If I was the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change... (part 4!)

We’ve heard from Rachael, so I guess it’s my turn now. Some election day musings about a manifesto for energy and climate change. Rachael and I didn’t confer on these, so it’s interesting to see which aspects she’s prioritised and compare them to mine. I think if you add the two together you get quite a good picture of energy supply and demand. After 11 years of working together, maybe it’s a sign of having the right business partner!! So here we go:

Firstly, I’d have an energy strategy for the long term – we’re talking decades here – allowing pathways to a long term shift in energy generation, some investor and industry certainty but also the scope for flexibility and innovation.

To support that innovation, I’d have a constant and ready fund and support in place for energy technology innovations – starting with energy storage and mastering tidal energy because those could make a very big difference to our future energy mix.

We can see the impact that our national skills base in oil and gas has had – many of the offshore workers around the world either trained or worked in the UK, for example. But these are jobs of the soon-to-be-past (well, 50 years or so), and I think we need to place a lot more emphasis on the jobs of the future – to our benefit and as an export market.

It may seem strange that someone who’s spent a lot of time working in energy efficiency starts with the supply side. All the efficiency in the world won’t help if the energy we are using remains fossil-based. Hence that earlier focus. That said, demand side activity is vital if we’re going to manage our investment in the energy supply that we need – the cheapest energy is the unit that you don’t use.

So, I’d set long term pathways for expectations around the energy performance of buildings, along with incentives for early adoption, ramping down and heading towards penalties for failure to comply once a new standard becomes law. (This is where Building Regs were heading through the Code for Sustainable Homes and it’s a great approach.)

I’d also protect those people who are early adopters from issues caused by new and innovative technologies – we have to think about our test beds and really understand the measures we’re installing (Colin King’s presentation at Retrofit Live was a stark warning in what happens if we charge ahead with measures that we don’t yet understand - have a look at our tweets for a bit of a commentary on what he said).

We need to talk about energy, though. Out loud. Because it’s important. It’s one of the highest costs faced by households across the country, a scarce resource and yet we’re profligate with it. We need to help those who can’t afford to keep warm by penalising those who are wasteful – rising block tariffs that encourage energy saving are a great tool here. But we need to get a sense of where our energy comes from, to rebuild that relationship with resources that we had before the arrival of natural gas. The rapid growth of localised energy generation has been great for helping people to see where their electricity comes from; we need the same for heat, we need the same for businesses, we need the same for transport, if we can. Once we make visible the nature of the system, and the consequences of our energy choices – whether in terms of climate change, local environmental impacts, health or economic development – then we can have an intelligent debate about how we generate energy and how we use it. The more it’s hidden behind a switch, the less we care.

Back to the manifesto: a long term strategy, plugged into national infrastructure priorities so it can’t be switched off by political change. Communication of that strategy to give investors, industry and citizens a sense of the journey we are on, how we’re going about it, and the part that they can play. Support for innovation, bringing in our experiences of energy generation, our skills in engineering and technology development and our universities’ research capability. Devolution of local delivery of fuel poverty programmes to local partners – most probably local authorities – ensuring both a mandate and the resources to tackle the problem in a targeted way. Continued support for energy intensive industries to take up more efficient modes of generation and use, through Climate Change Agreements with ever tougher requirements. And a pathway to take us away from dirty fuels (seriously, why is 30% of our electricity still generated from coal?) and towards renewable and sustainable sources.

I talked more around some of these issues in an interview with London students for the Open University recently. You can listen to it at http://bit.ly/1QlyyGj (it’s about 30 minutes long; you might need to load the page twice to see the sound file).

What do you think? What should the core principles and priorities of our energy policy be? What about climate change policy, which I haven’t touched on at all in the above?

Send us your thoughts! Email liz.warren@se-2.co.uk or tweet to @se2limited.