UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced new measures to cut energy bills alongside a “pay-per-mile” electric-vehicle levy as part of Labour’s second budget.
The policy changes are expected to cut typical household bills by around £134 per year, amid intense political scrutiny of energy prices and a government pledge to reduce them.
This cut is achieved through a combination of moving a portion of renewable-energy subsidies from bills to general taxation and ending a support scheme for energy-efficiency measures.
Reeves has also retained a long-standing freeze on fuel-duty rates on petrol and diesel, albeit with a plan to “gradually” reverse the extra cuts introduced under the previous government.
With fuel-duty receipts set to fall as people opt for electric vehicles, the government has also laid out its plan for an “electric vehicle excise duty” from 2028, to replace lost revenue.
The government has also announced new “transitional energy certificates” to allow new oil and gas production at or nearby to existing sites, as part of its plan for the future of the North Sea.
Below, Carbon Brief runs through the key climate- and energy-focused announcements from the budget.
- Energy bills
- Electric vehicles
- Fuel duty
- North Sea oil and gas
- Nuclear, ‘green finance’, critical minerals and rail
Energy bills
The chancellor used her budget speech to announce two major changes that will cut dual-fuel energy bills for the average household by £134 per year from April 2026.
The first is to bring the “energy company obligation” (ECO) to an end, once its current programme of work wraps up at the end of the financial year. This will cut bills by £63 per year, according to Carbon Brief analysis of the forthcoming energy price cap, which will apply from 1 January 2026.
The second is for the Treasury to cover three-quarters of the cost of the “renewables obligation” (RO) for households, for three years from April 2026. This will cut bills by £70 per year.
The total impact for typical households – those using gas and electricity – will be to cut bills by an average of £134 per year over the three-year period to April 2029.
(As explained in footnote 77 of the budget “red book”, this rises to an average of £154 per year, when including households that use electric heating and are not connected to the gas grid. This figure is then rounded to £150 per year in government communications around the budget.)
Notably, given the political attention on energy prices, this three-year period of discounted bills runs through to just before the next general election, which must be held by August 2029.
There has been furious debate over the past year over the causes and the most effective solutions to the UK’s high energy bills. A Carbon Brief factcheck published earlier this year showed that it was high gas prices, rather than net-zero policies, which has been keeping bills high.
Nevertheless, a politicised debate has continued and there has also been increasing attention on the factors that will put pressure on bills in the near future, such as efforts to strengthen the electricity grid.
At the same time, the advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC) has repeatedly advised the government that it should make electricity cheaper, as so much of the UK’s climate strategy depends on getting homes and businesses to use electricity for heat and transport.
The changes in the budget will go some way to addressing this.
Carbon Brief calculations show that they would cut unit prices for domestic electricity users by around 4p per kilowatt hour (kWh) – roughly 16% – from 28p/kWh under the next price-cap period from the start of 2026, down to around 23p/kWh.
However, the red book says the government wants to further “improve” the price of electricity relative to gas, often referred to as “rebalancing”. It explains:
“The government is committed to doing more to reduce electricity costs for all households and improve the price of electricity relative to gas…The government will set out how it intends to deliver this through the ‘warm homes plan’.”
Under ECO, which has been in place since 2013, utility firms must install energy efficiency measures in fuel-poor homes, funded by a levy on energy bills.
It replaced two earlier schemes, known as CERT and CESP, with reduced funding after then-prime minister David Cameron reportedly told ministers to “get rid of the green crap”. This shift coincided with a precipitous decline in the number of homes being treated with new efficiency measures.
The ECO scheme has been hit by a series of scandals, with a recent National Audit Office report citing “clear failures” in its design, resulting in “widespread issues with the quality of installations”.
Pre-budget media reports had speculated that the government would pay for ongoing energy efficiency initiatives after scrapping ECO, using funding from the forthcoming “warm homes plan”. This speculation had suggested that subsidies for heat pumps would be cut as a result.
Instead, the budget includes an extra £1.5bn of funding for the warm homes plan, to cover the additional cost of taking over from ECO. (The total cost of ECO was around £1.7bn.)
Adam Bell, head of policy at the consultancy group Stonehaven and the government’s former head of energy policy, tells Carbon Brief that, while this £1.5bn is not the total cost of ECO, the scheme had been “terribly inefficient”. He adds that a government-run alternative that tackles home upgrades on an area-by-area basis was “likely to be cheaper”.
Contrary to much pre-budget speculation in the media, the chancellor did not reduce the already-discounted 5% rate of VAT on energy bills. Nor did she scrap the “carbon price support”, a top-up carbon tax on electricity generators.
Finally, the budget red book says that the government “recently confirmed” an increase in the level of relief for certain industrial users, from electricity network charges.
It says that, in total from 2027, the “British industrial competitiveness scheme” will cut electricity costs for affected businesses by £35-40 per megawatt hour.
Electric vehicles
The budget confirmed the introduction of a new “pay-per-mile” charge for electric vehicles, to raise more than £1bn in additional tax revenue by the end of this decade.
It has long been expected that fuel-duty receipts will begin to fall as electric vehicles start making up a rising share of cars on the road.
In its report accompanying the budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts a decline to around half of current levels in the 2030s in real terms, before falling to near-zero by 2050.
As such, the new charge on EVs will help maintain road infrastructure, the budget states. The “red book” notes that the new tax will see EV drivers paying a “fair share”. It adds:
“All vehicles contribute to congestion and wear and tear on the roads, but drivers of petrol and diesel vehicles pay fuel duty at the pump to contribute their fair share, whereas drivers of electric vehicles do not currently pay an equivalent.”
The electric vehicle excise duty (eVED) will come into effect in April 2028 at a rate of 3p per mile for battery electric vehicles and 1.5p per mile for plug-in hybrid cars, according to the OBR report.
The budget red book says this will mean the average driver of a battery electric vehicle paying “around £240 per year”. This is roughly half of the rate of fuel duty paid per mile by petrol and diesel car owners. (See: Fuel duty.)
(EVs will remain significantly cheaper to run than their combustion-engine equivalents. According to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, EVs would still be £1,000 cheaper to run per year than petrol equivalents, even after the new eVED charge.)
Currently, there is no equivalent to fuel duty for electric vehicles. Excise duty was brought in for EVs for the first time in April 2025, costing £10 for the first year and then rising to a standard rate of £195 per year – an increase announced in last year’s budget.
The introduction of the eVED is expected to raise £1.1bn in 2028-29 and £1.9bn in 2030-31, dependent on electric-vehicle uptake in the coming years.
The revenue generated by the eVED will “support investment in maintaining and improving the condition of roads”, the budget adds, with the government committing to £2bn in annual investment by 2029-30 for local authorities to repair and renew roads.
A consultation will be published seeking views on the implementation of eVED, the budget notes. It adds that there will be no requirement to report where or when the miles are driven, or to install trackers in cars.
The OBR report states that the additional charge of the eVED “is likely” to reduce demand for electric cars, due to increasing their lifetime costs.
Overall, it estimates that there will be around 440,000 fewer electric car sales across the forecast period relative to its previous forecast.
New support for EV buyers and manufacturers also announced in the budget could help offset 130,000 of this impact, the report notes.
This includes a boost to the electric car grant, which was launched in July and currently offers up to £3,750 off eligible vehicles.
The budget announces an increase of £1.3bn in funding for the programme, as well as an extension out to 2029-30.
Additional measures include an increase in the threshold at which EV owners have to pay the “expensive car supplement” from £40,000 to £50,000 from April 2026. This is expected to cost the government £0.5bn in 2030-31, the OBR notes.
The government will delay changes to “benefit-in-kind” (BIK) rules for employee car-ownership schemes until April 2030. This is a continuation of a policy announced in Reeve’s first budget as chancellor in 2024, which delayed the previously planned increase in BIK rates to 9% per year for electric vehicles by 2029, instead increasing them to just 2% per year out to 2029-30.
EV manufacturers will see the research and innovation Drive35 programme extended, with a further £1.5bn allocated to the project to 2035. This takes total funding for the project to £4bn over the next 10 years, according to the government.
Beyond the vehicles, the budget includes investment for EV charging infrastructure – also partly funded through the eVED revenues, it notes – with an additional £100m allocated. This builds on the £400m announced in the spending review in June.
Additionally, funding will be allocated to local authorities to support the rollout of public chargepoints, a consultation will be launched on permitting rights for cross-pavement EV charging and a 10-year 100% business-rates relief for eligible EV chargepoints will be introduced.
Fuel duty
Former Conservative governments repeatedly cancelled inflation-linked increases in fuel duty – a tax paid on petrol and diesel – every year since 2010.
Fuel duty was cut by an additional 5p per litre in 2022 by then-Conservative chancellor Rishi Sunak in response to the energy crisis.
Successive freezes in fuel duty have substantially increased the UK’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by lowering the cost of driving and, therefore, encouraging people to use their cars more and low-carbon transport options less.
Last year, Reeves opted to maintain the existing freezes and cuts introduced by her predecessors.
In the new autumn budget, she has once again announced a freeze on fuel-duty rates for an additional five months from April until September 2026.
Beyond that, the government says the 5p additional cut introduced in 2022 will be reversed – “gradually returning to March 2022 levels by March 2027”. However, the planned increase in fuel-duty rates in line with inflation for 2026-27 will be cancelled.
Then, from April 2027 onwards, the government says that fuel-duty rates will increase annually to reflect inflation.
In total, the 16 years of delays to expected increases in fuel duty rates – plus the “temporary” 5p cut – will have cost the Treasury £120bn by 2026-27, compared to the expected rise in line with inflation from 2010 onwards, according to the OBR.
Increasing fuel duty is very unpopular. However, research by the Social Market Foundation thinktank suggests persistent freezes have “done little for average Brits”, with the wealthiest in the country disproportionately benefiting.
Meanwhile, the government is also responding to the long-term decline in fuel-duty receipts “as more people choose to switch to cleaner, greener electric cars” by introducing a new per-mile charge on electric-vehicle use from 2028. (See: Electric vehicles.)
North Sea oil and gas
Much of the environmentally focused coverage previewing the budget centred on government plans to allow for new oil and gas production on or near existing field sites in the North Sea.
This was formally announced in the North Sea future plan, a 127-page document outlining the government’s approach to put the region “at the heart of Britain’s clean energy and industrial future” and “deliver the next generation of good, new jobs”.
(The plan was published in response to a consultation held earlier this year on the North Sea’s future, involving nearly 1,000 responses from stakeholders, including oil and gas companies and environmental groups.)
The future plan outlines that the North Sea is an ageing oil and gas basin, “much more so than other areas of the world”, and that production has been “naturally declining over the past 25 years”.
It includes the chart below, showing past and projected oil and gas production.
It adds that the decline of the basin caused direct jobs in oil and gas production to fall by a third between 2014 and 2023, according to official statistics.
The plan also has a section on the UK’s “proud history” of international climate leadership.
It notes that the UK is committed to the Paris Agreement, which has the aim to keep global warming to well-below 2C, while pursuing efforts to keep it at 1.5C, by the end of the century.
It continues:
“Scientific evidence from the International Energy Agency, UN Environment Programme and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that new fossil fuel exploration risks exceeding the 1.5C threshold. The IPCC warns that emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure alone could surpass the remaining global carbon budget, reinforcing the urgency to phase out fossil fuels.”
The plan says that the UK “now has the opportunity to lead in clean energy”, which “is both a national and global imperative”.
With this backdrop, the plan reaffirms Labour’s manifesto commitment to not issue any new oil and gas licences.
However, the plan says that the government will introduce “transitional energy certificates” to allow new oil and gas drilling on or near to existing fields, as long as this additional production does not require exploration.
An analysis by the North Sea transition charity Uplift found that the amount of oil and gas that could be produced by such certificates is “relatively small”.
It suggested that new discoveries within a 50km radius of existing productions contain just 25m barrels of oil and 20m barrels of oil equivalent of gas.
(By comparison, the Rosebank oil field, which is currently seeking development consent from the government, would produce nearly 500m barrels of oil and gas equivalent in its lifetime.)
In a footnote on page 36, the plan says that these certificates will have no effect on the process for giving development consent to new oil and gas projects.
Last year, Carbon Brief reported that several large oil and gas projects are currently seeking development consent from the government.
Because they already have a license, these projects are able to get around Labour’s policy on not issuing any new oil and gas licenses and still seek final approval.
However, a landmark legal case in 2024 means that all of such projects, including Rosebank, will now have to present the government with information about how much emissions will come from burning the oil and gas they plan to produce, before they can be approved.
Responding to today’s budget news, Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift, said that the “government is right to end the fiction of endless drilling”, but should “put an end to all new fields, including the huge Rosebank oil field”.
The North Sea future plan also says that the government will change the objectives of the North Sea Transition Authority, the government-run company that controls and regulates offshore oil and gas production.
Before the change, the NSTA was in the awkward position of being responsible for both ensuring the oil and gas sector reaches net-zero and maximising the economic recovery of oil and gas reserves from the North Sea.
Now, the government wants the NSTA to balance three objectives: to “maximise societal economic value”; support the energy secretary in meeting net-zero goals; and consider the long-term benefits of the transition for North Sea workers, communities and supply chains.
In addition, the North Sea future plan also announces that the government will establish the “North Sea jobs service”, a national employment programme offering support for oil and gas workers seeking new opportunities in clean energy, defence and advanced manufacturing.
Nuclear, ‘green finance’, critical minerals and rail
The section in the budget about “investing in the UK’s energy security” largely focuses on the government’s plans for nuclear power.
At the last spending review, the government announced £14.2bn of investment in the planned Sizewell C nuclear-power plant in Suffolk.
The plant is set to be supported under the “regulated asset base” (RAB) model, which levies an extra charge on consumer energy bills to support the cost of the development. OBR analysis concludes this will generate £0.7bn in receipts in 2026-27, doubling to £1.4bn in 2030-31.
The budget also says the prime minister is issuing a “strategic steer” on the “safe and efficient delivery” of nuclear developments through “proportionate regulation and stronger collaboration”.
It says the government will additionally issue an “implementation plan”, within three months, in response to the recently published report on nuclear regulation. It says it will “complete implementation within two years”.
The government has also updated its “green financing framework”, which sets guidelines for the type of expenditures that can raise funding from investors under the UK’s green financing programme. It has now added nuclear power to the list of eligible expenditures.
Other climate-related measures mentioned in the budget include regional funding, such as £14.5m for a new low-carbon industrial centre in Grangemouth, Scotland, and support for “critical minerals, renewable energy and marine innovation” in Cornwall.
This builds on the government’s “critical mineral strategy” released last week, which specifically highlights Cornwall as a site of “mineral wealth”, where mining for lithium, tin and tungsten is being undertaken.
The government has also announced a one-year freeze on rail fares, which it states could save commuters taking expensive routes “more than £300 per year”.
The post UK budget 2025: Key climate and energy announcements appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Hundreds of scientists in dozens of institutions are embarking on the next phase of the world’s largest coordinated climate-modelling effort.
Climate-modelling groups use supercomputers to run climate models that simulate the physics, chemistry and biology of the Earth’s atmosphere, land and oceans.
These models play a crucial role in helping scientists understand how the climate is responding as greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere.
For four decades, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) has guided the work of the climate-modelling community by providing a framework that allows for millions of results to be collected together and compared.
The resulting projections are used extensively in climate science and policy and underpin the landmark reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Now, the seventh phase of CMIP – CMIP7 – is underway, with more than 30 climate-modelling centres expected to contribute more than five million gigabytes of data – so much that downloading it using a fast internet connection would take two and a half years.
Here, we look at what is new for CMIP7, including its model experiments, updated emissions scenarios and “assessment fast track” process.
What is CMIP?
Around the world, climate models are developed by different institutions and groups, known as modelling centres.
Each model is built differently and, therefore, produces slightly different results.
To better understand these differences, CMIP coordinates a common set of climate-model experiments.
These are simulations that use the same inputs and conditions, allowing scientists to compare the results and see where models agree or differ.
The figure below shows the countries that have either produced or published CMIP simulations.
During this time, scientists use new and improved models to run experiments from previous CMIP phases for consistency, as well as new experiments to investigate fresh scientific questions.
These simulations produce a trove of data, in the form of variables – such as temperature, rainfall, winds, sea ice extent and ocean currents. This information helps scientists study past, present and future climate change.
As scientific understanding and technical capabilities improve, models are refined. As a result, each CMIP phase incorporates higher spatial resolutions, larger ensembles, improved representations of key processes and more efficient model designs.
CMIP7 objectives
Each CMIP phase has an “experimental design” that outlines which climate-model experiments should be run and their technical specifications, including the time period the models should simulate.
The CMIP7 experimental design has several components.
As in CMIP6, for a modelling centre to contribute, they are asked to produce a suite of experiments that maintain continuity across past and future CMIP phases.
This suite of experiments is known as the “diagnostic, evaluation and characterisation of klima” (DECK) and is used to understand how their model “behaves” under simple, standard conditions. These experiments are designed and requested directly by CMIP’s scientific governing panel.
Alongside the DECK, CMIP also incorporates experiments developed by model intercomparison projects (MIPs) run by different research communities. For example, experiments exploring what the climate could look like under different levels of emissions or those that explore how sea ice might have changed between the last two ice-ages.
Currently, CMIP is working with 40 MIPs. These groups investigate specific scientific questions at their own pace, rather than on timelines prescribed by CMIP.
Running a large number of simulations can take modelling centres a long time. To speed up the process, CMIP7 has launched the “assessment fast track”.
This is a small subset of CMIP7 experiments, drawn from past and present community MIPs, identified through community consultation as being critical for scientific and policy assessments.
Data from the assessment fast track will be used in the reports that will together form the seventh assessment (AR7) of the IPCC.
It will also be used as an input by other groups that create climate information, including organisations involved in regional downscaling and modelling climate impacts and ice-sheet changes.
The figure below shows the different components of CMIP7. It shows how a subset of CMIP7 experiments will be delivered on an accelerated timeline, while the majority of experiments will be led by MIPs.
CMIP7 experiments
There are three categories of experiments set to take place in CMIP7:
- Historical experiments, which are designed to improve scientific understanding of past climates. Model runs exploring the recent historical period also allow scientists to evaluate the performance of models by checking how well they replicate real-world observations.
- Prediction and projection experiments, which allow scientists to analyse what different climates could look like under varying levels of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as near-term (10-year) prediction experiments.
- Process understanding experiments, which are designed to better understand specific processes and isolate cause-and-effect relationships. For example, a set of experiments might change the emissions of one greenhouse gas at a time to see how much each pollutant contributes to warming or cooling the climate.
Modelling centres typically produce and publish their data for the historical and projection experiments first.
CMIP expects the first datasets to be available by this summer, with broader publication recommended by the end of the year, in time to be assessed by IPCC AR7 authors.
Drafting of the reports of AR7 is currently underway. However, countries are yet to agree on the timeline for when they will be published. This presents a challenge for the climate-modelling community, given the difficulties of working with a moving deadline.
(For more on the ongoing standoff between countries around the timing of publication of the reports, read Carbon Brief’s explainer.)
New emissions scenarios
Scientists use emissions scenarios to simulate the future climate according to how global energy systems and land use might change over the next century.
Crucially, these scenarios – also known as “pathways” – are not forecasts or predictions of the future.
The group tasked with designing the scenarios for CMIP phases, as well as producing the “input files” for climate models, is the “scenario model intercomparison project”, or ScenarioMIP.
In a new paper, the group has set out the new set of scenarios for CMIP7:
- High (H): Emissions grow to as high as deemed plausibly possible, consistent with a rollback of current climate policies. This scenario will result in strong warming.
- High-to-low (HL): Emissions rise as in the high scenario at first, but are cut sharply in the second half of the century to reach net-zero by 2100.
- Medium (M): Emissions consistent with current policies, frozen as of 2025, leading to a moderate level of warming.
- Medium-to-low (ML): Emissions are slowly reduced, eventually reaching net-zero emissions by the end of the century.
- Low (L): Emissions consistent with likely keeping warming below 2C and not returning to 1.5C before the end of the century.
- Very low (VL): Emissions are cut to keep temperatures “as low as plausible”, according to the paper. This scenario limits warming to close to 1.5C by the end of the century, with limited overshoot beforehand.
- Low-to-negative (LN): Emissions fall slightly slower than in the VL scenario, with temperatures just rising above 1.5C. Emissions then rapidly drop to negative to bring warming back down.
The figures below show the emissions (left) and the estimated global temperature changes (right) under the seven new scenarios for CMIP7, from the low-to-negative emissions scenario (turquoise) to a high-emissions scenario (brown).
As a set, the ScenarioMIP scenarios “cover plausible outcomes ranging from a high level of climate change (in the case of policy failure) to low levels of climate change resulting from stringent policies”, the paper says.
Compared to the scenarios in CMIP6, the range in future emissions they cover is now narrower, the authors say:
“On the high-end of the range, the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends…At the low end, many CMIP6 emission trajectories have become inconsistent with observed trends during the 2020-30 period.”
Put simply, progress on climate policies and cheaper renewable technologies means that scenarios of very high emissions have now been ruled out.
However, this progress has not been sufficient to keep society on track for the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C goal. The paper notes that, “at this point of time, some overshoot of the 1.5C seems unavoidable”.
The change to the high end of the scenarios has sparked misleading commentary in the media and on social media – even from US president Donald Trump. A Carbon Brief factcheck unpacks the debate.
Also notable in the new scenarios is the “low-to-negative” pathway, which has the explicit feature of emissions becoming “net-negative”. In other words, through carbon dioxide removal (CDR) techniques, society reaches the point at which more carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere than is being added through greenhouse gas emissions.
Reaching net-negative emissions is fundamental to “overshoot scenarios”, where global warming passes a target and then is brought back down by large-scale CDR.
Overshoot scenarios allow scientists and policymakers to investigate the impacts of a delay to emissions reductions and better understand how the world might respond to passing a warming target. This includes the question of whether some impacts of climate change, such as ice sheet melt, are reversible.
CMIP has encouraged modelling centres to run simulations using the “high” and “very low” scenarios first to ensure downstream users of the data – including groups working on regional climate projections (CORDEX), climate impacts modelling (ISIMIP) and ice-sheet modelling (ISMIP) – have enough time to produce their data for IPCC reports.
These two scenarios were selected as they sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of climate outcomes. The high scenario will demonstrate how models behave under high emissions, while the very low scenario will demonstrate how models behave when emissions are rapidly reduced.
CMIP has recommended that modelling centres then run the “medium” and “high-to-low” scenarios. The remaining scenarios should then follow and no official recommendation has been made yet on their production order.
Other new features
In addition to the assessment fast track and new scenarios, CMIP7 has a number of other new developments.
Updated data for simulations
Climate models use input datasets to define the set of external drivers – or “forcings” – that have caused the global warming observed so far. These drivers include greenhouse gases, changes to incoming solar radiation and volcanic eruptions.
CMIP recommends modelling groups use the same input datasets, as this makes it easier to compare model results.
In CMIP7, the historical forcing datasets available for modelling groups to use have been improved to better represent real-world changes and extended closer to the present day. The historical simulations will be able to simulate the past climate from 1850 through to the end of 2021, whereas CMIP6 only simulated the past climate through to 2014.
CMIP is also planning to extend these historical datasets through to 2025 and maybe further throughout the course of CMIP7.
Emissions-driven simulations
CMIP7 introduces a new focus on CO2 emissions-driven simulations, providing a more realistic representation of how the climate responds to changes in emissions.
In older generations of climate models, atmospheric levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gas concentrations have been needed as an input to the model. These levels would be produced by running scenarios of CO2 emissions through separate carbon cycle models. The resulting climate-model runs were known as “concentration-driven simulations”.
However, many of the latest generation of models are now able to run in “emissions-driven mode”. This means that they receive CO2 emissions as an input and the model itself simulates the carbon cycle and the resulting levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This development is important, as climate policies are typically defined in terms of emissions, rather than overall atmospheric concentrations.
This new development in modelling will enable a more realistic representation of the carbon cycle and a better understanding of how it might change under different levels of warming.
Enhanced model documentation and evaluation
All CMIP7 models will be required to supply standardised model documentation that ensures consistency across model descriptions and makes it easier for end users to understand the data.
Additionally, CMIP scientists have developed a new open-access tool that dramatically speeds up the evaluation of climate models.
This “rapid evaluation framework” allows researchers to compare model outputs with real-world observations, providing immediate insight into model performance.
The post Guest post: How CMIP7 will shape the next wave of climate science appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How CMIP7 will shape the next wave of climate science
Democrats are within reach of a majority on Georgia’s Public Service Commission, a little-known body that oversees Georgia Power and utility rates.
Georgia Public Service Commission elections historically received limited public attention and turnout. That changed last year, when voters, frustrated by rising electric bills, ousted two GOP members of the utility regulator, previously made up entirely of Republicans. This year, Democrats have a chance to flip control of the five-member commission.
Like many Yemeni farmers, Salem Abdallah first bought solar panels to power a well pump to irrigate his fruit and vegetable crops. Now, he has a new use for the surplus electricity they generate – a Chinese-made electric pickup truck.
“The roads between villages are rough and my farms aren’t all in one place, so the power and height give me a real advantage,” the 60-year-old told Climate Home News as he charged his plug-in hybrid Geely Riddara in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa, where nearly a dozen charging stations have sprung up in the last two years.
Prices for Abdallah’s Riddara model run from $25,000 to $40,000 – out of reach for all but a few in the impoverished country, where more than a decade of civil war has shattered the economy and made fuel supplies unaffordable for many.
The conflict has also taken a heavy toll on the national grid, which only 12% of Yemenis rely on for electricity, according to the World Bank.
Many homes and businesses have instead installed off-grid solar systems to confront frequent blackouts and patchy coverage in rural areas, and this improbable solar boom has caught the attention of Chinese electric vehicle (EV) brands.
Solar boom stirs Chinese interest
China’s BYD, Geely and Jetour have opened dealerships in Yemen in recent years, betting that enthusiastic solar uptake, coupled with high fuel prices and shortages, will lead to rapid growth in the nation’s small and incipient EV market, at least among those able to afford the initial outlay.
At the other end of the scale, electric two-wheelers are also starting to make inroads in Yemen among delivery services and salaried employees.
Mohammed Ali, 25, an accountant at an exchange office in Sanaa, said the $1,050 he spent on a Chinese-made electric motorcycle was “the best decision I ever made”.
“I charge my electric motorcycle at work and it saves me transportation expenses and time,” he said.
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Nepal’s EV revolution pays off as oil crisis causes pain at the pumps
Import subsidies, abundant hydropower and charging investments have spurred EV adoption, with electric vehicles now making up about three-quarters of new car sales
But even as the global energy shock caused by the Iran war spurs the shift to electric transport in some lower-income countries, buying an EV still remains an impossible dream for most of Yemen’s 40 million people, said Mustafa Nasr, head of the Yemen-based Centre for Economic Studies and Media.
“Most Yemenis can barely secure their basic needs,” Nasr said.
Shrinking incomes, rising prices
Yemen has been gripped by civil war since 2014, plunging it into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is projected to fall to about $384 this year, according to estimates from the International Monetary Fund – less than a quarter of what it was when the war began.
At the same time, petrol and diesel for transport and to power generators have become increasingly out of reach. A litre of petrol in Sanaa costs the equivalent of $0.94 – close to what many Yemenis earn in a day.
Charging stations spring up
But for those able to buy them, EVs are proving a revolutionary solution to Yemen’s road transport woes. Sustained fuel price rises and solar adoption could push a gradual widening of the market, particularly if EV and battery prices continue to fall, Nasr said.
For large-scale farmers like Abdallah who already own solar installations generating between 60 and 80 kilowatts, built to run irrigation systems, charging an EV at night is a no-brainer.
EVs started appearing on the streets of Sanaa and the southern port city of Aden in late 2024, when the first charging point was installed by Al-Raebi Company, which holds the concession to build charging infrastructure in Sanaa and several other provinces and also sells electric Farizon trucks and Riddara pickups.
Al-Raebi’s sales manager, engineer Mundhar al-Farran, said the company has sold hundreds of electric vehicles this year to farmers, traders and institutions. Like Abdallah, many of them say EVs’ simpler construction reduces breakdowns, while the immediate torque of electric motors suits Yemen’s mountainous terrain, he said.
There are now 11 charging stations in Sanaa, and one each in Aden, Dhamar, Ibb and Hodeidah. On long inter-provincial routes there is one station per corridor, al-Farran said.
The price per kilowatt at a public charging station is 120 Yemeni rials ($0.22). According to economic expert Ali al-Tuwaiti, this translates to a per-kilometre cost of about 18 rials for an EV – two and a half times less than for a fuel-efficient petrol car.
“The absence of charging infrastructure was the biggest obstacle at the start,” al-Tuwaiti said. “Al-Raebi’s initiative was the first turning point in this sector.”
Al-Raebi is also working to bring fuel station operators into the transition, offering to cover half the cost of installing solar-powered charging equipment and financing the rest, al-Farran said.
Solar power backbone
Such efforts seek to leverage the country’s investments in solar generation. Over recent years, the country has imported solar systems totalling more than 1,000 megawatts of capacity, representing an estimated investment of about $250 million, al-Tuwaiti said.
That accounts for almost a quarter of Yemen’s current electricity needs of 4,500 megawatts, he added.
It has also given an unexpected boost to the climate-vulnerable country’s efforts to further shrink its tiny carbon emissions. Al-Tuwaiti estimates that solar generation now displaces the equivalent of 7,800 barrels of oil and more than 1.2 million litres of diesel per day.
Recent estimates show Yemen contributes only around 0.03%-0.06% of global emissions, with most energy-related emissions coming from transport and power generation.
China’s BYD starts with hybrids
Yemen’s nascent EV market comes amid faster-than-expected transport electrification in some emerging countries, where Chinese manufacturers are seeking to attract buyers with lower prices in markets seen as having unlocked potential.
China’s EV giant BYD mostly sales hybrid models at its dealership in Aden for now, but it also offers repayment plans for its popular battery electric Seagull car model, which retails for about $13,000.
The dealer also sells several other models that are available as plug-in hybrids, which tend to be popular in places with limited charging infrastructure and erratic power supplies.
One recent buyer, food trader Amin, 50, paid $50,000 for his new BYD model.
“It’s powerful, has four-wheel drive, and a better launch than modern conventional cars,” he told Climate Home News outside his home, adding that the air conditioning runs efficiently even when stationary – a serious consideration in Aden’s sometimes sweltering heat.
“It’s wonderful … it has all that I want in a car,” he said.
This story was published in collaboration with Egab.
The post Chinese EV brands woo Yemen’s wealthy elite as war prompts solar boom appeared first on Climate Home News.
Chinese EV brands woo Yemen’s wealthy elite as war prompts solar boom
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