Former Chief Executive of Energy UK, Angela Knight, has hit out at Energy Secretary Ed Miliband after his plans for net zero were dealt a fresh blow.British Gas boss Chris O'Shea has issued a stark warning that the UK's transition to renewable energy will not lead to lower electricity prices for consumers, directly contradicting Miliband's claims.FULL STORY HERE.
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00:00No, it was Ed Miliband's promise. I don't think it was the great promise, and I'm not sure how many people believed him, because there's no way that you can start a programme of huge investment and somehow it doesn't get paid for.
00:15So under any sort of circumstances, the big push for renewables, for wind farms, for solar and so on, is an expensive one. It might be much better for the environment, and I'll come to that in a moment.
00:30But the reality of cost has always been there and has been one of those things which Ed Miliband has unfortunately tended to sideline.
00:39In fact, I often think that either he lives in complete sort of cloud cuckoo fantasy land of fanatics, or he actually is knowing that in many respects, he is not really telling the people of this country the truth.
00:57Yeah, I mean, he's had a hard couple of weeks, hasn't he? You've had jobs being announced to go in the North Sea, but also green jobs too, big projects, wind farms and the like being cancelled, or at least being put on the back burner.
01:11I mean, Angela, do you buy the argument that perhaps, you know, we've got short-term investment that will lead to long-term gains and that perhaps we may not see the bills go down for now,
01:20but when we are, you know, completely green in the future, we'll have lower bills?
01:25No, it can't be the case. Because, you know, how are you going to be completely green?
01:30After all, renewable energy is, yeah, it comes free in the sense that the wind will always blow and the sun will always shine,
01:39but they'll only do it for some of the time. So, even though, you know, it may cost a reduced cost now to build a wind farm,
01:47you've still got to build the backup. Now, building the backup is something that we lamentably have not done.
01:54And so, right now, we're increasingly relying on being able to import power from continental Europe.
02:01Now, that comes at a price, and it comes at quite a significant price, but also there are very – it is not uncommon for there to be times
02:11where the demand is high right across Europe. And so, our ability to even buy power at whatever price from Europe starts to reduce.
02:21And so, actually building the backup is now where the investment needs to go,
02:26because we've closed down our coal-fired power stations and our nuclear power stations are old.
02:33Even if we were to build, you know, huge battery farms, they will only keep a town or whatever running for not a very long period of time.
02:44And so, it is that reliable backup that is needed. And, in fact, baseload is where we should be looking.
02:51That is stuff that just goes on and on and on steadily.
02:54Yeah. I mean, it seems as though – sorry to – we've just run out of time, Angela, unfortunately,
02:58but it does seem like there's a lot of wishful thinking going on in this area.
03:01A lot of wishful thinking.
03:02For the Chief Executive of Energy UK, I'm sure we'll speak again soon.
03:04Thank you very much indeed, Angela Knight there.