Donald Trump is a very quotable man. Despite his ostensible dislike of the media, America’s new president has done about as many press conferences in his first two weeks as Biden managed in his entire period in office.
Often he is quotable for the wrong reasons. When an American Airlines flight crashed in Washington last month, killing all on board, Tump was asked if he’d visit the deadly scene. Pointing out that the aircraft had plunged into the Potomac River, he replied: “You want me to go swimming?”
But sometimes his pithy rhetoric is an asset to his political messaging. During his presidential campaign, Trump repeated the phrase ‘drill baby drill’. He didn’t coin it – Republicans first used it in 2008 – but the message was clear: environmental concerns were not going to get in the way of keeping energy cheap and abundant for Americans.
Across the pond, costly energy is among the biggest obstacles to growth. Households in Blighty pay about double the electricity costs of the US average per kilowatt hour – and the running costs of energy-intensive industries are eyewatering. The tech industry is not immune from this – demand for more and more compute means data centres are consuming a growing share of the nation’s energy output.
Which is why it was encouraging to hear Keir Starmer address the issue head-on last week. Planning obstacles to build nuclear reactors were going to be removed, he said, and it would now be possible to set up a small modular reactor anywhere in the country.
Small modular reactors, or SMRs, are tiny, factory-built nuclear fission reactors that occupy much less space and can be setup much faster than a conventional reactor. Once the tech is ready, it is thought to cost only £2bn to install an SMR compared to more than £20bn for a full-scale nuclear power plant.
The arrival of SMRs will be a game-changer for the UK’s energy security. And it may not be far off: the UK’s Office for Nuclear Regulation is currently assessing three different prototype SMRs with the first of these, by Rolls-Royce, scheduled for approval before the end of next year.
There are plenty of reasons for gloom in Britain, but our energy future can be a good source of optimism. And if you need further reasons to be cheerful, wind power is also making great headway. Around a third of the UK’s electricity was generated by wind last year, and it’s projected to cross 50% by the end of the decade.
To understand the scale of this endeavour, have a scroll around the Open Infrastructure Map website and count the number of huge offshore wind farms under construction around Britain’s coastline. It put a smile on my face – I hope it does yours.
All of this means we can look forward to a much more competitive energy market – though this is still a decade away and there’ll be more pain before then. But does Starmer have the charisma and the political nous to convey this message of hope? One BBC journalist quipped this week that perhaps he ought to adopt the phrase ‘build baby build’. Perhaps he should – a few buzzy slogans might do him some good. The government’s rhetoric could do with a bit more energy.
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