Presidential Roundtable summary: how can government deliver on clean power commitments

Clean power is a pathway to achieving more stable, secure and resilient energy grids. It also creates economic opportunities through new industries and jobs.

But getting there is a huge engineering, technical and mobilisation challenge.

In the UK, achieving clean power by 2030 is one of the government’s central missions. Right now, the system is too slow.

The ICE convened a roundtable with senior infrastructure professionals and experts to discuss how to speed up progress.

The discussion was chaired by the ICE’s President, Professor Jim Hall and attended by Chris Stark, head of the UK’s government’s Mission Control for Clean Power 2030.

Participants explored the benefits of having a clean energy mission and what needs to happen to remove some of the blockers to its success.

These barriers include an uncertain project pipeline, workforce and training constraints and questions about private investment and future market arrangements.

The discussion highlighted:

• The need to join up the Clean Energy Mission with other policy areas, wider outcomes and benefits, and governmental missions.
• Ensuring the mission is underpinned by a project pipeline that is realistic about costs and timeframes, clear about skills and resource requirements, and integrated across all sectors.
• Increasing the volume of people interested in engineering, speeding up training to “absorb” new recruits and addressing gaps in key non-engineering skillsets.
• Driving investment by answering questions about future market arrangements and the use of zonal pricing.
• Countering shifting global politics and public attitudes around clean energy and net zero by winning the public’s hearts and minds.