The Energy Secretary Ed Miliband published his report here. But what is the time lag between publication and results on the ground? Is this enough?
A sizeable chunk of the report is focused on skills – even though it feels like politics has been banging on about it for years. The problem is that the impact so far has not been great.
Above – Percentage of online postings for jobs in CPCA Area with green jobs titles & skills 2019-2023. From Cambridgeshire Insight (2024) p10
The ‘green jobs’ in the vacancies is less than 1% of the total posted each year, and the green skills in Cambridgeshire has remained stubbornly below 4%.
Playing with the data from the CPCA, the green electricity generation has somewhat plateaued, but it may well rise soon given the recent planning permissions for large solar farms.
Above – from CPCA Dashboards on renewables.
Green Jobs in Cambridgeshire & Peterborough
Above – Estimated number of Green Jobs in 2030 & 2050 by local authority area. From Cambridgeshire Insight (2024) p27
I think the above are significant *underestimates* because the responding to the climate emergency is going to have a massive impact on how we travel (far fewer motorcar journeys for a start) and also on how we consume, reuse, and dispose of things. We haven’t even begun to model or pilot ‘future living in a zero carbon world’ to know what sort of things we’re going to have to give up, and what sort of things are going to be essential that we will want to keep.
“How will this square with the local growth plans?”
The draft local growth plan – a requirement from ministers, gets discussed this week. I want to see something substantial on how this growth will be achieved while at the same time cutting our energy use and resource inputs too. While we have seen some recent significant planning approvals for solar farms – and another one looming east of Cambridge between Burwell and Balsham (<<– Have your say here), will it be enough? I don’t think it will be.
When I filmed a video for Cambridge Carbon Footprint on their pilot retrofit, I was struck by how labour-intensive the work was just for that one house. The prospect of retrofitting an entire city was and is sobering – and will require far, far more than the number of green jobs being predicted. Halfway through this 2022 blogpost I tabled a series of questions on the information needed to work out how to retrofit a city.
Recalling the ARU-Cambridge Ahead report on the infrastructure gap 2025
You can read the report: The Infrastructure GapThe future of sustainable energy in Greater Cambridge here. See also the BBC Cambridgeshire article here.
There’s little that you won’t be familiar with if you are a regular reader of this blog. At the moment so many of the usual complaints apply:
- Lack of empowered local state institutions to incentivise (very strongly!) or compel people and firms to take action (such as installing solar panels over car parks and on large buildings with wide roofs and big plain south-facing walls.
- The lack of opportunities to enable ordinary people to routinely retrain with maintenance grants to move from areas of oversupply to where there are chronic shortages.
- The lack of sound public transport access to the places where people can learn and train, along with the lack of community-level facilities
Some of you may want to review the ARU-Cambridge Ahead report and ask what progress if any has been made on each of their recommendations.
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