Britain’s prospects under Boris Johnson are obviously much, much better than they would have been under Jeremy Corbyn. But there’s one area especially, I fear, where this Conservative administration is going to come seriously unstuck.
It’s climate change and energy policy, obviously.
On its current trajectory, Britain’s destabilised grid system is heading for more and more blackouts like the ones that caused chaos last August, stopping trains and seriously inconveniencing over one million people.
Ofgem — the industry regulator — has now fined the three electricity companies responsible a total of £10.5 million.
But this needs to be seen for what it is — a cover-up designed to distract from the serious, long term problems facing Britain’s electricity system as a direct result of the government’s embrace of renewable energy.
The more intermittent, unreliable renewables that are connected to the grid, the more unstable it will grow.
Last year’s blackout was caused when Hornsea wind farm tripped offline as a result of a lightning strike, followed shortly afterwards by an outage at a smaller, gas-fired station.
The National Grid claimed that this was a “rare and unusual event, that has happened only three times in thirty years.”
But wind and solar weren’t nearly such a significant part of the grid back then. As the salutary example of South Australia’s Great Green Energy Disaster suggests, these outages are likely to become the new normal.
The obvious solution to Britain’s energy problems — highlighted by the oil price spike caused by the Soleimani assassination — is to frack the rich seams of shale all over the country and experience a taste of America’s energy independence.
Unfortunately, Johnson’s administration has more or less caved to the environmentalists on shale gas; and Boris has furthermore committed himself to the on-the-hoof, well-poisoning Net Zero by 2050 policy dreamed up in the dog days of his disastrous predecessor Theresa May.
Something will have to give, at some stage.
Britain will eventually have to choose between the expensive green virtue-signalling urged, inter alia, by Michael Gove, discredited former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, and Telegraph house eco-loon financial writers Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner.
Or keeping the lights on and stopping people — the working classes who voted Tory at the last election, for example — being driven into energy poverty.
Gosh, it’s going to be a toughie. Who to side with: the remote, unaccountable elite or ordinary working folk?
Why, the divide is so similar you’d almost imagine that Brexit had never gone away….
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.