A huge deceit at the heart of our energy policy

The interview in last week’s with Hugh McNeal, the new head of RenewableUK, was remarkable in more ways than one. Certainly readers may have been surprised to know how easily he could switch from being a senior official at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to running our leading lobby group for wind farms. But even more significant was the way he unwittingly exposed what appears to me to be a massive deceit now at the heart of our national energy policy.

Like DECC, he has bought into the trick of pretending that renewables are now “the cheapest form of new [electricity] generation in Britain”. On the face of it this claim seems ludicrous, since renewables only

But herein lies the utterly deceitful game DECC is playing. First, they know that George Osborne’s “carbon tax” is gradually intended to make power from fossil fuels as costly as that from wind and solar, so that they can describe these as “subsidy-free”. Secondly, they know they desperately need new gas-fired power stations to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. So, thirdly, they are planning to throw huge bribes at the power companies to get those new gas plants built.

But, fourthly, the bit Mr McNeal didn’t mention, or perhaps does not know yet, they are also aware that because the would-be operators of these power stations know that it is DECC policy to phase out all fossilfuel electricity by 2030 (unless it is made with “carbon capture” technology which is unlikely ever to be invented), it is not going to pay these companies to invest billions in new power plants with such a limited life.

So DECC has got itself impaled on the contradictions of a policy which, short of repealing the Climate Change Act, can only result in the lights going out and our economy grinding to a halt. As the old saying has it, “those who seek to deceive others, end up only by deceiving themselves”.