It’s Chris Huhne again. Here is his message to the Offshore Wind Conference in Liverpool last week, organised by Renewable UK, p.k.a. the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA).
Says Huhne, “Both the Prime Minister and I stated quite categorically that we will be the greenest government ever.”
It doesn’t matter if you voted blue, or if you voted yellow. You’re getting green. Even if you only voted blue and yellow to get rid of red, you’re getting green. It doesn’t matter what you want. It doesn’t matter what the public wants. The policies of the government that the public wanted to get rid of have been taken up by Huhne and his colleagues in the Con-Dem coalition.
The reason Huhne gives for this is that “We need a low-carbon economic recovery to tackle the challenges of climate change and energy security”.
Yet the climate change story is – at least as far as almost everyone else is concerned – disintegrating. Even those who remain attached to climate politics are acknowledging that the alarm and fear generated in the debate has been much exaggerated and poorly-founded. Yet Huhne is promising “the greenest government ever”. It is hard not to smell a rat when senior politicians present such doublethink. What is going on?
The rest of Huhne’s speech is assurance after assurance that wind energy manufacturers and producers will be able to cash in on the policies created by Cameron, Clegg and Huhne’s “greenest government ever”.
There are renewable energy targets; there are incentives, breaks, and subsidies. And there are contracts. There is £200 billion on the table.
As for “energy security”, Huhne is backing the least competitive form of electricity production with your money. He wants to be a world leader in the last technology anyone wants. Wind was technology in the dark ages. It was abandoned when we discovered how to find, extract and use coal, oil, and gas, and when we discovered how to split the atom. We might yet discover how to create fuels through biotechnology and through fusion. There are still terrific advances to be made by science, yet Huhne opts for the obsolete technology. And behind his desire for obsolete technology is his obsolete politics. It is not you or I Huhne believes he needs to win over; it is the producers of this energy themselves that need to be convinced. In order to convince them, he offers them cash incentives.
First prize goes to Siemens Windpower. Huhne has just written them a cheque for a cool £5 million in order to help them create a 6 megawatt wind turbine. In 2009, Siemens generated nearly €21 billion profit. Its energy sector created €26 billion of revenue, more than €3 billion of which was profit. Why then, would they need Huhne’s £5 million, if wind really were viable? Why aren’t they leaping at the “opportunity” and need instead to be bribed, and promised subsidies, grants, deals?
The other beneficiaries of Huhne’s generosity with your money announced this week are as follows. JDR Cable Systems Ltd from Hartlepool get a £2 million grant to develop cables to carry the ludicrously expensive electricity back to our shores. Converteam from Rugby will enjoy a £1 million grant to develop “Large scale DC conversion technology”. NGentec from Edinburgh will receive £800,000. Cooper Rolling Bearings get £256,250; South Boats Special Projects Ltd get £300,000; MTL Group £250,000; and Blade Dynamics of the Isle of Wight – the place where wind-energy firm, Vestas couldn’t sustain themselves – gets £400,000.
The £10 million is the prize awarded by the government in a competition it has set up to hasten the development of cheaper wind energy. It might be said that it is not a huge amount seen next to the millions and billions that the government wastes on all sorts of things. But this £10million is just a small part of the billions it spends and billions more that it plans to spend on wind energy – a technology that Chris Huhne has admitted can barely compete with conventional sources of energy, even during a time of historically high fuel prices - through subsidies, grants, and other giveaways.
Britain is facing an energy crisis, on top of its economic problems. Chris Huhne and his colleagues are hoping that something magical will be blown in by the wind. They are living in a fantasy world, in which ‘the greenest government ever’ simply powers homes, businesses, and the economy by tapping in to nature’s bounty. However, they were appointed to run the affairs of a country which is unfortunately subject to the laws of material reality. The government’s preoccupation with ‘renewables’ invites more problems and far more cost than is necessary. Just as with Ed Miliband before him, Huhne seems determined to make a name for himself as the man who fulfilled something impossible, making Britain green and prosperous.
Wouldn’t it be better if they just got on with the job, rather than their own daydreams?
