Rushed EMR lacks quality, MPs told

The government’s Electricity Market Reform (EMR) programme is being rushed and the quality of delivery has been adversely affected, MPs were told today (Tuesday).

The Solar Trade Association’s (STA) head of external affairs Leonie Greene, told the Energy and Climate Change select committee (ECCC) that there is a “relationship between pace and quality” that the government is failing to adequately balance.

She said: “Full credit to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) for the pace over the last six months, but I feel this has come at the expense of quality over the last six months.”

Greene added that the industry was hit with an “avalanche of consultations” from Decc, some of which were “only a couple of weeks long”, meaning the STA “barely had time” to consult its members.

She stated: “The pace was so fast that it was difficult to believe that the feedback was being assimilated.”

Greene was supported by the Renewable Energy Association’s (REA) chief executive Nina Skorupska, who said the EMR programme has been introduced “at such a pace” that the smaller members of the association “may not be able to participate effectively” in the reformed energy market.

She added that the reforms were being introduced in “quite a piecemeal way”.

Director of the University of Cambridge’s Energy Policy Research Group, Professor David Newbery, added that the EMR programme was not as well designed as could have been due to trying to get it completed on time.

He said: “There is whole range of things that would be nice to not have pre-committed ourselves to do, but we finished up where we were and have to make the best of a bad job.”

However, Dong Energy’s head of UK regulatory affairs Danielle Lane stated that while the pace of the implementation of EMR had increased over the last six months, her company “had been well consulted”.

EDF Energy’s director of strategy and corporate affairs Paul Spence, supported Lane, and told MPs: “We’ve been engaged in pretty intensive consultation and refinement of the process and have had opportunity to put in evidence and be listened to.”

He added: “There are a lot of pieces of secondary legislation to put into place, and [Decc] has been moving at pace to do that.

“But they seem to have been reasonably well organised to undertake what’s a pretty major change.”

A statement from Decc said that the industry and stakeholders had been consulted “extensively” throughout the EMR process to ensure the “policy design was as transparent as possible”.

It added: “Reforms were implemented in a timely manner to minimise uncertainty and drive much-needed investment in our energy infrastructure.

“Rolling out the programme through secondary legislation will enable our proposals to evolve over time so that the arrangements work on a practical level for industry.”