Britain’s energy crisis is a national political humiliation
By Paul Homewood
Tony Lodge of the Centre for Policy Studies wrote this in September, but it is still highly relevant:
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; 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 UK electricity generation. Between 2000 and 2017 over a third of the UK’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.
In order to provide a proper understanding and long-overdue analysis of this systemic policy failure, a judge-led public inquiry is needed in the national interest both to prevent recurrence and to identify the key mistakes on the part of politicians, regulators and senior civil servants.
Alongside a long list of former energy secretaries (17 since 1997), ex-premiers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson should also be called as they led governments which oversaw the running down of British energy security, diversity and resilience.
Exposing and scrutinising how we got here and the decisions taken – or not – over this period is vital as it represents one of the biggest national policy failings in the post-war era.
It has huge implications for the economy, households, industry and future competitiveness – as this winter will show.
News in July that the National Grid had to panic-buy staggeringly expensive Belgian electricity to avoid power cuts fundamentally illustrates Britain’s perilous energy supply. As power demand surged during the heatwaves, the National Grid paid £9,724 per megawatt hour, more than 5,000pc the typical price, to prevent London suffering blackouts.
Whilst backbenchers are told to keep citing Russia and Ukraine as the reason for this very avoidable energy crunch, the real story is much more damning, concerning and home-grown. 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 writing was on the wall years ago following the Blair, Brown and Cameron government’s 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 UK to start shutting key plants from 2012.
Consequently, ministers are now desperately trying to keep remaining 50-year-old coal power plants running, at huge cost, alongside the hope that they will be able to import more and more electricity from Europe, again at high cost. So how did it come to this? Only a full and proper public inquiry can help us find out, prevent recurrence and deliver better policies for the future.
The emergency bid to Belgium has importantly exposed Britain’s growing overdependence on imported power. This growth has huge implications for energy security, resilience, future bills and climate change. We must stop building interconnectors and instead prioritise reliable home grown generation.
A public inquiry into Britain’s energy crisis will serve to expose the dangerous and failed doctrine of draconian out-of-date targets and poor policy-making over a generation. The public deserves to know who is responsible for soaring bills and the mistakes which have led to a real risk of power rationing this winter and beyond.
A failed energy policy inflicts huge pain on households, industry and the wider economy. It diverts investment and stops job creation. We need to learn and understand how and why political leaders failed in this most critical area of policy in the national interest.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
How did it come to this?
The wind stopped!
Successive governments have consistently worked against the country’s economy and society as a whole. They have bowed to global undemocratic institutions such as the WEF and signed us up to the UN’s Agenda 2030 on “sustainable” development. Presently, we have a totally economically illiterate Chancellor intent on increasing inflation by raising taxes. You couldn’t make it up. Nuff said.
Agreed!
Its an epidemic of uselessness, recently a manager of two years ineptitude was asked? to move on, HR offered staff counselling as he was leaving, meanwhile the whole of the workforce were celebrating wildly, you couldn’t write it. This pervades the whole of Government, NHS, etc top heavy with useless people in non jobs earning loads without a clue!
Merry Christmas all.
And a specially merry Christmas to those useless people in non jobs with their final salary, index linked pensions funded by taxpayers 😡
The question is why they did this. Why did they act against the interests of their country? Why are they in the pocket of the global billionaires?
Because they are terminally stupid and vain. Rather than address any real problems – failed health service, out of control immigration etc – they can virtue signal and bathe in the glory of saving the planet.
This is why, and it has nothing to do with the climate.
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
And while we’re at it, check out the United Nations Replacement Migration Program that is running in tandem with the destruction of Western Capitalism.
We’re being cancelled, time to get the pitch and tow together for the torches, sharpen the pitchforks and beat the ploughshares and sickles back into swords and spears.
I support all of this. However, I fear even if there was such a public enquiry none of the Ministers and PMs named would actually acknowledge that their decisions were faulty. They are all sufficiently scientifically illiterate to not actually understand the enormous problems their flawed policies have created
I’m sure the politicians would blame the slithering serpents who advise them; who are just as, if not more so, scientifically illiterate
The climate change committee has focused purely on renewables has led to this hopeless energy situation, the national grid did not highlight how unreliable the system was becoming to meet base loads.
For how much longer must we make excuses – errors of judgement, economical illiteracy, good intentions overriding common sense – before admitting what it is? Uncaring greed on behalf of many who milk everything ‘green’ for personal gain; uncaring greed by many whose zeal is grant or donation driven; virtue signalling politicians trying to appease those who will never ever vote for them; the supra-national non-elected bodies and billionaire ‘philanthropists’ attempting a global coup, using health and saving the planet as subterfuge in their hunger for power.
It is not just with energy where these clowns have utterly failed ? Most notable for me was Brown’s Bottom when Gordy sold almost all our gold at a rock bottom price near $250/oz. The price has not been lower since that day. But that is why he was at the Exchequer. The price today is rising and is near $1800/oz, approx. seven times his bottom.
It was actually worse than this. He didn’t just sell a valuable resource. He went out of his way to ensure that this country would get the worst possible price by signalling to the market his intention to sell, thereby crashing the price !
If he’d wanted to maximise his price he would have sold quietly and drip fed the market.
Typical of Labour governments, putting an economic incompetent as Chancellor of the Exchequer
It came to this because our MPs are stupid. Blair shut down the Nuclear power program. This should just get the old coal power up and running. Windmills and solar power just can not cope.
One thing that really angers me is that we blew up our coal fired power stations as they were decommissioned. At least Germany had the good sense to mothball theirs.
Well actually Germany did not mothball many, they still had them running almost continuously!
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
The “how?” needs to be investigated by an (electrical) engineer and not a judge.
A judge should be employed to determine the more important question of “why?”, if a suitable judge in today’s judiciary can be found of course.
How did our leaders allow it to come this? To get part of the answer you have to understand who is employing and paying some of those past energy ministers: the likes of Deben, Clark, Davy and more. They used their positions to line their own pockets, and to he’ll with the public need.
And we’re meant to call them public servants.
Amber Rudd overseeing the end of carbon capture funding in 2015
Not seeing any error there.
Well carbon capture is a total waste of money and bad for the planet. We need all that life-giving CO2 in the atmosphere not wastefully buried underground.
Carbon capture is a total insane farce.
‘slavishly follow EU diktat’
We know why, the woke pipe dream that co2 is the problem, when all the time its those idiots in Whitehall and rubber-stamping Sir Humphrey’s. The man (or woman) in the street could foresee all this so why not our moribund leaders?
Because they’ve just left school, college, University and done nowt else’
Career politicians, example Neil Kinnock, failed politician, but 5 pensions from the public purse…… literally a pension millionaire. This is also the chap who sacked the Danish accountant who was trying to sort out the EU accounts, before the truth emerged! EU, IOC, FIFA, EUFA, UN et al all shady as hell, not one without self interest as their guiding principle!
Anyone with the internet can see that we are in an interglacial. We are warming since then and it cannot therefore be due to CO2 alone since 1850. The planet was much hotter in the past and did not die.
Our so called political elite cannot be so dumb. They are just blatantly enriching themselves at out expense.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
“How did it come to this?”
Incompetence, greed, lethargy, the need to believe, the need to trust, naivety, lack of cynicism by default.
There’s the making of a fiery book or 2 or 3 on this subject and the origins of the chaos and the results. ‘Phone calls to the more obvious potential publishers would probably discover that more than one book was ‘ in development’. Two necessary chapters come to mind:
One building on Harry Passfield’s list as above with the dates and the essence of the fragile arguments offered to justify the politicians’ stance at the time. That would also reveal how little the legislators understood the issues.
Another covering the scope of the damage to industry which subsequently migrated overseas to locations with cheap power leaving an underemployed workforce with spiralling domestic costs i.e. heating, public transport and food — the inflation at source.
You would think that with the surfeit of think tanks, NGOs and pressure groups in the UK matters would not have become so acute. It suggests that the civil service and our elected representatives no longer exercise the intellectual rigour when addressing crucial issues of national importance to which we are entitled.
I’m half expecting the “special military operation” to flare into a major conflagration that will cause Tony Lodge’s suggestion to lose practical significance (become moot).
Besides, Paul H. and commenters on this site have been saying much the same for the years I’ve been a reader or since he started in 2011.
There is no easy path out of the mess because, as yet, the leaders (or most of them) believe in the global warming CO2 connection. That belief cannot be rapidly expunged from thousands of minds. Even if that could happen a fix to the energy question will be a multi-year endeavor.
On the plus side, many people have prayed for a white Christmas. Their prayers have been answered. Now, please stop.
Whatever you celebrate this time of year – I wish you the best.