When, as seems ever more likely, David Cameron enters Downing Street as prime minister, he will find himself facing two major national crises. One, our collapsing economy, he knows about, although it is not certain what he plans to do about it. To the other, however, he seems totally oblivious. There is no secret about the fact that within a few years Britain will be faced with a terrifying and unprecedented shortfall in its electricity supplies. All but one of the nuclear plants which provide a fifth of our power are so old they will have to close. Nine more major coal and oil-fired power stations are rapidly running out of the hours they are allowed to remain open by Brussels. The combined output of these plants is 22 gigawatts (GW). At peak demand we need 56GW. We thus face a 40 per cent shortfall in the supply needed to keep our economy functioning. There is no way that gap can be filled in time by new nuclear plants. Building more gas plants, when we are fast running out of our own gas and prices are likely to soar, all the experts agree is crazy. So what does Mr Cameron propose? There is no more alarming gap in Tory thinking than the complete vacuum that represents their energy policy. For three years they have indulged themselves making "green" noises about the need for a "low carbon economy", "smart meters", more wind turbines, without giving any indication that they have the slightest practical knowledge of where our electricity actually comes from. This was devastatingly brought home in January 2006 when the media were summoned to watch Mr Cameron and his shadow cabinet colleagues sitting in front of laptops to sign up with "green electricity" suppliers. Clearly they imagined that if you sign up to a "green" tariff, all your power will somehow come from nice eco-friendly windmills and solar panels. In fact it all still comes through the National Grid, where the derisory amount of power from windmills just gets mixed in with all that "dirty" electricity from grown-up power stations. Mr Cameron himself signed up with a company called "npower juice", which boasts that it gets most of its power from a windfarm off the north Welsh coast. The deal is fine for npower, which makes £9 million a year in subsidies from its turbines through selling Renewable Obligation Certificates, on top of much the same from the electricity itself. But most of the power entering Mr Cameron's home via the grid is no more "renewable" than anyone else's. From the electricityinfo website we can actually see the sources from which supply companies derive their power. Npower gets 38 per cent from coal, 46 per cent from gas, only 3 per cent from renewables. Mr Cameron's energy adviser Zac Goldsmith, also present in 2006, happily explained that he is signed up with Ecotricity, which likes to boast that it is the "greenest" of all supply companies. But even Ecotricity only derives 37 per cent from renewables, the remaining two-thirds coming from nasty, polluting, ungreen coal, gas and nuclear. The point of this story is that it reveals the almost fathomless naivete of the Tory leadership about one of the two most serious issues which will confront them if they come to power. They babble on about the wind turbines which very intermittently provide barely 1 per cent of the electricity we need and are unlikely ever to produce significantly more. But they show not a glimmer of grasping the scale of the crisis now roaring down on us, let alone give any sign they have an answer to it, Unless they grow up very fast on this issue, Mr Cameron could go down in history as the man who left Downing Street shortly after the lights went out. A point well delivered Following my item last week pointing out that the part-privatisation of Royal Mail is ordained under EU directives, that doughty Tory backbencher Ann Winterton made the same point at a rowdy Prime Minister's Questions. An embarrassed hush fell on the House as if someone had broken wind in church. Harriet Harman in reply notably avoided mentioning the EU but directed Lady Winterton to "the Hooper report", to which I referred last week, where the guilty secret is revealed. MPs don't mind being in Europe and ruled by Europe, but the last thing they want is for anyone to admit it. Fuel for thought Completely missing from the excitement over the 25th anniversary of the miners' strike was the most interesting point about it. Our coal industry went into the strike with 187,000 miners and 174 pits, of wildly varying efficiency. Four years later the inefficient pits were closed and the workforce cut by two-thirds. Yet output, at 100 million tons a year, was much the same as before the strike. Productivity had trebled. Then in the 1990s, thanks to Michael Heseltine's "dash for gas", the benefits of that revolution were chucked away. Of the 62 million tons a year of coal that we use now, only 17 million are mined in Britain and we import 22 million from Mr Putin's Russia. Good old Hezza, as the Tories used to say.How will the Tories fill our power shortfall?
David Cameron appears oblivious to the fact that within a few years we will not be generating enough power to keep the country running, says Christopher Booker.
Sunday, 8 March 2009
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