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To seehowMPUKGBCOPNESONESOGWNESOLNGYour browser does not support the element. much Ed Miliband is enjoying his second life in politics, watch him at the dispatch box. Every few weeks s get a chance to prod the energy secretary; they receive sharp jabs in return. Tories are lambasted for delaying the roll-out of cheap and popular wind turbines. Greens and Liberal Democrats are chided for appearing eco-er than thou and then blocking the pylons that would carry clean power to people’s homes. Mr Miliband picks fights with Reform , a flag-waving right-wing party, for failing to back Energy, a fledgling state-owned energy firm.It is almost a decade since to a humiliating defeat in the 2015 general election. Four months after the party’s return to office, he is arguably the government’s most effective minister. It is the energy department and its mission of a clean power system by 2030, say Labour wallahs, to which the prime minister turns when he needs to convey a sense that his government has a purpose.Since the election, Mr Miliband has approved four giant solar farms in the east of England, which had been gummed up for months. He has lifted a de facto ban on onshore wind in England, which had been in place for nine years. He has overseen an auction round which delivered contracts for 131 renewable-energy projects, the largest-ever haul. His department is preparing changes to the planning system to make it easier and quicker to build turbines, solar arrays and pylons. “These guys have come in with a plan,” says Guy Newey, a former Tory adviser who now runs Energy Systems Catapult, a think-tank.Mr Miliband’s instincts are not always right. He may not achieve his targets. But he does know how to frame political fights. There is a logic to his focus on the grid. And he is prepared to temper ambition with pragmatism. That approach holds lessons for politicians elsewhere trying to win support for the transition to clean energy.This sure-handed second act can partly be ascribed to a long apprenticeship. At 54, Mr Miliband has spent three decades on the front line of Labour politics. He is one of three cabinet members to have held the rank before, and the only one to have returned to his old post (he was the first to head the department for energy and climate change, in 2008). No one expects him to run for the highest office again. “I think that he feels like his career has led him to this point and this cause,” says a colleague.Mr Miliband also draws on his experience as an adviser to Gordon Brown, a former prime minister for whom politics was all about creating sharp dividing-lines. Whereas Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the prime minister and chancellor respectively, cloak their decisions in legalistic or budgetary justifications, Mr Miliband’s argument is more straightforward.It runs like this. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, British people realised they were reliant on a volatile gas market controlled by a foreign tyrant. The only way to change that is to have clean “home-grown” power. Taking back control of energy will, he argues, mean cheaper bills and some good jobs; cutting emissions is a happy by-product. Even at this week’s in Azerbaijan, where Sir Keir announced a new, tougher target of reducing Britain’s emissions by 81% by 2035, Mr Miliband stuck to his message: “The reason we’re here is frankly national self-interest.”If the political message is clear, what about the government’s actual policies? Decarbonisation will eventually require electrifying nearly everything, but Labour is deliberately focusing its efforts on the grid on the basis that cheaper renewable energy should make it easier to make progress in other areas, such as the roll-out of electric vehicles.Achieving a clean-power energy system by 2030 would make Britain the first big economy to hit this goal. But what this means had not been properly defined until earlier this month. That was when the National Energy System Operator (), a public body that oversees the electricity and gas systems, said that clean, domestic sources should provide 95% of Britain’s electricity over a typical year by the end of the decade. The other 5% would be generated by gas-fired power plants—a pragmatic way of reducing the problem of intermittency, which in Britain is caused mainly by rare spells without wind. By exporting surplus electricity when it is gusty, the government will be able to say that it is generating the same amount of power from clean sources as Britain consumes.The engineers at say that this definition of the 2030 target can be met, albeit with caveats about how it is “at the limit of what is feasible” and will rely on many things happening “simultaneously, in full and at maximum pace”. Getting there will depend first on a huge expansion of renewables, particularly offshore wind (see chart). Pylons need to go up faster, including that will doubtless cause locals to erupt in fury.But Britain needs only a small number of big new transmission lines (see map), and most voters support the upgrades needed to bring them electricity. Slightly fewer new wind farms would be needed if the government managed to nurture an amount of “dispatchable” (ie, usable on demand) low-carbon power, like hydrogen or gas with carbon capture and storage. Smoothing demand—for instance through the use of smart charging to avoid times of peak electricity usage—is another promising area. It is possible at the moment to shift around 2.5 of demand at peak times in Britain. With the right policies, thinks that demand flexibility could increase five-fold by 2030.Three big questions remain. The first is whether Mr Miliband can strike the right balance between the state and the market. In opposition Mr Miliband enthused about a “Green New Deal”. His instincts remain statist. That leads to nervousness among some businesses that the government will try, in the words of one executive, to “plan every square inch of the energy system”.There is bitter debate over whether Britain should introduce more market signals in the form of zonal pricing, where the price of electricity varies depending on supply, demand and grid capacity in different regions. Proponents say this would lead to a more efficiently planned grid and lower bills for homes and businesses. “We need regulation to reflect that a local electron is the cheaper one,” says Greg Jackson of Octopus, Britain’s biggest energy company. Mr Miliband has so far demurred.The second question concerns Mr Miliband’s promise to voters that they will feel the benefits of changes in their pockets by the next election, which is likely to take place in 2029. In reality electricity bills will continue to be influenced by many factors, not all of them in his gift.The government could take steps to shift levies, which have been used to pay for various schemes like reducing fuel poverty, from electricity to gas bills. And reducing the proportion of the year in which gas is “price-setting” in the electricity market should feed through into lower bills. But globally, the cost of building wind farms remains elevated after a bout of inflation and supply-chain pressures. Electricity bills have already increased this winter as global gas prices have risen. Ironically, Mr Miliband’s pledge of lower bills could depend on a glut of liquefied natural gas () reaching Europe towards the end of the decade, as America and Qatar ramp up their exports.The third question is whether the government can indeed push decarbonisation beyond the power sector. Britain’s success at building wind farms has not been matched by a knack for nudging people to, say, replace their . The policy and tax levers to do that lie in other government departments. Ministers remain nervous about imposing extra costs and disruption on stretched households; Ms Reeves ignored an obvious opportunity to increase fuel duty in her budget.It is possible that Mr Miliband could make remarkable progress and still be the first British energy secretary to breach the country’s carbon budgets, five-yearly caps on emissions, under an act which he signed into law in 2008. But even if that happens, he may also help show how to win the fight for clean power. That would be quite the renaissance.
