The CCC suggested this week (December 7th 2010) that the UK should aim to reduce its emissions by about 46% below today’s levels by 2030. (60% below 1990 figures). Its plans suggest a reduction of 1.5% a year for this decade, followed by about 4.4% per annum in the following ten years. These are very rapid changes and rely on the successful implementation of decarbonisation initiatives across all parts of society. What does data from recent history tell us about the scale of the task?

The European Environment Agency has recently published a series of factsheets on energy use and CO2 emissions across the EU-27 over recent years. I have tried to tabulate the main results to give a sense of how challenging a task the UK is setting itself.

The evolution of energy demand and emissions in four sectors of the European economy

Sector Energy usage change CO2 output change ‘Energy efficiency’ change Comment Households +0.5% -1.1% Up 1.0% Transport +1.4% +1.4% Up 1.0% Much faster improvement from 2000 onwards Manufacturing +1.0% -1.1% Up 2.1% Energy usage is per employee, slower improvement from 2000. Services (1997-2007) +0.6% Na Up 1.3% Efficiency is measured as kWh per unit of value added

Source: http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/#c7=all&c5=&c0=10

What are the key messages from this table? First, energy demand tends to grow substantially less than GDP. Nevertheless, we can expect energy use to continue to increase, probably at a rate of about 1% less than the economy as a whole. Second, some sectors including personal transport over the past few years and manufacturing in the nineties, have shown improved efficiency of energy use at rates of more than 2% a year. But complete decoupling of energy use from growth has certainly not been possible thus far. So the CCC’s targets must rely on decarbonisation of energy supply.

The crucial change, of course, is moving electricity generation from fossil fuels to low carbon sources. This will enable improved emissions from heating (for example through the widespread use of heat pumps) and from transport (through the use of electric cars). The problem is that many of the CCC’s cost estimates for low carbon generation look optimistic. Although this year’s report has accepted, unlike some of the Committee’s past analyses, that nuclear costs are going to be higher than predicted a few years ago, it still uses a figure of only 7p per kilowatt hour for fully utilised plants. The uncomfortable reality is that the cost will almost certainly be over 10p. And the risk is that long-term abundance (and thus cheapness) will always mean that the generators want to build gas turbines (as is happening at the moment). These gas plants, offering cheap, reliable electricity and relatively low carbon emissions are almost certainly going to stop decarbonisation at the rate the CCC says we need. The Committee’s insistence that we can get to the 2030 targets for less than 1% of GDP looks increasingly impossible.