Britannia Radio

Future of UK's energy supply is dark indeed
By Christopher Booker
10/08/2008


With every week that goes by it becomes clearer that, within a few years, Britain will face an unprecedented crisis, thanks to the shambles the Government has made of our energy policy.

After years of dereliction, when only a crash programme of measures could keep our lights on and our economy functioning, our policy has become so skewed by blinkered environmentalism and diktats from the EU that we are fast heading for the worst of all worlds - a near-total dependence on foreign sources of energy which will not only be astronomically expensive but which can in no way be guaranteed to supply all the electricity we need.

What are the hard facts?


Between now and 2015 we shall lose 40 per cent of the generating capacity we currently require to meet maximum demand (still rising), due to the phasing out of almost all our obsolescent nuclear reactors and the closure of nine of our major coal- and oil-fired power stations under an EU "anti-pollution" directive.

Gordon Brown talks about building a new generation of nuclear power plants, for which we would have to rely on the French - having two years ago sold off Westinghouse, the only British-owned firm capable of constructing them.

But even if the French play ball, which seems less likely since the collapse of Brown's plan to sell off British Energy to France's EDF, the new plants could still not be built in time to plug the gap.

The only short-term remedy will be to build yet more gas-fired stations, at a time when we are fast running out of our own gas supplies and when gas prices are shooting through the roof, reducing us to dependence on countries such as Mr Putin's Russia or Qatar, both of which have recently announced caps on future exports.

Our best bet might seem to invest urgently in a dozen more coal-fired power stations, which still supply more than a third of our electricity.

But own coal industry is so run down - though we still have more than 100 years of reserves - that barely a quarter of the 62 million tons of coal we used last year was British.The rest had to be imported, including 22 million tons from Russia and 12 million tons from South Africa.

At a time when rocketing world demand for coal has already doubled prices in a year, we should again be dependent on unreliable foreign sources, to generate electricity by means which excite almost as much fury from environmentalists as nuclear power - as we saw with last week's demonstrations against plans by German-owned E.On to build a new "clean coal" station at Kingsnorth in Kent.

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Read more from Christopher Booker
With this colossal crisis fast approaching, our ministers are still lost in the cloudcuckooland of Mr Brown's £100 billion "green energy" plan, to meet our EU target of generating a third of our electricity from renewables by 2020.

Not an energy expert in the country says this is remotely feasible. Our present 2,000 wind turbines supply just 1.5 per cent of our power, and even if Mr Brown's 7,000 additional turbines could in practice be built, we would still be more than 200 per cent short of our EU target.

Worse still is the fact that our electricity investment market is now so skewed by the various subsidy and "carbon savings" schemes adopted to meet our various EU targets that these are now uselessly soaking up more than £5 billion a year which should otherwise be urgently invested in proper generating capacity.

Our major power companies can now make so much money from "renewables" subsidies and other "planet saving" schemes that they have much less incentive to risk capital on those which might keep our lights on.

Our energy policy is now so constrained and distorted by EU requirements that, even if we had a government with the knowhow and will to sort out the mess, we should soon be breaking EU laws all over the place.

Tragically, no one seems to remain in more blissful ignorance of all these harsh realities than our Conservative opposition which, when the crisis arrives, may well be in power.

Not only will those at the top of the Tory party, on present showing, have no idea why the lights are going out, but they will have even less idea of what to do about it - because by then it will be too late.

China replays Russian games

Following coverage of the Beijing Olympics, I have had a strong sense of déjà vu. In 1980 I was sent by the Daily Mail to cover the Moscow Olympics, and the parallels between then and now have been overwhelming.

In each case we have seen a totalitarian regime making a titanic effort to use the Olympics as a showcase for itself to the world (while of course insisting that the Games are about sport, not politics).

For the shadow of Tibet now, read in 1980 the shadow of the invasion of Afghanistan, which caused 65 countries, led by the US, to boycott Moscow.

Each occasion has seen a fierce crackdown on dissidents and anyone who might explain to visitors the dark side of life under a ruthless and creaking regime.

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Beijing Olympics: Full coverage of the 2008 games
Moscow in 1980 saw the biggest security operation since the death of Stalin (they even evacuated all children from the city). Huge efforts were put into staging the most spectacular opening ceremony the Games had ever seen. But few sporting journalists witnessed the 200,000 stony-faced soldiers who closed off much of the city that day, while - as in Beijing - all non-military aircraft were banned from its airspace. (The Chinese authorities even copied the Soviets by seeding clouds, in a bid to let the sun shine.)

After my irrepressible colleague Ian Wooldridge and I filed excoriating reports on that awesome but joyless opening ceremony, headed "the sham and showmanship of the eerie games", hundreds of journalists were startled at next day's press conference to hear us being threatened with deportation for "affronting the dignity of host nation".

The sport itself, particularly for British observers, was unforgettable: the great duels between Seb Coe and Steve Ovett, Daley Thompson's triumphant decathlon, Alan Wells ducking into the tape to win the 100 metres.

As a propaganda exercise to hide the internal strains already pushing the Soviet empire towards breaking point, the Moscow Olympics were largely successful.

But every night on shortwave radio I was following the unprecedented industrial unrest spreading across Poland, which gave birth to Solidarity. Similarly unprecedented strikes in Russia itself had been reported only by David Satter, an astute correspondent for the Financial Times.

As he drove me past the grim walls of the Kremlin (as I recorded later in a book about this eerie moment in Soviet history, The Games War), he startled me by saying "this system cannot last more than another 10 years".

He was spot on. Will anyone make such a prediction about China in the days ahead?