Britain’s post-industrial past provides clues for our clean-energy future

Steps taken by the United Kingdom to establish energy independence at the turn of the 20th century could help contemporary society grapple with a future dominated by renewable energy, writes Jonathan Gornall.

Abu Dhabi's Masdar Institute is proof that key oil producing nations are invested in a renewable energy future. Photo courtesy: Hufton + Croe

Two events took place in the past couple of months which, while overshadowed by seemingly more significant current affairs, will ultimately claim their rightful place in the history of our times.

On Saturday, March 25, a record amount of electricity was generated in the United Kingdom by solar power – six times more, in fact, than was made that day by coal-fired power stations. It was, in the words of the National Grid, a “huge milestone”. A little under a month later, on Friday, April 21, a full 24 hours passed in the UK without a single lump of coal being burnt to generate electricity – for the first time since the 1880s.

It was, as Greenpeace UK commented, “a watershed in the energy transition”. Only a decade ago, said Hannah Martin, head of energy at the environmental group, “a day without coal would have been unimaginable, and in 10 years’ time our energy system will have radically transformed again”.

Of course, post-Empire, to say nothing of post-Brexit, the UK is no longer the engine of world affairs it was when it kick-started the industrial revolution, but these twinned events nevertheless carry vast historical, economic and political significance.

Furthermore, the story of the decline of Old King Coal, arguably initiated a century ago by a far-sighted energy decision taken in Britain on the eve of the First World War, carries within it prophetic lessons for the future of oil.

It is rarely wholly convincing to attribute tectonic shifts in human affairs to a single decision or tipping point. In the case of the rise of oil as the planet’s most important fossil fuel, however, one can point with some confidence to the year 1911 and Britain’s need to wring five additional knots of speed out of its next generation of warships, to be able to outpace the enemy fleet in the looming conflict with Germany.

It was Winston Churchill who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, made the seemingly extraordinary decision to switch the

British fleet from coal to oil, a decision that was swiftly echoed around the world. The need to ensure that Britannia continued to rule the waves was beyond dispute – at least to Britain. “The whole fortunes of our race and Empire,” as Churchill put it, “would be swept away if our naval supremacy were to be impaired.” But the decision seemed extraordinary to many of his contemporaries because while Britain had vast coal resources within its own borders, its nearest possible source of oil was over 4,500 kilometres away on the shores of the Arabian Gulf, in modern-day Iran.

For Churchill, however, on the eve of war the technical, tactical and long-term strategic advantages of oil trumped any short-term considerations of cost. “The advantages conferred by liquid fuel were inestimable,” he wrote in The World Crisis, his five-volume account of the First World War. Fuelled by oil and freed of the burden of stoking, British ships would require fewer hands to man them, could travel faster and farther than the enemy’s and, because they could be refuelled at sea by tankers, could remain in action at sea far longer.

In June 1912, Churchill appointed a commission to “find the oil: to show how it can be stored cheaply: how it can be purchased regularly and cheaply in peace; and with absolute certainty in war”. The solution was the purchase by the British government in 1914 of a 51-per-cent stake in a fledgling oil company with drilling rights in the Gulf and a refinery at Abadan. When the war erupted, British and Indian troops were sent to secure the oilfields and the refinery, initiating a militarily-enforced Anglo-American interest in the region’s oil which, in various guises and with geopolitical ramifications unforeseeable in 1914, has continued to this day. Of course, coal wasn’t finished in 1911 and isn’t completely done for even now. Although it’s the dirtiest fossil fuel in terms of climate change, it’s also cheap and more accessible than the alternatives, which is why it remains the go-to resource for emerging economies. Nevertheless, in 2015, despite the best efforts of countries such as India and China, global production of coal fell by 4 per cent. This was the first decline since 1998, achieved largely because even China, the world’s leading producer, cut its output by 2 per cent. In North America, according to BP’s annual Statistical Review of World Energy, coal production declined by 10.3 per cent in 2015 – and, of course, where developed countries lead, those farther behind in the economic evolutionary cycle will inevitably follow.

The power vacuum in the United States, according to the department of Energy’s annual Energy and Employment Report in January, is being increasingly filled by low-carbon alternatives. Between 2006 and 2016 the amount of electricity generated by coal in the United States fell by an industry-crushing 53 per cent, while the role of natural gas increased by 33 per cent and that of solar, though still only a small part of the mix, by an astonishing 5,000 per cent.

In 2016 there were almost as many jobs (800,000 and rising) in the US in “low-carbon-emission generation technologies”, including renewables, nuclear and low emission natural gas, as the 1.1 million (and falling) in traditional coal, oil, and gas generation.

Today, the UAE, owner of one of the world’s largest reserves of oil, finds itself in a situation curiously comparable to that of Britain in 1911. It is not, of course, about to turn its back completely and overnight on the oil that so dramatically powered the UAE’s socioeconomic development in much the same way as coal once boosted Britain’s imperial fortunes. But, crucially, it has seen the future and embraced it vigorously.

Back in 2006, it would have been easy to dismiss the creation of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company and the allied Masdar Institute of Science and Technology as little more than an exercise in greenwashing, along with the decision in 2009 by Irena, the International Renewable Energy Agency, to set up its headquarters in the UAE.

Since then, however, Abu Dhabi’s genuine commitment to becoming one of the key global players in renewable energy has become beyond doubt, thanks to a range of initiatives from the foundation of the globally influential annual World Future Energy Summit in 2011 to a series of game-changing strategic investments in cutting-edge green projects and companies at home and around the world.

These range from the world’s largest Concentrated Solar Power plant, Shams 1, which came on stream at Madinat Zayed in Abu Dhabi in 2013, to its 20 per cent share in the vast London Array wind farm off the east coast of England – an investment that, in a shrewd and fascinating reworking of history, echoes Britain’s prescient engagement with the oil of the Gulf in 1911.

The world is at a tipping point, an all-important moment when belief and investment in renewable energy ceases to be seen as naively quixotic, but as prophetically wise. The lesson from 1911 is that victory – in economic and social progress as well as in war – belongs to those nations that embrace radical technological change with prophetic enthusiasm. Thanks to its pioneering, decade-old engagement with the possibilities and technologies of alternatives such as nuclear, wind and solar power, today the UAE finds itself positioned not in the trough of the ebbing fortunes of oil, but on the cusp of the new wave of green energy – a strategic master stroke of which Winston Churchill surely would have approved.

Jonathan Gornall is a frequent contributor to The National