The US and UK have signed the ‘Atlantic Declaration’ confirming that the two nations will cooperate on building a “clean energy economy of the future”.
The two nations reaffirmed their commitment to the energy transition on 8 June by signing a framework for a “twenty-first century US-UK Economic Partnership”. Central to this framework are low carbon technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs) and offshore wind.
Detailed within the “Building the Clean Energy Economy of the Future” section of the framework, both countries are set to cooperate on “bold investment and strategic public funding” in a bid to achieve net zero targets and spearhead the green revolution globally.
One of the core pillars of this will look to strengthen clean energy supply chains, including building diverse, resilient, and secure critical mineral and battery supply chains that reduce unwanted strategic dependencies to meet defence, economic, energy security, and climate goals.
Through the partnership, both the UK and the US will work towards increasing respective and collective clean energy industrial capacity, boost EV production and deployment and expand access to sustainable, secure, high-standard critical mineral and battery supply chains. This could help scale the EV market and strengthen supply chains as adoption ramps up ahead of the internal combustion engine (ICE) sale ban from 2030.
The two countries also announced the launch of a one-year ‘Joint Clean Energy Supply Chain Action Plan’ which will look to identify and decide on near-term actions to accelerate the buildout of capacity in both the US, the UK and third countries sufficient to meet the clean energy demands of the future.
Through this, the plan will see the two countries conduct public-private consultations across key clean energy supply chains, including offshore wind and electric vehicle batteries and also conduct rapid stress-test exercises across key clean energy supply chains. These could form a model for future work on supply chain resilience.
