Dan Lewis is Chief Executive of the Economic Policy Centre which has just published his new paper, Securing our Energy Future: Why and how it must be done
When it comes to getting bang for your buck, you’d be lucky indeed to get a small pop or even a pipsqueak out of a whole gamut of spectacularly expensive and ineffective energy policies we have in place in today’s Britain. As I wrote yesterday in the Yorkshire Post and as covered in The Engineer, we have got to get back to basics and put energy security first, affordability second and environmentally clean power third.
Unfortunately, right now, British energy policy is all back to front. We are over-rewarding low impact, intermittent technologies while failing to secure investment for big impact, long lifespan, clean and secure technologies like large hydro, nuclear, interconnectors and a Severn Tidal Barrage or Tidal Lagoons. This will only lead to even greater future dependence on expensive, tight supplies of imported gas from the LNG spot market and very possibly, power cuts from the middle of the next decade.
And in surveying the miserable, rent-seeking landscape that we call British Energy Policy, it would also break a long British policy-making tradition not to set up or help finance an oddly-named quango of questionable benefit. I was astonished to find a Wales Centre of Excellence for Anaerobic Digestion, partly sponsored by the Welsh Assembly. I wonder, is this a good use of taxpayers' funds?
And then aside from the general lack of focus and waste, there are those policies which actually have the opposite effect of that intended. Exhibit A has to be energy efficiency and that is the theme for this platform piece today.
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