Britain’s unilateral carbon tax should be scrapped before it causes blackouts, pushes up household bills and makes the UK uncompetitive, ScottishPower argues. Keith Anderson, chief corporate officer, warns that the “carbon price floor” (CPF), which taxes companies for burning fossil fuels, will make Britain’s remaining coal plants “largely uneconomic by around the middle of the decade”. With Britain’s spare power margin already forecast to fall as low as 2pc by 2015, the carbon tax will force more closures and “threatens to make us even more vulnerable to the risk of blackouts”, he warns. --Emily Gosden, The Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2013
Britain may face blackouts as soon as next winter as old power plants are closed down and new ones not built in time, Npower has warned. Paul Massara, the energy supplier’s chief executive, said he did not know whether the UK would “get through next winter” as the country’s spare power-generation capacity dwindles. Ministers must urgently provide clarity over policy, which investors need in order to build new power plants, Mr Massara told the BBC’s Panorama programme. --Emily Gosden, The Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2013
Most draining for [deputy Prime Minister] Nick Clegg has been keeping the Coalition on — as he sees it — the straight and narrow on green issues. George Osborne, eager to remove barriers to recovery and much influenced by Nigel Lawson’s sceptical writings, has grown increasingly impatient with the green agenda. Yet even this, Clegg presents as an example of how the Coalition works successfully. --Matthew D'Ancona, The Sunday Telegraph, 8 December 2013
The heightened political risk faced by the UK utility sector following the announcement of the Labour Party’s price freeze has materially impacted on the valuation of the sector and reversed the five year utility sector trade of Long UK / Short Europe. Total shareholder value lost so far amounts to between £7bn to £11bn. In our view, if the UK government is successful in politically neutralising Labour’s price freeze policy then some of this loss, but probably not all, could be regained. Some of the loss is likely to be permanent in our view because it is now apparent that UK politicians (like those in Europe) are unwilling to stand by the logic of their own energy policy and enforce the higher costs onto consumers that naturally follow from their de-carbonisation strategy. --Peter Atherton & Mulu Sun, Liberum Capital, 5 December 2013
It has long been obvious that by far the most delusional element in the Government’s shambles of an energy policy is how it subordinates all else to an obsession with building thousands of hopelessly inefficient and absurdly oversubsidised windmills. This is now only made worse by George Osborne’s bid to appease his backbenchers by transferring a fraction of the 100 per cent subsidy paid to those increasingly unpopular onshore wind farms to the giant offshore wind farms, which already receive a 200 per cent subsidy, making such electricity as they produce six times more expensive than that we get from coal. --Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 8 December 2013
The American Meteorological Society seems to be upset by a survey that shows that only 52% of their members believe that global warming is mostly man-made. I am sure that is jolly inconvenient for them, but it is exactly what the results of their survey show. --Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 6 December 2013
Despite the fact that the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) apparently provided a significant portion of the funding for the recently concluded International Forum on Conservation of Polar Bears (December 3-6, Moscow), it appears in the end they and their NGO cohorts were prevented from having an undue amount of influence at the meeting. For that we can thank the delegates of the five Arctic nations: three cheers for common sense! --Susan Crockford, Polar Bear Science, 8 December 2013
