The price we will pay for dithering on energy

One of the most basic duties of government is to keep the lights on. Yet for a decade and more, Britain has failed to treat this task as a priority.

One of the most basic duties of government is to keep the lights on. Yet for a decade and more, Britain has failed to treat this task as a priority. True, there was a growing acceptance that the country faced a crunch point, as its nuclear power stations neared the end of their lives and their coal-fired equivalents were forced into premature retirement by European emissions restrictions. And there were all manner of grand plans to remedy the situation: for example, David Cameron's team promised while in Opposition to ensure that a new nuclear plant would roll off the conveyor belt every 18 months from 2018.

Yet for all the speeches, all the studies and reviews, we are further from fixing the problem than ever. As Alistair Buchanan, the head of the energy watchdog Ofgem, warned in this newspaper yesterday, we face "a unique challenge" in securing our electricity supply between 2015 and 2020 - one that cannot be met simply by papering Britain with yet more wind turbines.

Part of the problem has been the difficulty in choosing which horse to back - renewables, nuclear, or gas? Yet we spent so much time deliberating that we ended up running out of options. To bridge the energy gap, we need more generating capacity of any and every stripe. But while it is being built, we will become far more dependent on gas - and therefore on the fluctuations of the global market, and the charity of leading producers. The situation could be ameliorated by embracing shale, but getting it on stream would still take time.

For now, the prospect of rolling blackouts remains a distant possibility (though it is utterly shameful that it cannot be ruled out completely). But in order to avoid them, we will almost certainly have to pay through the nose. It is not just gas: the costs of new nuclear capacity are also spiralling, thanks to the paucity of suppliers in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the problems experienced by those building new capacity elsewhere, and the palpable desperation of our plight.

One idea that ministers have embraced is to focus on demand as well as supply, by promoting energy efficiency: if we used power more effectively, we could save the output of a whole suite of generating stations and do much to stave off the "energy gap". But this short-term salve could only ever buy time for a long-term cure. In an ideal world, the Government would disregard the European Commission's emissions strictures on grounds of pressing need; instead, it looks as though the price for a generation of dithering will be paid by consumers and businesses via their power bills. And if the new Energy Bill fails to deliver the hoped-for surge in affordable generating capacity, they will be paying that price for years to come.

From The Daily Telegraph
 

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