![]() ![]() Much of our renewable riches are already in public ownership. Unlike the present approach, in which private financing, market-based governance and profit-focused goals guide the development, generation and pricing of clean power, PPB would build out a renewable future based on public financing, social governance and democratic planning to meet urgent climate and energy needs. This would bypass the wholesale private market and its marginal pricing system, which artificially inflates the cost of renewable energy by hooking it to the price of fossil fuels, thereby allowing clean, abundant energy to be sold at low cost. It would generate and sell electricity to households and businesses through an integrated public supply company, using a Power Purchasing Agreement between the public generator and supplier. Instead, PPB would invest in, build, operate and maintain a range of new clean energy infrastructures, including both proven and frontier technologies: offshore and onshore wind, tidal stream and lagoon power, zero carbon hydrogen, and solar, among others. PPB would not nationalise existing clean generation nor would it play a passive and minority investor role. In doing so, it would help create a clean energy system faster, fairer and more affordably than leaving development of renewable generation purely to the foreign state-owned entities, private equity actors, and multinationals that currently dominate the renewable sector, while ensuring the public directly benefits from the UK’s common resources. ![]() This briefing explores the potential for a new institution to support the first of these vital tasks: a publicly-owned power generation company - Public Power Britain, or PPB - whose mission would be to accelerate the shift to a 100 per cent green, low-cost and secure energy system within a decade by generating between 40-50GW of renewable power by 2030. The logical and durable solution to the crisis points in the opposite direction: an accelerated and rapid decarbonisation of the UK’s energy system through a decade-long sprint to 100 per cent clean power, matched with an ambitious green retrofit of the housing stock to improve energy efficiency and help eliminate fuel poverty. Moreover, because increased domestic extraction will take decades to come on stream, if at all given the dubious business case, this approach is unlikely to significantly reduce the UK’s exposure to fossil fuel-driven import shocks the doubling down on fossil fuels risks further weakening our macroeconomic position. Unfortunately, the new government appears set on encouraging fracking and further North Sea extraction as the solution to spiralling bills, despite clear warnings from the Committee on Climate Change that this would negligibly impact energy prices while putting existing net zero targets out of reach. However, it “buys time” to address the underlying driver of the cost of living crisis: our over-reliance on costly, volatile, imported fossil fuels to heat and power our homes and businesses. The policy to freeze energy bills for the next two years is poorly designed and inadequate to the scale of crisis: while welcome as a temporary measure, over the proposed time period the measure will do little to improve energy efficiency, disproportionately benefits the better off at great public expense, and will leaves millions of people in acute financial difficulty this winter. ![]()
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