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UK -Energy bill published – as it happened -The Guardian highlights

• Leo Hickman
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 November 2012 17.04 GMT

Today, after months of speculation, politicking and lobbying, the coalition government finally publishes its energy bill.

At 11.30am, the energy secretary Ed Davey will make a statement to the House of Commons, followed by an hour-long press conference at 1pm. (You, too, might have spotted that it happens to coincide with another long-awaited publication.)

Steve Thomas, professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich, and Dr Paul Dorfman, founder of the Nuclear Consulting Group (a joint statement):

The energy bill will not complete its passage in this parliamentary term and carbon reduction targets and funding beyond 2020 will be decided in 2016, long after the government has completed negotiations on the price to be paid for nuclear energy. This price will be well above the market price for electricity, and energy consumers will be required to pay the difference (via ‘Contracts for Difference’) through a levy on their bills. The impact of these contracts would be to shift the very great economic risk of building new nuclear facilities from the nuclear corporations to consumers. With the stroke of a pen, the government is attempting to disguise a ‘subsidy’, under which the corporate liability for new nuclear cost over-runs is simply passed on to the UK consumer. And if new build in Finland and France is anything to go by, these cost over-runs will be very great. In order to pay for new nuclear by the time it comes online, the subsidy budget will have to double to about £15bn and would have to be financed from additional levies from consumers. But new nuclear plants cannot be online before 2020 the time when funding under the current bill is no longer quantified. This raises two questions: will renewables face a ‘fiscal cliff’ post-2020 because all the budget for additional budget post-2020 will already have been committed to nuclear; and is new nuclear the most cost-effective way to meet our climate change targets?.….

 Some other extracts from live the streaming blog

[…]

Guy Shrubsole, an energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, has emailed to say he’s spotted something interesting:

Trawling through the energy bill’s small print, it looks like the government is trying to dilute still further its already weak commitments on cleaning up the power sector. Up until now, DECC have said they were looking at the power sector decarbonising to 100g of carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt hour by 2030. But today, DECC have snuck out documents saying they will be ‘updating their analysis’ to anticipate emissions being up to 200g/kWh by 2030.

They’d already moved the goalposts – now they’re moving them again. It’s a total cop-out that will hurt the climate and tie us into an expensive dash for gas.”

The relevant doc is here

Of course, the Committee on Climate Change – which was set up to advise government on setting carbon budgets – recommends (pdf) a target of 50g CO2e/kWh by 2030.

[…]

Tom Burke, the environmental consultant and former director of the Green Alliance, has written a comment piece for the Guardian today arguing that, despite common thinking, the energy bill is actually a victory for Davey and the Liberal Democrats, as opposed to George Osbourne and the Treasury:

The government is now explicitly committed to meeting its obligations under the renewables directive. And it has provided the money to do so through increased cap in the levy control framework. That means that by 2020 just over 30% of our electricity will come from renewable sources.

This is a significant defeat for the Treasury, which has long sought a way to avoid meeting this commitment. It means that by 2020 a lot of relatively cheap renewable electricity will have been contracted for an as-yet unspecified period, but which is likely to extend beyond 2030. John Hayes, the wind-sceptic energy minister, may think he has killed onshore wind, but he will now discover that money talks louder than ministers.

[…]

Ray Noble, PV specialist at the Solar Trade Association:

Solar could readily deliver a third of the UK’s power supply, using south-facing roofs and facades alone. This technology will be massive. Furthermore solar puts the power to generate directly in the hands of millions, not the few. Decc and its electricity market reform agenda now need to fully recognise the major role that solar power will play in transforming our electricity markets. The approach so far has been top down. Solar power means a bottom-up energy revolution and any government serious about breaking open the electricity market to much greater consumer choice and competition should be right behind us.

[…]

John Alker of the UK Green Building Council emails to say he’s noticed an omission in the small print that is of potential concern:

A scan and search of the 100+ page document reveals no mention whatsoever of display energy certificates, currently driving energy efficiency improvements in public sector buildings. This is bizarre really – firstly because they are doing a good job in public buildings. Secondly, there is a big lobby to roll them out to commercial buildings, and they will be essential if we are going to pay people to use less energy – because how on earth will that be measured without some sort of assessment tool?

[…]

Fiona Harvey, the Guardian’s environment correspondent, has just asked a question at the energy bill press conference being held at Decc. She asked whether John Hayes, the new energy minister, approved of any onshore wind. He refused to answer.

[…]

Tim Yeo MP, chairman of the energy and climate change committee, has just commented on the energy bill:

I welcome the government’s response to my committee’s report and am pleased that there have been some significant changes to the bill as a result. However, there is still room for improvement. It is disappointing that Decc is only launching its consultation on electricity efficiency today, when my committee has been calling for stronger action on efficiency for many years. I am pleased that ministers have seen sense on having a single counterparty to guarantee new energy contracts, but if the Treasury wants to deliver the best deal for consumers it should use the government’s triple AAA rating to back the contracts directly. This would lower the risk for investors and reduce capital costs, keeping the overall bill for energy investment down. I am also concerned that National Grid will face conflicts of interest in its role as delivery body for these reforms. I believe this role should be performed by a new, independent, not-for-profit company.

[…]

Dr Gordon Edge, director of policy at RenewableUK, has a comment piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website:

You don’t have to be a whizz at maths to see that the [energy bill] targets will require a steep growth rate in renewables. It would be a remarkable trajectory, taking wind from a 1% share of the nation’s electricity to around 25% in under 15 years, overtaking nuclear power in the process. But can this actually happen?

Yes it really can, provided the industry (both in the UK and abroad) continues to make the strides it has been making over the past few years. At around 9.30pm on a cold day in mid-September last year, something extremely exciting happened in the UK (albeit completely unnoticeable to all but a few operators in the National Grid’s control centre): wind power set a new all-time generation record of 3.98GW. “System demand” at the time was 34.9GW which meant that, for the first time in the UK’s history, the wind was meeting more than 10% of our total electricity demand, nearly 12% actually.

This probably doesn’t strike you as a particularly high figure, but bear in mind that it wasn’t until 2007 that wind power actually registered in the government’s energy statistics at all, coming in at a rather paltry 0.9%. Nevertheless, that was also the year in which the largest windfarms were given the status of “major power producers” by the then Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. Installed capacity (the maximum amount of electricity that can be generated by a technology) is 10 times greater today than eight years ago, in 2004, and that kind of growth isn’t too bad over a period in which, for the greater part, the country has been mired in economic difficulties.

[…]

The Guardian carries a comment piece by Ditlev Engel, the CEO of Vestas Wind Systems AS:

The failure to establish a firm 2030 power sector carbon cap prolongs uncertainty for the supply chain where investment time horizons extend well beyond 2020. This is a significant missed opportunity. It is, however, helpful that the need for a 2030 power sector target has been recognised, as has the importance of the energy mix to facilitating the 2050 carbon targets at least cost. Wind will have a huge role to play in delivering both of these.

The Financial Times has the headline: “Energy bill key to investment, says EDF.”

[..]

Keith Parker, chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association:

The bill provides much needed investment certainty. A major nuclear new build programme will lead to substantial industrial and employment benefits – including considerable opportunities for the UK nuclear supply chain and a boost for UK manufacturing and construction/

[….]

Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s head of environment, has just posted a blog welcoming Davey’s promise to focus on energy efficiency measures:

As Ed Davey points out today, even a modest 10% reduction in 2030 means five fewer power stations need to be built, nearly five million tonnes of carbon dioxide is saved, and £4bn is cut from bills.

The ideas in the proposal are smart: financial incentives to install more efficient equipment and to guarantee keeping the lights on by allowing industry to commit to cutting energy use, not just by generating more. Targeting the replacement of old, inefficient appliances is a huge opportunity, but has proved tough to achieve in the past, such as when Gordon Brown as prime minister wanted to cut the VAT on efficient appliances only to be thwarted by European Union rules. The voluntary schemes the coalition is consulting – better information, prizes – would be more convincing if the coalition had not slashed the budget of the Energy Savings Trust, which does exactly this work.

[…]

More here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/blog/2012/nov/29/energy-bill-published-electricity-emissions

December 1, 2012 - Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized