bring forward £30bn of capital investment, put it into low-carbon industries over the next 18 months and create 400,000 jobs”.
He said the announcement “broadly equates” to what France and Germany were already doing, but with less new money – and he’s right.
While Johnson’s plan offers up £4bn of fresh funds, France has just earmarked €30bn (£28bn) for energy transition as part of its €100bn (£89bn) Covid-19 recovery plan to be spent over the next two years.
That includes €7bn for making homes and businesses more energy efficient and €2bn to boost the hydrogen industry in the next two years — considerably more than the UK plan.
An electric car plugs in at a charging port in London
Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth /AP
Regarding electric vehicles, it will pump €1.9bn into helping motorists convert to “clean vehicles” including through offering targeted tax breaks. It intends to triple the number of public charging stations to reach 100,000 by the end of next year, with €100m going into fast-charging stations on roads and motorways.
France, which already has 58 nuclear reactors and is the world’s largest net exporter of electricity, has set aside almost €500m for nuclear projects in its recovery plan, including research into mini-reactors.
Germany, meanwhile, has earmarked a whopping €41bn (£37bn) of its €130bn (£116bn) coronavirus recovery package for a green transformation.
Angela Merkel’s government is spending €8bn on promoting electric cars, including €2.5bn on expanding charging stations. It’s also spending €2bn to make homes more energy efficient.
One area where Germany is not spending is on nuclear power, which Mrs Merkel has pledged to phase out. Instead, it is ploughing €11bn into subsidies to cut consumers’ electricity bills and offset the cost of changing over to renewable energy sources.
Rather than focusing on hydrogen as a domestic fuel, like the UK, Germany is to spend €9bn on developing it as a clean source of power generation, because renewables cannot meet the demand from its heavy industry sector.
Germany is also to invest €5bn in national rail, €2.5bn in local public transport, and €1bn on developing aircraft with lower carbon emissions.
One of the only areas where the UK is ahead is in its plan to stop the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles by the end of the decade. France intends to do so by 2040, although it will ban diesel cars built before 2006 from next June.
Germany has yet to fix a firm date, largely because of fears for its car industry. The upper house of parliament has called for a ban by 2030 and the government has a target of 2050, but neither is binding.
Ireland, the Netherlands, along with Sweden, Denmark and Ireland, all intend to end sales of fossil fuel-driven vehicles by 2030.
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