Report

The great grid gamble

This report from UK think tank the Centre for Policy Studies states that politicians need to be guided by the best available evidence when considering the future of Britain’s energy system.

Ed Miliband hailed a recent report from the National Energy System Operator (NESO) as vindicating his plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030. But new analysis shows that the NESO report is built around a series of assumptions designed to cast Miliband’s plans in the best possible light, rather than reflecting the reality of the energy markets.

As other critics have pointed out, the NESO report says that ‘several elements’ of Miliband’s plan are ‘at the limit of what is feasible’. For example, it envisages building twice as much transmission network capacity in the next five years as was built in total over the last decade, with zero delays.

Far more alarming, using the central price forecasts produced by Miliband’s own department, his plans would make UK electricity more rather than less expensive.

When making hugely important decisions about the future of Britain’s energy system, politicians need to be guided by the best available evidence, rather than picking the evidence to fit their existing ideological beliefs, and warns that the Energy Secretary appears to be failing this test.