Source: BBC TV: Newsnight
URL: N/A
Date: 27/07/2010
Event: Kirsty Wark presents BBC Newsnight: Chris Huhne's Energy Statement.
People:
Kirsty Wark: While most media attention was on the fate of an old-style oil giant today, the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne explained in Parliament how he intends to keep the lights on in Britain, with low-carbon energy. There'll be no public subsidies for new nuclear power stations, he said, but renewables, and especially offshore wind power would get help. But what is the energy mix to plug Britain's looming energy gap? And will we all end up paying more in gas and energy bills? Our science editor Susan Watts reports.
Susan Watts: It's the latest in shifting responsibility from Whitehall to the rest of us. Now the Government wants you to think about where you get your energy from, and how you keep it carbon-free. Lots of nuclear power, perhaps. Or hundreds of offshore wind turbines. You might even dabble in a bit of geo-engineering. Not many people would argue that it's going to take all our engineering ingenuity to move to the low-carbon economy we hear so much about. This radical new turbine design is one example. [Image of vertical-axis wind turbine, designed by Grimshaw and Wind Power Ltd.] And this is the same turbine scaled down. It's on a test rig at Cranfield University, where the jet engine was designed.
Graham Lee: The type of turbine we're talking about, the 10 megawatt turbine, is something that we believe we will build on from what you're seeing today, which is just a laboratory, in reality.
Susan Watts: It's the kind of innovative thinking that Chris Huhne, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, seems to approve of.
Chris Huhne [speaking to Parliament]: Like the other industrial revolutions, the low-carbon revolution will be driven by entrepreneurs, the private sector, local communities, individuals and businesses, scientists and engineers, not by government.
Susan Watts: What the Government's done today is to give us a first glimpse of their thinking on the future of our energy systems. And what they want the rest of us to do now is to find out just how complicated those decisions are, especially if you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions, by having a play with a new online Energy Calculator. Michael Hurley is impressed that people can use the Energy Calculator to factor in the kind of efficiencies his company is building into its new green offices. But he says the online system doesn't go far enough.
Michael Hurley: I think this is a heroic effort by DECC in trying to explain what is a very complicated problem in a simple way, showing all the choices of the demand and the supply side. One of the limitations is that in the real world, you need the cost information to be able to make informed choices. And that cost information, unfortunately, isn't in this model. But that will be revealed within the Government policies, which will allow companies to make informed decisions about where to invest, when to invest.
Susan Watts: So is any of this online gaming going to help us decide how best to bridge the so-called "energy gap" looming in the next 10 years or so?
Michael Hurley: Well we won't run out of energy, so there's not a gap in that sense. But there are some very tough political choices that have to be made between closing the gap, for example the proportion of renewables that is a legally binding target, and also making sure that we keep the lights on. So today's announcement set a path of intent from the Coalition Government, which was helpful, but the real detail will come in when they start to announce the findings from the spending review in October, and also in the new white paper that the - white paper on market reform due in spring.
Tim Yeo: I think the most important thing is to reduce demand...
Susan Watts: Tim Yeo chairs the Climate Change Select Committee. He's a convert on even the toughest green measures in today's Statement from the Coalition Government.
Susan Watts: Can I ask - did you, when you played with this, did you manage to get to that 80% cut target?
Tim Yeo: You could only get to the 80% cut target if you make some pretty optimistic, not to say heroic, assumptions about how Britain is going to be transformed, how our coal industry will be transformed, how our electricity industry will be transformed and how, as individuals, we'll make low-carbon choices at home, at work, when we travel and so on. You've got to be at the optimistic end on all those things.
Chris Huhne [speaking to Parliament]: This is a bold vision. We will not be able to deliver it without a 21st century network that can support the 21st century infrastructure. The Statement sets out practical measures we're taking to improve network access, and to begin the building of a truly smart grid. This vision, however, needs to be grounded in reality. The low-carbon economy must happen, but it will not happen tomorrow.
Susan Watts: And the reason that may not happen tomorrow is tensions within the Coalition Government. Nuclear power is the most obvious, with Liberal Democrat opposition written in black and white in the Coalition Agreement. But that's not the only difference to overcome.
Tim Yeo: The high-profile conflict is over nuclear, but there is a majority in the House of Commons, if you include the Labour Party, in favour of nuclear now, so I think in a vote on nuclear power, there clearly would be support for new nuclear power stations. I think that the dangers in the Coalition are the sheer unpopularity of some things that have to be done, all these extra wind farms, the fact that the price consequence of renewable energy is quite tough, the documents admit - prices up by a third by 2020. You've got to get a massive improvement in energy efficiency to prevent that from feeding through to household bills.
Susan Watts: Greenpeace protesters shut BP petrol stations across London today. They're worried that early signs from the Coalition, like cutting green research budgets, are a surprise from a government that says it will be the greenest ever.
Ruth Davies: In the end, this is all a question of investment. It's a question of whether or not we actually put the money behind the clean technologies which are going to get us out of oil. And that question is one that we're posing publicly to BP. But we also need to pose back to Chris Huhne - one of the most telling things he said today was that if we continue to rely on fossil fuels, this will be a dead-end economy. The truth is with him now, to make the investment that is necessary to shift us from that dead-end economy into a clean, green, job-rich economy of the future.
Susan Watts: So the big energy debate has begun. But until it's more clear how much the Government intends to spend on nurturing the green economy, we won't know how much we're all going to have to pay.
Kirsty Wark: Susan Watts.