We do not revel in gloom. We wish we could lift up your hearts. But the reality is that every month things seem to go from bad to worse. As we write, the economy is sinking, the Coalition resembles two ferrets fighting in a sack and UK energy policy grows more eccentric by the day. There are only two bright spots: i) EdF’s aim, according to its CEO. Vincent de Rivaz, to be the first, along with its partner, Centrica, to deliver new nuclear in the UK; and ii) the threat of a deep winter freeze, with snow even in October, according to the current Express. Only trouble in maintaining electricity supply now seems likely to bring the government to its senses.

So far it has been deaf to all criticisms of its energy policy, even though this month has brought a wave of doubts and outright condemnation of its attachment to renewables, and notably wind power (see below).

We can but hope that Whitehall and Westminster read the Sunday Telegraph of September 18. Referring to the payment of £1.2m to the Norwegian owner of a Scottish wind farm not to produce electricity for eight hours, it said: “This should precipitate a swift reappraisal of the commitment to such a source of energy. It is becoming increasingly clear that the commitment is based on dogma, not evidence. But the truth is you cannot meet a country’s energy needs from dogma”.



WHY PERPETUATE SOMEONE ELSE’S FOLLY?

To be fair, the commitment to obtain 35% of Britain’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020 was agreed in Brussels and mandated by the EU long before the Coalition came to office. At the time, there were questions as to whether Tony Blair knew what he had done. But to perpetuate someone else’s folly when it is plain as a wind turbine that it is an expensive idiocy and probably unattainable in the bargain is no excuse.

There is no other policy, not even the fiasco over the reform of planning law (on top of the aborted forestry sale) or international aid largesse in the face of Africa’s failure ever to improve from it, that is sucking so much credibility out of the Coalition.

It is true Britain is not quite as incredible as Germany where Angela Merkel has completely tarnished her escutcheon by phasing out nuclear power by 2022 after Fukushima. Indeed, the UK Coalition has behaved sensibly since the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster. But it has not brought any new sense of urgency to the development of nuclear power as the only viable element in its energy policy. Instead, we continue to take the most expensive and ultimately impractical route to energy and environmental “salvation” with an apparently undimmed enthusiasm for renewables in the face of the mounting criticisms and evidence of their financially crippling uselessness.

It is all the more frustrating when the government is desperate to reduce expenditure and secure growth amid reports of a “black hole” in its balance sheet and a halving over the year in projections of the UK’s economic expansion. It should be obvious to Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, who prides himself unduly on his economic expertise, that renewables, far from creating jobs are destroying them by reducing the competitiveness of established firms through inflated energy bills caused by the cost of the subsidies needed to create renewables employment. This isn’t just folly; it is madness.





THE SIX-POINT POLICY FOR THE UK’S RUINATION

This is exactly the point made by Professor Gordon Hughes (University of Edinburgh) in a report “The Myth of Green Jobs”, published this month.

He says: “Claims by politicians and lobbyists that green energy policies will create a few thousand jobs are not supported by the evidence. In terms of the labour market, the gains for a small number of actual or potential employees in businesses specialising in renewable energy have to be weighed against the dismal prospects for a much larger group of workers producing tradable goods in the rest of the manufacturing sector”.

Professor Hughes rattles off a whole series of figures and deductions that should have any rational politician urgently examining current policies:

1 – The Government’s target for electricity from renewable sources will cost 9- 10 times the amount required to meet the same demand with conventional power plants.

2 – The extra investment required for renewable energy – around £120bn – will be diverted from more productive uses.

3 – Together with this diversion of investment, increases in the cost of energy will mean many manufacturing firms will either go bankrupt or relocate.

4 – Policies to promote renewable energy could add 0.6-0.7 percentage points to core inflation up to 2020.

5 – The cumulative impact of these policies could amount to the loss of 2-3% a year of potential GDP for 20 years or more.

6 – Once the effects on economic growth are taken into account the cost of saving one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2020 will be £270. Currently the carbon price on the EU emissions trading system is around £11.50.

Professor Hughes says the public have never signed up to the idea that the UK should sacrifice growth in GDP to meet climate change targets. Indeed, the proposition has never been put to them. Instead, their economy is being wrecked and themselves impoverished by charlatans claiming to be saving the planet. Humbug.

Current energy policy, Mr Huhne, is a recipe for national decline and de-industrialisation.





IT IS ALL OUR FAULT

So what did our Energy Secretary do at the Liberal Party conference this month – apart from earn himself a rebuke from Baroness Shirley Williams for slagging off his Tory Coalition partners? Why, he said we consumers should take some of the blame for high energy bills because we cannot be bothered to shop around. “They frankly spend less time shopping around for a bill that’s on average more than £1,000 a year than they would shop around for a £25 toaster”, he told The Times on September 17.

It is clear that Huhne has a severe dose of the Callum McCarthy’s. Once when we tackled the former CEO of Ofgem, the energy regulator, about energy bills, he imperiously dismissed us for not shopping around “as you would for tomatoes in a supermarket”. After giving him the Captain Mainwearing treatment – “You stupid boy” – we pointed out that in a supermarket you can physically examine tomatoes but there are so many tariffs no one knows what they might be signing up to.

It is suggested that there are about 400 different energy tariffs on the UK market. But did Huhne promise to tackle that problem? No. Instead, he wants to make it easier for us to switch suppliers (without knowing what we are buying) and went for the Big Six energy companies for allegedly abusing their dominance of the market by keeping smaller suppliers out by predatory pricing.

It is not our function to defend electricity suppliers or those who may be manipulating the gas market. We note that the aforesaid M. de Rivaz, of EdF, has said that the energy industry has lost public trust and that a Competition Commission inquiry may be necessary to clear the air.

But all this ignores one fundamental point: we have an energy policy that offers only insecurity of supply at exorbitant cost and fails miserably to deliver CO2 savings. That is not the energy suppliers’ fault, though they might have protested more about the nonsense of it. They should at least be given credit for wanting to go nuclear – the answer to every rational Energy Secretary’s prayer.





IS THERE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?

Just as we were about to shoot ourselves in a recurrent fit of energy-induced depression, up popped a certain Mr Ben Moxham, formerly of BP. He turns out to be the Prime Minister’s senior energy adviser, brought in to beef up his policy unit. And, according to the Daily Telegraph, he has got David Cameron worried – as he should be. Best of all, he has asked “Can we open some of our policies” - notably high-cost technologies such as offshore wind turbines.

His leaked memo shows he has warned the PM that current policies will have a “significantly greater” impact on consumer bills – 30% by 2020 according to the Department of Energy’s mid-case gas price scenario. He also finds the scale of household energy consumption savings calculated by the Department as “unconvincing”. There is, of course, no sign as yet that Cameron’s “green” convictions have been shaken, still less that the current ruinous policy is to be changed. But it is encouraging that they are being challenged at the heart of government.

It is understandable that the attack is concentrating on their effect on prices now that all the Big Six suppliers have raised them, when 27% of households – some 7m in total – are living in fuel poverty and household budgets are being squeezed by austerity measures. A serious social problem is in the making and could become acute if the Express’s cold winter arrives.

But what we need is a root and branch review of energy policy that produces security of low carbon supply at competitive cost. We might then see some urgency behind the development of nuclear power.



UK V GERMANY IN THE BLACK-OUT STAKES

The urgency has recently been underlined by the CBI, which is getting worked up about the adequacy of energy supplies. In a report with KPMG, the accountancy firm, on September 9, it revealed that of 447 UK businesses interviewed, covering all sizes of firm and sectors of the economy, 89% were worried about the adequacy of supply as well as 95% about its cost.

Mark Elborne, head of a new CBI board to lobby the Government in the lead up to a new UK infrastructure plan in November, said: “If the Government falters, or there is a lack of determination, there is clearly a risk that there will be insufficient [energy] capacity to meet the UK’s needs by 2020”.

In the eyes of Christopher Booker, the Sunday Telegraph’s scourge of wind farms, it is now a toss up between the UK and Germany whose lights go out first. Germany’s national grid has just warned that the country’s supply is in such a parlous state after the decision to shut eight nuclear power plants immediately and the rest by 2022 that major power cuts may soon be inevitable.

Breeding cynicism

It has the most wind turbines in the world – 22,000 – but they are even more unreliable than Britain’s, generating only 15% of rated capacity compared with our 21-25%, depending on the weather. The result is that Germany is keeping open dirty coal-fired power stations and, like us, importing nuclear electricity from France. You could not make it up.

In spite of CBI concerns, we are less alarmist about supply because some 20,000MW of gas-fired power stations were sanctioned by Labour before the last election. But that – linked with the obsession with renewables - only increases our alarm about the less than determined approach to developing nuclear power.

This is why some think there is a hint of Micawber about the Government’s attitude to nuclear. Could it be that it is waiting for something to turn up that will obviate the need for a new generation of nuclear power stations? This only goes to show that the UK’s unsustainable energy policy breeds cynicism as well as entirely unnecessary CO2 emissions. It also shows that SONE has unfinished business.





PUBLIC OPINION IN A HEALTHY STATE

At least public opinion towards nuclear power is in a far healthier state than any of us imagined it would be when the tsunami swept away power supplies to the Fukushima reactors. A Times/Populus poll of September 9 found that public support for building more new nuclear plants or replacing existing ones is up from 46% last year to 54%. The proportion of people who think the benefits of nuclear power outweigh the risks has also risen from 38% to 41% and those who think the risks outweigh the benefits has fallen from 36 to 28%.

The research was presented to the British Science Festival in Bradford. It confirmed the gradual increase in support for nuclear power over the past 10 years. It is perhaps helpful that the poll found that support for nuclear power is now based much more on the contribution it could make to security of supply – the real justification for nuclear - than as a tool for containing climate change.

Women, as ever, remain a problem. The significant gender gap between men and women in their attitudes to nuclear power persists. Only 21% of women back it (53% men) and 39% of women (23% men) are opposed. Perhaps more will be persuaded by the argument that the Japanese earthquake and tsunami “threw the worst it could at nuclear power and no one died”, as a scientist put it.

As Vincent de Rivaz, EdF said in July: “There is a difference between nuclear before Fukushima and nuclear after Fukushima. Post-Fukushima, nuclear will be safer”.





BEWARE PENITENTS BEARING THORIUM GIFTS

Meanwhile, let us welcome a female sinner come to repentance. We refer to Baroness Bryony Worthington, a Labour peer, former head of climate campaigns at the Friends of the Earth who led their effort to close nuclear power stations. She now takes the view that if climate change is to be stopped we need to commercialise “affordable, safe, long-lasting, low-carbon sources of energy like nuclear power”.

So far so good. It is always encouraging when former opponents see the light. But she has stressed her support for nuclear is not absolute. Instead, she wants a new approach to nuclear energy based on thorium rather than uranium because she claims it produces less waste and is much harder to use in nuclear weapons.

To this end she launched the Weinburg Foundation – after Alvin Weinburg who pioneered the liquid fuel thorium reactor 50 years ago - in the House of Lords on September 8 to promote molten salt thorium reactors. Again, fine, provided this cannot be used as an excuse for delaying the development of the uranium-based French EPRs and Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactors in Britain. We need to keep our eye on the match ball, not on some prototype for a future decade, perhaps emanating from India where a lot of thorium reactor work is in progress.

As it happens, we laymen monitored a learned discussion earlier in the summer of the merits of uranium v thorium. At risk of causing hypertension among SONE experts, we have reached the conclusion that the argument in favour of thorium is more relative than perhaps Baroness Worthington thinks. Thorium is more proliferation resistant in the sense that it produces very little plutonium or other transuranic elements but waste disposal is still necessary. There are also fuel cycle experts who say thorium’s radiotoxicity (an internal hazard as distinct from external radiation) makes it more dangerous to process than uranium. Life is never simple.





RENEWABLES NOT SMELLING SO SWEETLY

The debate over the simplification of the planning laws, building in a presumption in favour of sustainable development, whatever that is, has intensified this month. The Government is under siege from the official countryside lobbies who are perhaps a touch hypocritical. They have done very little over the last 20 years to halt the march of wind turbines across Britain’s wild places in the course of which government tinkered with the system to make it easier for developers to get them through.

While this battle is being fought, renewables themselves have been taking a hammering.

Two thirds of UK wind turbines (2,276) turn out to be foreign owned and notably the Daily Mail has been up in arms about these foreigners creaming off consumer subsidies, including payment to stop generating during the mid-month visitation of the tail end of Hurricane Katia. Then at the beginning of the month it was pointed out that 3,696MW of National Grid- monitored wind turbines were for 24 hours generating as little as 60-70MW, leaving £3.7bn or so of subsidised capital investment idle.

Worries have been voiced about swathes of countryside being lost under solar panels and environmentalists are on the warpath about biomass (wood). Friends of the Earth Cymru are vitriolic about the approval of a partly subsidised 300MW biomass plant in Anglesey – “absolute lunacy”, “unsustainable”, they cry. The wood industry is not far behind. It is dead set against Drax and other power stations converting from coal to biomass after a 50% rise in timber prices over the last three years. Jobs are threatened by the thousand, it says. Why don’t they tell the Government: “Go nuclear”.





IS THERE NO END TO MAN’S INGENUITY?

One of our diversions is to monitor the endless parade of supposed remedies for global warming. We have long reached the conclusion that if the scientific world applied itself as much to promoting nuclear power we would be well on the way to a more secure, cleaner and richer future.

This month’s crop is especially rich. A prototype 62ft balloon will soon rise over an airfield in Norfolk to investigate geo-engineering global warming away. The idea is for ten 600-ft long balloons the size of Wembley Stadium flying over the oceans spewing out chemical particles to reflect the sun’s rays back into space to stop Planet Earth heating up. This is not to be confused with another wheeze - solar power being transmitted back to earth by laser beams from satellites plastered with solar panels.

Then we learned that “elephants could solve the biofuel problem”. A Dutch technology firm’s fermenting technique is reported to be making it possible to process elephant droppings and rotting compost into ethanol - green gasoline – without food crops. We have just one question: is there really enough elephant muck in the world to crack this?

Finally, we learned that “biodiesel made from algae could solve energy crisis,” according to Professor Sir David King, former Government chief scientist. It is said it can produce up to 30 times more fuel than other biofuel crops. Yes, but where are we going to grow the algae that has proved such a nuisance in places this year?

It sometimes seems that nobody has heard of nuclear power.





ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

Members will shortly be receiving formal notice of the SONE AGM – Monday, October 17, 2-5pm at the Institution of Civil Engineers, Great George Street SW! - and the annual report and accounts. Please inform the Secretary if you wish to attend on or Tel 020-8660-8970. The speakers are Mark Higson, head of the Office for Nuclear Development, and Dr Mike Weightman, Chief Nuclear Inspector.

STOP PRESS

A magnificent early response to the chairman’s appeal for funds, launched this month. £12,540 so far. Thank you so much for your generosity