Interview: Nina Skorupska,chief executive, Renewable Energy Association

“I believe if you have a 95 per cent probability of something materialising, you do something about it.”

It was Star Trek that inspired Nina Skorupska’s lifelong fascination with science, she admits with a laugh. Her mother, a Polish immigrant, is credited with instilling the value of education and self-reliance.
Fast forward 25 years and Skorupska is chief executive of the Renewable Energy Association. With the freshly inked Energy Act bringing in a new subsidy regime amid a political backlash against rising energy prices, it is not the easiest time to fight renewables’ corner.
Despite all the challenges, six months into the job Skorupska brims with enthusiasm about the prospects for renewable energy. In an interview that ranges from flooding to fossil fuel tax breaks, bickering MPs to reticent ministers, energy bills to biomass, she remains determinedly upbeat.
In her career, she has boldly gone where few women have been before. She set her sights on the job of power station manager when she was some four pay grades away. Once her boss stopped laughing, he helped her get the necessary training. “It was tough, but it was great fun, I loved it.” She became the first woman to run one of RWE’s UK power stations, at Didcot B.
And she is keen to get more women into energy, joining the board of the Women in Science and Engineering campaign in February.
During a quarter of a century in the industry, Skorupska covered most forms of power generation and trading before making the jump to renewables lobbying. She stresses that the REA is not “anti” anything, seeing energy efficiency, gas and nuclear – not to mention carbon capture and storage, eventually – as part of the solution to climate change.
“It is not an either/or. The problem is so huge, it is a big, big ‘and’.”
Recent flooding has pushed climate change back up the political agenda, with Julia Slingo, chief executive of the Met Office, saying “all the evidence suggests” a link. “There is something about it happening in your backyard that finally hits home to people,” says Skorupska, although she is careful not to appear opportunistic.
“I take a stronger signal from the release of the IPCC report,” she says, referring to the weighty scientific document that last year stated, with 95 per cent certainty, that human activity is the main cause of global warming since the 1950s. “I believe if you have a 95 per cent probability of something materialising, you do something about it. But because it does not serve everyone’s interests to admit that is a reality, then they will find excuses to attack.”
She cites a recent flare-up between climate sceptic MP Peter Lilley and Tim Yeo, his greener Conservative colleague on the Energy and Climate Change Committee. Lilley laid into a climate scientist giving evidence and did not take kindly to Yeo asking him to desist. “These are people interviewing a very serious person. But because she is not  saying what they want to hear…” Skorupska trails off. “That is not a debate; that is bullying.”
While mindful the REA is primarily there to represent technology developers, not climate scientists, Skorupska pushes back against those who dismiss the evidence of man-made global warming. “I would stand up quite firmly against people who use random bits of data to say nothing is happening,” she says.
Asked whether environment secretary Owen Paterson should resign over his climate sceptic views, as some environmentalists argue, Skorupska equivocates. “I have never met the guy. You need people who are able to have a good debate but you also need people to accept when things are a certain way.”
Another Conservative notably reluctant to talk about climate change is Michael Fallon, whom Skorupska reveals is the only minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) she has yet to meet. Fallon has cancelled three appointments, she notes.
When it comes to the political hot potato of rising household energy bills, Skorupska staunchly defends renewable subsidies, as you might expect. The REA calculated – working from Decc figures – such subsidies cost a typical household just £3 a month, rising to £7 by 2020.
“Of course, not everybody can afford even that amount of money on their energy bills,” says Skorupska. “Every pound counts and those people really need to be supported. But we are wanting to transform our energy system. If you truly want to move to low carbon, you can’t carry on doing what you were doing before.”
Making the case for the importance of stable political backing to bring down costs, Skorupska draws on an example from the coal sector. When the first calls were made to tackle acid rain by fitting flue gas desulphurisation kit on coal power stations, the industry complained that it would put them out of business. But Germany stayed the course and within ten years the cost of the equipment fell by 90 per cent, she says.
One of Skorupska’s “real bugbears” is the lack of support for a strong 2030 renewables target. The European Commission has proposed a target of 27 per cent that is not binding on member states – “a sneeze” and only about 2 per cent more ambitious than business as usual, says Skorupska.
The UK government is lobbying against any kind of renewable target for 2030, arguing a single carbon reduction target allows more flexibility. But Skorupska argues the carbon market has failed to trigger investment and renewable targets send a stronger message. “What gets measured gets done.”
The EU emissions trading system used to be seen as the “panacea”, says Skorupska. If carbon emissions cost €30 a tonne, it was expected to spur on development of expensive technology such as carbon capture and storage. Instead, the price has fallen into single digits, giving a weak signal for investment.
A carbon floor price introduced by the UK government last year to boost that signal is also under threat. It has been widely reported that the Chancellor plans to freeze it in his upcoming Budget speech, a move Skorupska warns will undermine support for renewables.
The UK was only getting 4 per cent of its energy from renewable sources at the last official count (“diddly squat”), placing it 25 out of 27 European countries. It has a binding target to reach 15 per cent by 2020. “And yet some people in our government go around acting as though we are world leaders, and say ‘the rest of Europe needs to step up’,” says Skorupska. “Well, somebody else needs to step up and that is us.”
The policy to back that shift has made progress, with the Energy Act signed in December setting out support for renewables under EMR. However, much of the detail has yet to be worked out, with half a dozen consultations in the offing. The REA welcomes the opportunity to contribute, but Skorupska worries “it is going through a bit piecemeal” and the whole programme is on such a tight timescale the quality could suffer.
As the details of EMR are thrashed out, the REA is at least as concerned about independent generators being able to compete as attracting investment for utility-scale schemes. The trade body represents some big hitters including Npower, EDF Energy and Drax, but its near 1,000-strong membership is mainly made up of small players. Skorupska is “not 100 per cent confident” that those smaller companies will be able to navigate the intricacies of the policy to take part.
Skorupska wants to see “much more ambition” for community energy. The government estimates community projects could generate up to 3GW by 2020, or 1.4 per cent of demand; Skorupska would like four or five times that. It can add to the overall level of renewable deployment, she argues, not just displace utility investment as government assumes.
She also advocates more investment in energy efficiency. “We have some of the cheapest energy prices, it is just we use a lot more of it [than other countries in Europe],” she says. Having just invested in a Victorian house she knows first-hand the difficulty and expense of treating older buildings, however. “It is important not to lose our heritage, but I would say let’s create a new heritage. If I were a real greenie, I would say: ‘Otherwise we won’t have any heritage to worry about, with what’s happening with the climate!’ But then that wouldn’t make me the kind of person the REA wants me to be.”
For all that the REA is not “anti” anything, Skorupska draws attention to some of the hidden costs of other forms of generation, from fossil fuel tax breaks to nuclear decommissioning. And she is scathing about the notion that shale gas can keep the lights on or that we are going to have a whole fleet of nuclear power stations by 2030.
The REA has itself been on the receiving end of an aggressive campaign, against biomass power, by the very green groups it can normally count on for support. Skorupska was “completely flummoxed” by the attack, which contrasted sharply with pro-biomass views in the Netherlands, where she was working at the time.
In the UK, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB infamously claimed the technology could be dirtier than coal. “Some of the facts are blatantly wrong,” says Skorupska. Whatever the merits of their argument, the NGOs had an impact, with government rolling back support for biomass power. Skorupska is left trying to rebuild bridges.
Skorupska has many such political and policy battles ahead of her that will call on the curiosity and grit that has got her this far. The goal is a vibrant renewable energy sector. Make it so.