UK seeks end for clean energy goal that may sour Brexit talks

Bloomberg

Britain is looking for ways to scrap its 2020 clean energy targets while maintaining everyday trade in Europe’s energy market, an early sign of the kind of cherry-picking that threatens to sour Brexit negotiations.
Officials in the Treasury and the business department are looking for a way to abandon the national goal of getting 15 percent renewable energy by 2020, which is almost double the current level, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.
Erasing the target would allow Britain to skirt fines that could reach 10s of millions of pounds since it’s on track to narrowly miss the 2020 goal. It would also move the UK out of step with other European Union nations that maintain targets as part of their membership in the region’s energy market. The UK wishes to preserve its link to the market and smooth cross-border trading of electricity, which has helped lower power prices, the person said.
“There is a risk that energy gets wrapped up in the wider political negotiation, with the EU seeking to make access to the Internal Energy Market subject to the UK signing up to future energy and environment legislation,” said Simon Virley, head of power and utilities at consultants KPMG LLP an a former director-general of the UK’s energy and climate ministry. “That is when it could get difficult.”
The move is an example of Prime Minister Theresa May’s government seeking to maintain the most advantageous parts of the EU relationship while scrapping rules concerning to business — the sort of “cherry picking” that the European Commission has ruled out. May began the two-year process of leaving the union on March 29. And while renewables targets and electricity market rules are negotiated differently, they link at the level of political discussions.

MARKET’S ADVANTAGE
The EU’s Internal Energy Market is a package of assets, codes and rules that allow intraday trading over borders. Britain wants to build up those links as part of its effort to maintain electricity supplies as aging power plants retire from service.
Britain already has power links with about 4 gigawatts of capacity, according to National Grid Plc, and that could reach about 18 gigawatts by the mid 2030s. In all future scenarios, the UK will remain a net importer of electricity until the early 2030s, the grid operator predicts.
Power links with other countries are key to reducing the cost of electricity, since each gigawatt of interconnector has the potential to reduce wholesale prices by as much as 2 percent, according to National Grid.
No country has left the EU before, though other countries outside the EU such as Norway have energy agreements in place and are part of the internal energy market. The UK may seek to follow the Swiss, who have been negotiating deals on energy for a decade with the EU but aren’t allowed intraday trading of electricity, according to Antony Froggatt, an analyst at the Chatham House research group in London.
A government spokesman said the UK remains committed to tacking climate change and will meet all targets “while we remain part of the EU.” “