And power generation will increase to compensate? Sounds ... odd?
That is the plan.
UK energy policy was all over the place in the years 1998 to 2008 as the government was wrestling with so many vested interests, coal, gas, oil, renewables, nuclear lobby. Since then the debate has settled and a pretty decent energy policy has emerged with a strong decarbonising agenda.
Basically subsides for renewables in solar and wind to kick start the market have paid off and we now have electricity competitively generated by large scale solar and wind and costs falling as industrial scale production ramps up. Solar and Wind will be compatible to other sources of electricity and cost will continue to fall.
Coal is the big polluter and is being rapidly phased out.
Natural gas is a kind of stop gap solution, its emits half the co2 per Giga watt as does coal, so its is a good and quick replacement for coal. But it will have to be replaced. Gas and oil are cheap to produce, so there will be cost issues as they are replaced.
Nuclear is part of the mix. The problem with nuclear is, not so much the hazards of nuclear, but the huge capital cost of of large scale stations eg Hinkley point, it effectively needs government cash to get going. Roll Royce have been pushing the idea of SMRs small modular reactions, they are must more cost effective to build build as they can be build in a factory and then shipped to the power station. The result is a station such as Hartlepool or Sizewell would have dozens of small reactions rather than 3 or 4 huge ones. Its based on their submarine reactor, much easier to install and decommission. They planned this in the 2000 to 2010 period but then it ran into government quagmire and was finally announced as part of the nuclear deal last year with a £500m programme. Projected nuclear generation:
A source of confusion in the UK newpapers, the predomenant dicuson is about electricity going green, but electricity is only about 20% of our energy use, its all the other uses as well - tranport, industry, heating that also have to be replaced. The vast majority of our energy comes from oil an gas.
The biggest CO2 emissions are transport and domestic space heating so they are high up on the governments agenda for Net Zero. This will mean find ways to replace domestic gas heating. This graphic shows the total energy by source and also the source of energy for electricity generation. So whilst Wind, solar and hydro were 20% of electricity generation in 2017 ( 24% in 2020), that is only 20% of 21% so only 4% of total energy supply was renewables in 2017.
So its a massive challenge for the UK to complety replace its dominant energy sources.
This graphs shows government projecting to 2050 , cf 2019,sows coal, oil gas are replaced by hydrogen and electricity.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...g-our-net-zero-future-accessible-html-version
This final graphic from Bloomberg summarises the past from 2012 and projects the energy mix into electricity generation and I guess space heading to 2040 (its seems to have overlooked oil and diesel!).
So coal in red provided close to 50% of UKs energy needs in 2012 and will be gone by 2025. Gas has grown to fill the gap from coal but it then declines from 2022 onwards, Nuclear declines as old stations come off line, but picks up as new technology kicks in from late 2020 onwards and renewals continue to grow from less than 1% in 2012 to provide 75% of all energy by 2050, nuclear providing the rest. Not sure what happened to oil in this graphic! - edited for typos!