In its 2010 briefing to House of Commons Energy and Climate Change committee, the National Audit Office reported that a £100 billion investment in the national grid was needed to accommodate the home grown clean electricity needed for the UK to reduce its dependency on volatile global oil and gas prices [1].
Ten years later, in November 2020, Boris Johnson announced his Ten Point Plan to “build back better” by introducing a £12 billion green energy policy. Investment in the electricity grid was conspicuously missing from that plan, which BHESCo pointed out at the time. Three years later, £200 billion of private funding for development of clean, home grown energy has become stuck in the gridlock of connection to the grid due to chronic underinvestment because of government policy restrictions. The next connections are now scheduled for 2030. Regardless of your political affiliation, we must agree that politics is broken in the UK, and the legislation that we need is not being put in place. Action is required by the people to drive forward change.
Negligence in energy policy over the past twenty years has shown that we cannot rely on the regulator or government to fix the mess that they have created that has condemned 10% of UK households into a state where they cannot afford to properly heat their homes or to turn the lights on, exacerbating mental and physical health problems.
UK politics is broken. The parties fling accusations at each other while the quality of life for the average British person declines. We are officially in recession[2] and now the Labour party, our only prospect for change, has released an energy strategy that is not fit for purpose, perpetuating the last 40 years of inconsistent, ineffectual and wasteful leadership on the nation’s ability to supply clean, affordable energy to everyone.
Labour’s Energy Plan continues the excessive waste of taxpayers money and disregard for the working person who they claim to serve. Their energy policy dooms the UK to continued expensive energy long into the foreseeable future.
This is because it promotes nuclear power, an expensive, obsolete and destructive electricity source. Precious taxpayer money is being wasted in unproven, unreliable nuclear power. No one wants a toxic, radioactive nuclear waste dump in their back garden.
No one wants to perpetuate the killing of innocent people, victims of the war machine that the UK perpetuates with its weapons sales. There is a direct link between the civil and military nuclear programmes in the UK[3]. The Labour party plans to perpetuate investment in the nuclear programme.
The plan for GB Energy does not include becoming an energy supplier. It will use taxpayer money to invest in generation infrastructure that is commercially a profitable business where plenty of private companies want to invest. UK energy suppliers are primarily owned by foreign interests, thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s sale of state assets to bail out an infirm British economy in the 80s.
Privatisation served to enslave the energy bill payer to a broken system, where the regulator OFGEM doesn’t have the power to change the basis for energy prices, global oil and gas markets, and the antiquated, uninvested national grid doesn’t have the capability to connect new home grown electricity. GB Energy will not fix this structural problem with the energy market.
You can do something to change this paradigm.
You can support BHESCo and other community energy groups to continue to demonstrate that there is another way to develop clean power sources for your home or business.
We can’t renationalise the system, but we can socialise it.
Find out more at: https://www.ethex.org.uk/invest/bhescobond2023
[1] ‘The Energy Generating Landscape in Great Britain’, Briefing for House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, July 2010
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-economy-entered-recession-second-half-2023-2024-02-15/#:~:text=The%20COVID%2D19%20pandemic%20triggered,the%20second%20quarter%20of%202009.
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/19/weatherwatch-uk-push-civil-atomic-power-highlights-link-nuclear-weapons
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