Carbon Literacy Training
This week the government approved the Jackdaw gas field. It’s big selling point is speed: gas flowing into homes within weeks.
BUT look at what short-term thinking is already costing us.
Jobs: Greenpeace UK’s reading of the developer’s own Environmental Impact Assessment puts the number of genuinely new full-time jobs at just 27.
Wasted wind: The world’s largest offshore wind farm, Dogger Bank, sits in our own North Sea. Yet this year Britain has already spent more than £1.5bn paying Scottish wind farms to switch off, because the grid can’t carry their power south. Then we pay gas plants to fire up and replace it. September alone cost £404m.
The bill is growing: The system operator forecasts £3.2bn next year, and the government has warned it could reach £10bn by 2030.
This seems to be a pattern. The long-term fix feels too slow, so we buy the short-term one. The long-term fix then stays slow, because we never properly started it.
As two former buying directors, we know this pattern well. When a season goes wrong, the quick fix is deeper markdowns and chasing volume. The real fix is a better range plan, listening to your customers, evolving your offer, but that takes longer and doesn’t help this quarter’s numbers. So it keeps getting pushed back. We stick with business as usual - or rather bad business as usual and sales slowly continue to get worse - because you never fixed the problem.
So I’m not an MP but - what would the long-term fix actually look like for UK power?
Phase 1, now to 2027: Stop wasting what we already have
Install batteries in Scotland to store surplus wind instead of switching it off
Use cheap surplus power locally, in factories and industry near the turbines
Scale up smarter grid management, which is already saving hundreds of millions
Phase 2, 2027 to 2030: Build the grid
Up to £90bn of new lines and substations have been approved, and it will take 5+ years to build
The major Scotland-to-England transmission upgrades are due late this decade
Dogger Bank fully online, supplying around 5% of UK electricity
Phase 3, 2030 to 2040: Move heating from gas to electric
Most of our gas heats homes rather than generating electricity
Over 22 million households rely on gas boilers
Heat pumps and insulation, home by home
This is the longest phase, and it’s the one that lets wind genuinely replace Jackdaw
Phase 4, 2040 to 2050: Net zero
A clean grid plus electric heating gives homegrown energy security without new drilling
What’s the realistic leadtime:
About 4–5 years to stop wasting our own wind
About 15–20 years to replace the gas Jackdaw supplies
That sounds like a long time. But every time we reach for the quick fix instead of starting, the clock resets. We need to stop putting plasters on every situation and start fixing the root cause.
So why are we talking about this at Our Fashion Fix, you may ask? Simple, fashion faces the same choice. You can treat sustainability as a cost to manage this season, or as a strategy that pays back over the next ten years. The businesses that start now will be the ones still standing.
That’s what our Carbon Literacy for the Fashion Industry training is built for: helping buyers and merchandisers make decisions that hold up beyond this quarter.
Quick fix or long-term plan: which is your business choosing and what will you do when the injury/problem cannot be fixed with a sticking plaster?
Get carbon literate- build a resilient company.