The Government is not complacent about the energy crisis but is confident there will not be any disruption to supplies, Alok Sharma, the climate change envoy, said yesterday.
The first of those statements can only be true if the second is as well. If the coming winter sees power cuts and shortages then the Government will have been very complacent indeed.
An energy crunch has been building for some time and has suddenly come to a head with a rapid rise in the price of wholesale gas. The knock-on effects of this go far beyond the provision of heating. Food supplies need gas to prolong their shelf life, while fertiliser and even steel production have been affected.
The high price of gas may be a blip but energy experts think it is here to stay. Mr Sharma told the BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show that consumers can be reassured because prices are capped.
But this interference in the market is part of the problem and was rightly denounced by the Tories when proposed by successive Labour leaders, before it was adopted as Conservative policy.
Small providers are being pushed to the wall leaving energy provision in the hands of a few large suppliers. So far the UK has eschewed exploiting its own considerable shale reserves and needs to import gas, mainly from Norway and Qatar, which are at least friendly countries. Germany and other continental countries rely heavily on Russian supplies, giving Vladimir Putin the whip hand.
Britain has virtually ceased coal production and its belated efforts to revive a nuclear programme are now hampered by the deep freeze into which relations with China have been plunged.
The country’s future is being gambled on the success of renewables, with offshore wind farms the size of Yorkshire required to produce enough electricity, an approach that hinges on the vagaries of the weather.
The geopolitics of energy supply have always required careful management. The great recession of the late 1970s, leading to three million out of work, was precipitated by the oil price shock of 1973 and changed the world’s power balance.
Facing an equally challenging future ourselves, we should question whether our political leaders fully appreciate the scale of the looming crisis, especially if there is a long, cold, windless winter https://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/winter-energy-discontent…/.
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