The Prime Minister and Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, are negotiating for Britain to rejoin the EU’s internal electricity market, which treats the 27 countries of the EU and Norway as a single borderless power grid.
The EU will only let Britain back into the system if Sir Keir agrees to the bloc’s ambitious targets for renewable energy, which would require the UK to decarbonise not just electricity but also heating and transport rapidly. In practice, it would mean net zero targets would need to be doubled.
Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary, accused the Prime Minister of “surrendering control of our energy system to bureaucrats in Brussels”. She said: “UK ministers will be forced to reduce emissions regardless of what it will do to people’s energy bills or the competitiveness of our businesses.”
It comes as Labour seeks to forge closer ties with the EU, with MPs debating in recent weeks whether Britain should return to the customs union. The plans would also aid Mr Miliband’s ambitions to decarbonise the power grid, allowing the UK to import foreign electricity when low wind or sunshine cuts output from wind and solar farms.
The EU’s demands emerged in a document placed without fanfare on the Cabinet Office website. The plan is both technically challenging and politically sensitive because it would make UK energy policy subject to EU jurisdiction.
It stated: “The Electricity Agreement should ... set an indicative global target for the share of renewable energy in the gross final consumption of energy in the United Kingdom. To ensure a level playing field, the global target should be comparable to that of the European Union.”
The EU’s target is that 42.5pc of all its energy should come from renewables by 2030, with an aspiration to reach 45pc. This is roughly double the UK’s current level of 22pc.
Mr Miliband has set a target to decarbonise Britain’s power generation by 95pc by 2030, but electricity accounts for only 20pc of UK total energy consumption, so this will never be enough to meet EU demands. Transport, heating and industrial energy account for 75pc of the UK’s total energy consumption. At the moment, the UK gets about 75pc of its total energy from oil and gas, a level that has hardly changed in decades.
Energy experts said the EU target could only be achieved by accelerating the replacement of boilers with heat pumps, adding more biofuels to petrol and diesel, and encouraging even faster adoption of electric vehicles.
‘Billpayers should be very worried’
David Turver, an energy analyst, cast doubt over the feasibility of the target even with more ambitious action. He said: “Whether it’s a 42.5pc or 45pc target by 2030, it doesn’t matter. It’s totally unachievable. Unless, of course, they totally crush overall energy consumption and the whole of Europe deindustrialises and goes back to 19th century levels of energy use.”
Ms Coutinho said: “Billpayers should be very worried about what the Labour Government is signing up to. The EU’s Renewable Energy Directive is like all the worst parts of the UK Climate Change Act – on steroids.”
Britain left the EU internal electricity market in 2021 as part of Brexit – but has since become increasingly dependent on its European neighbours to keep its lights on. Power generated in France, Holland, Belgium, Norway and Denmark reaches the UK via seven interconnectors – subsea cables – with plans for several more.
On Tuesday, about 18pc of the UK’s electricity was being generated overseas, mostly in France, Norway and Denmark. On some days recently more than half the electricity consumed in London and the south east is generated in France.
The UK’s exclusion from the EU market means its traders are banned from using the automated algorithms that optimise cross-border flows and have to buy and sell manually. They also have to buy interconnector capacity and electricity in separate transactions. The “clunkiness” of such trading adds costs estimated at up to £370m a year.
Barnaby Wharton, the head of grid policy at Renewable UK, which represents the wind industry, said greater alignment with Europe would lower costs by improving the effeciency of the system.
A Cabinet Office spokesman said that agreed text exchanged between the EU and UK would form the basis for further talks in 2026. They said: “Closer cooperation on electricity will bring real benefits to British businesses and consumers – helping to drive down energy costs, strengthen energy security and drive investment in the North Sea. We will not give a running commentary on ongoing talks.”
(Yahoo Finance, December 24, 2025)