§ Solar record

The leap in solar output in 2025 saw generation reaching a record 7.6TWh in the first five months of the year, up 42% year-on-year.

Electricity output from UK solar installations saw particularly big jumps in March – where the 2,320 megawatts (MW) average was up 66% from a year earlier – and in April (3,189MW, up 53%).

There was a more modest 37% year-on-year increase in May 2025 – the country’s second-sunniest May on record – with average output reaching a new monthly high of 3,383MW.

The amount of electricity generated from solar also hit a new high of 2.5TWh in May 2025, beating April 2025’s 2.3TWh into second place. The previous record of 2.1TWh was set in June 2024.

The figure below shows the average monthly output of the UK’s solar capacity, in MW. Output dips in the short, dark days of winter and generally peaks with the longer daylight hours in June.

(The differences between installed electricity generating capacity, actual power output at any given moment and the amount of electricity generated per hour/day/month/year can cause confusion. The UK’s installed solar capacity reached 20GW at the end of last year. This is the maximum amount of power that could theoretically be produced at one time. In practice, the maximum power output recorded to date is 13GW and the average across a full month reached just over 3GW in May, generating 2.5TWh of electricity.)

The electricity generated by the UK’s solar panels in the first five months of 2025 – at 7.5TWh – is enough to have offset the need for around 16TWh of imported gas.

Buying this gas would have cost around £600m – based on recent average wholesale prices – and burning it would have resulted in roughly 6MtCO2, adding nearly 2% to total UK emissions.

The 16TWh of avoided gas imports is equivalent to 10% of the UK’s net gas imports in the same period last year – or around 10 individual Q-Max liquified natural gas (LNG) tankers, the largest currently available.

(For comparison, the UK only took 24 LNG deliveries during April to September 2024, according to data provider Argus. Figures for the first five months of last year are not available.)

The total amount of electricity generated by solar determines how many deliveries of imported gas can be avoided each month, as well as how far the power sector can cut its emissions.

In total, solar accounted for 11.6% of UK electricity generation in May 2025, only the fourth time it has ever breached the 10% threshold, after June 2023, June 2024 and April 2025.

(Solar topped 10% of monthly global electricity generation for the first time in April this year.)

However, the impact on the electricity market depends more closely on the hour-to-hour and day-to-day variations in solar generation due to the weather, seasons and diurnal cycles.

The highest UK solar output on record was reached at 13:00 on 6 April, when the technology was delivering 13.2GW of power and meeting 40% of demand for that half-hour period.

§ Sunniest spring

The UK saw 653 hours of sunshine in the period from 1 March to 31 May 2025, making it the sunniest spring since records began in 1910, according to the Met Office.

This total is 43% higher than the average for 1961-90. Before this year, the previous record for the sunniest spring had been set in 2020, when there were 626 sunshine hours.

UK sunshine hours have been on an increasing trend, particularly since the 1980s, according to Met Office analysis for Carbon Brief and illustrated in the chart below, which does not cover 2025.

The analysis found that, on average, spring months had been around 15% sunnier over the past decade than during the reference period from 1961-90.

(The analysis put this trend down to a combination of natural variability, changing circulation patterns and possible human influence from shifts in aerosol pollution.)

In a statement announcing the sunniest spring, Met Office scientist Emily Carlisle said: “Seven of the top ten sunniest springs on record for the UK since 1910 have occurred since the year 2000.”

A further Met Office release notes that spring 2025 is not only the sunniest spring on record, but also the fourth-sunniest season overall, with only three summers having had more sunshine.

The extra sunshine this spring contributed to unusually high solar power output per unit of installed capacity, a metric known as the “capacity factor” of the UK’s solar plants.

The capacity factor is a percentage, showing the actual electricity generation relative to the maximum theoretical output, if the panels were working at full capacity all of the time.

§ Clean power

While sunny weather helped drive the new highs for solar this spring, the UK’s growing capacity also contributed to the records.

After stagnating at around 12-14GW for several years after the then-Conservative government’s decision to end subsidies for solar in 2015, the UK’s installed capacity has since leapt to 20.2GW as of the end of 2024.

Capacity has grown as prices have fallen – boosting the economic case for solar – and as projects with newer “contracts for difference” have started to get built.

Early 2025 has seen the strongest start to the year since 2012 in terms of new rooftop solar capacity. Moreover, the UK is expected to add 3-3.5GW of new solar capacity across 2025 as a whole, according to Solar Media Market Research, up from the 2.3GW added in 2024.

Since taking office last July, energy secretary Ed Miliband has approved around 3GW of new solar capacity at giant sites, including the 500MW Heckington Fen and 500MW Gate Burton schemes.

The government is targeting 45-47GW of solar by 2030 as part of its “mission” to become a “clean-energy superpower”, which aims to have low-carbon sources meeting 100% of UK electricity demand and at least 95% of generation in the country.

Before then, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) is aiming to run the electricity system without fossil fuels for a short period, at some point this year.

Since setting itself this target in 2019, NESO has been making preparations by contracting for zero-carbon sources of grid stability services. These include “inertia” and voltage control, which have traditionally only been offered by conventional fossil-fuel generators.

Only familiar to grid engineers, previously, these terms have recently seen widespread usage in media coverage and finger-pointing over April’s blackouts in Spain and Portugal.

The increase in electricity generation from variable sources, such as wind and solar, brings new technical and market-related challenges, including increasing periods of “negative pricing”.

However, the solutions to these challenges are well-known and already being implemented in the UK. These include the buildout of battery storage systems, increasing interconnector capacity linking the national grid to other countries and new sources of grid stability, such as flywheels.

§ Key developments

‘Tricks’ and ‘cover-ups’

LIVESTOCK EMISSIONS: Climate scientists speaking to the Financial Times accused the governments of New Zealand and Ireland of using an “accounting trick” to “cover up” methane emissions from their livestock sectors. An open letter from 26 climate scientists and covered by the newspaper said that New Zealand’s “proposed new methane targets risk setting a dangerous precedent”. The title added that scientists have separately raised concerns about Ireland’s approach. 

POTENTIAL PROBLEMS: The controversy hinges on a way for measuring the impact of methane emissions on climate change, called “global warming potential star” (GWP*), the FT said. This method “estimates [methane’s] contribution to warming based on how emissions are changing relative to a baseline”. By contrast, the “long-established approach” used by most countries “compares the total warming impact of a given mass of methane to the same mass of [carbon dioxide] over a 100-year period”, the newspaper said.

‘MISAPPLICATION’: The scientists told the FT that some governments are “misapplying” GWP* to justify setting “no additional warming” targets, which allow methane emissions to remain flat rather than decline. The governments of Ireland and New Zealand did not respond to the newspaper’s requests for comment. But the newspaper added that “proponents” of the GWP* typically argue that it “better reflects methane’s short-lived nature in the atmosphere compared to the long-lasting effects of CO2”. One of the scientists behind the letter explained more of his thoughts in a LinkedIn post. A scientist not involved in the letter also posted a response.

SOMETHING FISHY: Elsewhere, an investigation by DeSmog and the Guardian has alleged that several UK supermarkets have sold seabass linked to “devastating overfishing” in Senegal. The two publications said that the retailers are accused of selling fish from Turkish farms that import large quantities of “fishmeal” – ground up fish used as feed – sourced from the African nation. Overfishing for fishmeal in Senegal is linked to “unemployment” and “food insecurity”, according to the Guardian. Responding to the claims, several of the supermarkets said they do not currently source from the implicated farms, but declined to say whether they had in the past.

Wild weather worldwide

EARLY MONSOON MAYHEM: An “unprecedented” early monsoon caught India’s farmers off guard, with “massive crop losses in states such as Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Telangana and Gujarat”, IndiaSpend reported. Climate scientists attributed the pre-monsoon thunderstorms to “unusual sea surface temperature patterns in the Pacific since 2023” and a higher frequency of “western disturbances” – extratropical storms originating over the Mediterranean. In the past week, north-eastern India has been battered by flash floods and landslides, with “at least 32 people killed and tens of thousands displaced”, the Independent reported. The newspaper noted that “studies show the monsoon in south Asia is getting worse due to the climate crisis”. 

DELUGE AND DROUGHT: BBC News reported that more than 700 people are believed to be dead after “devastating” floods hit Nigeria, with the farming region of Mokwa witnessing “the worst [floods] in the area for 60 years”. Separately, Reuters reported that China’s south-western Yunnan province was hit by “flash floods and mudslides”, triggered by heavy rainfall. In unconnected reporting, Bloomberg said that China had stepped up cloud seeding to “bolster rainfall across parched wheat-growing areas” in the north, adding that the country had ramped up “weather modification” investments as “climate change heightens food security risks.”

CANADA BURNS: Canada’s prairie provinces continued to reel from “record-breaking” early-season wildfires, the Guardian reported. It pointed out that in Manitoba alone, wildfires have burned “about 200,000 hectares already this year” – three times “the recent full-year average”. Manitoba premier Wab Kinew said that ​simultaneous fires “in every region” were a “sign of a changing climate that we are going to have to adapt to”. The Guardian added that First Nations peoples in Saskatchewan – one of three recognised Indigenous peoples in Canada – “have been particularly affected, with some entire communities evacuated”. 

§ Spotlight

UK’s former lead negotiator on UN nature talks  

In this Spotlight, Carbon Brief speaks to the UK’s former lead UN negotiator about the successes and challenges of international nature talks.

Will Lockhart OBE represented the UK in UN nature negotiations from 2021 until the end of COP16 talks in Rome in February of this year.

In 2022, he helped to negotiate the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), a landmark deal which has a headline “mission” to “halt and reverse” nature loss by 2030.

Following his departure from government, he spoke to Carbon Brief about his highs and lows, whether the world is making progress towards meeting its biodiversity goals and the role of UN summits – called COPs – in tackling environmental issues.

Carbon Brief: When you look back at your time heading up biodiversity negotiations, what are your highlights?

Will Lockhart: It’s all still emotionally raw. From a global perspective, the agreement of the GBF was a huge personal highlight. That was a really, really complicated negotiation. The notion that you could have frontpage news that was about an international agreement on nature, that was immensely exciting.

CB: In your view, is it possible to achieve the GBF’s mission to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030?

WL: The trajectory right now would suggest, no, it’s looking incredibly hard to achieve. But, even then, with exactly the right interventions at exactly the right scale, it might still be possible. A fair question might be was it ever possible?…There has always been a contested evidence base about whether it could ever have been achieved.

The important thing is that people spent a lot of time thinking about why we were setting certain kinds of targets…We wanted them to be specific, measurable and achieveable. What does achievable mean? What does ambitious mean? What message are we trying to send? This is politics, this isn’t necessarily science.

If the answer is that it was never possible in the first place, then the question is: ‘Why did the world agree to it?’ And the answer to that is: ‘Because it matters that we try.’

CB: Could there be a better way for countries to address biodiversity loss than the current system?

WL: It’s a very complicated question. A question that everyone has to bear in mind is: ‘What [is the] value [of] the COPs?’ You pour a huge amount of time and resource into a global dialogue, which results in a very, very carefully negotiated outcome. It’s extremely important, in my view, that you have a space where the whole world can come together in a room and agree that it wants to do something. The question is, where does the world locate that process?

I worry that the world is simultaneously asking too much and too little of COPs. It’s asking too much in the sense that there’s so much coverage and intense scrutiny of ‘this person’s arrived’, ‘this comma has moved’…There’s an extraordinary media circus. [There is] extreme expectation on each individual meeting.

And, at the same time, it’s simultaneously asking too little of them. It’s like: ‘Great, this word was in so it was a good COP’ or ‘this word was out so it was a bad COP’. And of course COPs are just one tiny part of this huge global process that needs to happen if we’re going to tackle these problems. I rather worry – and I know that colleagues feel the same – they’re just viewed as ends in themselves.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. A longer article has been published on Carbon Brief’s website.

§ News and views

RECORD FOREST LOSS: Tropical forest loss hit its highest level in a two-decade record in 2024 – double the level of 2023 – according to satellite data from Global Forest Watch covered by New Scientist. The report authors “attributed the surge in forest loss to the El Niño weather phenomenon and the warming global climate, which made the rainforest a tinderbox”, the magazine said. Climate Home News added that the rate of forest loss was the equivalent of losing 18 football pitches every minute.

RATIFY THIS: The EU ratified the UN “High Seas Treaty” last Wednesday, “joining a global effort to protect the ocean, curb environmental damage, tackle climate change and preserve biodiversity”, Jurist News reported. The EU’s ratification of the landmark treaty was joined by six of its member states: Cyprus, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Portugal and Slovenia. The EU also pledged €40m as part of a Global Ocean Programme to support African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, according to an EU Commission press release.

THOUSAND CUTS: A “cornerstone” ecological research programme could potentially be culled by the Trump administration, the New York Times reported. Abolishing the Ecosystems Mission Area (EMA) “was an explicit goal of Project 2025, the blueprint for shrinking the federal government”, the story added. However, the budget cut “still needs to be approved by Congress”, with scientists rallying to save the EMA, the paper wrote. On Monday, the Trump administration announced plans to “eliminate federal protections across millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness” that could open the region to drilling and mining, according to another New York Times story. 

NET NATURE LOSS?: In the UK, the Guardian reported that the “nature-friendly farming budget is set to be slashed” for “all but a few farms” in an upcoming spending review. Meanwhile, legal analysis of the Labour government’s new planning and infrastructure bill showed that “more than 5,000 of England’s most sensitive, rare and protected natural habitats are at high risk of being destroyed by development”, per another Guardian story. A key concern for green groups, it added, is a “cash for trash” clause that allows developers to “inflict adverse effects on the integrity of a protected site” if they pay into a fund to restore nature elsewhere. 

MIRAGE CITY: Reuters reported on Egypt’s plans to build a new desert city, 42km west of Cairo, that could reroute “about 7% of [its] annual Nile River quota” from fertile delta land. According to the story, an estimated 10m cubic metres of Nile water will flow daily to Jirian city to “pass by upscale glass-fronted housing units and eventually” irrigate a 2.28m acre “New Delta” agricultural project. Jirian city will include luxury housing, a free economic zone and even a “yacht marina”, the newswire added, noting that the country is facing “mounting water shortages, power constraints and deepening economic crisis”.

FOREST-FRIENDLY BATTERIES: Electric car batteries made using iron and phosphorus “that pose less of a threat to forests” are “rapidly replacing batteries reliant on cobalt and nickel”, according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) report covered by Climate Home News. From 2020 to 2024, the market share of lithium nickel manganese cobalt batteries has risen from one-tenth to almost half, according to the IEA data. Both cobalt and nickel are “mainly mined in rainforest countries”, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, the publication added. 

§ Watch, read, listen

REFORESTED SCHOOLS: Mongabay explored how “urban forests” in schools in Niger are helping to build “climate resilience and education”.

SO LONG, SALGADO: The New Yorker examined the visual legacy of photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, who died last week. Salgado’s Genesis series is celebrated as a “paean to natural landscapes and Indigenous ways of living”. 

SECOND ACT: In an Atlantic long-read, writer Emma Marris looked at the debate calling for a law to protect ecosystems along with endangered species in the US. 

PROUD, NATURALLY: CBC News reviewed Animal Pride, a new documentary about queer animal behaviour that filmmaker Connel Bradwell described as “nature’s coming-out story”. 

§ New science

• Greater fish biodiversity can help improve nutrition and make fisheries more resilient, according to new research published in Nature Sustainability. The study found that fishing waters with complementary species could provide more than 60% in additional nutrients than a similar-sized catch of the most nutrient-rich species. 
• A new study in Nature Climate Change found that “natural climate solutions” in croplands offer only “modest” mitigation benefits if reductions in crop yields are to be avoided. According to the authors, this indicates that “cropland soil will constitute a fraction of food system decarbonisation”.
• New research in Communications Earth and Environment found that global agricultural labour productivity could decrease by 18% by 2100 under a scenario of high heat-stress and labour sensitivity. 

§ In the diary

• 2-6 June: 69th Meeting of the Global Environment Facility Council | Washington DC
• 5 June: World Environment Day
• 7 June: Ocean Rise and Coastal Resilience Summit | Nice, France
• 9-13 June: 2025 UN Ocean Conference | Nice, France
• 16-26 June: UN Framework Convention on Climate Change intersessional meetings | Bonn, Germany

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org

§ Aiming high

The GBF is a global agreement with an aim to “halt and reverse biodiversity loss” by 2030 and achieve “harmony with nature” by 2050.

To help achieve its aims, the GBF sets out 23 targets for countries covering a wide range of topics, from protecting and restoring ecosystems to slashing subsidies for activities harmful to nature and providing funding to developing countries.

The GBF follows the Aichi targets, the previous set of UN goals for tackling nature loss by 2020 that ended in collective failure.

Towards the end of the 2010s – as it became clear that the Aichi targets were likely to fail – a flurry of research papers were published examining what it would take to “bend the curve” on biodiversity loss.

Among the most influential was a 2018 commentary in Nature Sustainability, led by the late pioneering biodiversity scientist Prof Georgina Mace. It urged countries to “clearly specify the goal for biodiversity recovery” in their post-2020 agreement for nature, “analogous to the [UN climate change] 1.5-2C target”.

On biodiversity loss, Mace and her team wrote:

“This declining trend must not only be halted, but also reversed.”

The post-2020 agreement for nature – covering the decade from 2021 to 2030 – was meant to be finalised in 2020. However, the Covid-19 pandemic caused the COP15 biodiversity summit to be postponed several times, before it was eventually held in two parts, starting in October 2021 and concluding in December 2022.

When negotiators met in Montreal to decide the details of their post-2020 agreement, the idea of halting and reversing biodiversity loss within a few years was already viewed as a steep challenge, Lockhart says:

“The important thing is that people spent a lot of time thinking about why we were setting certain kinds of targets…We wanted them to be specific, measurable and achieveable. What does achievable mean? What does ambitious mean? What message are we trying to send? This is politics; this isn’t necessarily science.

“If the answer is that it was never possible in the first place, then the question is: ‘Why did the world agree to it?’ And the answer to that is: ‘Because it matters that we try.’”

When Carbon Brief spoke to biologists about the feasibility of the goal in 2023, they expressed similar sentiments. 

Dr David Obura, founding director of Coastal Oceans Research and Development, Indian Ocean (CORDIO) East Africa and current chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), told Carbon Brief in 2023:

“As a scientist, whether we can achieve halting and reversing by 2030, I’m highly doubtful.

“[But] for a political document like this, there has to be a time-bound [element]. So, in that sense, I think halt and reverse by 2030 is the right language to have, for sure.”

§ The future of COPs

But whether setting a lofty target truly spurred sufficient action on biodiversity loss remains an open question.

Following on from the agreement of the GBF in 2022, countries were asked to submit new national plans for how they will meet its goal. These are known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs).

In October 2024, Carbon Brief and the Guardian reported jointly that 85% of nations had missed the deadline for submitting their NBSAPs. 

As of June 2025, only 26% of parties have submitted new NBSAPs. (Separately, 67% of parties have submitted shorter – and less detailed – national targets.)

Further Carbon Brief and Guardian reporting found that, of countries that have submitted nature plans, more than half do not commit to protecting 30% of their territories for nature by 2030, which was billed as one of the headline targets of the GBF.

And research published in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that countries that have submitted nature plans have broadly failed to commit to another GBF target to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030.

Following on from a set of fractious UN environmental negotiations last year, some experts have called for “reforms” to the way that these summits – known as COPs – work. 

Lockhart tells Carbon Brief that, following his time representing the UK at the highest level at COPs, he still carries hope for the future of these summits. But, he says, he also has questions about how the world views the role of these negotiations in addressing environmental problems:

“A question that everyone has to bear in mind is: ‘What [is the] value the [of] COPs?’

“You pour a huge amount of time and resource into a global dialogue, which results in a very, very carefully negotiated outcome. It’s extremely important, in my view, that you have a space where the whole world can come together in a room and agree that it wants to do something. 

“The question is, where does the world locate that process?”

He said that he fears the “world is simultaneously asking too much and too little of COPs”, continuing:

“It’s asking too much in the sense that there’s so much coverage and intense scrutiny of ‘this person’s arrived’, ‘this comma has moved’…There’s an extraordinary media circus. [There is] extreme expectation on each individual meeting.

“And, at the same time, it’s simultaneously asking too little of them. It’s like: ‘Great, this word was in so it was a good COP’, or ‘this word was out so it was a bad COP’. And, of course, COPs are just one tiny part of this huge global process that needs to happen if we’re going to tackle these problems. I rather worry – and I know that colleagues feel the same – they’re just viewed as ends in themselves.”

COPs were “always” meant to be just one “part of the jigsaw puzzle”, he adds:

“We agree stuff. It doesn’t get delivered, by and large. It doesn’t get delivered because the implementation processes aren’t in place back at home in different government departments. 

“The reasons that the implementation processes aren’t in place varies based on political factors, capability factors, jurisdictional factors, all sorts of different things. The problem is that by focussing on COPs as an end to themselves, we risk missing the wood for the trees.”

Lockhart is now working as the director of climate and energy at Apolitical, an online platform offering training and support for governments globally.

§ 中国碳排放因清洁能源而下降

过去十年来，尽管中国化石燃料和水泥行业的碳排放量有高低起伏，但总体上升了20%。

最新数据显示，该排放量可能已经接近达峰以及趋稳，甚至正步入结构性下降的阶段。

截至2025年第一季度的最新数据显示，中国的碳排放量已经连续一年多呈现稳定或下降趋势，如下图所示。

不过，由于该排放量仅比最近的峰值低1%，这意味着其仍有可能在短期内反弹并创下新高。

因此，中国未来的碳排放走向尚未确定，这取决于各经济部门的趋势，以及中国对特朗普关税政策的应对方式。

§ 电力行业排放下降，其它行业却现反弹

2025年第一季度中国碳排放的下降主要源于电力行业排放下降了5.8%。尽管整体电力需求增长了2.5%，但火电（主要是燃煤和燃气发电）却减少了4.7%。

由于大量新建风电、太阳能和核电装机投入运行，发电量的增长足以弥补需求的增长。水电发电量也有所上升，虽然其受季节因素影响，但同样对化石能源的替代发挥了作用。

电力行业碳排放降幅超过化石能源发电量降幅，因为生物质和天然气的占比上升，同时燃煤电厂的平均能效也有所提升。

具体而言，燃煤电厂度电煤耗平均下降了0.9%。

下图底部显示了第一季度电力行业煤炭使用造成的碳排放量减少情况，该数据低于其他行业的碳排放量变化。

而在电力行业之外，碳排放量增长了3.5%，其中以金属和化工行业的煤炭使用增幅最大。

煤制化工产业正在快速扩张，背后的推动力包括对进口油气依赖的担忧。2025年第一季度，由于煤价走低而油价偏高，该产业的经济性更具吸引力。

粗钢产量同比增长了0.6%，金属制品增长6%，有色金属产量增长2%。这些增长主要集中在3月份，企业赶在关税生效前集中出口，带动金属需求激增，而高产出一直持续到4月。

房地产开工量同比下降24%，新房销售下降3%，反映出建筑行业对水泥、钢材和玻璃的需求持续疲软。

相比之下，汽车和机械制造的经济产出分别增长了12%和13%，表明对金属的需求正在上升。

水泥产量同比下降1.4%，降幅低于往年，可能是由于气温偏高使得依赖天气的施工活动提前启动。

由于燃气发电装机容量增长14%，尽管燃气发电的平均利用率下降，但电力行业的天然气消费量估计增长了6%。但在其他行业，天然气消费减少，总体上抵消了电力行业天然气需求量的增长。

石油制品消费略有上升，如图中最上方所示。由于天气偏暖，依赖天气的施工和农业活动与往年相比提前开工。

然而，从结构性角度来看，汽车电动化和货运行业改用液化天然气，预示着石油需求将持续走低。

§ 中国是否已经碳达峰？

在2025年第一季度排放量同比下降1.6%之际，中国的碳排放自2024年3月以来已连续一年多保持平稳或下降态势。

然而，截至2025年3月底的12个月内，排放量仅比近期峰值下降了1%，这意味着只要出现短期反弹，排放量就可能再创新高。

继一季度大幅下降后，电力行业过去12个月的排放量同比也出现下滑。

在过去40年里，这种情况曾经发生过四次——分别是在2009年、2012年、2015年和2022年。但此次下降首次主要得益于清洁能源发电的增长。

2025年一季度清洁能源发电增速不仅超过整体用电需求增长，也高于过去15年电力需求的平均增长，如上图虚线所示。

此外，过去六个月水电发电量同比保持稳定，这意味着这轮清洁能源的增长是由太阳能、风能和核电装机容量的增长所推动的，而非水电的逐年波动所致。

除发电行业外，2024年12月到2025年3月期间，各行业碳排放均有所下降，但煤化工是个例外。

要使中国整体碳排放量达峰并开始下降，各下降行业的减排总量需超过仍在增长行业的排放增量。

电力和化工以外的煤炭使用量与水泥行业同时达峰，但此后一直在反弹，目前已接近之前的峰值水平。

中国煤炭工业协会预计，钢铁和建材行业的煤炭使用量将下降，而化工行业的煤炭消费量将继续增长。

对煤炭未来需求增长的预期主要集中在化工行业，这也代表着煤炭从单纯的燃料向燃料和原料双重角色的转变。

该协会还认为，燃煤发电将至少在短期内恢复增长，但他们已将2025年的预测下调，与2024年底的展望相比有所保守。

“关税战”可能影响了预期。有分析指出，如果中国GDP因关税下降0.5到1个百分点，可能导致主要用于发电站的燃煤需求也出现类似的下降。

疫情后经济反弹到2024年3月结束，石油产品的消费量自此下降，较峰值减少了2%。尽管化工和航空领域的需求在上升，但由于交通运输领域电气化趋势增强，预计其长期仍呈下降趋势。

天然气的使用量近几个月有所下降，但总体趋势仍可能保持上升。

下表列出了每个行业在12 个月周期内的最高排放量，以及自最新峰值以来的减排量。

除了水泥生产之外，其他行业目前还不能明确判断是否已达排放峰值。然而，有迹象表明，其他行业的峰值也可能已经过去。

诚然，对于石油产品消费和钢铁生产而言，行业预测表明未来排放趋势可能会下降。

对于电力行业而言，只要新增清洁能源装机容量维持在当前或更高水平，就有望带来结构性的排放峰值——因为清洁能源的增长足以覆盖新增的电力需求。

这些行业碳排放量合计占全国八成以上。若这些行业均进入结构性下降阶段，那么中国碳排放总量很可能将开启持续下降通道。

§ 中国推动内需应对美国关税

特朗普政府实施的史无前例的贸易关税政策，以及中国的反制措施，将影响今年及未来中国的经济和碳排放前景。

关税措施实施后，首当其冲的是中国沿海出口大省的工厂减产，从而导致排放下降，同时也可能波及投资和消费支出。

但因双方随后达成90天休战协议，反而刺激美国订单短期内激增，以弥补短暂的贸易放缓，并在休战结束前囤积商品。

中国对关税的反应主要集中在通过刺激措施抵消其经济影响。

虽然暂时的休战会降低出台刺激政策的紧迫性，但当前美国对中国的平均关税税率仍高达40%，远高于特朗普上台前的水平，因此中国领导层也很可能在为未来再次加征关税做好准备。

中国的重点将是为那些原本出口至美国的产品开拓国内市场。这一转向或将助力中国实现长期以来所希望推动的经济向消费驱动型增长转型，而成功实现经济再平衡，有望带来更低能耗的经济增长。

中国的应对措施还包括加大对“新质生产力”的重视，该概念强调新兴科技的发展。

这一概念涵盖了清洁能源产业，该产业如今已成为中国经济的重要引擎，因此难以在刺激计划中被忽视。

中国发改委最新公布的低碳示范项目清单，明确了清洁能源投资的重点方向。绿氢、储能、“虚拟电厂”以及基于氢能的工业脱碳是新的增长领域。

从碳排放角度来看，中国对特朗普关税的反应最关键的问题在于：针对这些优先领域（包括新兴的低碳领域及其他清洁能源产业）的刺激措施，是否足够有力。

§ 新风光电价政策加剧不确定性

中国碳排放面临的另一个不确定性来源，是即将于今年6月生效的新可再生能源电力电价政策。

新政策取消了与煤电价格挂钩的价格保障机制，要求新的风电和太阳能发电项目与购电方直接签订电力合同。这可能导致新建风电和太阳能发电项目的售电价格下降。

不过，政策也为满足中央政府能源目标所需的新增装机容量提供了更有利的价格机制——“差价结算”。

该政策的直接影响可能是大量项目争相在6月前完成投产，以确保能够按现行政策享有机制电价。

其效果已经体现在最新数据中：仅 3 月份中国就增加了 23 吉瓦 (GW) 的太阳能和13GW的风能，比该月之前的新增太阳能和新增风能的最高记录高出80%和110%。

下图根据不同的预测显示，预计2025年和2026年新增清洁能源发电量仍将高于去年创纪录的水平。

然而，这一政策也带来了更大的不确定性。一些行业，尤其是分布式光伏，将经历上半年装机量的激增而下半年放缓的艰难时期。

不确定性主要集中在两个方面。首先是地方如何执行这一政策，因为省级政府拥有相当大的回旋余地。考虑到清洁能源对许多省份经济的重要性，预计地方政府会力求以尽量不扰乱行业的方式来落实政策。

第二个不确定性来自中央政府的能源目标。新电价政策将更优惠的价格与中央政府的能源目标挂钩。而在过去几年中，清洁能源增长远远超过了官方设定的目标。

这凸显了即将出台的“十四五”规划中能源目标的关键作用。国家能源局设定的目标是“年均新增2亿千瓦（200吉瓦）以上新能源的合理消纳利用”，这一数字远低于去年实际新增的360吉瓦。

当然，电价政策的最终效果也取决于市场环境。当前中国煤电项目仍在快速上马，存在产能过剩风险。

§ 中国与巴黎承诺之间的差距扩大

中国风电光伏发展面临的不确定性，也对该国履行《巴黎协定》下的国际气候承诺带来影响。

2020-2023年碳强度（即单位经济产出的排放量）下降进度明显滞后，中国已经明显偏离实现其2030年碳强度承诺的路径，几乎可以肯定将无法实现2025年的阶段性目标。2024年中国的碳强度下降了3.4%，未达到实现2025年和2030年目标所需的改善速度。

2025年政府工作计划中并未设定碳强度目标，仅包含单位国内生产总值能耗降幅超过3%（不包括原材料消耗）的目标。

这可以间接反映碳强度的改善幅度。2024年，中国的碳强度下降了3.4%，而化石能源使用强度下降了3.8%。如果2025年两者之间的比例相似，那么碳强度可能只能下降大约2.5%。在这种情况下，如果GDP增长达到5%的目标，碳排放量仍可能上升超过2%。

政府工作计划中没有设定碳强度目标，也没有特别强调碳强度的下降，显示出当局当前并未将实现这一目标作为优先事项。

政府工作报告中强调了“双碳”目标，即在2030年前实现碳达峰、2060年前实现碳中和。

然而，按照这些目标，2030年前碳排放仍可继续增长。这意味着到该年度，绝对排放量可能在2024年的水平上大幅增加。因此，即便“双碳”目标得以实现，也不能确保中国当前最核心的国际气候承诺——2030年碳强度目标——能够兑现。

即便今年碳排放有所下降，未来五年也需要大幅加快碳强度改善步伐，才能兑现中国2030年《巴黎协定》承诺。

如果中国仍然致力于兑现2030年承诺，那么该过程就需要体现在下一个五年规划设定的目标中。

§ 2025年及未来展望

过去12个月可能标志着中国二氧化碳排放的一个重要转折点：清洁能源的增长首次超过电力需求增长，并在电力领域取代了化石燃料的使用。

尽管新的电价政策带来了一定的不确定性，但预计2025年仍将迎来创纪录的清洁能源新增装机容量，这表明这种趋势将在今年持续。

中国碳排放的未来长期走势将在很大程度上取决于即将出台的五年规划中设定的目标，以及北京应对美国关税和其他经济压力所采取的政策。

从短期看，美国加征关税将抑制能源需求增长和排放水平。为抵消特朗普关税影响而制定的经济政策，很可能会进一步推动清洁能源产业的发展，并可能促使经济重心转向国内消费，这意味着能源消费的增长将相对于GDP增长更少。

但另一方面，中国此前的经济刺激措施往往伴随着排放的急剧上升。中国若想转向消费和新技术驱动的刺激政策，而非高碳排的基建重工业，就必须突破传统发展模式。

电力行业的排放是否已经达峰，将取决于清洁能源供应增长与总体电力需求增长之间的竞赛。

按行业来看，除了电力行业，建筑材料、钢铁以及石油制品消费等领域的排放也可能已经达峰。

这些行业合计占中国与化石燃料相关碳排放的80%以上。然而，在所有这些行业中，都存在短期反弹的可能和不确定性。

目前仍有较大排放增长潜力的行业是煤化工。美国加征关税后国际油价的下跌将削弱该行业的盈利能力，可能导致即便新增产能增加，其工厂利用率也将下降。中国对自美国进口石化产品征收的报复性关税本可能本可能使煤化工行业受益，但这些关税据报已被豁免。

总体而言，这些因素可能推动中国未来五年排放持续下降，并有望在未来五年内实现大幅绝对减排。

然而，若政策出现转向，也同样可能导致碳排放在通往2030年的过程中继续上升。

§ Electric transportation

Shenzhen’s low-carbon transition did not happen overnight – it resulted from early planning, government support and market-driven solutions, Wei Fulei, director of finance, taxation, trade and the industrial development research centre at the China Development Institute (CDI), a state-sponsored thinktank based in Shenzhen, tells Carbon Brief.

The city’s low-carbon transformation kicked off in the 2000s, when the number of days with heavy air pollution peaked in Shenzhen. 

A BBC News report back in 2017 said that after a decade’s work on tackling pollution, Shenzhen “reduced its average air pollution by around 50%”. 

The move was largely a result of changing its “industrial base”, which made Shenzhen “one of [the] first batch of these ‘low-carbon cities’”, said the BBC News article. 

During this period, the officials developed strategies for “low-carbon development”. Part of this included nourishing the growth of a number of “strategic emerging industries”, such as the “information and communications technology“, which in return provided core technology support for low-carbon industries, largely benefiting the NEV sector.

The current leading global electric vehicle (EV) giant, BYD, for example, was born in Shenzhen against this background.

“With this ‘industry gene’, Shenzhen only needs to adapt and upgrade accordingly to meet the new demands of the NEV industry [in the 2020s],” says Wei.

According to the Shenzhen government work report at the 2025 “two sessions”, the city – whose population makes up 1% of the country’s total –  produced 22% of China’s NEVs in 2024. 

About 100 new “climate investment and financing projects” will be launched in the year ahead, said the report, adding that another 180bn yuan ($24bn) of “green loans” will be also be issued.

Shen Xinyi, analyst and China team lead at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), tells Carbon Brief that the local government has a track record of nurturing new industries:

“Wind and solar power, along with EVs, were all emerging industries that required substantial investment and technological research 20 years ago…The risk of failure was high, but the Shenzhen government introduced innovative policies to support them.”

The quick growth of NEV companies has pushed up the share of NEVs in the local vehicle market. On top of national subsidies, the local government has also provided support for producing and purchasing NEVs.

In 2024, NEVs accounted for some 77% of new car sales in Shenzhen, significantly higher than the national share of 48%.

In addition, the city has also replaced all of its buses, taxis and ride-hailing cars with electric versions – the first city to have done so in China. 

Heran Zheng, lecturer in sustainable infrastructure economics and finance at University College London (UCL), tells Carbon Brief that the “greener transport fleet” speeds up Shenzhen’s low-carbon transition, because a city’s low-carbon transition mainly requires two focuses – “transport transition” and “industry decarbonisation”. 

Zheng says: 

“There are limited policy efforts a city can make in carbon mitigation. It can work on greener transports. London, for example, set up the Ultra Low Emission Zone to encourage the usage of public transport and cleaner vehicles. And a city can upgrade industries and mitigate their emissions, which are harder to do because no city wants to slow down economic growth.”

Shenzhen, “different from some coal mining cities in China”, has an “advantage” in industry transition, says Zheng, which allows it to set “more ambitious” emissions targets. 

§ Carbon control

China uses energy intensity and carbon intensity – the energy use and emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) – as key metrics in its climate policies. 

In addition, the country has been using the “dual control of energy” system – regulating energy intensity and energy consumption – since 2016. However, it announced plans to switch to the “dual control of carbon” in 2024.

Under the new system, a binding cap for total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will be set and will become the main target after 2030, while carbon intensity – the prime target before 2030 – will be gradually lowered to be the secondary target. 

(Read more about the “dual control” systems in this edition of China Briefing.)

Here too, Shenzhen was an early mover. As early as 2023, it became China’s “first city to explicitly state its commitment to the ‘dual control [of carbon]’ system”, according to Dialogue Earth.

It issued two “implementation plans” towards this effort, published in 2023, as well as developing a city-level carbon emissions cap.

The plans, compared to the national ones, have more ambitious timelines. A city-level “dual control of carbon” system will be built up by 2025 and it will be “fully implemented” in 2026-30. One of the plans says: 

“We will strive to achieve the goal of using a dual carbon emission control approach to carry out quota allocation in the Shenzhen carbon market [for the] manufacturing industry by 2028…and strive to achieve a significant improvement in market regulation capabilities by 2030.”

Shenzhen plans to reduce its energy intensity by 14.5% before the end of 2025, compared to 2020 levels. The national energy intensity target is 13.5% during the same period. 

Zheng says that Shenzhen’s commitment “should be within its capacity”, adding: 

“There are three major carbon mitigation areas [for China as a whole] – steel, cement and electricity. Shenzhen has no major steel and cement industries, so it only needs to largely focus on electricity…It is also not at the upstream of a supply chain, unlike some fossil fuel cities; it doesn’t need to worry about business, such as coal mining. Its industry structure is dominated by ‘high value-added’ industries, such as technology and NEVs, whose emissions are easier to mitigate.

“In addition, the city is a technology hub. A lot of high-emissions manufacturers have moved out of Shenzhen to its neighbouring cities, such as Shanwei. This is what we call ‘emissions outsourcing’. Shenzhen, benefiting from this, has fewer hurdles in [its] green transition.”

Last year, Zheng and colleagues published a study on this outsourcing of emissions between Chinese cities in Nature. They found that “some cities benefit from the carbon mitigation efforts of other cities more than their own” and suggested that policymakers work to acknowledge these effects.

Another “big difference” between Shenzhen and other cities is that “Shenzhen has its own nuclear power”, says Zheng, which is “important” for the city’s electricity transition – the remaining sector that Shenzhen needs to put efforts towards low-carbon transition.

§ Low-carbon energy

According to a 2021 report, Shenzhen’s “largest local power source” is the Daya Bay nuclear power station, with a total installed capacity of 6.1 gigawatts (GW).

Nuclear power accounted for 35% of the city’s total power generation in 2021. 

It has also pushed up Shenzhen’s low-carbon energy usage – about 47% of Shenzhen’s primary energy consumption was from clean energy in 2024.

Nuclear dwarfs all the other clean energy sources feeding into the city’s grid. The Shenzhen local authority’s 2025 government work report says current solar power capacity stands at about 1GW – and it does not mention wind capacity.

Its “14th five-year plan for climate change response” says that Shenzhen’s renewable energy capacity has “little room” for future growth due to “scarce” energy resources and “limited” land for wind and solar power.

Meanwhile, Shenzhen relies heavily on imported electricity, which accounts for approximately 70% of the city’s total electricity consumption.

This reliance limits Shenzhen’s control over emissions from the sector. It also challenges the local grid’s ability to manage demand during peak usage times. 

In 2024, China approved the constructions of more nuclear reactors in Shenzhen’s neighbouring city of Huizhou. 

The Shenzhen government also aims to “raise the combined share of natural gas, nuclear and renewable energy to 90% in 2025, up from the current figure of 77%, which is noticeably ahead of the nationwide figure of 52%”, according to a research paper in 2022. 

Zheng says that “Shenzhen is a lot like its neighbour Hong Kong, whose energy transition does not rely on solar and wind build up either”.

He adds that in order to achieve a sustainable energy transition, both Shenzhen and Hong Kong would need to utilise their advantage as “financial cities”.

§ ‘Green finance’

Shenzhen has long been using “market forces” and has successfully “struck a balance between government support and market-driven solutions”, where enterprises “take the lead, handling 90% of the work”, while the government intervenes only when necessary, says Wei. 

With little interference from the government, Shenzhen was one of the first seven cities and provinces in China that established a local “pilot” ETS in 2013, ahead of the national rollout in 2021.

Similar to China’s national scheme, the local ETS allocates emissions allowances for companies to trade on the market, based on their emissions intensity – the emissions per unit of output – rather than absolute emissions. 

The Shenzhen local ETS covered 38% of the city’s carbon emissions upon launching. The figure rose to 50% in 2020 and will continue to expand, says a report by the trading forum International Carbon Action Partnership (ICPA), with a shift to an “absolute cap” for carbon emissions being announced to apply from 2027.

(For now, the national ETS does not include a cap on emissions either, although this is also set to change.)

However, Yan Qin, carbon analyst at consultancy firm ClearBlue Markets, tells Carbon Brief that despite Shenzhen ETS plans to expand its coverage, more pilot ETS are seeing their coverage “shrinking” due to enterprises leaving to join the national ETS”. 

ICPA’s research also finds that electricity production was excluded from the Shenzhen ETS after 2019 when it “transitioned to the China national ETS”. 

Yan says that the pilot ETS, nevertheless, “has been an important testing field, paving the way for the successful launch of national ETS eventually. [It] will continue to exist and cover the small to medium enterprises as well as sectors outside national ETS”.

The Shenzhen local ETS, as of 2022, covers water, gas, heat, manufacturing, transport and other sectors, says ICPA. 

It was the biggest local ETS in China as of 2024 and maintains the highest annual trading volumes in the country for several consecutive years, says Shenzhen Business News.

In the meantime, Shenzhen has taken initiatives in “green finance”, bringing private investments into the market.

In 2021, Shenzhen issued China’s first overseas sales of “green government bonds” in Hong Kong along with China’s first local “green finance legislation”, which provides a “solid institutional guarantee” for regulating the “green market”, according to an assessment of the legislation by research institute the International Institute of Green Finance.

In contrast, China’s national sovereign bonds were only available to international buyers from April 2025.

Various other “green finance” products have also been issued. According to state-run newspaper Economic Daily, about 4.6 trillion yuan ($633bn) was traded for new energy, NEVs and other environment-related stocks at the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange in the first half of 2024.

Nevertheless, Zheng says that the impact of the “green bonds” is “hard to evaluate”. He says: “A lot of projects, such as sewage treatment, can also fall into the category of ‘green bonds’”. 

According to the state broadcaster CCTV, Shenzhen’s “green bonds” issued in 2021 covered projects including “construction of ordinary public high schools, urban rail transit and water management”. 

Zheng says that although these projects are linked to energy efficiency improvements, they nonetheless make only “limited contributions” to cutting carbon emissions.

Zheng adds that market guidance is “necessary” in a city’s low-carbon transition, but “there is not yet a study on how large a green finance product can make a difference on mitigation”. 

Shen says there is nevertheless an important role for “financial instruments” to support the low-carbon transition. She explains: 

“Low-carbon industries generally have higher costs than fossil fuel-based industries…With policy support and financial instruments, the costs can be reduced, allowing these industries to scale up.”

§ ‘Shenzhen model’ 

The local government and media outlets have touted the city’s achievements on climate as the “Shenzhen model”, implying that it could be applied elsewhere. 

Xu Hua, an official from the Shenzhen Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau, said the model “demonstrated the results to the world” at last year’s COP29:

“Firstly, Shenzhen has continuously improved its top-level design…establishing a comprehensive policy system. Secondly, the city has focused on the transformation and upgrading of key sectors…promoting strategic emerging industries such as new energy, energy conservation, and environmental protection. Thirdly, following the principle of openness…Shenzhen has been exploring new paths for green and low-carbon development.”

Xu added that the city “positions itself as a leader in green development nationwide”, as it had “significantly reduced its energy consumption, water usage and carbon emissions per 10,000 yuan of GDP to one-third, one-eighth and one-fifth of the national average, respectively” by the end of 2023.

However, not all of Shenzhen’s journey is “replicable”, says Shen, adding: “Shenzhen capitalised on the opportunities of its era.” She tells Carbon Brief:

“For example, its supply chain advantages and the skilled workforce that has settled in the city have been key enablers of its high-end manufacturing sector.”

Zheng agrees with Shen, saying that Shenzhen can only represent a certain type of city in China. He says:

“Shenzhen is China’s Silicon Valley and heavily invests in high-end technology. It can only represent a [certain] type of cities in China, the ‘top tier’, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. There are more than 300 cities in China, all facing unique transition situations. It is meaningless for coal-heavy industrial cities to learn from Shenzhen.”

Other cities in China, meanwhile, have also started to explore their own ways to achieve sustainable development.

The city of Suzhou has built the Suzhou Industrial Park – one of China’s first pilot low-carbon industrial parks. It has also established a “market-based carbon inclusion trading system”, which incentivises “voluntary” carbon emission trading among citizens, as well as small- and medium-sized companies.

Meanwhile, the city of Tianjin has launched a collaboration with Singapore to “explore a path for China’s urban systems to reduce carbon emissions”, according to a Xinhua report.

Other cities must “adapt strategies according to their unique conditions”, Shen adds. This sentiment is reflected in a 2023 document issued by China’s State Council – the country’s central government. The document, called “China’s green development in the new era”, says that:

“Local authorities should rely on their resource endowments, environmental conditions and industrial development foundations to fully leverage the comparative advantages.”

§ This week

Earth eyes 2C

TEMPERATURE WARMING: Global temperatures could hit nearly 2C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in the next five years, according to new data from the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) covered by the Financial Times. The outlet noted that this would not represent a breach of the Paris Agreement target of keeping warming below 2C, as this threshold is typically measured over at least two decades. However, it added that 2C of warming would result in a “fall in crop yields” and more than a third of the world’s population being exposed to extreme heat. 

WILDFIRE EMERGENCY: Wildfires in Canada have forced thousands of people to flee their homes, CBC News reported. The government of Manitoba declared a state of emergency after evacuating 17,000 people and neighbouring province Saskatchewan followed suit a day later, CBC News said. Manitoba premier Wab Kinew said the prevalence of fire in “every region” was a “sign of a changing climate that we are going to have to adapt to”, according to Le Monde. BBC News noted that “scientists have linked worsening wildfire seasons to climate change”. 

MONSOON IN MAY: Monsoon rains hit the coast of India’s southernmost state of Kerala eight days early, marking the earliest arrival of the rainy season in 16 years, Reuters reported. Just two days later, the rains reached Mumbai – the city’s earliest monsoon in 75 years, according to Business Standard. India Today said human-caused climate change and “natural climatic systems” played a role. 

ALPINE DISASTER: A landslide of ice, mud and rocks triggered by the collapse of a glacier has buried a large part of the Swiss village of Blatten, Swissinfo reported. Climate scientist Christian Huggel told Reuters that climate change had “likely played a part in the deluge”, given that the loss of permafrost can “negatively affect the stability of mountain rock”. The Swiss army has been deployed to find a missing person, Reuters said.

§ Around the world

• INDONESIA UN-QUITS COAL: Indonesia set out plans to build new coal plants in its power supply plan for 2025-2034, “backtrack[ing]” on its previous pledge to gradually phase out coal assets, the Straits Times said.
• NIXED: Inside Climate News covered analysis which found that $14bn of clean energy investment has been cancelled so far this year in the US. The non-profit group behind the figures – Environmental Entrepreneurs – said this was an “ominous sign” as the Senate gears up to vote on a bill that would, if passed in its current form, gut Biden-era clean energy tax credits.
• ‘CLIMATE SETBACK’: Bloomberg reported that Australia has given preliminary approval to extend the life of its biggest and oldest liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant from 2030 to 2070.  
• THE NEW SCEPTICS: COP30 president-designate André Corrêa do Lago told the Guardian that attempts to discredit climate policies are the “new kind of opposition to climate action”. He said: “It’s not a scientific denial, it’s an economic denial.”
• FARAGE’S ‘FANTASY’: Meanwhile, the UK’s hard-right Reform party led by Nigel Farage has been accused of espousing “fantasy economics” after falsely claiming £225bn could be saved by scrapping net-zero projects, according to the Evening Standard. 
• GREEN TOURIST LEVY: Hawaii has introduced a tax on hotel rooms and holiday rentals which will raise money for environmental protection and defences against natural disasters, the Guardian reported.

§ 18 football pitches

The equivalent amount of primary tropical forest that was lost every minute in 2024, according to data from the World Resources Institute. 

§ Latest climate research

• Researchers in Nature Climate Change looked at how floods drove migration between counties in the US from 2006-19, finding young, educated people were more likely to leave following a disaster, while older, unemployed people were more likely to move into an affected area.
• Sea ice strength and “pressure” along two major Arctic shipping routes will decline “substantially” over the next two decades under strong warming, according to findings in Geophysical Research Letters.
• A study in Nature revealed that changes to concentrations of air pollutants have contributed in recent decades to an increase in the global “methane sink”, the amount of methane that is removed from the atmosphere and thus unable to drive up temperatures.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

§ Captured

A new analysis by Carbon Brief of data from UK energy regulator Ofgem showed how the biggest driver of recent increases in electricity bills in the UK has been wholesale electricity prices – which in the UK are set almost exclusively by wholesale gas prices. In contrast, “green levies” – costs added to bills in order to pay for government climate policies – actually fell during the height of the gas price spike, as the dark grey area of the chart shows. This runs counter to opposition politicians’ claims that the UK’s high electricity prices are caused by its target for net-zero emissions by 2050 and green levies.

§ Spotlight

§ Livestreaming for climate science

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to US climate scientists taking part in a 100-hour livestream aimed at raising awareness of their work and the risks they face.

Marathon livestreams are typically the preserve of video gamers, sex workers and chess stars – not climate scientists. But unusual times call for unusual measures.

Hundreds of climate scientists and meteorologists from across the US are this week participating in a 100-hour livestream, which aims to raise awareness of their work as the government gears up for a major programme of cuts to federal science agencies. 

The broadcast runs day and night until Sunday afternoon on YouTube, with each speaker advised to dedicate their 30-45 minute session to presenting their research in layperson’s terms – with a mention of how it is or could be impacted by federal cuts to science. 

The online event comes after the Trump administration set out plans to halve NASA’s science budget and shrink the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA’s) funding by more than a quarter. 

The livestream will be rolling while NASA’s climate and space monitoring lab, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is moving out of its New York building on 31 May, after the federal government abruptly terminated the space agency’s lease. 

(The White House has also cancelled funding to the body that produces the country’s National Climate Assessment, blocked US scientists from attending Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change meetings and laid off hundreds of workers at the agency responsible for hurricane preparations.)

Speaking to Carbon Brief in a personal capacity, climate scientist and keynote speaker Dr Kate Marvel described the livestream event as a “fire hose of public engagement”. She added:

“It is scientists making the case to the people we work for. We work for the American people because we receive taxpayer dollars. It is really important for us to share our results, to explain to people why what we do is important and to help them see themselves in what we do.”

‘Climate science affects us all’

At 1:30am California time – 4:30am New York time – on Thursday morning, more than 750 people were tuned in to the livestream, and the comment section was lively. 

Some viewers shared words of encouragement – “not from the continent of America but still here to support!!! climate science affects us all!!!!” and “beautiful visualisations!”

Others focused on the science: “Look up the relationship between the Salton Sea and earthquakes – fascinating findings”, “does this mean misaligned storms have two different impacts on each level?” and “albedo effect [fire emoji]”. 

Livestream organiser Dr Margaret Duffy, who studies cloud dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the event’s “long format” is designed to underscore the “widespread” nature of the cuts. She told Carbon Brief:

“[It will] make clear that it’s not one or two programmes that are being cut, [nor] one or two researchers that are losing their funding. Researcher after researcher after researcher will explain what they do, and then make the connection to the cuts and what is happening to them.”

The audience is being pointed to materials to help them contact their political representatives about cuts to climate and weather research – but this is not an obligation, Duffy said, explaining that “at a very basic level, we just want to share with the public what it is that we do”.

Climate scientist Marvel commended the livestream organisers for “stepping up” amid much-justified “flailing” and “panic”, adding:

“We are not in normal times. There is a lot of fear and there’s a lot of reasons to be afraid. I think trouble may be coming for us – but we just need to make sure that we get in good trouble. [In other words] you shake things up, you maybe attract negative attention. Maybe it’s scary and maybe there are consequences. But ultimately, you are always going to be happy to have done the right thing.”

§ Watch, read, listen

WATER CRISIS: Atmos Earth looked at how changing rainfall patterns are impacting the lives of Palestinians already denied access to water. 

FRAGILE TEXTS: In a photo essay, Al Jazeera looked at how encroaching desert sands are threatening centuries-old manuscripts stored in Oualata, Mauritania.
LURCHING RIGHT: For Drilled, Amy Westervelt unpacked the structural issues in the US media hurting climate coverage.

§ Coming up

• 1 June: Round two of Poland’s presidential election
• 2-4 June: 8th Copernicus Climate Change Service general assembly, Valencia, Spain
• 4-7 June:Right here, right now global climate summit, Oxford, UK

§ Pick of the jobs

• Carbon Brief, summer internship | Salary: London living wage (£13.85 an hour). Location: London (hybrid)
• British Antarctic Survey, space weather scientist | Salary: £41,344-£45,479. Location: Cambridge, UK
• UN Development Programme,energy finance specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

§ Key developments

Climate leadership and cooperation

ENVOY REMARKS: Xinhua published an exclusive interview with Chinese climate envoy Liu Zhenmin, in which he spoke about how China-Europe cooperation could make a “positive contribution” to combating climate change. In the interview, Liu said that developed countries were “generally worried about who will share the responsibilities that the US should bear” after its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, adding that China “deeply regretted” the “shrinking space” for US-China climate cooperation. The outlet quoted Liu saying: “However, we must see that China and the US do not have fundamental differences in the field of climate change, but rather have broad space for cooperation.”

EU AMBIVELANCE: Meanwhile, the EU’s ambassador to China, Jorge Toledo, warned that the EU may not hold an expected “high-level economic [and] trade dialogue” with China in July, due to current negotiations over Chinese EV tariffs and supply chains “not making progress”, reported the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP). European countries, such as the Netherlands, France and Germany, on the other hand, have expressed interest in more collaboration in areas such as climate and the low-carbon transition, said state-supporting media the Global Times. Belinda Schäpe, China policy analyst at Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), nevertheless wrote on LinkedIn that while both China and Germany “expressed support” for tackling climate change, it is “unclear how this will translate into Germany’s position on cooperation in areas like energy transition or climate diplomacy”.

EARLY PEAK?: China’s emissions will “likely peak a few years ahead of its self-set deadline of 2030”, Bloomberg said, reporting comments by Zhu Guangyao, who was the country’s vice minister of finance from 2010-2018 and who cited analysis recently published by Carbon Brief. The outlet quoted Zhu saying: “It’s most likely China will realise the peak of carbon emissions a few years before 2030…That’s good news for China, also good news for Asia, for the whole world.” Meanwhile, the SCMP published a comment article by former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon on China’s “green energy leadership”. In the article, Ban called on China to target a 30% reduction in emissions below 2023 levels by 2035 in its next international climate pledge (nationally determined contribution, NDC).

New plan for ‘green’ manufacturing

‘GREEN TRANSFORMATION’: China’s central government approved an action plan for “advancing the green and low-carbon development” of the manufacturing sector between 2025 and 2027 at a State Council executive meeting, reported state news agency Xinhua. The full text of the action plan is not yet public. The meeting called for “deep[ening the] green transformation of traditional industries” while “accelerat[ing] innovation in green technologies”, added the outlet. The state-owned newspaper Securities Daily said that the policy extends “intensive” regulatory support and will affect a range of industries, including steel, metals and construction. About 20% of the “total output of China’s manufacturing industry” in 2024 had already come from “national-level green [factory] plants”, added the newspaper. (According to the “general principals” outlined by the Chinese government, such plants have tighter requirements on their emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.) 

RECTIFY THE ‘RAT RACE’: Meanwhile, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) commented on “neijuan” (内卷) – officially translated as “rat race competition” that leads to oversupply in affected industries, including clean energy, steel and oil refining, reported Xinhua. According to the newswire, the NDRC said at its May press conference that this “rat race” had “disrupted” fair competition and “must be rectified”. According to the NDRC transcript, government officials called for eliminating “inefficient and backward production capacity” in the oil refining and steel industries, “preventing blind new construction” in the coal chemical and aluminium industries, and “guiding” “new-energy vehicle” (NEV) and solar companies to “focus on technology research and development”. Nevertheless, the officials stated that the majority of the investments the NDRC had approved from January to April this year were still in the “energy” and “advanced technology” sectors, among others, reported Chinese media outlet Dazhong News. The NDRC also said its “two new” policy “stimulated green consumption” of products such as NEVs, according to the transcript. Separately, the production of NEVs rose by 39% in April, said the Communist party-affiliated People’s Daily, adding that China’s “shift toward intelligent and green development is gaining momentum”.

‘Record’ solar added as policy deadline looms

SOLAR RUSH: China installed a “record” 105 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity between January and April 2025, industry outlet PV Tech said, citing a recent data release by the National Energy Administration (NEA). It added that “April alone” accounted for 45GW of new additions – compared to a total of 46GW solar installations in China between January and March 2024 – as a deadline set by a new renewable pricing policy “triggered a project installation rush”. [Outside China, the US is the only country in the world to have more than 105GW of solar capacity in total. The UK has 18GW.]

THERMAL FALL: Analysis by thinktank Climate Energy Finance found that the amount of new solar installations between January and April was eight times larger than that of new thermal capacity (13GW, mainly coal). It added that China’s coal plants were only running 46% of the time on average in the first four months of 2025, saying that this was a “record low”. Similarly, Reuters reported that “thermal power generation in China, fuelled mainly by coal, fell 2% in April and 4% from January to April amid slower overall power output growth”. New data from energy thinktank Ember found that wind and solar power generated 26% of the country’s electricity in April 2025, the “highest monthly share on record”.

ROOFTOP ‘BOOM’: Meanwhile, separate data from consultancy Rystad Energy found that, of the 60GW of solar installed between January and March 2025, rooftop solar installations accounted for 36GW, marking the “highest quarterly total for distributed solar in [China’s] history”, solar news outlet PV Magazine reported. Industry news outlet SolarQuarter said that, according to Rystad Energy’s forecasts, the rooftop solar installation “boom” will continue through to June 2025, “potentially pushing total distributed solar capacity additions for the year to 130GW”. 

SOLAR CYBER SCARE: Reuters reported that the US government is “reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made” renewable energy components after “rogue communication devices not listed in product documents ha[d] been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by US experts”. The newswire added that it “was unable to determine how many solar power inverters and batteries they have looked at”. Following this, the Japanese government also “launched an investigation into Chinese-made solar panels”, reported SCMP. Tom Nunlist, associate director at consultancy firm Trivium China, wrote on LinkedIn that while “an industrial-scale plot to disrupt the US power grid” cannot be ruled out, it is “far more likely that we’re dealing with commonplace bill of materials errors”. He added that “given the atmosphere, I think there’s a good chance this will get blown way out of proportion”. Meanwhile, the industry association SolarPower Europe called for stronger cybersecurity rules for Europe’s clean-energy installations, following the discovery of “unexplained electronic components in imported circuit boards from an unnamed country destined for [Denmark’s] energy infrastructure”, PV Magazine said. It added that the “suspicious elements were not solar components”. 

Extreme weather sweeping across China

RAIN AND FLOODING: Four people were killed by “torrential rain” in Guizhou province in southwest China and 17 people remained missing, reported Reuters on 23 May. China is facing “hotter and longer heatwaves and more frequent and unpredictable heavy rain as a result of climate change” and its “huge population” made the country “especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, authorities have said”, added the outlet. 

EXTREME HEAT: Temperatures in north China reached as high as 43C in May, according to China Qixiang Aihaozhe, a popular scientific blog. State broadcaster CGTN reported that many places in the provinces of Henan and Hebei broke local temperature records for May and that ground temperatures in “multiple places” broke 70C on 20 May. The outlet noted that May is a “critical” period for maximising wheat harvest yields. Reuters reported that China disbursed 1.4bn yuan ($194m) for “agricultural production disaster prevention and relief”. Meanwhile, cooling demand from air conditioners could drive electricity demand to be about 100GW higher than last year, Bloomberg cited the NEA as saying. Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at CREA, posted on Bluesky that, even if this demand does disrupts the recent plateau in China’s emissions, the “structural trend” of clean-energy additions pushing overall emissions down will continue to drive reductions in the long-term. 

§ 68%

The share of China’s overseas energy investments that went to solar and wind projects between 2022-2023, reported Inside Climate News citing data from Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center. Only 13% of investments had gone into solar and wind from 2000-2021, added the outlet, noting that 2021 was the year that China pledged to stop funding overseas coal projects.

§ Spotlight 

What is China’s ‘Shenzhen model’ for city-level low-carbon transition? 

Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong that is known for pioneering China’s economic reforms, is leading the country in several carbon mitigation measures and is seen as a “pilot” for the construction of “low-carbon cities”.

Carbon Brief looks back at Shenzhen’s efforts to date and assesses its progress on carbon mitigation. The full article will be available on Carbon Brief’s website. 

Electric transportation

Since the 2000s, Shenzhen has developed strategies for “low-carbon development”. Part of this included nourishing the growth of a number of “strategic emerging industries”, such as “new-energy vehicles” (NEVs).

According to a government work report, Shenzhen – whose population makes up 1% of the country’s total – produced 22% of China’s NEVs in 2024. NEV also comprised 77% of the new car sales in Shenzhen last year, significantly higher than the national share of 48%. 

The city has also replaced all of its buses, taxis and ride-hailing cars with electric versions – the first city to have done so in China. 

Heran Zheng, lecturer in sustainable infrastructure economics and finance at University College London (UCL), told Carbon Brief that a city’s green transition mainly requires two focuses: “transport transition” and “industry decarbonisation”. 

With no major heavy industries, Shenzhen has an “advantage” in industry low-carbon transition, said Zheng, which allows it to set “more ambitious” emissions targets. 

Carbon control

Shenzhen was China’s “first city to explicitly state its commitment to the ‘dual control [of carbon]’ system”, according to Dialogue Earth. It issued two “implementation plans” towards this effort and developed a city-level carbon emissions cap.

Shenzhen plans to reduce its energy intensity by 14.5% before the end of 2025, compared to 2020 levels. The national energy intensity target is 13.5% during the same period. 

Zheng said that Shenzhen’s commitment “should be within its capacity”, adding: 

“There are three major carbon mitigation areas – steel, cement and electricity. Shenzhen has no major steel and cement industries, so it only needs to largely focus on electricity…In addition, the city is a technology hub. A lot of high-emission manufacturers have moved out of Shenzhen to its neighbouring cities.”

Another “big difference” between Shenzhen and other cities is that “Shenzhen has its own nuclear power”, said Zheng, which is “important” for the city’s electricity transition – the remaining sector that Shenzhen needs to put efforts on towards green transition.

Low-carbon energy

According to a 2021 report, nuclear power is Shenzhen’s “largest local power source”. It contributed 35% of the city’s total power generation in 2021. 

Nuclear dwarfs all the other clean energy sources feeding into the city’s grid. The Shenzhen local authority’s 2025 government work report says current solar power capacity stands at about 1GW – and it does not mention wind capacity.

Its “14th five-year plan for climate change response” says that Shenzhen’s renewable energy capacity has “little room” for future growth due to “scarce” energy resources and “limited” land for wind and solar power.

In 2024, China approved the construction of more nuclear reactors in Shenzhen’s neighbouring city of Huizhou. 

The Shenzhen government also aims to “raise the combined share of natural gas, nuclear and renewable energy to 90% in 2025, up from the current figure of 77%, which is noticeably ahead of the nationwide figure of 52%”, according to research published in 2022. 

‘Green finance’

Shenzhen was one of the first seven cities and provinces in China that established a local “pilot” emissions trading system (ETS) in 2013, ahead of the national rollout in 2021.

Yan Qin, carbon analyst at consultancy firm ClearBlue Markets, told Carbon Brief that despite Shenzhen’s plans to expand the coverage of its ETS, most pilot ETSs are seeing their coverage “shrinking” due to enterprises leaving to join the national ETS. 

In the meantime, Shenzhen issued China’s first overseas sales of “green government bonds” in 2021 in Hong Kong. In contrast, China’s national sovereign bonds were only available to international buyers from April 2025.

Zheng said that the impact of the green bonds is “hard to evaluate”. He added that projects, such as sewage treatment, can “also fall into the category of ‘green bonds’”. Although linked to energy efficiency improvement, they nonetheless make only “limited contributions” to cutting carbon emissions, he added.

‘Shenzhen model’ 

The local government and media outlets have touted the city’s achievements on climate as the “Shenzhen model”. 

But Shenzhen’s journey is not all “replicable”, said Shen Xinyi, analyst and China team lead at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), adding that “Shenzhen capitalised on the opportunities of its era”.

Zheng said Shenzhen can “only represent a [certain] type of city in China, the ‘top tier’, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou”. He added: 

“There are more than 300 cities in China, all facing unique transition situations. It is meaningless for coal-heavy industrial cities to learn from Shenzhen.”

Other cities must “adapt strategies according to their unique conditions”, Shen added. 

This report is by freelancing climate journalist Henry Zhang and Carbon Brief’s China section editor Wanyuan Song. 

§ Watch, read, listen

CRITICAL MINERALS: An episode of consulting firm Trivium China’s podcast discussed China’s critical mineral export controls. 

‘MARSHALL PLAN’?: Sam Geall, Dialogue Earth’s outgoing chief executive officer, published a comment on China’s new role amidst shifting “climate politics”. 

US-CHINA DECOUPLING: In an exclusive interview with Chinese financial media Caixin,  Huang Hanquan, dean of the Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research – a thinktank under the direct management of NDRC – said there are still “risks” in US-China decoupling. 

‘ZERO-CARBON’ PARKS: The 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese media outlet, published an interview with Chai Qimin, director of the International Cooperation Department at the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, a thinktank under the China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, talking about “zero-carbon industrial parks”. 

§ New science 

Peer effects on rural household carbon emissions in China

Scientific Reports

New research found that the “peer effect” – a phenomenon where an individual’s behavior and attitudes are influenced by their peers – has a “significant positive impact” on carbon emissions in rural China. The paper quantified emissions from rural Chinese households over 2012-20 using data from “China family panel studies” and “carbon emission accounts and datasets”. The authors found that carbon emissions from “low social status families” are influenced by those of “high social status families”. They added that the “peer effect has a relatively greater impact on the carbon emissions of farmers in the eastern region”.

The impact of carbon news coverage on corporate green transformation

Scientific Reports

A new study of Chinese companies found that “carbon news coverage significantly enhances the corporate green transformation”. The authors examined the effect of “carbon news coverage” on the green transformation of “Chinese A-share listed enterprises” over 2013-21. They found that “carbon news coverage” can help enterprises with their “green transition” by “alleviating financing constraints, strengthening environmental information disclosure and increasing R&D investment”. They added that “carbon emissions trading market and carbon news coverage serve as multiple co-regulations of formal and informal environmental regulation, synergistically advancing enterprises’ green transformation”.

China Briefing is compiled by Wanyuan Song and Anika Patel. It is edited by Wanyuan Song and Dr Simon Evans. Please send tips and feedback to china@carbonbrief.org 

§ Biological carbon pump

The ocean takes up and stores vast amounts of CO2 every year through two mechanisms known as “carbon pumps”.

The first is the “solubility pump”. This is the process by which dissolved CO2 in seawater is transported from the ocean’s surface to its depth through the sinking and upwelling of water mass.

The second is the “biological carbon pump”. This is the process where carbon is converted into organic materials by plankton and other marine organisms at the ocean’s surface and then transported to the deep sea when they die or migrate. 

Scientists have long known that the biological carbon pump played an essential role in maintaining low atmospheric CO2 levels before the industrial revolution.

However, the conventional view is that the solubility pump has been responsible for the ocean’s steady absorption of rising CO2 emissions caused by human activity.

Our findings challenge this view, by showing the biological carbon pump plays a crucial role in the modern ocean’s sequestration of atmospheric CO2.

We find that, without marine life, the ocean’s capacity to capture CO2 emissions would be significantly diminished.

§ Two scenarios 

To get an estimate of the contribution of the marine carbon pump in a stable pre-industrial climate, we simulate the planet’s climate as it was before the industrial era using a complex Earth system model.

(This is the second generation of the Norwegian Earth system model, which contributed to the sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project.)

We then explore what would happen to the Earth’s climate system under two scenarios:

• A reference, “healthy ocean” scenario where ocean biology conditions were as realistic as possible.
• An “abiotic” scenario where all marine life is removed. 

In a pre-industrial scenario with no marine life, we find that atmospheric CO2 levels would rise to 445 parts per million (ppm). This is an increase of more than 50% on the “healthy ocean” scenario, where CO2 levels are 282ppm.

(This suggests that the influence of marine life on global CO2 levels is greater than the sum of all human activity, which has – so far – raised atmospheric CO2 concentrations to around 425ppm).

The rise in CO2 levels caused by the absence of marine life would result in about 1.64C of global warming at the surface and a 1.15C increase in global sea surface temperature. 

This warming would have considerable impacts on the wider world, including declines in sea ice area at the Arctic and Antarctic of close to 25% and an Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation that was around 9% weaker.

The value of exploring such an extreme scenario is to investigate the role biological processes in the ocean play in carbon storage, as well as the implications of damage to marine life.

§ The role of terrestrial ecosystems

Our estimation that pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 would rise by 163ppm without ocean biology is on the lower end of the 150-240ppm range approximated by some previous studies.

However, previous estimates of the contribution of the biological carbon pump in a pre-industrial climate neglect the interactions between oceanic and terrestrial biospheres.

Our research reveals that terrestrial ecosystems – such as tropical forests and grasslands – play a crucial role in compensating for the increase in CO2 concentrations when ocean life declines. (This is due to the CO2 fertilisation effect, when higher CO2 concentrations speed up photosynthesis).  

We find that in the extreme pre-industrial scenario, approximately half the carbon lost from the ocean is absorbed by the land. 

The figure below illustrates the Earth’s carbon reservoirs in a pre-industrial climate with (left) and without (right) marine life. It shows how, if marine life is wiped out, carbon content decreases in the ocean and marine sediment, whereas more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere and on land.

§ Ramifications for the future

Today, the ocean captures approximately 25% of human-caused CO2 emissions – which allows it to play a crucial role in slowing global warming. 

In order to estimate the overall importance of marine life to carbon sequestration in the ocean, we also conduct experiments for various future emission pathways – both with, and without, marine life. 

In all cases, we find that more CO2 emitted by human activities remains in the atmosphere when there is no marine life.

One might think that the ocean’s lower concentrations of carbon in the pre-industrial climate, relative to the atmosphere, might mean it would be able to absorb more additional carbon. 

However, we find the absence of marine life fundamentally alters the vertical distribution of carbon in the ocean. Although the total amount of carbon stored is lower, there is more carbon at the surface due to an absence of organisms. This, in turn, hinders additional CO2 from entering the ocean. 

Another surprising finding of the simulations was that the terrestrial biosphere’s capacity to absorb excess CO2 by increasing its vegetation mass diminishes over time, potentially due to limited nutrients. 

The figure below shows the distribution of human-caused CO2 in the Earth’s carbon reservoirs under two 2100 scenarios. The chart on the left shows a scenario with ocean life, and the chart on the right shows one without ocean biology.

It illustrates how, without marine life, more CO2 stays in the atmosphere and less goes into the land and the ocean. 

The study shows that in the absence of marine life, future warming would occur faster and more intensely. 

This acceleration in warming would potentially trigger other processes that could further amplify warming, such as greater ocean stratification, longer sea-ice free Arctic summers and greater loss of permafrost.

§ Economic benefits 

Damaging marine life is economically costly given the many and various benefits – or “ecosystem services” – provided by carbon sequestration.

We estimate that the sinking of organic matter sequesters approximately 2.8bn tonnes of carbon annually, locking it away from the atmosphere for at least 50 years. 

This carbon sequestration capacity is equivalent to 10bn tonnes of atmospheric CO2 – or roughly 27% of emissions generated by fossil fuels in 2024.  

We estimate – based on a carbon price of $90 per tonne of CO2 – that the carbon storage provided by the marine carbon pump is worth $545bn per year in international waters and $383bn per year within national waters. Its total value is projected to exceed $2.2tn by 2030. 

Carbon storage is valuable because it helps avoid climate impacts.

This economic value is important for developing countries, particularly small island developing states whose national waters are collectively responsible for 11% of biological carbon pump sequestration activity, in terms of carbon stored.

The top eight countries where the biological carbon pump value is highest in proportion to gross domestic product (GDP) are small island states. These are the Cook Islands, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu. Of these nations, just one – the Cook Islands – is classified by the World Bank as high income. 

These climate-impacted nations’ key role in preserving ocean health should be considered in discussions of international climate finance. 

The figure below shows the economic value of carbon sequestration of the biological carbon pump for each of these eight small island states, calculated on the basis of a carbon price of $90 per tonne of CO2. 

For example, it illustrates how Micronesia and Kiribati have an estimated biological carbon pump value of $4,620m and $8,525m each year, respectively.  

A healthy ocean buys the world time in the battle against global warming, but the window to protect it is closing rapidly. 

Marine ecosystems remain vulnerable to a raft of human activities, including industrial fishing, pollution, shipping and deep-sea mining. Stronger conservation policies, enhanced financial incentives for lower income countries and increased international cooperation are essential to protect the services provided by ecosystems. 

These are important steps towards not only protecting 30% of the global ocean as agreed under the new Global Biodiversity Framework – but it will help to reach the Paris Agreement’s climate target.

There are a number of tools at governments disposal to protect the valuable services provided by marine ecosystems. This includes promoting sustainable fishing and ecotourism, establishing marine protected areas and undertaking robust environmental impact assessments. 

Nations can also support protection of the biological heat pump within international waters by ratifying the High Seas Treaty, which recognises the importance of protecting biogeochemical cycles.

§ Why are UK electricity prices so high?

In the months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, global gas prices had already started to rise as the global economy bounced back from the Covid pandemic and Russian president Vladimir Putin began restricting energy supplies to Europe.

In the wake of its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia then cut off the bulk of gas deliveries to Europe, having previously been the continent’s biggest source of the fuel.

Gas prices rocketed – and so did the UK’s energy bills. Millions of households were left in fuel poverty, despite the government spending £100bn on support to alleviate the pressure.

While gas prices have subsided from their historic highs in 2022, as of May 2025, they remain three times higher than they were before the global energy crisis.

As such, despite all of the media commentary and politicians’ speeches arguing the contrary, the UK’s exposure to high gas prices is still, by far, the biggest reason for the country’s high electricity prices.

(In 2022, International Energy Agency (IEA) chief Dr Fatih Birol wrote in the Financial Times that it was “absurd” to blame high prices on clean energy. He added: “When people misleadingly blame clean energy and climate policies for today’s energy crisis they are, intentionally or not, moving the spotlight away from the real culprits – the gas supply crunch and Russia.”)

The figure below shows the price cap for household electricity bills set by energy regulator Ofgem, breaking down the different elements of average household costs over the past decade.

The biggest driver of recent increases in electricity bills is the wholesale price of electricity, which is set in the UK almost exclusively by wholesale gas prices (see below).

Consequently, the spike in electricity bills shown by the dark blue area in the figure below is a reflection of the spike in gas prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In contrast, “green levies” – costs added to bills in order to pay for government climate policies – actually fell during the height of the gas price spike, as the dark grey area of the chart shows. They are currently only marginally above pre-crisis levels.

In recognition of these basic facts, the UK’s prime minister Keir Starmer has reiterated the link between high energy bills and the country’s exposure to fossil-fuel prices.

The UK’s households and businesses have “paid the price” for “our over-exposure” to fossil fuels, he told an energy security summit in London at the end of April 2025, attended by Carbon Brief and jointly hosted by the UK government and the IEA.

Starmer told the summit that half the UK’s recessions since the 1970s had been caused by “fossil-fuel shocks” and that his government was “determined” to get the country off the “roller-coaster of international fossil-fuel markets” by shifting to clean energy:

“When it comes to energy, we’re also paying the price for our over-exposure, over many years, to the roller-coaster of international fossil-fuel markets, leaving the economy and therefore peoples’ household budgets vulnerable to the whims of dictators like [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, to price hikes, and to volatility that is beyond our control.”

Under the latest price cap from Ofgem, the average household now faces an electricity bill of £926 per year, up from £603 before the energy crisis – a rise of 54%.

Two-fifths of the current cap is made up of wholesale costs (38%), one-fifth from network charges (22%), plus another one-fifth from green levies (15%) and social policies (4%). The final fifth of the bill is made up of operating costs (14%), profits (2%) and other items.

The biggest change in these costs has come from the spike in wholesale energy costs.

Other elements of household electricity bills have also gone up over the past decade, including network charges and levies. (See: What has driven the rise in UK household electricity bills?)

However, the gradual rises in these other costs have been overwhelmed in recent years by the huge spike in wholesale power prices driven by expensive gas.

One common objection to these facts is that gas prices have been equally eye-watering in other European countries, but their electricity prices have not been quite so affected as the UK’s.

Whereas the UK once had middling power prices relative to other European countries, it has risen up the ranks to post some of the continent’s costliest electricity per unit.

(Figures comparing electricity prices in European capital cities in April 2025 put the UK fourth, whereas France is close to the continental average.)

The biggest reason for this rise in the UK’s relative prices is the fact that its power system is far more exposed to gas-fired generation than other countries.

Specifically, gas sets the wholesale price of electricity in the UK 98% of the time, according to academic research published in 2023. This is far more often than in other European countries, including France (7%) or Germany (24%), as shown in the figure below.

The UK’s electricity market operates using a system known as “marginal pricing”. This means that all of the power plants running in each half-hour period are paid the same price, set by the final generator that has to switch on to meet demand, which is known as the “marginal” unit.

While this is unfamiliar to many people, marginal pricing is far from unique to the UK’s electricity market. It is used in most electricity markets in Europe and around the world, as well as being widely used in commodity markets in general.

Still, the UK’s current electricity mix means that gas is almost always the marginal fuel, even though it only accounts for a third of generation overall.

(In contrast, the marginal fuel in many other European countries is hydro. In France, it tends to be nuclear, while in Germany it is split between coal, gas and hydro.)

The result is that the UK’s wholesale electricity prices track wholesale gas prices almost perfectly, as shown in the figure below.

In summary, the UK electricity system is far more heavily exposed to gas prices than those of other European countries and, consequently, its power prices have been hit harder by the energy crisis.

Prof Rob Gross, director of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), tells Carbon Brief:

“I think the bottom line on it all is that we are particularly exposed to gas prices…That’s the principal driver of our [electricity] prices.”

Energy UK chief Vyas said in a recent statement that “it’s the volatile cost of fossil fuels and our dependence on them that have driven up energy bills for customers”.

In comments to Carbon Brief for this article, Vyas expands on the point, explaining how the UK’s exposure to imported fossil fuels has left it worse off than its neighbours:

“Our electricity prices are high largely because our energy system depends on imported gas – and because of the extent to which that gas sets the price for electricity. This is what has driven UK bills to record levels in recent years – and why, despite falling from that peak, they remain high compared to three years ago. It’s also largely why our energy costs are higher than our European counterparts.”

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§ What has driven the rise in UK household electricity bills?

Since 2021, the household electricity price cap set by regulator Ofgem has risen from £603 per year for average households to £926 per year – an increase of £324, or 54%.

Some £162 of the increase is due to wholesale costs, which have roughly doubled over the period.

Put another way, the UK has spent £140bn on buying gas since the start of the global energy crisis, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

Vyas tells Carbon Brief:

“It’s crystal clear what has driven bills up in the UK. If you look at any data about our energy bills over the last 5 years – every single time it’s the wholesale costs, driven by the price of gas, that pushes bills up or down. The policy costs on bills (sometimes referred to as green levies) hardly shift.”

Underneath the large spike in wholesale power costs due to the “roller coaster” of international gas markets, there have also been steady increases in policy and network charges in recent years. This includes the “green levies” that support the expansion of the UK’s clean energy supplies.

Specifically, some £63 has been added to bills since 2021 as a result of rising network charges, another £18 from “green levies” and £65 from other sources.

(Notably, as explained below, part of the rise in network charges is also due to high gas prices.)

This means that network charges and “green levies” account for 20% and 6% of the rise since pre-crisis levels, respectively, compared with 54% due to higher wholesale prices.

These contributions to the increase in electricity bills since 2021 are shown in the figure below.

As explained above, the driver of higher wholesale electricity costs is high gas prices, with the fuel remaining three times more expensive than before the global energy crisis.

In contrast, “green levies” have gone from £118 per year in summer 2021 to £137 today. As bills rose dramatically in this period, the share due to green levies has dropped from 20% to just 15%.

The small rise in green levies is due to a £22 inflationary increase in the cost of the “renewables obligation” (RO) scheme, which closed to new projects in 2017. The RO currently adds £89 per year to average household electricity bills, some 10% of the total.

Ironically, this means that the cost of renewable support has risen, at least in part, because of high gas prices, which have contributed to higher-than-expected inflationary pressures.

The RO still supports around 30% of UK electricity supplies, but the first tranche of 15-year contracts will come to an end from 2027, meaning the cost will fall over time.

In 2023, the then-Conservative government sought views on changing the measure of inflation used to calculate the RO each year from the “technically deficient” index known as “RPI”, to the lower “CPI”. However, this shift was not pursued.

The cost of renewables that hold newer “contracts for difference” (CfDs) has actually fallen by £5 per household per year since before the energy crisis – from £32 to £27 – despite supporting more capacity than four years ago.

This is because CfDs offer a fixed price for each unit of electricity generated. As wholesale prices have climbed, the top-up needed to meet this fixed price has fallen. CfDs currently account for less than 3% of average electricity bills, down from 5% before the crisis.

In total, the RO and CfDs currently add around £10bn a year to end-user electricity bills, of which households account for around a third. This amounts to £116 per household per year.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts that the combined cost of the RO and CfDs will rise by 3% between now and the end of the decade, from £9.6bn to £9.9bn.

Current electricity bills also include £20 to pay for “feed-in tariffs” (FiTs), which were offered to small-scale renewable schemes until 2019. This is up by £2 per year since before the crisis.

FiTs also rise with inflation, but, as with the RO, the scheme is closed to new projects. This means costs will fall over time as the oldest installations see their contracts coming to an end.

The cost of government social policies adds another £36 to average electricity bills, up £18 since summer 2021 due to higher spending on insulating the homes of families on low incomes.

This type of spending had been falling until 2019, after the then-Conservative government tried to lower energy bills from 2013 by “cutting the green crap”. Although these efforts reduced bills in the short term, they ended up adding £22bn to bills in the long term, previous Carbon Brief analysis found, because they left homes more exposed to the spike in gas prices during the energy crisis.

Vyas tells Carbon Brief:

“For well over a decade, investors have been telling us they want to see ambition and certainty from government. Taking a ‘boom and bust’ approach, where policy and direction of travel keep changing, adds costs to everyone’s bills. For example, the infamous move to ‘cut the green crap’ cost customers in this country billions of pounds, as Carbon Brief has demonstrated.”

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§ Why network charges on electricity bills are going up

Alongside wholesale prices, network charges have also seen significant increases since before the global energy crisis, as noted above. These charges have risen by £63 from £136 a year in summer 2021 to £198 today, up by nearly 50%.

The figure below breaks down the £200 cost of network charges per household per year.

Some £115 of this – 13% of bills – is earmarked for “distribution” networks, which deliver electricity to households and businesses at lower voltages. This segment has seen the largest increase of all network charges, adding £25 per year.

Next is the national “transmission” network, at £51, which moves electricity around the country on towering pylons carrying high-voltage lines – sometimes referred to as the “motorways of the grid”. While these costs have risen by more than half since 2021, this still only added an extra £18 to bills each year.

The third component is grid balancing, which reflects the costs of making sure that supply and demand are perfectly matched at all times. This has soared from £12 a year in 2021 to £32 today.

Many articles on the UK’s high electricity bills have said that rising network charges are due to the cost of managing and expanding the grid to cope with new, variable wind and solar generation.

While major investments are being made in the grid, the rise in network charges is not all it seems. Indeed, parts of these increases are also due to high gas prices.

For example, the cost of bailing out the dozens of electricity retailers that went out of business during the energy crisis – ultimately, as a result of high gas prices – is being paid for by households and is included within distribution network charges under the Ofgem price cap.

The amounts being added to bills to pay for these bailouts, within each of the price-cap periods shown in the figure above, is not routinely disclosed by Ofgem.

However, in 2022, Ofgem said that £66 was being added to household bills to pay for these failures under a scheme known as the “supplier of last resort” (SoLR). This aligns with the first hump in the figure above – and the second hump likely relates to further SoLR costs.

For grid balancing costs, there is a similar story, because high gas prices make it more expensive to manage the electricity system.

National Grid Electricity System Operator (NESO) sometimes pays gas power plants to switch on – and these “redispatch” instructions are more expensive as a result of high gas prices.

NESO explains that balancing costs are “strongly in correlation to the wholesale spot electricity markets and [therefore] dependent on the natural gas market”.

A gas-related bump in balancing costs is clearly evident in the figure above.

There have been two other important drivers of rising balancing costs. First, an increase in the number of balancing actions that NESO needs to take, mainly relating to “constraints” on the network that result in wind projects being paid to switch off – known as curtailment.

Constraint costs have risen because grid capacity has not kept pace with the number of new wind power projects being built, particularly in Scotland.

A series of new grid connections are being built between Scotland and England, which will add to transmission charges while cutting balancing costs.

The second additional factor for balancing charges is that, since 2023, consumers have paid for 100% of these costs, whereas they were previously shared equally with electricity generators.

Despite their rapid recent rise, balancing charges still only add £32 a year to average household electricity bills, including the much–publicised cost of wind constraint payments.

One analyst tells Carbon Brief:

“I know people make a great fuss about constraint payments…it sounds like a big number. It’s actually not, in terms of its impact on bills.”

A final important factor in rising network charges is that the UK’s electricity networks are ageing and require significant ongoing investment in order to replace old equipment before it fails.

(For example, the substation fire that closed Heathrow airport earlier this year started in a transformer that had been commissioned in 1968, making it 57 years old.)

Moreover, grid operators have been allowed to increase their investments in recent years, partly in order to make up for previous periods of what a select committee report called “under-investment”.

The 2003 report, on the resilience of the electricity network, said that customers at the time had been “living off the investment made by [their] predecessors” and that there was “insufficient investment” to replace old equipment “in a planned and orderly way”.

Similarly, a 2009 Ofgem report on energy network price controls found that distribution network operators “may not have been carrying out the investment required to maintain” the grid.

Gross tells Carbon Brief:

“My suspicion is that the investment to facilitate renewables being connected to the grid is a pretty small fraction of that increase [in network charges]…I think [a lot of it is] the legacy of maybe…squeezing and minimising expenditures in the immediate post-privatisation period.”

To be clear, it remains the case that major investments are being made in expanding the grid – and that these investments will, ultimately, be paid for via consumer electricity bills.

Yet, to take one example, expanding the distribution network to support the electrification of heat and transport will add just £5-10 to annual household bills by 2030 and £20-25 by 2050, according to a February 2025 report from the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), now part of the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority.

The relatively low annual cost increase to households is despite these investments totalling as much as £50bn, according to NIC. (This is a good illustration of the way that “scary-sounding numbers” can be used to mislead people about the “cost” of the transition to net-zero.)

Moreover, NIC expects household energy bills to drop significantly overall by 2035, even as electricity network charges rise. (It sees the average dual-fuel bill for electricity and gas falling from just shy of £2,000 a year in 2019 to around £1,300 by 2035 and to less than £1,200 by 2050.)

In broader terms, rising levies and network charges illustrate the changing nature of electricity bills – and energy bills more broadly – as the UK shifts towards net-zero.

Historically, fuel costs have accounted for the bulk of energy bills, including not only household gas and electricity, but also the cost of motoring.

In a net-zero future, fuel costs would be massively reduced, as gas for heat and power, as well as petrol in cars, are progressively replaced with more efficient electrified alternatives.

Notably, this means that part of the cost of upgrading, decarbonising and expanding the UK’s electricity system would translate into major savings in the cost of UK transport.

This transition carries upfront capital costs to build new clean power sources, as well as the infrastructure needed to connect them to consumers and to manage their variable output.

However, the cost of these upfront investments will be spread over many years. Moreover, they are ultimately expected to pay dividends via lower operating costs (See: What will the UK’s climate goals mean for bills in the future?)

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§ What about UK industrial electricity prices?

The UK’s industrial electricity prices have also been a prominent fixture in the debate over why energy costs have become so high, particularly following the latest crisis in steelmaking.

In November 2024, the Financial Times had published a chart showing that industrial electricity prices in the UK in 2023 were far higher than in any other country listed.

The idea that the UK’s industrial power prices are among the “highest in the world” has now become firmly embedded in the political discourse.

Yet this discourse frequently ignores the dominant role of gas in driving high prices.

In her March 2025 speech abandoning Conservative support for the UK’s net-zero by 2050 target, opposition leader Kemi Badenoch misleadingly blamed high power prices on climate policies in general and “environmental levies” in particular.

The debate around industrial power prices was supercharged at the end of March with the news that the owner of the Scunthorpe steelworks, British Steel, planned to shut it down.

After the closure was averted by a government takeover, an April editorial in the Daily Telegraph illustrated the tenor of much of the commentary in right-leaning, climate-sceptic newspapers by confidently blaming the crisis on “sky-high energy costs imposed by successive governments in the name of net-zero”.

Like so many others debating the UK’s high industrial electricity prices, the editorial failed to even mention the word “gas”, let alone acknowledge its role in driving up costs.

In reality, the UK steel industry is completely exempt from “environmental levies” and – under the government’s “supercharger” scheme – it also gets relief from the majority of network costs.

While the UK steel industry still faces higher electricity prices than its counterparts in the likes of France or Germany, this is almost entirely down to expensive gas driving up UK wholesale prices.

Indeed, as UK Steel explained in a recent report, environmental levies have a smaller impact on steel industry electricity bills in the UK than in neighbouring countries.

Frank Aaskov, director, energy and climate change policy at UK Steel, tells Carbon Brief that the debate around industrial energy costs since the start of the global energy crisis has been “poorly informed”, adding that that is “probably a bit of an understatement”.

Some actors have been “willingly misinforming others” by blaming net-zero for the problems in the steel industry, says Aaskov, adding that other factors are “much more important”. He says:

“Net-zero, in itself, is not the cause of the decline in the steel industry. There are much more important factors, such as global overcapacity, [as well as] inflexible and unambitious trade policies.”

While Aaskov identifies high industrial electricity prices as a “key factor” for the sector, he says that “today, it’s not net-zero policies” that are causing those prices to be high. He says:

“Today, [net-zero policies] are not the driver of high industrial electricity prices in the UK. It is higher network charges – because we have lower exemptions than there are in Germany and France – and it’s the cost of natural gas, which is driving the higher wholesale price.”

Aaskov says attempts to blame net-zero are “unhelpful to the steel industry, especially because we as a sector have committed to decarbonising, our members are making huge investments in reducing emissions and Port Talbot is the key example of that”.

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§ How could UK electricity prices be cut?

Ever since the start of the global energy crisis in 2022, debate has been raging over how to get spiralling energy bills under control.

The spike in gas prices put the spotlight on its role in setting wholesale power prices via marginal pricing, leading some people to call for electricity market reform.

In April 2022, the then-Conservative government launched a “review of electricity market arrangements”, known by its acronym REMA. It ran the first consultation in July that year. 

Although the review was much broader in scope, it was presented as a way to tackle high electricity prices and – potentially – to decouple them from the high price of gas.

In the foreword of the first REMA consultation, then-energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said that the electricity markets will be the “backbone” of the future electricity system, so it is “critical” to get the design right. He added: 

“The last major programme of electricity market reform was 10 years ago and left some key parts of our market structure unchanged from the time when fossil fuels were the dominant source of energy; it is time to look again at whether they are fit for purpose, or whether reform is needed to deliver a clean, secure and low-cost energy system for consumers.”

The consultation explained that, while the use of marginal pricing left UK wholesale power prices “closely track[ing] gas prices”, the impact of this would “naturally diminish over time” as the share of generation coming from gas declined and that of clean power increased.

Still, it set out a number of options for explicitly breaking the link between wholesale power prices and the price of gas, such as a market that was “split by characteristic”, or that offered generators a price reflecting their own costs, rather than that of the marginal unit (“pay-as-bid”).

A summary of the responses to this consultation was published in March 2023, with the government deciding to rule out a number of options – including “pay-as-bid” – shown in the figure below. 

A second consultation followed in March 2024, with the results published alongside the REMA autumn update in December 2024. 

This narrowed the options still further, including ruling out both the “green power pool” and split market options, both of which would have created a separate market for renewables. 

This means that, while there are numerous options within REMA that are still being considered, breaking the link between wholesale power prices and the price of gas is no longer on the table. 

The core final decision within REMA is now between reforming the current national wholesale market, where this is a single price for wholesale electricity across the country, or switching to a regional market split into a number of zones with their own prices.

Both options would continue to use marginal pricing, whether at national or regional level. The switch to “zonal” pricing has been made in numerous markets in recent years, including Ontario, Italy, Denmark and Australia. It is also being considered in Germany.

In the UK, the “bruising” question around whether to adopt zonal prices is seen as the “most hotly contested aspect” of REMA and has become an “energy death-match”.

As such, despite the role of gas in wholesale power prices continuing to be the biggest driver of high electricity bills, it has come to dominate the discussion around market reform. 

Those who support zonal prices have claimed it would more closely reflect local supply and demand conditions, ultimately leading to a more efficient electricity system, as well as helping to cut network costs.

Analysis by the Energy Systems Catapult suggests that it would save £30bn by 2035, while a study by FTI Consulting for Octopus Energy found that it could save consumers between £55bn and £74bn by 2050.

Octopus Energy and its CEO, Greg Jackson, are some of the most vocal proponents of zonal pricing. Jackson and supporters argue that while it is true that wholesale prices and CfD payments would increase under a zonal system – by £35bn and £15bn, respectively, over 25 years – these would be more than offset by a drop in constraint costs and “congestion rents” of £40bn and £65bn. 

The impact on constraint costs is a core pillar of the argument for zonal. However, grid balancing costs overall – including constraints – currently only make up 4% of electricity bills. (See: Why are UK electricity prices so high?)

The shift to zonal pricing is also supported by key organisations such as Ofgem, NESO and Citizens Advice. 

However, there is also a long list of groups that are strongly opposed to zonal pricing, including Renewable UK, energy intensive industries and many individual energy firms.

A consultation response from Energy UK says that while a “minority” of its members favour zonal pricing, “the majority prefer further exploration of alternatives”.

These organisations have mustered numerous studies of their own, which they say show that zonal pricing could dent investment and could, as a result, even raise costs for consumers.

In the public realm, the main criticisms of zonal prices focus on the potential for it to create a “postcode lottery” for consumers and to create uncertainty – and higher costs – for investors in the clean power capacity needed to hit UK targets. 

For example, a report prepared by consultants LCP Delta for energy company SSE found that zonal pricing could increase wholesale prices across 97% of the country. Its research suggested a drop in wholesale costs would only be seen in Northern Scotland.

(Advocates for zonal argue that these higher wholesale costs would be outweighed by lower costs for building and managing the electricity network.)

Recent research by consultancy Afry, summarised in the screenshot below, suggests that the savings from a shift to zonal pricing are “overestimated” and that risks, such as higher borrowing costs, could mean it translated into an increase in energy bills overall.

Jane Cooper, deputy CEO at trade body RenewableUK, said in a statement that people in England and Wales are “rightly worried” about zonal pricing creating a postcode lottery, adding: 

“This scheme would create so much uncertainty in our electricity market that it could disrupt investment in vital new clean-energy projects and push up their costs, at the very time when we need to start building at pace to deliver the government’s target of clean power by 2030. We’re urging ministers to rule out zonal pricing as soon as possible and to focus on policy decisions which do not undermine the confidence of investors.”

(Analysis by Cornwall Insight highlights that there is already a “postcode lottery” of sorts, with households in London paying £120 less than those in north Wales and Merseyside over the coming year. This is to do with the variation in the regional distribution network charges added to bills. The figures in the sections above are national averages.) 

Modelling from UKERC found that zonal pricing could increase strike prices in the next CfD auction by up to £20 per megawatt hour (MWh), as investors seek to factor in the associated risk. It found that higher prices in the CfD auctions could increase consumer costs by £3bn a year. 

Non-profit Regen highlighted that the £55bn savings over 20 years, as suggested by FTI, only equates to around £31 per household per year, if applied evenly across current demand.

Ultimately, the debate around the benefits of zonal prices continues, with many aspects of the exact design of such a system – for example, how many zones there would be – still undecided.  

The government is expected to make a decision on whether to switch to zonal power pricing ahead of the seventh CfD allocation round in summer 2025, to minimise the impact on renewable energy investment by providing greater certainty. 

Zonal was chosen over nodal in part because it would be simpler to implement, with the government estimating in 2023 that this would take about 18 months. (It is not clear if this 18-month timeline includes consultation, such as on the number of zones.)

Subsequently, the government has told industry that a shift to zonal pricing would not be put in place until 2032, according to RenewableUK. 

This is supported by recent analysis from consultants Cornwall Insight, which suggests that a shift to zonal would take closer to five years, until the mid-2030s. 

In a statement, Kate Mulvany, principal consultant at Cornwall Insight, said:

“The government’s commitment to a decision by mid-2025 is welcome. But we must be realistic: this is the start of a long road, not the finish line. Clear, early communication and a credible delivery timeline will be essential to retain market confidence, keep renewables investment and avoid unintended consequences, which could have substantial impacts on government targets. 

“Zonal pricing may still form part of the long-term vision for electricity market reform. But, for now, its delivery sits firmly in the next decade.”

With zonal pricing – and any associated changes in the costs of the electricity system – unlikely to kick in before the next election in 2029, the hunt for options to cut bills more quickly continues.

However, there are currently no mechanisms in place that would guarantee a reduction in energy bills in the short term, according to Energy UK, meaning potential reductions would only be possible if the gas wholesale market tumbles. 

Gross says: “We could all cross our fingers and hope that the global price of gas will collapse over the next few years…[But] it’s definitely not a great energy-security strategy for the long term.”

In a recent report, Energy UK identified a number of ways the government could lower electricity bills during the current parliament, listed in the table below.

These can be categorised into optimising the energy system, investing public money in a “strategic and targeted way” and capitalising on the benefits of a smarter, more flexible host of technologies in the energy sector.  

For example, Energy UK says that households with equipment such as a battery, a heat pump or an electric vehicle (EV), could save £115 per year if changes are made to maximise flexibility. This might mean charging the EV at night or warming the house in advance of periods with high electricity prices.

Additionally, it says flexibility could be used to reduce the need to build out networks and power stations to meet peak demand, potentially reducing the need for investment by £3.5bn. 

(Following Energy UK releasing this advice, the UK and EU have signed a new energy cooperation deal. This includes exploring UK participation in the EU’s electricity trading platforms, because, “since we left the EU, we have traded electricity inefficiently, adding costs and friction”.)

The single-biggest way the government could reduce electricity bills would be to remove some or all of the policy costs they currently include – a total of £173 for the average household.

These costs could be paid for via general taxation, which is split more fairly between households on different incomes, or the government could “rebalance” bills by shifting levies onto gas.

At present, gas faces an implicit subsidy because resulting CO2 emissions do not face a carbon price. However, raising gas bills could have implications for fuel poverty, even if power prices drop.

Many other organisations have looked at how bills could be “rebalanced”, given that the UK’s net-zero target relies heavily on increased use of electricity and reduced reliance on gas. Many of these analyses examine options to ensure fuel-poor households are not disadvantaged.

Further options for cutting bills, beyond those considered by Energy UK, have been proposed by a number of other groups.

A recent report by thinktank Common Wealth, for example, suggested that gas power plants should be nationalised, in order to prevent owners holding the electricity market “to ransom”. 

One final possibility is that bills could drop as a result of falling gas prices. The latest forecast from Cornwall Insight suggests that there will already be a small 7% drop in the Ofgem price cap from 1 July, as a result of slightly cheaper gas.

EU gas use is set to fall in the coming years, meaning that available supply could exceed demand by 43% by 2030 and 42% by 2040, according to projections from the European Commission.

At the same time, the IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook noted that analysts are expecting a glut of liquified natural gas (LNG) on the global market, as projects in the pipeline come on stream.

On top of this, US president Donald Trump is pushing for an even faster expansion of LNG exports, which could see European gas prices going down by up to 9% by 2030, according to November 2024 analysis from Aurora.

Cornwall Insight forecasts power prices will fall between 2024 and 2030, predominantly due to ample gas storage levels in Europe for the winter, alleviating previous supply security concerns  – although they expect prices to remain higher than the pre-crisis 2021 levels. 

Moreover, gas prices remain at the whims of geopolitical disruption and a drop cannot be taken as a guarantee. In Cornwall Insight’s most recent power price forecast, Dr Craig Lowrey, principal consultant at the organisation, said: 

“We mustn’t get ahead of ourselves. While prices are falling, recent patterns show the impact that wholesale market volatility can have on bills in the space of just a few days. The UK’s heavy reliance on energy imports – particularly gas – combined with ongoing geopolitical tensions, ensure household bills remain highly vulnerable to sudden shocks.

“To secure the UK’s energy future and drive down costs for good, we must break free from volatile international markets and fast-track the transition to renewables.”

Despite the clear impact of gas on UK power prices and energy security – and the lack of any evidence to suggest it would be good for bills – several prominent politicians have recently called for a slower transition to renewable energy. (See: What will the UK’s climate goals mean for bills in the future?)

Paul Drummond, climate and environment research lead at asset manager Redwheel, tells Carbon Brief that sticking with gas would leave the UK exposed. He says:

“We wouldn’t be solving any of the problems we have now. We’re still going to be significantly reliant on the gas price setting the power price – and as we’ve seen in the last few years, that has been highly volatile. That volatility in itself is a cost. It’s uncertain. So we wouldn’t change the situation we’re in now, which is not a great position to be in.”

Beyond household energy bills, Energy UK has produced a list of recommendations for reducing electricity prices for non-domestic users. This includes shifting legacy policy costs and Climate Change Levy payments away from electricity bills, among other actions. 

Additionally, the government is reportedly looking at plans to help shield industry from “sky-high energy costs in what is expected to be the centrepiece of Keir Starmer’s vaunted new industrial strategy”, according to the Financial Times. 

The industrial strategy is set to be published in June. 

A coalition of manufacturers, investors and climate groups recently called on chancellor Rachel Reeves to move policy costs, which would include green levies, off electricity prices and into general taxation. They argued that this would cut business energy costs by up to 15% and household bills by up to £370 per year.

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§ What will the UK’s climate goals mean for bills in the future?

At the heart of debates over the causes of high electricity prices are different views on the future path of the UK’s energy system.

The UK’s Labour government is targeting a “fully decarbonised” power system by 2030, setting a goal for clean sources to meet 100% of domestic demand and account for at least 95% of electricity generation in the country. 

To reach these targets, it has laid out plans for a massive expansion of wind and solar power, along with steep increases in energy storage capacity and flexible low-carbon generation. 

The government’s 2024 plan suggests it would require a programme of investment in clean power and associated infrastructure worth around £40bn per year until the end of the decade. 

During campaigning and after being elected last summer, the Labour party had stated that this transition to clean electricity would save “up to £300” on household energy bills. 

More recently, however, the party has gone quiet on this specific number. Speaking at an event run by the UK government and the IEA in April, energy secretary Ed Miliband said: 

“Our vision of low-carbon power goes well beyond the climate imperative – important as that is. Homegrown low-carbon power is our nationally chosen route to energy security.  Solar power, wind power, tidal, geothermal, nuclear power – also an essential part of the low carbon opportunity.  These are often unlimited, low-cost power supplies which we can exploit for the benefit of our citizens.”

While the short-term picture is relatively uncertain, there is credible analysis to suggest that the government’s push for clean power will leave bills lower than or consistent with their current levels.

In its Clean Power 2030 report on reaching clean power by 2030, system operator NESO highlights that the overall cost to consumers “would not increase as a result of the move to a clean power system”.

Instead, it says that the much-reduced role for gas in a clean power system would be responsible for an increasingly small percentage of the wholesale costs protecting the country from price swings, the operator notes. 

In one of the scenarios set out by NESO, gas would set the price in just 15% of hours by 2030, insulating consumers from “volatile international gas prices”.

It states that without accelerated action towards clean power, a repeat of the sort of gas price spike seen in 2022 would add around £22bn to electricity costs in 2030. 

If the clean power mission is successful, it says, this cost would be cut in half and price spikes would be less likely. 

(NESO does note that “how costs flow through to prices and, ultimately, bills, will depend on policy design”.) 

As highlighted by research by Ember and E3G, deploying renewables “at speed” helps lower bills and increase energy security.

According to consultancy Aurora, a total of £116bn will need to be invested between 2025-35 to reach Labour’s 2030 clean power target, or around £10.6bn per year.

Despite criticism of the impact of bringing forward the target date, Aurora’s analysis suggests that it would require just an extra £1bn of investment a year to achieve the target five years earlier. 

Aurora found that consumer energy bills will be lower under Labour’s 2030 target than under a 2035 goal. 

In the longer term, there is more widespread agreement that a clean energy system – predominantly using electricity for heat, power and transport –  would reduce overall energy costs for the UK. 

For example, thinktank E3G suggests that the UK’s clean power “mission” could cut bills could fall by £200 by 2030, while consultancy DNVGL expects bills to fall 40% by 2050. 

In contrast, the Conservative party has recently ended cross-party support for the UK’s net-zero-by-2050 target, launching an intensifying attack on clean energy.

Party leader Kemi Badenoch falsely claimed in a recent speech that the UK’s current climate policies are “driving up the cost of energy”. 

Similarly, Reform UK has argued that net-zero policies are to blame for higher energy bills and that it would scrap the 2050 target if elected. In its manifesto in June 2024, it claimed, without evidence, that scrapping net-zero would save “over £30bn per year for the next 25 years.”

In contrast, asked if rowing back on climate action would reduce bills, Energy UK’s Vyas tells Carbon Brief: “No – not least because we’re only part way through the job and haven’t realised the full benefits yet.” She adds:

“Investing in clean power is crucial if we are to make progress on tackling climate change and achieving energy security. People across the country are clear that they want cheaper bills – and they want to see action when it comes to tackling the climate crisis. Of course, we need to go at a pace we can manage in practical terms and make sure that the costs of the transition are paid fairly.”

In a post on LinkedIn, Vyas’s colleague Adam Berman, director of policy and advocacy at Energy UK, writes that the “mental gymnastics” needed to believe it would be cheaper to stick with gas for electricity, instead of shifting to clean power, is “truly remarkable”. He says:

“If you genuinely believe gas is cheaper than clean power over an extended period of time, how do you reconcile that with the £100bn the UK government spent supporting homes and businesses during the energy crisis? The mental gymnastics required to ignore this are truly remarkable.”

In the longer term, electrification is key to net-zero, helping the UK to decarbonise not just its electricity system, but sectors including transport and heating at pace and in the most economical way. 

Speaking at the UK government and IEA event in April, Emma Pinchbeck, the chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said that electrification with clean power was vital to the UK’s climate targets and energy security, but was also the cheapest option to pursue.

The impact of clean power on lowering household bills is supported by the CCC’s recent advice to the government, which suggested the transition to net-zero would cut average household energy bills to £700 below today’s levels by 2050.

Additionally, the CCC said it would cut household motoring costs by a similar amount, thanks to EVs being much cheaper to run than petrol or diesel alternatives. 

Vyas tells Carbon Brief that the best way to lower bills in the long-term will be to decarbonise the power system and to electrify energy end use, such as heat and transport. She says: 

“The focus has to be on taking action that will make it quicker and easier to do two things. The first is to decarbonise our power system, encouraging investment in generation, storage, infrastructure and other technologies, tackling barriers that cause delays, such as planning and consents. And the second is to electrify – with a big focus on decarbonising the way we heat homes and buildings, as well as the way we power our transport.”

Much of this impact comes from reducing the UK’s need for fossil fuel imports, as well as improving energy efficiency. Analysis by ECIU highlights that renewables have already cut the UK’s dependence on foreign fuels for electricity generation from 65% in 2014 to under 50% today. 

A report from the IEA last year similarly concluded that accelerating climate action towards net-zero “could lead to major reductions in household energy bills” around the world.

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