Sticky plaster energy policy is falling apart

Another day and another bit of sticky plaster is applied. With the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world, the government is increasing the number of companies that will get a bit off their bills in 2027. This follows other moves, like the £150 off customer bills. It will not be enough, given the sheer scale of the problems. The industrial crisis will go on; domestic bills are scheduled to go up and stay up for the next decade; new energy-intensive inward investment (e.g. for data centres) is being deterred; and where there are projects, own generation from gas is the route to firm power. The facts are not changing, and it is getting ever more painful to ignore them. Climate realism means facing up to the relentless increase in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, the continuing 85% of the world’s energy supplies coming from fossil fuels, and the lack of any transition away from this, with the oil, gas and coal burn going ever up as the world energy demand looks set to double by 2050. Renewables on a system basis are not cheap. It takes 120GW now to meet the same peak 45GW demand, which 60GW once comfortably met, as well as doubling the transmission grid and adding all the extra batteries and storage. The renewables are not “home-grown” – the supply chains are foreign. Britain is not on a path to home-grown energy. It is not cheap, and other countries are not looking to Britain as a “clean-energy superpower”. They look to Britain to find out how not to do it – no one else wants the highest energy prices. It’s not difficult to sort all this out, but more sticky plasters will make the situation worse and harder to fix the longer the government ducks the need for a fundamental re-set of British energy policy.