The consumer cost of all of this is also rising. In short, if you don’t know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, you need to have a lot of back-up power on standby in case the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
And if the wind blows too much, or if the sun is too shiny, you need to pay out at the last minute to switch things off. This balancing is an expensive business – costing us £1.5bn per year now but up to £10bn by 2030, all paid for through consumer bills.
These “hidden costs” are what triggered my battle to get the energy department to do a true costing of renewables. We have to look at their full system costs, not just their cost when the wind is blowing the Goldilocks amount.
Sadly, one of Ed Miliband’s first acts was to cancel that work, and to ask Neso to take it on instead. They promptly delivered one of the most discredited reports I have ever seen, showing through shameless statistical contortions that the Secretary of State’s dash to Clean Power 2030 was, conveniently, both achievable and consumer-friendly.
And here is the rub. As the sole shareholder of Neso, it is only the Secretary of State who can hold them to account. The Neso leadership’s craven support for his plans, worked out behind the scenes with his political advisers, show they had already given up on the standards of impartiality and integrity required from our independent public bodies.
Perhaps this is, in part, why ministers now seem so determined to turn a blind eye to their misdeeds. However, when public bodies face no accountability, there will always be one major loser: the British public.
In my three years covering the energy brief, I have never seen anything like this.
The fact that things have got so bad for expert engineers within our control room that they are talking to an Opposition politician and the press at huge personal risk is, frankly, shameful.
The ministers dismissing their concerns do these courageous individuals a huge disservice. We should not be denigrating them, we should be applauding them. I will not stop until they are heard.
Claire Coutinho is the shadow energy secretary
