“Certainly we should not be making an enemy of the renewables sector,” cautioned James Heappey MP during yesterday’s energy fringe at the Conservative conference.
As the MP for the Wells constituency and member of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, Mr Heappey said his constituents and local businesses had written to him in concern that the Government had “abandoned” the renewables sector. He stressed he “hoped that was not the case”.
As it currently stands, the energy market is changing fast due to low oil prices, explained Mr Heappey, something that was “completely unthinkable” several years ago. He asserted this offered an opportunity to liberalise energy markets, making them less dependent on the will and policy of the sitting government.
Richard Howard from Policy Exchange referred to the “trilemma” of concerns facing energy policy in the UK - affordability, decarbonisation and security of supply.
He cited a recent Policy Exchange report on this topic entitled ‘The customer is always right: Putting consumers back at the heart of UK energy policy’, which “argues that policymakers have, for too long, failed to strike the right balance between energy affordability and decarbonising the economy.”
The difficulty, Mr Howard argued, is to assess if energy policy can indeed be both green and affordable. He said that households - between 2009 and 2014 - have on average seen bills increase by £250 due to a variety of reasons, such as increased cost of supply and increased green levies.
When it came to energy infrastructure Michael Pollitt, Professor of Business Economics at the University of Cambridge, said there was no net creation of jobs if the energy sector required significant public subsidy. He said government subsidy should be decided on the grounds of industrial policy, rather than energy policy.
Julie Hirigoyen from the UK Green Building Council said her organisation is calling for energy efficiency to be part of UK infrastructure plans because of the huge economic and environmental benefits associated with reducing CO2 emissions and eradicating fuel poverty for the elderly and vulnerable.
She said the Government is committed to spending £100 billion on infrastructure projects over this Parliament and argued that there was a strong business case for allocating as little of 3% of this budget to create a “world leading energy efficiency programme”.
Mr Heappey asserted there was currently “not enough focus on [carbon capture and storage]” and suggested that members of the public could be incentivised to tackle domestic energy efficiency if they were offered council tax reductions.
Speaking from the industry’s perspective, Dave Young, the Managing Director of Energy Efficiency at British Gas said company policy and vision statements reflected the changing nature of this area of policy. British Gas now aimed to “help customers reduce bills and use energy more efficiently” and had moved away from obligation.
Mr Young also reflected on the importance of Smart meters as a means to reduce domestic and corporate energy usage from smart phones. 5,500 British Gas employees were installing smart meters across the UK as the company is committed to installing 16 million nationwide by 2020. The average reduction in consumption is 2% once a smart meter is installed this can rise to as much as 6%.