Bill Carmichael: Government's power failure

I NEVER thought I'd hear myself saying this – but I'm beginning to miss the last Labour Government.

Don't get me wrong, the policies of the Blair/Brown administrations were an unmitigated disaster in most major areas, not least on the economy, national security and immigration.

But in the twilight years of the last government, Ministers finally began to see some sense on one absolutely crucial policy – energy.

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Prompted by dire warnings from acknowledged industry experts that the UK could face power cuts within a decade, Ministers, such as the former Business Secretary John Hutton, started to treat the vital issue of energy security with the urgency it demands.

With commendable bravery, he argued at last year's Labour Party Conference that Britain desperately needed clean-coal technology and a "renaissance in nuclear power" if we weren't to leave ourselves at the mercy of gas imports from unstable and unfriendly foreign rgimes.

He bluntly told delegates: "No coal, plus no nuclear, equals no lights, no power, no future."

Such courageous and hard-headed realism is in marked contrast to the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne, who is emerging as the most disastrous appointment that the coalition Government has made.

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The Lib Dem millionaire is a green ideologue who this week firmly ruled out any government help to develop cheap, reliable, carbon-free nuclear power – despite the fact that we subsidise expensive, inefficient and intermittent wind power to the tune of billions of pounds through our electricity bills.

For political, rather than practical reasons, Huhne is opposed to both coal and nuclear. His answer instead is to build yet more heavily subsidised windmills – another 6,000 of them, in fact.

The big problem with this is that, even if you accept Huhne's calculations – and they are disputed by energy experts – this is never going to be near enough to keep the lights on.

The uncomfortable truth is that 37 per cent of Britain's electricity generating capacity will disappear by 2015. Nine oil and coal-fired plants will be forced to close under EU legislation and four nuclear power plants will shut down because they have come to the end of their lives.

There is no chance that wind power can fill this gap.

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There is also the issue, of course, of where we are going to put all these windmills. We will have to build about 400 large wind farms to replace each conventional power station such as Drax.

But even in the unlikely event of this green pipe dream becoming a reality, there is another problem. Because of the intermittent nature of wind power, we will still need gas, coal or nuclear plants running in the background to provide power when the wind isn't blowing.

My advice? Get the candles in, you're going to need them.

Culture shock

Remember those dreams of the "caf culture"?

The last Government promised us that a relaxation of the licensing laws would spark a renaissance in our city centres and make them more like Barcelona or Milan.

Gone would be the mad dash to get a round in before last orders.

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Instead, urbane young things would relax at elegant street cafs while sipping a small glass of chilled Sancerre.

Well, 24-hour drinking didn't turn out quite like that, did it?

Now Home Secretary Theresa May has called time on the experiment after pointing out that there were almost one million alcohol-related violent crimes last year.

It is a pity, but perhaps we Brits were simply not ready for the

sophisticated cosmopolitan life.

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