We have a new energy bill that placates and sucks up to the
big energy companies
England is underwater, it seems. The
rain is falling – splat! – from the leaky gutter by the window as I
write, and with every day it looks more and more likely that, just like
Winnie-the-Pooh, I will soon end up sitting on a branch with jars of
honey lined up beside me, sending out messages in bottles. “Help! Bibi
(me). It’s me Bibi help help!”.
Families canoe down village high streets, or spend their evenings
bailing out the local pub. The rain comes on more heavily every night,
and now is moving into the north. The land lies beneath heavy grey
cloud, water pooling and collecting in every ditch and field.
Against this backdrop, as insurers plead with politicians, as a month’s
rain falls in a day, as negotiators are wearily heading off for yet
another round of special pleading at the UN climate negotiations (COP18)
in Dohar, here the energy bill battle has entered a tiny lull. Last
week, like a long-brewing marital row, everything suddenly came to a
head. On Thursday labour leader Ed Miliband raised his sword in a field
of wind turbines and pledged to adopt the decarbonisation target that
campaigners have been pleading for. This, of course, meant that the
Deparment of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was forced to leap into
action in order to keep Miliband off newspaper covers; it duly announced
that a deal would be released at midnight… Midnight! And it worked!
Miliband was relegated to an inside story so that every paper could
carry the news that wind turbines would be driving our bills up by £100s
every year.
So what does it all really mean? Dr Alan Whitehead MP sits on the energy
and climate change committee and has been a huge believer in renewables
since the 1980s when he introduced geothermal energy to the civic centre
in Southampton. He points out that despite having promised - way back in
the day when the bill was first mooted - a radical shake up of the
electricity market, this bill will in fact deliver nothing of the sort.
“It’s still all about the market,” he says, his mouth twisting wryly. If
that’s the case then will the big six be satisfied with this bill, I ask
him? He nods. “I should think so.”
In short, despite months of bickering over this reform, we will still
end up with the big six energy companies dominating our energy supplies.
They will still own most of the power stations in the country, will
still buy and sell from themselves in a market which we now know to be
operated fairly liberally; they will still set prices as they please,
and even after all this, they will still have no decarbonisation target.
The contrast is all the more powerful because I’ve just been reading
Osha Gray Davidson’s Clean
Break – a riveting account of Germany’s energy revolution or the
Energiewende as it is
better known. There, pressure from a population increasingly concerned
about acid rain and climate change and dwindling supplies of coal
brought about the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) in 2000 with the aim of
breaking the utility monopoly and getting energy production out into
everyone’s hands. The legislation there used instruments like feed-in
tariffs to prompt people into becoming their own generators by allowing
them to sell excess energy back into the grid and make some tasty
profits.
The result, as has been well documented, has been spectacular in terms
of renewable growth, and Davidson has traveled to meet some of the
people now running their own collectives all over the country. Eva
Stegen, the director of EWS - Germany’s first clean energy co-op - tells
Davidson: “Einstein said that the way that leads into a catastrophe
cannot be the way that leads out. Centralised energy was the problem. So
we needed to find a new way. And that is what the EEG gave us.” One
commentator has described the results of the EEG as “a strange mixture
of idealism and greed”.
Whether it has succeeded in its aim of breaking the utility monopoly in
German is still not completely clear (the long-read piece does not give
as much detail here about the rest of the German market as I would have
liked). It is true though that more than 50% of all German renewable
capacity is owned by individuals or collective, while the Big Four only
own 6-7%. But more than that, it is impossible not to feel a twinge of
envy at a government that would try such a thing.
Here, meanwhile, we have the vision of our government, prone, as usual,
in front of big business interests. We have a bill that placates and
sucks up to the big energy companies, with consumers left, as usual, to
watch the giant profits sailing out to shareholders while they pick up
the bill.
And in the meantime, it rains…
Bibi van der Zee is the
Ecologist’s political correspondent
Subscription
enquiries:
members@resurgence.org