This article is from the January issue of Total Politics

There’s been a shift in the way we think about energy and climate change in this country. In 2009, hardly a day went by without the UN Climate Change summit in Copenhagen making the news – was Obama going to attend? Would China try and hijack the talks? Could then-energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband keep the hope of an agreement on global emissions alive? It’s two years later, and the same summit has just taken place in Durban, South Africa, although you’d be forgiven for not knowing about it; the UK media has barely touched on it.

The issues these summits represent haven’t disappeared from our collective consciousness, though. With energy prices soaring and government debt at home and abroad dominating the debate, we worry more about how it will affect our energy bills this winter, and what we can do to bring that cost down, rather than how we will be generating electricity in 50 years’ time.

Charles Hendry, minister of state at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, is one of a trio of MPs charged with helping people to understand that these two problems are bound together. “We face the most significant challenge of a generation,” he says. “Coal is clapped out and needs to be replaced, nuclear is coming to the end of its life and the fuel isn’t available for much of the plant anymore.” In solving these problems, he continues, we must have two objectives in front of us at all times. The future of our electricity generation has to be both low-carbon and affordable.

To achieve this, the watchword has to be balance, Hendry insists. “We don’t have the luxury of being able to say that we’ve got one technology that’s perfect for us, so we’ll put all our eggs in that basket.” Controversially for some, Hendry is a staunch supporter of nuclear power’s place in our energy future, but he’s pragmatic about the fact that it isn’t the universal solution that some might like to think it is. “With the very best will in the world, the first date for getting a new plant operating is the end of this decade,” he says. “My capacity challenge stems from the fact that we don’t have enough supply to meet demand on all the days coming before that.”

So, what else is there? “We’ve got some of the best renewable resources in Europe, and some of the highest tidal reaches almost anywhere in the world. We’ve got some of the best winds, so you’ve got tremendous potential in those areas, but, again, the step forward in tidal technology will be in the 2020s, not now. Then there’s the intermittency issue, so again that doesn’t give us the guarantees.

“On the timescale we need, things like coal carbon capture will still be in the test project phase, not in fully operational commercial plants. Because of that we’ve got to have gas in the mix as well… There are people who say that the solution is obvious, but actually the solution is never obvious. If we were purely to go for nuclear, it actually means that there are a lot of our own resources that we wouldn’t be harnessing.”

Set out like that, our energy future doesn’t appear to be all that bright. But Hendry is confident that together, all of these different technologies can solve the problem. “This is why we’ve ended up saying that our energy security is best met by having a balanced portfolio,” he says. In fact, he argues that this diversity is going to be one of the UK’s greatest strengths in the future, allowing us to respond much more quickly to changes in circumstances than countries that are committed to a single method of power generation.

Of course, we’ve already made progress on renewable energy – wind farms and solar panels have become a relatively common feature of our landscape. How does Hendry deal with the residents who object to the installation of the technology for aesthetic reasons?

“We all recognise that people would prefer to have invisible electricity,” he says. “People understand the need for it, but actually they don’t want to overlook a coal-fired power station or a wind farm, and they don’t want to see the pylon infrastructure that gets it to our homes. We understand that, which is why we’re trying to be more flexible, to provide more direct community benefits for the place where a facility is hosted, why we’re looking at the design of pylons to see if it can be done in a less obtrusive way, giving the national grid scope for undergrounding in sensitive areas. We’re trying to take a much more pragmatic, proactive approach.”

I meet Hendry at the Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) at the University of Surrey, where he is due to inspect some of the cutting-edge, future power-generating ideas being researched there. Ministerial visits like this are often seen as a necessary chore for those in Hendry’s position, but his enthusiasm for the tiny solar panels, diodes and lasers the scientists introduce him to is such that his staff have difficulty dragging him away to the next engagement. He’s particularly fascinated to meet Professor Alf Adams, the man who invented the strained quantum-well semi-conductor laser – or, to you and me, the bright light that makes CD and DVD players work – and I don’t think it’s just because Professor Adams lets him have a go on his laser pointer.

The kind of technology being researched at the ATI is a very long way from being mainstream – one set of scientists painstakingly explain how they want to put solar panels in space that will bounce solar energy down to the Earth, in a way that sounds suspiciously like the plot from a James Bond film. At the moment, a whole raft of financing vehicles exists to try and make these scientists’ dream a reality, each with their own acronym – Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs), contracts for difference (CFDs) and feed-in tariffs (FiTs). Once this kind of idea does approach the commercially-viable stage, though, how can Hendry and his department really make sure it ends up plugged into the national grid?

“The work that Stephen [Professor Sweeney of the ATI] and his colleagues are doing here makes us realise that the way we’ll be generating electricity in 20 years’ time is radically different to the way in which it’s being done today. There are some technologies that the UK has missed out on historically, and we need to be at the forefront of developing the ones for the future. This isn’t just about the here-and-now; this is about long-term support as well.”

What form will that support take, though? The FiTs, a mechanism by which investors are encouraged to support solar power by allowing them to sell excess back to the national grid at a discounted rate, recently caused controversy when the government announced it would be reducing the level of subsidy the scheme offered.

Hendry is adamant that this change isn’t a reflection of the government’s need to save money: “The change in the FiTs reflected the drop in the cost of the technology. When you can see dramatic changes in cost, you shouldn’t be giving the same level of support. When Ed Miliband wrote the foreword to the original FiTs document, he said that the level of support would decline over time as the cost comes down. What we shouldn’t be doing is putting a burden on people’s electricity bills so that those on low incomes pay more so that wealthy investors can make a 15 per cent return. That is completely indefensible.”

In the future, however, the system will be much clearer, he says.

“We’re going to move onto a much clearer system of degression so that people can predict much more accurately how it’s going to come down. For the major plant, the contract for difference will be a guarantee for 20 years or 40 years, so these are very long-term legal contracts. It’s not a government policy, it’s legal contract.”

This move away from the usual political hurly-burly of Whitehall is typical of both Hendry and his department. Parliamentary colleagues comment that Hendry is rarely seen in the Westminster tea rooms. Earlier, when asked about the inheritance he received from his Labour predecessor in the role, he refused to take the chance to hand out the usual criticism, saying instead: “I’m not going to make a political point about that.” Given the long-range nature of his brief, it’s perhaps just as well.

Ministers are usually reluctant to make cast-iron guarantees about anything – there are too many unknown factors and too much potential for possible blame. But Hendry is more than happy to put his reputation on the line when it comes to finding the money his department needs to secure the UK’s energy future.

“I’m not going to be the minister who lets lights go out,” he says. “Nor is Chris Huhne going to be the secretary of state who lets that happen. We are completely committed to getting that new investment to come forward… There is absolutely no prospect that we will back away from what we have to do on this.”

Tags: Charles Hendry, Energy, Issue 43