Time to widen our horizons on energy policy?

Energy and climate change secretary Chris Huhne recently published a list of eight proposed sites for nuclear power stations. The plans for the new nuclear power plants are part of a series of national policy statements on energy which seek to provide a ‘clear policy framework’ within which future energy infrastructure decisions can be made.

It’s great to see the UK government taking the issue of energy security seriously. However, I’m not convinced the same policy solutions would be reached if taking account of the full social, economic and environmental costs and benefits of different energy systems.

Let’s take nuclear power generation. Firstly, there’s no way we can build nuclear power plants fast enough to meet targets for cutting carbon emissions – i.e. getting CO2 concentrations down to 350 parts per million. But that issue aside, increasing concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is making our climate system more variable and more likely to generate extreme events, such as inland and coastal flooding and drought.

These events have the potential to affect the operation of nuclear reactors and storage of high-level waste, and should be taken into account much more than presently the case when appraising options for new nuclear energy infrastructure. Nuclear power also poses serious unsolved problems to do with factors such as long-term waste and international security, but how strongly these factors feature in current policy appraisal is questionable.

Perhaps more fundamentally, the UK government seems to miss the fact that energy policy needs to seen in the context of advancing human security and economic resilience. Although clearly important, energy security is about more than consistency in fuel supply. It underpins the resilience of the UK economy, influences human wellbeing and affects our democracy.

Somehow, we need to inject some of this thinking into government policy debate. We do need an ecology of energy provision, as the government’s national policy statements rightly reflect. But we also need to ensure we appraise the different options in a way which reflects the interconnected nature of the challenges we face now and in the future.

For instance, if the UK is to gain serious traction on renewables as part of a diverse energy infrastructure, the benefits of such systems need to be better evidenced, and the financial and other barriers to the scaling out of these systems removed. This is not simply a research exercise. It requires changing the methodology used for policy appraisal and evaluation in this area so that it accounts for outcomes across the triple bottom line.

It also means doing things differently, particularly when it comes to decentralised systems. Demonstrating and scaling out new models of community energy provision, where the ‘gains’ are returned to the community, not the big energy companies, will be particularly critical. Nimbyism remains a barrier to many community schemes but we have much better chance of addressing this if the schemes are designed in such a way that communities see a direct benefit – whether in terms of democratic engagement in the design and running of the scheme, or financial returns which can then be reinvested in the local economy and community.

Meanwhile the plan for new nuclear plants, together with the broader policy statements, will soon be debated and voted on by parliament. Evidence suggests the proposals are likely to get the go-ahead. This will potentially bring new plants to: Bradwell, Essex; Hartlepool, Co Durham; Heysham, Lancashire; Hinkley Point, Somerset; Oldbury, south Gloucestershire; Sellafield, Cumbria ; Sizewell, Suffolk and Wylfa, Isle of Anglesey.

This puts the UK on the opposite path to that taken by Germany and Switzerland who recently reversed their nuclear energy policy in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster. Although not alone, I think it’s safe to assume the UK government still has some distance to travel to widen their horizons on energy policy.