Last week’s publication of the Conservatives’ energy strategy paper Rebuilding security: Conservative energy policy for an uncertain world shows a new kind of rhetoric from them on this issue. In a departure from last year’s climate-centric papers The decentralised energy revolution and The low carbon economy, the focus of this latest paper is very much on improving energy security. Although the language is mainly about security, a closer look at the proposals reveals that many of them also featured in last year’s climate-change-focused green papers. These include:
- Reforming the Climate Change Levy so that it is a tax on carbon rather than energy (a reform that ippr argued for back in 2005). This would help provide a ‘floor price’ for the price of carbon.
- Supporting the development of a new fleet of nuclear power stations
- Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) demonstration (partly through the introduction of an Emissions Performance Standard)
- Developing a smart grid (or ‘energy internet’ as they call it)
- Introducing a ‘Green Deal’ programme, which would offer loans to homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their properties.
There are some new ideas. The most radical is a proposal to allow feed-in tariffs to be used for large-scale renewables investments (as opposed to the current Renewables Obligation). Some people in the renewables industry fear that this would introduce unnecessary uncertainty around the future of support mechanisms for renewable energy.
A glaring omission is how the Conservatives would tackle fuel poverty. Apart from an objective to make energy affordable and speculation that the Green Deal ‘could provide new and effective options for the deployment of public funds to combat fuel poverty’, there are no further mentions of the issue and certainly no concrete policy proposals for dealing with it.
The number of people unable to afford to heat their homes properly continues to rise, so energy policy must get to grips with this problem as well as meeting security of supply and climate change objectives. ippr recommends establishing an independent commission to create a new UK fuel poverty strategy. It is a shame that the Conservatives have missed this opportunity to develop new thinking on addressing this growing social problem.
So will energy policy represent a new dividing line as the election campaign hots up? Perhaps on style – Conservative energy security versus Labour decarbonisation. But on substance, with the exception of the issue of fuel poverty, the approaches don’t look all that different.
Jenny Bird, research fellow, ippr
Main observation from a person campaigning against new opencast mines in the UK
ReplyDeleteThis paper sets out plans for future energy security which does include a future for coal if CCS works. However there is no discussion of problems associated with the sourcing of coal, and whether opencast mining for coal, which now supplies more than 50% OF UK indigenously produced coal, is compatible with this statement in the document:
“Practise environmental stewardship – We believe that each generation has an inalienable responsibility to bequeath a healthy natural environment to the next. Therefore, the environmental costs and benefits of energy use must be consistently and transparently priced into the decision-making of both the state and the market. Allowing sectional interests to force the costs of pollution on others is not only wrong and economically inefficient, it is also – given the scale of the energy industry – a threat to global security.” (p 13)
A recent research paper " UK Opencast / Surface Mined Coal: Its Role in Providing UK Energy Security" reviews current and prospective trends in the use of coal and the sourcing of that coal and comes to the conclusion that for the foreseeable future more than 50% of domestically produced coal will be from opencast sites. This will mean that 10 new opencast sites will be needed each year up to 2025. It raises the question whether under these circumstances we can ever talk about 'Clean Coal'.
Free copies of this 32 page referenced report are available from the following web site;
http://mopg.co.uk/MOPG-Research-Reports.php
Steve Leary