Paul Steedman: We can’t afford to miss out on future of energy

ONCE again, the major energy firms have announced a series of double-digit price increases. They blame it on the rising cost of oil and gas.

Coughing up for sky-high energy bills is already a struggle for many but it seems there’s no end in sight when it comes to these price rises.

With this in mind, the news that power plants are being paid not to produce energy – including wind farms on very windy days – is pretty bamboozling. How can it make sense to squander valuable energy?

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Energy chiefs attempt to play down the madness of this situation, but this needless waste is actually the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the lunacy of our energy system.

As supplies of oil and gas dwindle, we’re being forced to import more and more to meet our needs. We currently import more than half the gas we use. Relying on massive amounts of imported energy brings big challenges. What happens when foreign producers and traders ramp up prices or turn off the taps? And what happens when the countries we’re relying on are rocked by political instability? These aren’t imaginary situations – we’ve already experienced both in the case of Russian gas and Libyan oil– and matters are only set to get worse as energy supplies become harder and harder to get at.

Meanwhile we have home-grown and virtually limitless sources of power that we make very little use of.

Energy from our wind, waves and sun contributes a measly seven per cent of our electricity supply. Dirty, polluting and increasingly expensive coal and gas make up 73 per cent.

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Because we’re surrounded by sea, the UK has the best potential for wind, wave and tidal energy in Europe. Tapping less than a third of the UK’s usable offshore wind, wave and tidal energy could cover all our electricity needs – and leave us with extra to sell on to other countries.

Even with our unpredictable weather we have as much solar radiation as Germany – the proud hosts of the biggest solar energy market in the world, and shrinking energy bills as a result. An economic powerhouse, Germany already gets around 17 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources. It has plans to double that by 2020, while pulling out of risky nuclear power altogether.

At the risk of re-igniting an old rivalry, we’re losing out to Germany when it comes to energy. As well as having lower bills today than in 2008, Germany already has hundreds of thousands of people employed in renewable energy. They’ve spotted an opportunity to save money, boost their economy and protect the planet – and they’re going hell for leather to make sure they win the race.

In the UK, meanwhile, we’re dithering. We might even miss our legally-binding target for renewable energy and we’re missing out on a massive jobs boom.

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More than 10,000 new green jobs are set to be created in Hull. As well as jobs in making and installing wind turbines and solar panels, there’s a big job to be done to upgrade our National Grid and create a power system fit for the 21st century. Without this Grid upgrade, we’ll continue to have mad situations where we sometimes end up paying power stations and wind farms, for energy we don’t use.

We’re actually paying a fortune for energy we don’t use throughout our energy system. One in every four pounds spent heating our homes is wasted because the heat leaks straight out of our houses. This could easily be prevented with better insulation, but so far progress has been slow. Friends of the Earth is calling on the Government to provide more help to householders – particularly those living in rented homes which are the most likely to be poorly insulated – to keep their heat in and their bills down. But why are we barely off the starting blocks, when we could be reaping the rewards of a nationwide refurb and a home-grown energy boom?

A big problem is that our politicians have swallowed the myths spread by the companies making billions out of oil, gas and nuclear power.

The companies that are more than happy to accept Government hand-outs themselves but claim that renewable energy is too expensive for taxpayers.

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The truth is that like any young industry, our renewable energy industry needs a bit of support to get started but will soon pay for itself, as it’s starting to in Germany. By contrast, the nuclear industry needs a permanent injection of taxpayer cash, even after 50 years.

Our energy system isn’t just a bit faulty – as our German friends would say, it’s completely kaput. But if we fix it properly, we’ll stabilise bills in the long run, create new industries and jobs, and keep the lights on in the future. It’s time the Government saw sense and started acting on our behalf instead of helping the big energy companies to rip us off.

Paul Steedman is an energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth.