Urgent Investment Needed to Power Industrial Decarbonisation and Secure UK Jobs
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Adrian Ramsay MP co-signed this cross-party letter initiated by ADE the Association for Decentralised Energy.
Dear Chancellor,
Urgent Investment Needed to Power Industrial Decarbonisation and Secure UK Jobs
The UK’s 2050 target depends on decarbonising our industrial heartlands, but current policy is failing to address half the problem.
While significant focus is rightly placed on large industrial clusters, nearly 50% of our industrial emissions – and at least 1.4 million jobs in the manufacturing and utilities industrial sectors alone could be at risk – are based in dispersed sites outside these clusters. These are the distilleries in Scotland, the ceramics kilns in the Midlands, the food processors in East Anglia. They are the backbone of our regional economies and our national supply chains, yet they face a perfect storm of barriers.
Our electricity prices are the highest among IEA nations, with policy costs up to fourteen times more expensive and this contributes to making power more expensive than gas. This makes electrification – the primary route to decarbonisation for most of these sites – an economic non-starter. Compounded by crippling grid connection delays and a lack of tailored support, these businesses are being locked into high-carbon operations.
This is an active threat to our economic competitiveness and energy security. We are stalling investment and risking carbon leakage at a time when we should be spurring green growth in every part of the country.
The recent ADE: Demand report, "Decarbonising Dispersed Industries," provides a framework of this challenge, outlining five distinct archetypes of rural industry, each with unique needs but all united by this common policy blind spot.Therefore, I urge you to use the upcoming budget to allocate significant funding to address this imbalance. We need a mechanism that bridges the damaging price gap between electricity and gas, conditional on fuel switching, to make electrification the economically rational choice for British industry. This will unleash the investment we desperately need.
By providing this price signal, you can unlock billions in private investment, secure hundreds of thousands of jobs, and finally put dispersed industrial decarbonisation on the fast track
Let’s not leave half of our industrial economy behind. Let’s give them the tools to help us all reach net zero.
Yours sincerely,
Adrian Ramsay MP co-signed this cross-party letter initiated by ADE the Association for Decentralised Energy.
