Tim Leunig: Let's tap the North Sea for energy

When war in Iran doubled gas prices overnight, Britain's energy vulnerabilities were suddenly impossible to ignore. But what's the real fix — and who's actually right?

Tim Leunig, former economic adviser to Rishi Sunak and chief economist at Nesta, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for a clear-eyed tour through Britain's energy predicament. Leunig makes the case for extracting more from the North Sea — not out of climate scepticism, but precisely because of it. Every barrel left in British waters is one that doesn't have to be bought from Qatar, piped from a capricious Washington or, worst of all, sourced from Moscow. Fracking, by contrast, is simply unscientific in a densely populated country of Victorian terraced houses. The real hedge, he argues, is a combination of more renewables, smarter efficiency and a North Sea used to its full extent — with a contracts-for-difference model keeping both industry and the public on the right side of a price spike.

There's also an uncomfortable truth for British industrialists: in a world where solar energy in Texas and Western Australia is now the cheapest power on earth, energy-intensive manufacturing is going to follow the sun regardless of whether the right or the left is in charge. Britain simply isn't sunny enough to win that race.

The energy trilemma, it turns out, may be less of a trilemma than politicians on both sides would have you believe.

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