In what’s been Whitehall’s worst kept secret of late, the Government today gave the nod to a new round of nuclear power stations. Sort of…
See, the Government’s not actually going to build the stations themselves. The Minister, John Hutton, emphasised this in his statement to the Commons saying:
While recently discussing the BIEE energy white paper conference, I briefly mentioned the issue of domestic energy security. To many of the speakers, the real concern was not whether we would be able to source fuels from international markets but whether the energy infrastructure in the UK could provide reliable performance once the fuels arrived here. Some cited examples included the 2006 fire at Rough gas storage facilitiy and the 2000 fuel protests.
It can sometimes be tricky figuring out which way the political wind is blowing. Today for example was the Pre-Budget Report which is one of the three times per year that major policy initiatives are launched (the others being the Budget and the Queen’s Speech). For energy folks, there were two bits of news: an additional £170 million for low-carbon energy technologies and progress towards a CCS demonstration project.
However today also marked the release of the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review. This review of government spending over the next three years sets out the government’s highest priorities, written in the form of Public Service Agreements.
Last week the BIEE hosted an “academic critique” of the recent energy white paper. It was a well-attended event with insightful presentations from economists, engineers, and social scientists. I’d read the white paper when it came out but, as I do less policy work now, a forum like this is really useful to help understand what the big wigs think are the important issues. Perhaps not surprisingly, most were disappointed with the white paper in one way or another: it didn’t take into account recent policy changes (e.g. the EU energy and climate Action Plan), it gave insufficient attention to domestic security of supply issues and it generally failed to provide enough detail for academics (or anyone else) to independently verify the white paper’s chances of success.
The Energy White Paper was released today and there must be a lot of interest in it; it took about six hours to actually get a decent connection to the DTI’s website and download a copy. I haven’t had a chance to go through it all yet but a couple things have jumped out from skimming the executive summary and news coverage.
As you might have seen in the news last week, the government has restarted the Low Carbon Buildings Programme with a budget of £12 million. Though if this website was your only source of microgeneration news, you would be confused because I didn’t write about it being suspended in the first place. Tsk tsk.
