Single-minded objective

Outgoing REA chief Gaynor Hartnell opens up to Megan Darby on 18 years of policy battles and herding cats

One day in March, Gaynor Hartnell wrote a letter to members of the Renewable Energy Association, pleading with them to stick together in the face of a campaign against biomass power.

“You are obviously all passionate about your own schemes/technologies, and of course in your eyes they are the best,” she wrote. “But please, never resort to denigrating others’ technologies or projects when building yours up. With all due respect, whilst your passion and enthusiasm is essential in the long slog that is project development, it may also cloud your judgement.

“What you may see as clear blue water that distinguishes your project or technology from another, which is suffering criticism… well, I see that as a dangerous chasm into which enthusiastic campaigners may dive, in an attempt to make a career-defining splash.”

Her appeal for unity was too late to stop the damage and government went on to scrap support for dedicated biomass power generation. It was one of a series of heartfelt missives that reveal the struggle of growing an industry amid increasingly complex policy, hostile politics and infighting.

Earlier that month, Hartnell had announced her intention to step down as chief executive of the REA after 18 years in renewables lobbying. She insists the biomass debacle was not the reason she left, but it did have her reaching for her laptop in the middle of the night to engage in a bit of “therapeutic writing”. She did not publish this particular opinion piece, but read it out as part of a farewell speech to members last week.

When I interview Hartnell the day after she makes that speech, she is cheerful about moving on but downbeat on the progress of renewables. While green generation has come a long way during her career, she says the sector “certainly should be bigger”. And with energy policy in “a real mess”, she does not expect things to pick up enough for the UK to hit its 2020 renewables target. Beyond that, she sees nuclear power as a greater threat than gas.

Although Hartnell only became chief executive of the REA in March 2010, she says “it does seem to be 18 years of the job changing around me rather than me moving jobs”. She talks knowledgeably and enthusiastically about the pros and (mostly) cons of every policy development along the way.

Hartnell fell into renewable energy as an escape from academia, which she admits “really didn’t suit me”. She was working as a research fellow at Sussex University when a job came up as technical and policy analyst at the British Wind Energy Association in 1995. Competition for the job was less than fierce. “To be honest, I put very little effort into the interview,” she says, adding: “I would like to think I did a good job for them.”

At the time, there were three civil servants working on renewables policy, compared with more than 350 in the REA’s contact book today. There were around 13 trade associations to deal with. Support came from the non-fossil fuel obligation (NFFO), a mechanism brought in with electricity privatisation to boost the income of nuclear generation. Renewables were tacked on to make the policy more politically palatable and take the focus off nuclear. “Initially, virtually all the money went to nuclear,” says Hartnell. “The renewables industry felt it was there almost by chance, without a great political will behind it.”

Hartnell went on to oversee the renegotiation of NFFO terms on behalf of 235 companies, as co-ordinator of the Confederation of Renewable Energy Associations. Not for the last time in her career, the phrase “herding cats” sprang to mind. “You had the STA [Solar Trade Association] pointing out that the UK only had policies for renewable power, not heat… The Landfill Gas Association was pretty happy with the NFFO… Wind people didn’t like it very much because it ended up with a lot of contracts that never got planning permission and they didn’t like the competition.”

The competitive element of the NFFO regime was particularly controversial. “The people that were around at the time would say they bear the scars of that policy,” says Hartnell. She expresses some sympathy with their concerns, but does see the advantage of a competitive regime in comparison with administrative price-setting. “There are many ways of doing auctions wrong and the industry is very wary of that. But it is also very easy to do administrative pricing wrong, and this government is showing us how. One of the things I don’t like with administered pricing is that it is very easy for the government to overlook the technologies it is not very interested in. In an auction, it is very hard to overlook the cheapest thing.” Energy from waste, for example, she thinks is losing out because the present government favours offshore wind and coal-to-biomass conversion. It may be small in comparison, but it is “well worth having”.

Hartnell is critical of government moves to “micromanage” support and is keen to highlight this opposition. In an open letter to REA members on 31 May, she suggested that the government could be deliberately overcomplicating policy to make renewables projects unfinanceable. She wrote: “Whilst some of the myriad tariffs on offer for power and heat may look attractive at face value, there is now so much complexity and so little certainty surrounding them, that it begs the question of how supportive the regime really is to renewables. It could be a clever ploy on government’s part – it looks like it is pandering to the industry’s needs, but in doing so things become unfinanceable… If government renewables policy stuck to [the REA’s] principles, we would not be in the policy soup we are in. What we have at the moment are policies which overlap and interact, create perverse incentives and are so complex that few people fully understand them.”

The introduction of a feed-in tariff (FIT) for small-scale generation was the REA’s “biggest lobbying win”, according to Hartnell, but it didn’t pan out quite as the organisation had hoped. “It would be nice to feel better about that,” she says, “but because of the way they have implemented it, it has not gone as well as it could have.” There was an almighty row when the government suddenly slashed the FIT for solar photovoltaics. “A lot of the micromanagement has been triggered by the solar FITs being too high for too long, and that runaway train effect of the budget being used up. It [the cut] should have been done sooner and smoother.”

Now the details of the next generation of subsidy under Electricity Market Reform (EMR) are being thrashed out in expert working groups. “It sounds a real mess,” says Hartnell. “In total the package is so complicated with all the different elements, I think they have bitten off more than they can chew.”

There is heated debate over the length of contracts for renewables, which will get 15 years of certainty compared with a rumoured 35-year deal being put together for nuclear. “The rational thing to do is have a contract for difference for the duration of the asset. You should be able to compare like with like.” The government says the shorter contracts will be cheaper for the consumer but Hartnell “can’t see the logic for it”.

The idea is that administered prices under EMR will eventually give way to competition between all low carbon technologies. Hartnell fears that by the time that happens, after 2020, there will be no specific renewables target to meet and the bulk of contracts will have been allocated to nuclear. “It may be that by the time auctions come round again, it will be back to the same situation as under NFFO, where there was no real belief that the government wanted a major drive for renewables.”

She is less hostile to the exploitation of shale gas than you might imagine. “For me, the ultimate competition is between nuclear and renewable energy, not renewable and gas,” says Hartnell. “I think gas makes a far more natural partner to accompany renewables than nuclear does, because gas is inherently flexible. A lot of the arguments that you could make for renewables, such as not relying on imports, you can make for shale gas too. Gas is a transition technology because we really need to get stuff that is sustainable for the long term.”

The UK gets less than 4 per cent of its energy from renewable sources, beating only Luxembourg and Malta in the EU league table. “We are remarkably bad,” says Hartnell. The target is to get to 15 per cent by 2020. “I don’t think we are going to meet the 2020 target. If you look at any of the parameters and ask yourself whether it is getting better or worse at the moment, at this time when government needs to accelerate deployment, you can’t really help but think it is going to get worse.”

Complex policy is not helped by a quick succession of energy ministers, with varying views on renewables. “You do get the impression with this government, certainly, that it is not that enthusiastic,” she says. “We have had difficulty getting access to ministers. With such a rapid turnover, you do tend to feel they are coming in and not making a huge impact.”

While deployment has been disappointing, Hartnell has seen a positive shift in public perception. “There was never an environmental story in the media from one quarter to the next when I started,” she says. “Many people, even though they are pretty fed up with hearing about climate change, just get it now with renewables and that’s a big turnaround.” She points to images of wind turbines used to advertise non-energy related products. “There is loads of it around now, which is I think very emblematic of the change in perception.”

Indeed, climate change arguments are now so familiar that the industry tends to focus on economic benefits when trumpeting its achievements. “Acceptance of renewables and wind is going to come when people think their children are going to get a career in that. That is what I think people need to focus on.”

It is a message that successor Nina Skorupska, who joins from RWE, will no doubt take on. Where Hartnell had a keen policy focus, Skorupska is expected to take a more commercial approach. There will be no shortage of issues to keep her awake at night.

Meanwhile, Hartnell will continue to work for the REA as a consultant as well as taking on other clients. “There are other ways of working in this field, which are almost certainly going to be more fun,” she says. “It’s certainly time to move on.”

This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 2nd August July 2013.

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