Energy: when experts fail

By Richard North - August 20, 2022

In the dog days of the 2008 summer, before we had been hit by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, triggering the financial crash which nearly brought down the global banking system, the Tories were in an optimistic mood.

The election-winning Blair had deserted the New Labour camp leaving Gordon Brown to hold the fort, while in 2005 the Conservatives had elected David Cameron for their leader, a man who had vowed in his famous leadership hustings speech to make people “feel good about being Conservatives again”, declaring an ambition “to switch on a whole new generation”.

Those few years later, there was definitely an air of fin de siècle, the youthful Cameron having trounced the once all-conquering Blair in the Commons with the quip, “You were the future once”, while making the Brown-led government look old and tired.

For my part, at a time when political blogging in the UK was in its heyday, I was not particularly enamoured with the husky-hugging leader of the opposition, but was savvy enough to recognise that, if we were to have any hope of a referendum on the EU, it would need a Conservative prime minister in office.

Thus, even now I can recall that during this period I was largely supportive of the Tories and was keen to see them succeed in the forthcoming general election. And one of the key areas where I thought they could score was in energy policy, especially as  then – as now – we were seeing some unwelcome hikes in energy prices.

On the blog, therefore, I devoted – alongside Christopher Booker – considerable energy to exploring the issue of energy and in promoting the idea that an effective policy, designed to ensure security of supply, could be an election-winning stratagem.

From my writing at the time, two particular pieces stand out, the first on 3 August headed: “a choice of policies” and the other on 10 September with the title “policy now”, making a strong plea to the Tories to address an issue on which there had been a worrying silence.

Already, I had written a piece on 22 August, almost 14 years ago to the day, where I had remarked on “the increasingly vapid chattering classes whose detachment from reality seems to grow with each passing day”.

In what seems to have been a rehearsal for the current energy crisis, we had just seen a price hike in gas and electricity from another two utilities, following what we thought were savage increases from British Gas and EDF. Most consumers, I wrote, are now resigned to increases in their energy costs of up to 35 percent, and not a few are seriously asking how they are going to afford to heat their homes.

The following month I was thus writing that, as a direct result of cumulative failures in managing our energy policy, the UK had become “unhealthily reliant on gas for its energy supplies”. This was in political terms, I suggested, an open goal for the Conservative Party, except that its key decision-makers seemed at the time to have chosen to go back to the pavilion and talk amongst themselves.

Even at that time, we and any number of experts were warning that the situation would get worse, unless dramatic steps were taken. And even then, I was making the point that, in the nature of the beast, any decisions taken would have a long lag time, with many years passing before we see any results.

This is why, I wrote, the silence of the Conservatives is important. With many policy issues, I suggested, its input could wait until it got into office after the forthcoming general election. But with energy, I stressed, the providers needed to make decisions which would have a long-term effect. These, I said, needed to be made as soon as possible to mitigate some of the adverse effects of the years of delay and mismanagement we had already suffered.

Clear policy direction by the Conservatives even while still in opposition, I further suggested, would give a signal to the energy companies about which way they should spend their money. It would also give them confidence that, under the next administration, they would be presented with the stable and predictable regulatory environment needed to commit the massive investment which was so urgently required.

Continued silence on energy policy from the Conservatives, I concluded, was not a sensible or a responsible option. There is a time for leadership, I wrote, and that time was now.

As we know, that was not to be. The Tories did not deliver a coherent policy before the election and then, in 2010, we had the Tory-Lib-Dem coalition government which delivered a mish-mash of suicidal green policies fused with Lib-Dem insanity which had Ed Davey in 2013 abandon government support for gas storage, the effects of which were to become all too apparent a mere eight years later, when my piece was headed, “the years of neglect”.

Predictably, therefore – and we did predict it, many times – we are facing potentially a serious energy shortfall this winter and, while the Ukraine war and the Russian action on interrupting gas supplies to Europe hasn’t helped, this situation was baked in long before the Russians kicked off and was always a possibility with or without the Russians.

Now it comes to pass where we see in The Times a piece headed: “Blackouts on way unless we act now, say experts”. Yet, as we’ve been writing all those years back, energy decisions have to be taken in the long-term, and the lag between decision and result can be many years.

But now we begin to see the emergence of a trend. With our water supplies, where the water companies have so comprehensively screwed up that we are short of water, the policy response has been to bully the consumer into using less water, with metering and price penalties under consideration.

And so it is with energy. The Times piece is telling us that “leading experts” are urging the government to act urgently to reduce the risk of blackouts this winter by getting households and businesses to use less energy, so cementing in the now standard response: when the experts screw up, blame the consumer.

Actually, it is also ministers who are getting some share of the blame – not for the failure to ensure adequacy of supply – but for their failure to tell (aka nag) the public to save energy. At this late hour, they are also supposed to embark on an emergency programme of insulation and efficiency to “help” consumers reduce demand.

Much of this is coming from Adam Bell, who was head of energy strategy at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy until last year. He now tells The Times of his belief that there is a one in ten chance of four to five days this winter in which “for a short number of hours some domestic consumers lose power”.

Bell, now at the Stonehaven consultancy, complains that the government was “absolutely not” doing enough and warned: “By not educating the public about how they can best lower their demand, they’re increasing the likelihood of a security of supply issue.” Households, he said, should be advised to lower their thermostats, reduce boiler flow temperatures and draught-proof homes.

In another piece in the same paper, we see the “nightmare scenario” played out where Britain runs out of gas this winter and the National Grid is forced to order gas plants to stop generating, triggering blackouts for millions of households.

It’s a nightmare scenario, we are told, that ministers pray – and publicly insist – will not come to pass this winter. But behind the scenes in Whitehall and across the energy industry, such possibilities are being taken seriously. And fears of shortages are growing, sending wholesale energy prices for this winter to all-time highs this week, says The Times.

And when it comes to discussing what we should do, of course it is too late to do very much at all. Thus, this piece has Guy Newey, chief executive of the Energy Systems Catapult, declaring that: “The most important thing you can do to improve security of supply is reduce demand,”

And “experts” surveyed by The Times “overwhelmingly agreed” that the government should be doing more to encourage energy saving, both through behavioural changes and home improvements.

It really is a great pity that some of these “experts” weren’t a little more voluble earlier when we were writing about the prospects of blackouts and I was talking about our jokey references to “rising up and slaughtering” our politicians.

But, I wrote in 2010, if you take a cold, hard look at what is going to happen to this society when the lights go out and the supermarkets shut down, slaughter is the least of what is going to happen. Now, it begins to look as if we’re going to find out exactly what happens.