Return of the Mac

David Blackman

Published 20 February 2024

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Angus MacNeil’s appointment as chair of the energy security and net zero committee sees him return to his former policy beat after five years. He tells Utility Week that many of the burning issues the committee faces are depressingly familiar. He warns that grid constraint costs could be the next pinchpoint of public anger and explains why Kwasi Kwarteng stood out among a sea of former energy secretaries.

Angus MacNeil’s passion for energy began at an early age when he was growing up on a croft in the Hebrides.

The chair of the House of Commons energy security and net zero committee recalls spending his holidays, while still at primary school, trying to build a home-made wind farm. The ten-year-old attached a fan belt from one of his dad’s old Ferguson tractors to a dynamo from a Morris Minor car.

Sadly, this schoolboy tinkering never generated any power, MacNeil says: “I’d love to say that I was at least an Edison and managed to light a bulb. There was a lot of engineering going on but not much electricity.”

Growing up in the Scottish Islands offered “constant reminders” of the power of the wind, he says: “It blew a lot and my dad went on all the time about all the energy that was around and why we weren’t capturing that and what we could be doing with this stuff.”

After taking a degree in civil engineering, the 53-year-old entered Parliament in 2005 as Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, which covers the Outer Hebrides.

“If you can’t generate any energy, you go into a place that generates a lot of wind,” he quips when we meet in his office in Parliament’s Portcullis House.

MacNeil has held the seat ever since, although last year he was expelled from the SNP following an argument with the party’s chief whip. Since then, he has sat as an independent, on which basis he intends to fight for his seat at the next general election.

“We’ve got a tradition of independents running in my area and most of the council is independent,” he says.

The UK’s place in the global race to net zero

Angus MacNeil will be a familiar name to many Utility Week readers.

He chaired the then energy and climate change committee from 2015 until it was abruptly dissolved along with the department it had been set up to monitor in the following year as part of then chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne’s bonfire of support for green energy.

During the intervening years, he chaired the International Trade Committee from when it was set up in 2016 until it too was disbanded last year.

“It’s good to be back,” MacNeil says about being elected to chair of the committee that scrutinises the work of the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero, which has itself just celebrated its own first birthday.

Of course, energy has become a more pressing issue over the intervening years, with energy security and affordability concerns prominent since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

However, even when previously chairing the ECC committee, MacNeil recalls conversations in Brussels with diplomat Maroš Šefčovic, now the EU Green New Deal commissioner, about the need for greater electricity interconnection to guard against the risk of Russian gas supplies being cut off.

The soaring bills seen last year have been a “searing lesson” and one of the “unintended consequences” of the war has been to focus minds on more sustainable ways of generating electricity that will help both the climate and national security, says the Strathclyde University graduate: “The Putin experience has maybe taught us something about the end of gas, or fossil fuels. There is going to come a day when we know the gas taps can’t be turned back on.”

The biggest change he has seen returning to the energy beat is how “sharp” the gas versus electricity debate has become. “People said (then) you couldn’t possibly electrify everything because of the amount of energy in the gas network.”

MacNeil, whose home is a croft in his constituency, has been besieged by groups and companies wanting to press the case for their particular products or technologies, which can leave him feeling like a Dragon’s Den judge.

“Every day somebody in the energy space comes to you with something really, really useful and everything feels worthy. There’s a lot more competition coming through about which energy [technology] is going to be chosen for the future.”

However he is alive to how electrification raises its own host of challenges, such as securing sufficient copper to meet the vastly increased worldwide demand for cables.

“People say you have to mine as much copper in the next 30 years as you’ve done previously since the Bronze Age so your problem starts to become the demand for copper as everybody is in a global race to get to net zero.”

Another big topic for his old committee that has not gone away is Hinkley Point C nuclear plant.

In the run-up to the government’s approval for the project in 2016, he remembers his former committee being reassured by EDF that the project would be built on time and on budget. Of course the plant is “still not completed”, he notes, with the project’s budget and completion date both having just been pushed out yet again.

The ESNZ committee will be conducting a site visit to Hinkley in April as part of a south west tour that will also take in an on-the spot assessment of progress on geo-thermal energy in Cornwall.

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