Inconsistent renewables stance giving investors ‘whiplash’

Government inconsistency on the planning of renewable energy is giving investors “whiplash”, one of the world’s leading backers of clean power has warned.

Simon Maine, managing director of corporate communications at Brookfield, told Energy UK’s annual conference on Thursday (14 October) that problems with securing permissions are the key reasons more renewable energy has not been developed in the UK.

Pointing to the government’s desire to make it harder to build solar panels on agricultural land while relaxing planning rules for wind farms, he said: “We’re getting whiplash. Just when one hand is giving, the other hand is taking away. That kind of whiplash is not something that the investment community likes to see. We’ve got to recognise that things do change but the yo-yo effect is certainly not helpful.”

Maine, who was on the conference’s investment panel discussion, said it is “quite extraordinary” that the government is exploring moves to prevent solar panels on agricultural land, while easing rules on drilling for fracked gas.

“You don’t drill once and move on. It’s not like the North Sea, where the rig will sit there for 20 years, just producing from the same spot. It is an industrialised process, where you move from field to field.”

He added while fracking may supply 5% to 10% of the UK’s energy needs, this level of production would require as many as “10,000” planning permissions.

Maine also warned that he would be “amazed” if renewable generation developers pushed ahead with projects until the government publishes figures on the level of the revenue cap on low-carbon generators.

The cap was unveiled earlier this week in a bid to sever the link between high gas costs and the wholesale price of electricity produced by nuclear and renewables generation.

“It won’t have any effect other than for people to put their pens down for a while until that number comes out,” Maine said.

He added that proposals in the recently published Review of Electricity Market Arrangement consultation to encourage more locational pricing of electricity threaten to reduce liquidity in the energy trading market.

“It’s a tricky system to manage. If you try multiplying that these won’t be liquid markets,” he said, referring to the proposal in the paper to break down the national wholesale market into local zones or nodes.

He had earlier said that Brookfield, a Canadian-based asset manager, has 24GW of renewable power worldwide.