If it fails to hasten the end of the recession, the Government, or its successor, will have a little more time before it is forced to go cap in hand to Brussels to try to extend the lives of coal-fired power stations, which are steadily running out of European grace for environmental reasons.

Another £525m for wind “farms” – one of the so-called “green” elements in the Budget – is irrelevant to the real issue: how are we going to power Britain reliably, cleanly and competitively. Instead, this spending when we are set to borrow £175bn in a year and the national debt is soaring to £1.4trillion served only to underline the extent to which British politics is still fiddling about before an energy crunch succeeds the credit crisis.

For years now none of our political parties has demonstrated a firm grasp of energy essentials and the urgency that would automatically follow a real appreciation of the risks we are running with medium term electricity supply. It is clear that the political class is still running scared of “Greens” whose impractical and expensive ideas could have been devised only by an economic saboteur.

We got an insight into how far we have moved from reality when we received from inside the energy industry an April Fool’s Day message that was taken seriously by too many people. Admittedly, it was beautifully packaged in explaining the Government’s desperation to meet EU renewables targets and launch a massive construction project in the recession and the problem created by the unpredictability of tidal barrage electricity. It then quoted a Government spokesman as saying: “The project may look viable if its output would coincide with daily peaks in customer demand when electricity prices are at their highest. We cannot control the tides. Instead we are looking at ways to schedule people’s work and leisure to coincide with Severn tides” He went on to outline the “ radical” ideas for rescheduling school times, TV programmes and sporting events each day and varying tolls and fares to encourage people to travel when tides are slack. “We believe the change can be managed”, he said. The wind energy industry was wheeled in to encourage that notion.

It saw wind power at long last becoming very popular if we had flexible week-ends and holidays coinciding with calm, sunny weather and working days confined to the wet and windy.

Quite. That many were taken in by this spoof is a measure of the deluded nature of energy policy in this country.


BRITAIN GOES BANANAS
The third week in April 2009 will, in fact, go down in history as the moment when Britain finally proved conclusively it had gone bananas.

It stems from our politicians regarding carbon emissions instead of securing our supplies of electrical power as the priority energy problem.

Accordingly, the Chancellor not only set aside £1.4bn he could not afford for carbon suppression but also produced the first legally binding “carbon budget” in the world, according to an adoring press. We now have a new target to go with the 80 per cent cut in carbon emissions (on 1990) levels by 2050; a 34 per cent cut by 2020.

These targets are pure spin – that is, short term manipulation of opinion regardless of longer-term reputation – for three reasons. First, not a single politician associated with them will – or can - be held accountable for their achievement. If a week is a long time in politics 25 years is an era and 41 years an aeon.

Second, no Parliament can bind another, and third, when it comes to it, no self-respecting politician is going to impoverish his country for a few tonnes of carbon when eliminating the UK’s entire output of CO2 would have no measurable effect on global warming, assuming it is manmade.

The UK produces only two per cent of the world’s emissions.

In the meantime, they feel impelled to show business. So the Government, it seems, is going to chuck £525m at offshore wind turbines; £45m at small-scale renewable energy sources such as hopelessly uneconomic domestic wind turbines; £405m at encouraging “green collar” jobs through boosting the manufacture of even more uneconomic solar panels; and £25m at wood or waste-burning community schemes which, of course, produce CO2.

By any standards this is the economics of a mad house that is incidentally stupendously broke. It is not, however, entirely what it seems. You can cut the Government’s commitment by half a billion – the £525m for offshore wind farms. That will not be Government – i.e. taxpayer – money. It will be ours as consumers through the Renewables Obligation.

So what’s the difference? None to you and me.

We shall pay one way or the other while the Government tries to take credit for our enforced largesse.

THE CYNICISM OF CCS
But that is not the end of it. The Chancellor threw another £90m at up to four demonstration plants for proving carbon capture and storage, which are supposed to prevent CO2 from leaving fossil-fuel burning power stations and sequester it permanently in strata undergound.

This might be a sensible use of funds if we could afford it. But we fear that this announcement was designed by spindoctors to take the sting out of the subsequent approval by Ed Miliband, Energy Secretary, of the building of four very necessary new coal-fired power stations.

The Guardian, in a state of extremely confusing excitement over this “clean coal power revolution”, even went so far as to claim that Miliband had signalled that no new coal-fired power stations would be built unless fitted with CCS technology that captured at least a quarter of their CO2 emissions. In fact he gave the go-ahead for four new stations on the East coast on the basis that they would have to retrofit CCS technology by 2025.

Kidology
But what happens if CCS is not proven by then? And where will Miliband and his fellow Ministers be by then to answer for their policy? Are we, in our state of indebtedness forecast to last until 2032, just going to shut these new power stations if CCS is unproven by 2025? No doubt many people will hope so since the consumer will have to pay for the £1bn currently estimated cost of adapting each to CCS. It is anybody’s guess what the eventually effect on bills will be but some estimates suggest they could double.

The honest thing to have said would have been that we need new coal-fired power stations and that, in the meantime, we shall try to prove CCS and its retrofitting at reasonable cost. But such is the tyranny of the Greens that politicians are reduced first to kidding themselves and then trying to kid us.

THE STUNNING SILENCE
To be fair to the Chancellor, he also announced another £375m for improving energy efficiency in homes and buildings through insulation and more efficient heating systems. It is important to improve the energy efficiency of properties but we should not kid ourselves that this is all that is necessary to cut out waste. People’s habits in using those buildings are also important.

Otherwise, the alarming thing about a political class under the thumb of the Greens is that nobody we could discover spoke up for the cheapest, safest, most reliable and by far the cleanest – i.e. in CO2 terms – source of power generation: nuclear power.

Of course, the Government (and Conservative Opposition) are committed to developing nuclear power, though not that you would notice. But, given that value for money must be the nation’s watchword when it is up to the nostrils in debt, it is truly remarkable that not a single politician felt moved to point out that nuclear could take every trick at half the price.

The credit crunch, recession and their devastating consequences for our public finances and the economy should have killed stone dead the argument that we need all the energy we can get at any price. It is manifest nonsense. We cannot afford intermittent, unpredictable sources of energy, especially when they perform so badly in reducing CO2, the sole justification for investing in them.

We cannot afford not to develop nuclear power, and it is time, our political leaders said so loud and clear.

ON THE KNIFE EDGE
Predictably, the “Greens” described all this as “a lost opportunity”. (What more do they want – blood?) In doing so, they revealed their dangerous preoccupation with carbon rather than the economy or people’s energy bills.

If only they would listen to Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at Oxford. A week before the Budget he pointed in The Times to the pincer movement at work in Britain. On the one hand the scale of investment required to plug the energy gap while pursuing renewables is enormous – possibly £100bn in the next decade.

On the other, the credit crisis has made it harder and more expensive to finance investment. Just when investment is needed, finance has dried up.

“Time is now very short in energy terms”, he wrote. “With about five years to go if the economy recovers, there are still things that can be done. Our energy policy was designed for the years of energy surpluses and North Sea gas. It is still focussed on keeping costs down and sweating assets. What is needed is a radical rethink, with investment the priority. It will take a national effort to prevent a serious crisis in the middle of the next decade.

“Without such a redesign, things could get nasty quite quickly if there is a rapid economic recovery. As energy systems operate closer to the margin, small shocks have large consequences.

But as energy systems operate closer to the margin, small shocks have large consequences.

But as margins tighten, prices respond disproportionately. Britain has probably committed itself to higher and more volatile prices.

“This matters not only for customers. The rest of the economy depends on energy supply. Have a bit too much and we pay a small premium. Have too little and we pay a lot. These costs are the real burden on the economy and they are felt long before any physical interruption in supply. We should worry less about the lights going out and more about the costs to the economy of running our energy system on the edge.

“Unless reform is quick, the best hope for Britain’s energy supply from a security perspective is that the economy does not recover quickly – a long, hard Japanese-style recession would keep demand (and carbon emissions) low.

But that’s hardly a sound energy policy”.

THE RIGHT TO DEMO
The logic of Professor Helm’s alarm is that we have a mere six years to avoid trouble, with new nuclear unlikely, in his view, to come on stream before 2020. This raises a serious question for the environmental movement. Is it going to ensure we hit trouble or is it going to be sensible? This is not an academic question. They have already tried to shut down Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent and subsequently won in court the daft doctrine that it is permissible to commit an offence to avoid a larger crime – in this, case exacerbating global warming.

This month police at Nottingham have been vilified for arresting 117 protestors in a school at midnight before they had chance to shut down Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station on the grounds that they posed a serious threat to its operation. How are they going to react to Ed Miliband’s go ahead for four new coal-fired power stations if, as we suspect, his conditions are mere window-dressing spin? More to the point for SONE, are they going to throw the courts at the development of nuclear power and try to hamper the construction of new nuclear stations? They cannot surely claim that they are doing so to prevent a worse offence when nuclear power emits next to no carbon.

It is time the so-called Green movement was asked whether it is part of the human race or a virus intent on damaging it. How are they intending to reconcile their undoubted right to demonstrate peacefully with the militant elements hell bent on trouble that batten on to their protest .

We think we are entitled to ask in view of the ugly scenes at the G20 summit demo at the beginning of the month.

TORY STANDS UP
It is, of course, quite impossible to keep up with all the chatter – or is it Twitter? – that fills the ether these days. This means that it is possible we do politicians an injustice, though why they should go for minimal publicity instead of the maximum afforded by press, radio and TV remains a mystery.

Nonetheless, we have just picked up David Heathcoat-Amory, Conservative MP for Wells, on the Conservative Home blog sounding off about the deficiencies of energy policy . In the course of it he said the only hope of meeting energy demand in a world of increasing population without an enormous increase in CO2 emissions was nuclear.

In Britain, we were in a weak position because of a policy of neglect. Having sold off Westinghouse and now offering the commercial arm of the UKAEA to bidders, we were not in a position to lead any more, even if we wanted to. We could have led the revolution and done much for our manufacturing base and engineering skills.

“Instead”, he added, “we are now an also ran. We are clowns, spectators, supplicants. It is a very sad story” Greg Clark, Shadow Energy Secretary, agreed that the example of the recent past was not the way forward “if we want to take up our traditional role in the energy sector as a world leader in nuclear technology”.

We live in Hope

GEARING UP
The man from Mars could be forgiven if he assumed Britain had no nuclear industry because it remains so silent about all these matters. But work continues towards the promised nuclear renaissance and this month we note the following developments.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Agency is reported to be delighted with the progress of its auction of land at the Bradwell, Oldbury and Wylfa nuclear power station sites. The Government has also published 11 potential sites for the first wave of nuclear power stations. As expected, they are on or around existing nuclear plants at Hartlepool, Heysham,Dungeness, Sellafield, Wylfa, Oldbury, Hinkley Point, Bradwell, Sizewell and at Kirksanton and Braystones, near Sellafield.

Centrica continues to pursue its quest for a part of British Energy’s action.

And Areva, which through BE can be expected to build some of Britain’s reactors, has announced plans to nearly double its manufacturing capacity for heavy components for nuclear power plants at its Chalons/St. Marcel plant in Eastern France.

SHOCKED OR NAÏVE?
The Commons’ Skills Select Committee has just announced that it was “shocked” to discover that engineering advice was absent, or barely featured, in the formulation of government policies, including energy and large IT projects.

We are shocked to discover it was shocked. It presumably means that it had assumed that, notwithstanding the extensive criticism of energy policy, it had been given the engineers’ professional seal of approval. Perhaps they were entitled to do so since the National Grid, for example, seems prepared to contemplate up to 35 per cent of wind power on the system, whatever that precisely means under critical analysis.

But you would have thought the committee would have asked some serious questions as to how on earth Britain could be powered by wind, tides and solar when all three are not continuous and when common sense tells you energy conservation depends not just on technology but crucially on human behaviour, which is notoriously difficult to change. For too long renewables and energy conservation, with presumably gas as the fail safe provider, were seen as the way forward.

The committee’s solution is for the Government appoint a Chief Engineer as well as a Chief Scientist. But what is the good of a Chief Engineer if he is not listened to?

SONE’S FUTURE
The chairman has asked us to thank you for your responses to his letter seeking members’ opinions on SONE’s future. They will be considered by SONE’s committee at its next meeting at the end of May.