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New Energy World™
New Energy World™ embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low-carbon technologies.
Home Office and Foreign Office: What are the priorities for the UK climate agenda?
12/2/2025
8 min read
Feature
On 5 February, at separate London events, two key figures laid out details of the UK government’s climate agenda ambitions, both within the UK and outside its borders. They were Chris Stark, Head of the UK’s Mission for Clean Power, UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and Rachel Kyte HonFEI, UK Special Representative for Climate and Professor in Climate Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Stark returns to the stage at International Energy Week on 26 February. New Energy World Senior Editor Will Dalrymple reports.
Chris Stark discussed the government’s domestic plans to achieve ‘clean power’ (95% low-carbon generation and 5% unabated gas) by 2030. He was interviewed by Akshat Rathi, Senior Reporter for Climate, Bloomberg News, at the Carbon Trust’s Energy Transition Acceleration Forum event.
Asked if, six months in, he was confident of achieving the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, Stark said: ‘What we have committed to do is really right on the edge of what we think is possible... we call it a mission for a reason. It is an actual mission and just to make the point, governments can have a few missions, they can’t have hundreds, and I think it is really important that we selected this one as something that has the support of the whole government right up to the Prime Minister. It also has the support of other parts of government in the UK as well, including notably our devolved governments.’
Rathi asked about the £200bn project, which he called ‘expensive’, and questioned what the government’s obligations were. Stark responded: ‘Expensive is a word that’s doing a lot of heavy lifting in that question, and I don’t regard it as expensive. Let me briefly explain what are we trying to do here. Yes, I’m trying to clean up the power system and it’s tremendously important that we do that. But I think even more importantly than that, we are preparing for a period after 2030 when we’re going to need to seriously grow the power system, because we expect the end use of transport uses and the industrial uses and domestic heating and cooling to become electric.’