Tony Lodge from the Centre for Policy Studies has written in the Telegraph a searing criticism of Britain’s energy policy over the past several decades, rightly calling it a “national political humiliation”.
Britain’s energy crisis is a national political humiliation. It is a direct result of a generation of cross-party policy failures and contradictions which have conspired to deliver a perfect storm.
Grave errors by a range of past energy ministers range from: Patricia Hewitt’s opposition to nuclear power in 2001; Ed Miliband’s refusal to back new clean coal plants in 2009; Chris Huhne renewing opposition to new nuclear in 2012; Ed Davey supporting wood pellet plants over new gas in 2013; Amber Rudd overseeing the end of carbon capture funding in 2015; Greg Clark allowing the closure of the Rough gas storage site in 2017 and Andrea Leadsom banning fracking in 2019, to name just a few.
This brief summary of just some of the failures and short-term policy-making mistakes of recent years ran in parallel with the conscious and consistent run-down of reliable U.K. electricity generation. Between 2000 and 2017 over a third of the U.K.’s firm baseload electricity generating capacity was closed to meet EU rules without any comparable net replacements.
Instead, ministers approved weather-dependent renewables and more interconnectors to import power from the Continent, thus offshoring British energy jobs, resilience and security. New nuclear is already twenty years late.
The result is that in July during the heatwave the National Grid had to panic-buy Belgian electricity at £9,724 per megawatt hour, more than 5,000% (50 times) the typical price, to prevent London suffering blackouts.
Tony says that whilst backbenchers are told to keep citing Russia and Ukraine as the reason for the energy crunch, the real story is that “years of ministerial dithering alongside bad and conflicted planning by Whitehall and network managers have helped deliver the perfect storm of high electricity prices, tight supplies and insufficient power”.
The problem started with Blair and went from there:
The writing was on the wall years ago following the Blair, Brown and Cameron Governments’ decision to slavishly follow EU diktat and start closing coal and oil-fired power stations without clear policies to build cleaner equivalent replacements; weather-dependent windmills and solar panels could never fill the gap. The EU’s various power station directives, first supported by the Blair Government in 2001, forced the U.K. to start shutting key plants from 2012.
To address this systemic policy failure, Tony proposes a judge-led public inquiry “to prevent recurrence and to identify the key mistakes on the part of politicians, regulators and senior civil servants”.
There is no guarantee, however, that such an inquiry would avoid the fantasy green groupthink and NIMBYism that has afflicted U.K. energy policy for decades.
The real problem is the wrongheaded thinking of politicians of all parties, civil servants, regulators and ‘experts’, driven largely by an apocalyptic vision of the future and a messianic sense of needing to do something about it. In those circumstances, it’s hard to see how much a judge can do. The only thing that will really help is for everyone to start waking up from their collective delusion and look at things plainly and rationally. I suppose the right judge could help this happen, though the wrong one would make it worse, and either way he or she would take a very long time about it.
What’s much more urgently needed are political leaders willing to recognise reality and break with the herd to listen to the right voices and forge a better path ahead. It remains to be seen if the latest crop – under the new King Charles the Green – will be any better in this regard than their dismal predecessors.
Tony’s piece is worth reading in full.
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A judge-led enquiry is hardly likely to ask the most pertinent question about the energy mess. The question being: why our politicians are such short-sighted, virtue-signalling globalist stooges and have complete conrempt for Britain and its people.
There are certain things that transcend party politics imo. Water, food, energy. There should always be an abundant supply at reasonable prices.
Should these be taken from political control and handed to a national body who plans and ensures that it is always thus like the CEGB used to. Or are we so captured by ideology that even an independent body would will continue to be influenced against the very basics of life.?
Such a shame that we can’t trust our leaders to make sure the water is clean, we can eat, and the lights will go on and stay on in a time of relative affluence.
And, of course, we’d be in a much better position if governments hadn’t spent the last 25 years massively increasing the population through immigration.
The question is whether such an enquiry would identify the left’s long march through the institutions and the consequent capture of government, civil service and quangos by the Green Blob.
Without that we will have to remove these people ourselves before sense will prevail. Pitchforks at the ready!
Why was the “end of carbon capture funding” a “grave error”? Sounds like something that was diverting precious resources away from much more pressing issues.
You’re right that carbon capture would be a massive waste of money and increase the amount of fuel needed to produce a given amount of electricity by roughly a third. However it’s a bit much to expect even the best journalist/opinion piece writer to get everything right all the time, so I’m happy to overlook that slight blunder in what is otherwise an excellent piece.
You’re being too lenient imho.
carbon capture is the most stupid, useless, ignorant and unnecessary nonsense ever imagined.
Its shameful that the politicians short term view has reduced a country like the UK to this. Cabinet members must have been using their time as a stepping stone, step up and move on.
A great article until he said the last two words of this sentence and then I slowly brought the gun to my mouth..
”This growth has huge implications for energy security, resilience, future bills and climate change.”
Anyone who rages about the energy crisis but in the same breath mentions climate change and tries to link humans to it is plunging us further into lake bullshit and making our new Feudalists very happy.
I’m still amazed at how many, apparently rational people still manage to throw the words “climate change” into every conversation. To me it is a simple red flag that the person is a member of the cult, whatever their other beliefs may be.
Absolutely. Or they’re sucking on the giant tax payer funded green boob. The whole thing is an absurd toxic clown storm of virtue signalling billionaire grifters, scam artists, communists and their army of quasi-religious junk science worshipping Oompa Loompas. And the only ‘environment’ they’re concerned with is the one inside your wallet.
the flaw in this otherwise excellent article is the implication that CO2 and anthropogenic climate change are actual real problems. i strongly recommend videos by Tony Heller (RealClimateScience) and by John Robson (Cimate Discussion Nexus) for rational objective empirical real world data based forensic deconstruction of the World Economic Forum’s ‘great reset’ data fraud based anthropogenic climate change impoverishment, digital enslavement, and genocide scam.
Ian Plimer books and videos are also well worth reading and watching
A truly great Australian, Professor of Geology, who worked underground in mines at Broken Hill for years, and has a mineral name after him- “plimerite”.
The quickest way to lose voters is to make them cold this winter and the government knows that.
Very little action to urgently switch on UK fuels over the last few years, suggests that they either don’t know we will object to freezing or they don’t give a damn.