Boost interconnectors in energy supply plan, government urged

The government’s upcoming energy strategy should boost the UK’s interconnector capacity in order to harness the export opportunities offered by increased wind power, a former Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

At a webinar on the energy crisis, which was held by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) thinktank, Adam Bell called for a genuine strategy rather than a “long list” of initiatives.

Referring to reports that the document will contain a target to increase offshore wind to 50GW, he said: “Targets by themselves aren’t necessarily a strategy. They are short term political expediencies, wearing the clothes of long- term thinking.”

Noting that France has been able to curb bill increases recently by exporting low-cost electricity generated by its fleet of nuclear plants, Bell said: “I want to see the government thinking about how to maximise those (offshore wind) resources.”

But the head of policy at consultancy Stonehaven told the webinar that he had not detected any thinking about how to exploit the export opportunities offered by the UK’s abundant but intermittent wind power resources.

He described the UK’s interconnectors, which consists of 4GW of installed capacity and approximately another 2GW under development, as “relatively small pipes.”

Bell said increased rollout of wind power would create an “awful lot of power” to be exported via this limited capacity, much of which feeds into another “big exporter” in France.

He also cast doubt on the energy security benefits of postponing the closure of the UK’s existing coal and nuclear plants with the former due to be phased out out by 2025.

“Given we import quite a bit of coal from Russia, I am unpersuaded that there is an energy security argument to be made for keeping them on the system much beyond that.

“If you can postpone closure of an existing nuclear power plant that’s great, but technically it’s quite hard to do so and you start incurring increased cost. It’s not as easy as flicking a switch.”

Amidst reports of Conservative ministers and MPs blocking BEIS’ proposals for a threefold increase in the UK’s onshore wind capacity ahead of this week’s planned publication of the strategy, Bell questioned whether it would measure up to the urgency of the potential crisis that the UK  faces.

“Given the scale of the crisis, is it really appropriate to have same level of planning restrictions? I don’t recall in the Second World War, the RAF needing planning permission for airfields. We need these resources relatively quickly in order to offset loss of access to chunks of the market.”

Peter Aldous, Conservative MP for the Norfolk constituency of Waveney, told the same event that previous energy strategies had failed because they developers hadn’t worked closely enough with communities.

He said: “Where a community is hosting a solar or wind farm or sub-station, they need to be well rewarded and compensated for that.”