0:00
No, 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
0:15
So 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
0:30
But the reality of cost has always been there and has been one of those things which Ed Miliband has unfortunately tended to sideline
0:39
In fact, I often think that either he lives in complete sort of cloud cuckoo fantasy land of fanatics
0:48
or he actually is knowing that in many respects he is not really telling the people of this country the truth
0:57
Yeah, 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 to big projects, wind farms and the like being cancelled or at least being put on the back burner
1:11
I 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
1:20
But when we are completely green in the future, we'll have lower bills
1:24
No, it can't be the case. Because you know how are you going to be completely green After all renewable energy is yeah it comes free in the sense that the wind will always blow and the sun will always shine
1:39
but they'll only do it for some of the time. So even though it may cost a reduced cost now to build a wind farm
1:47
you've still got to build the backup. Now, building the backup is something that we lamentably have not done
1:53
And so right now we're increasingly relying on being able to import power from continental Europe
2:01
Now that comes at a price and it comes at quite a significant price
2:06
But also there are very, it is not uncommon for there to be times where the demand is high right across Europe
2:15
And so our ability to even buy power at whatever price from Europe starts to reduce
2:20
And so actually building the backup is now where the investment needs to go, because we've closed down our coal-fired power stations and our nuclear power stations are old
2:33
Even if we were to build huge battery farms, they will only keep a town or whatever running for not a very long period of time
2:43
And so it is that reliable backup that is needed. And in fact, baseload is where we should be looking
2:50
That is stuff that just goes on and on and on steadily. Yeah, I mean, it seems as though, sorry, we've just run out of time, Angela, unfortunately
2:57
but it does seem like there's a lot of wishful thinking going on in this area. A lot of wishful thinking
3:01
For the Chief Executive of Energy UK, I'm sure we'll speak again soon. Thank you very much indeed, Angela Knight there
