UK Trends and Developments Contributed by: Andrea Stauber, Martina Antosova, Medhavi Singh and Sadyant Sasiprabhu, King & Spalding International LLP
Development of UK net zero policy The UK’s 2050 net zero carbon emission target has provided an overarching framework for the country’s energy policy. Following the presentation of the Net Zero Strategy to the UK Parliament, environmental groups mounted a legal challenge, arguing that the Net Zero Strategy did not meet the required reporting standards. On 18 July 2022, the English High Court delivered its judgment, in which it determined that the Net Zero Strategy did not comply with the Climate Change Act 2008 and ordered that the strategy be refined and reissued by the end of March 2023. In this landmark judgment, the High Court declared that the UK government had breached its duty under Section 13 of the Climate Change Act 2008, which required the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero to adopt policies tailored towards meeting carbon reduction targets. The High Court found that the Secretary of State’s decisions were “irrational” in light of the available evidence, which accounted for what officials described as the “very low confidence” in achieving the UK’s 2030 international pledge to cut down carbon emissions. The UK government revised the Net Zero Strategy – although this too was subjected to judicial review in June 2023. In its judgment of 3 May 2024, the High Court upheld a majority of the grounds that environ- mental groups had advanced in holding that the UK government’s climate action plan breached the Cli- In September 2022, former Prime Minister Liz Truss appointed the Conservative MP Chris Skidmore to lead a review of the UK government’s approach to delivering its Net Zero Target (the “Net Zero Review”). The Net Zero Review’s findings were published in its final report – Mission Zero: Independent Review of Net Zero – on 13 January 2023. Per its final report, the Net Zero Review: • decisively concluded that “net zero is the econom- ic opportunity of the 21st century”; • referred to McKinsey’s estimates that the supply of goods and services to enable the global net zero mate Change Act. Net Zero Review
transition could be worth GBP1 trillion to UK busi- nesses by 2030; • concluded that new analysis conducted during the course of the review shows that the UK govern- ment’s Net Zero Strategy is still the right pathway and the policies outlined in the strategy should go ahead; • acknowledged that the UK is not matching world- leading ambition with world-leading delivery, and that it must move quickly and decisively; and • identified ten “priority missions to harness public and private action out to 2035”, which included: (a) the full-scale deployment of solar, including a “rooftop revolution” to deliver up to 70 GW of British solar generation by 2035; (b) paving the way for onshore wind deployment; (c) a “programmatic approach for a next-genera- tion fleet of nuclear”; and (d) setting a clear plan for industry decarboni- sation, built around long-term investment in carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) and hydrogen networks and technologies. In March 2023, the UK government published a com- prehensive policy paper responding to each of the 129 recommendations mentioned in the Net Zero Review. Powering Up Britain On 30 March 2023, the UK government released “Powering Up Britain”, comprising an Energy Secu- rity Plan and a Net Zero Growth Plan. These plans responded, in part, to the above-mentioned High Court ruling and Chris Skidmore’s Net Zero Review. The Powering Up Britain plans sought to reinforce the UK government’s commitments to many of the targets relating to alternative power that were announced in April 2022 as part of the British Energy Security Strat- egy. The plans also included some new commitments in the following areas. • Solar – a taskforce would be set up to help increase the UK’s solar capacity to 70 GW by 2035. • Wind – a GBP160 million fund would support the infrastructure for floating offshore wind projects as part of the plan to deliver up to 50 GW of offshore wind by 2030.
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