Energy is a difficult issue for the UK. Not only are there the competing needs to keep the lights on and at the same time tackle climate change, there are also pressures from the energy industry to secure their profits and from consumers to keep energy prices low. But the coalition government’s draft energy bill, launched last week, seems to have achieved the impossible. It seems to have brought together the energy industry, green groups and consumers, with their conflicting interests, in agreement – agreement that the draft bill fails to tackle the problems ahead.
It started well, with energy minister Ed Davey saying, ‘Leaving the electricity market as it is would not be in the national interest. If we don’t secure investment in our energy infrastructure, we could see the lights going out, consumers hit by spiralling energy prices and dangerous climate change.’ Not many will disagree with that – indeed, this was the scenario I described last summer when I called for ‘a revved-up energy policy’. But the truth is that reconciling all of these points is very difficult. Oil prices are rising, the cost of renewables is currently high and the price of nuclear largely unknown. And, despite the energy industry having acted like slum landlords for decades, letting our energy infrastructure become massively outdated, we know that it will be ordinary consumers not their shareholders who will bear the costs. The problem is so big and tangled that an answer to this problem has to be ambitious and radical.
Some argue for a dramatic change in lifestyle, others for huge investment in new technology. I’ve argued for a change in ownership and shift to more local energy generation. Whichever, the answer almost definitely won’t lie in the complicated proposals in the draft energy bill that amounts to little more than a tweak to the current opaque market and outdated infrastructure, with a ‘Hail Mary’ that carbon capture and storage works. The green groups have called it the start of the rush to gas, the committee on climate change says it won’t get us close to avoiding dangerous climate change, the energy industry complains that it is creating uncertainty in the market (does the government want to see more renewables or not?) and even the Department for Energy and Climate Change admits that the proposals will inflict even higher energy bills on cash-strapped consumers. Overall, quite a result.
Thankfully the most important bit of this draft bill is there in the title – it is still a draft bill. Over the next few months, backbench MPs (like SERA’s Alan Whitehead) will have the chance to do what Ed Davey presumably didn’t – to go through the bill line by line and debate what will and what won’t work. And while you would have to be very optimistic to hope that the end result will be anything more than disappointing, at least we can hope that more than the lights staying on, we’ll see some signs that someone is also in.
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Melanie Smallman is national coordinator of SERA, the Labour environment campaign
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