The fourth meeting of the U.S.-U.K. Strategic Energy Dialogue (SED) was held today (April 30), chaired by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Deputy Secretary David M. Turk and UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Andrew Bowie. The United States and United Kingdom announced the SED in June 2021 as the primary bilateral forum to enhance and expand cooperation across shared energy security and resilience, clean energy, and net zero objectives. The SED also serves to cement both countries' joint leadership priorities within global multilateral energy fora. The chairs welcomed the extensive in-person collaboration between DOE and DESNZ since the third SED last year in London, on topics such as offshore wind and civil nuclear energy.
The chairs also recalled that last year, on the margins of the third SED, DOE and DESNZ convened a stakeholder roundtable with small and medium-sized enterprises, innovators, and seed financiers that helped to inform the Ministerial discussion. As a follow-up to this engagement, both DOE and DESNZ, in partnership with British American Business, recently hosted two additional industry roundtables that helped to feed into the fourth SED. The inputs from these roundtables were welcomed; they focused on actions DOE and DESNZ could undertake to provide a positive business environment for and accelerate the development and deployment of clean energy technologies, and acknowledged the recommendations raised individually by participating stakeholders.
Engagements on Clean Energy Technologies
The chairs discussed efforts the United States and United Kingdom are taking, individually and together, to advance ambitions with respect to clean energy technologies. They acknowledged the launch last year of the Atlantic Declaration's Civil Nuclear Partnership and the longstanding, deep collaboration between DOE and DESNZ on civil nuclear energy, including ongoing efforts to secure nuclear fuel supply chains, ensuring safe and secure deployment of advanced nuclear technologies globally, and cooperation on other items of mutual interest. They further welcomed the establishment of the U.S.-UK Joint Standing Committee on Nuclear Energy Cooperation, which is expected to first meet later this year in the United Kingdom.
The chairs acknowledged the leadership of the group of like-minded countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Japan, colloquially known as the "Sapporo 5," to enhance uranium enrichment and conversion capacity and to establish a resilient global uranium supply market free from Russian influence. Both sides also reasserted the plans announced at COP28 to mobilize government-led investments to secure the global uranium supply chain.
The chairs also welcomed the November 2023 announcement of the DOE-DESNZ Strategic Partnership in Fusion Energy and the launch in March 2024 of its Joint Coordinating Committee, which aims to develop the complementarity between U.S. and UK resources, capabilities, and facilities in fusion to advance the U.S. Bold Decadal Vision for Commercial Fusion Energy, the U.S. Fusion International Strategy, and the UK's Fusion Strategy.
The chairs also offered support for a new line of effort on grid infrastructure in line with COP28 outcomes on expansion of renewable energy, to consist of a series of virtual government-to-government exchanges. As part of this new grid infrastructure effort, policy and technical experts intend to focus on three areas: i) advanced transmission and transformer technologies; ii) energy storage; and iii) electricity market issues. Both parties reiterated their commitment, agreed to in the G7 Ministerial Communique for Climate, Energy, and Environment in Turin, Italy on April 30, 2024, to contributing to a global goal for energy storage in the power sector of 1500 GW in 2030, which, when paired with last year's COP agreement to triple global renewable energy capacity, can transform the availability of these resources to better compete with fossil fuels and strengthen energy security.
Energy Security
The chairs discussed the current state of global energy markets and the roles of the United States and UK in addressing immediate and long-term energy security concerns. They emphasized that the path to long-term energy security is through clean energy transitions and the accelerated deployment of clean energy technologies including fusion energy, civil nuclear energy and resilient grid infrastructure. Both sides noted the important role multilateral institutions can play in driving forward progress on energy security and reflected on the success of the recent IEA Ministerial, which addressed current and future challenges on energy security and climate change, as well as the outcomes of the G7 Energy, Climate, and Environment ministerial.
The chairs reaffirmed commitments to supporting European partners and allies' efforts to reduce their reliance on Russian energy in response to President Putin's illegal, immoral, and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Both parties reaffirmed commitments to reach Net Zero by 2050, including efforts to decarbonize oil and gas production and transition away from fossil fuels. Both parties recognize the need to phase out existing unabated coal power generation in our energy systems during the first half of the 2030s, and welcomed the collective agreement for this phase out in that time frame in the G7 Turin Communique. Both parties reiterate our commitment to accelerate coal phase out and achieve 100 percent clean, carbon-free electricity by 2035. Both parties also acknowledged the importance of policy and regulatory interventions to tackle harmful short-lived methane emissions.
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