The sorry effects of governments seeking popularity
Over forty years ago I left University and entered the job market. I was actually rather surprised to land a job at the Central Electricity Generating Board, at its London HQ, working among a team of statisticians supporting the endeavours of others in the industry, which was, of course, very scientifically oriented.
The teams we worked with were based in laboratories or design units, all involved in projects that related to our quite limited range of responsibilities - electricity generation and high-voltage network management. This was before the age of ‘mission statements’, but it was post-1970s energy crises, and ‘security of supply’ was considered the top priority.
The problem is, power stations have a limited life - maybe thirty or forty years. It takes a long time to build them - particularly the large ones, far longer than a parliamentary session, and in more recent years our politicians have preferred to put off big decisions like building new power generating capacity rather than upset the voters.
So, we are now facing a crisis, the roots of which can be traced back to around the mid-eighties, when I was at the CEGB. Natural gas wasn’t used to generate electricity then, except as an option in small, gas turbine stations used to boost supply quickly; it was felt to be too precious a resource to use in power stations. It was also the time of ‘Nuclear Power - No Thanks’, and acid rain; what we might now term the mainstream media didn’t understand the issues (nothing much changed there, in forty years), and the government of the day wanted to privatise the electricity supply industry. However, selling off big industries that are building things people don’t want doesn’t maximise the price you get for them, so the government of the day reined in on plans for more generating capacity and other controversial new projects.
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Worse, something else happened in the 1980s - privatisations. Government seemed almost surprised to find that, irrespective of whether privatisation was the right thing to do, it was popular with voters: people made a few quid, and then went out and voted for the governing party at the next election.
By the time poor John Major found himself in the hot seat there wasn’t much left to flog off; he had a go with the railways, but failed to gain the popularity of his predecessor. Even he was surprised to get re-elected in 1992, and, having done little that was popular, was booted out five years later by 'New Labour', who realised the need to be popular to be elected. We were landed with A. Blair, Esq. for ten years, who introduced the idea of checking out how popular policies might be with voters (through opinion polls, or focus groups) before implementing them, with a possible view to never losing office.
This was just about the time when the UK should have been building more generating capacity. You can imagine the focus group, can’t you: ‘How would you like to have thousands of construction workers a couple of fields away from you for seven or eight years, then a nuclear power station operating there for the next forty, and it then being decommissioned (which, for Wylfa Magnox station in Wales, has been reported as possibly going to take a century)?
While our aging coal and nuclear infrastructure was coming to the end of its life, government only summoned up the courage to approve large power stations using that precious natural gas, hastening the depletion of North Sea stocks. It also approved the almost eleven thousand on- and off-shore wind turbines that produce, on average, 24% of our energy.
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That 24% figure may be welcomed, because it represents zero-carbon energy, but it comes at a cost: it is the proportion of our 'normal' electricity supply that is at risk should the wind not blow. At such times the UK is very dependent upon now-scarce natural gas, and imports of (nuclear-generated) electricity via undersea cables from France. One of these undersea cables is now out of action, and is, it seems, likely to remain that way for the next few months, leaving us more at risk of power shortages.
Only one power station using a fuel type that we would have built in the 1980s is currently under construction in the UK - the nuclear site at Hinkley Point C, in Somerset. The skills we then had to build such infrastructure in the UK have been lost in the last thirty years, so we’ve had to enlist the help of, of all people, the Chinese, to build this essential infrastructure.
In fact, why didn’t A. Blair, Esq. arrange for his focus groups to ask questions like: ‘Would you like your energy bills to go through the roof fifteen years from now?’, 'Do you think the UK should be dependent upon foreign countries for its energy supply?' or ‘How much will you enjoy power cuts when you’re in your sixties?’ ? But no, Mr. Blair avoided those questions. In 2006 the then government published a review(1) of the energy industry, declining to get involved in the building of new nuclear capacity:
‘It will be for the private sector to initiate, fund, construct and operate new
nuclear plants and to cover the full cost of decommissioning and their full
share of long-term waste management costs.’
No private sector business would want to take on such a challenge with as little government support as that.
It's not as if experts weren’t warning of the risks of going down the gas-fired generation route. In 2007 The IPPR produced a report (2) which, among other observations, noted the following regarding security of the natural gas supply:
‘The situation was highlighted in the winter of 2005/06 when gas
supply from Europe was not sufficient to meet peak demand.’
And since 2007 we’ve demolished almost all coal-fired generating capacity. When the wind isn’t blowing, we are even more reliant on imported gas than we were at the time of the IPPR report.
Oh, and in addition, the gas storage facility in the North Sea has been closed without replacement, leaving the UK with capacity to store only a few days' gas supplies, and North Sea gas production is dropping, currently only supplying around a third of our needs.
The introduction to that 2006 document was written by A. Blair, Esq. himself, and included the now laughable words, in bold:
But we now face two immense challenges as a country – energy security and climate change.
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Up to a couple of years ago trendy comedians used to joke about the 1970s: power cuts, strikes, food shortages. We’ve already had the food shortages; lockdowns and masks have been novel; now, it seems, younger generations are going to get the taste of power cuts too. All because our leaders have, for years, failed to properly address long-term issues like power generating capacity.
The energy crisis we now face is but one direct result of our politicians wanting to only do what is popular. Other crises we face have the same underlying cause: the government response to Covid-19 has flip-flopped from one idea to another, seemingly in desperation to find something that is popular - often a bail-out, to be paid for by future inflation or taxpayers; working from home is suddenly all the rage (especially for the public sector), in spite of the impact it is going to have on long term productivity and the NHS - all that sitting at home rather than commuting and moving round the office will be bound to increase the numbers with musular-skeletal problems, and, of course, diabetes and bowel cancer. What is good for the country, or for the people, matters not to our leaders; it is whether it is likely to be popular in the short-term. The long-term doesn’t matter, our leaders know they will be out of office by then.
Isn't it time that we woke up to their cynicism and thought about what they are doing for our future, and our children's future?
References
1 - ‘The Energy Challenge, Dept. of Trade and Industry, 2006.
2 - Energy Security in the UK, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2007.
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