I've been catching up on some archived reading (a never ending task!) and have just looked at Sam Laidlaw's speech to the RSA in September on transforming the energy sector. What leapt out at me was "We need to encourage low carbon capacity not just the lowest short run marginal cost. This means a strong price on carbon, so the polluter pays......the market will need to be reconstructed to reward all forms of low carbon generation." This really chimes with my previous post.
Of course there was a lot of puff about Centrica's role in any transformation and how they are already ahead of the curve etc etc but there were some good pointers to where we must be. Market restructuring, as mentioned above, is fundamental. Only by doing that will we properly incentivise grid decarbonisation - to include renewables, nuclear and CCS (I know some of my erstwhile colleagues will hate my mention of the 'n' word - but I'm convinced it has to be part of the mix). And of course energy efficiency has a huge role to play. Here again, the market requires transformation - will the Green Deal be up to it?
What I also found encouraging (I think) was some up-front acknowledgement that the consumer has to be convinced, that attitudes have to change, and that power companies have a major role to play in doing that - enabling people to manage their energy use - and part of that will be spelling out that the technological fixes noted above have a cost and the only way Joe Public has of minimising that cost is by not being profligate in his energy use.
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