Will our politicians harness the renewables revolution?

It’s not for nothing that, in both politics and business, the words “energy” and “power” are often used interchangeably.

Through history, we can track the major sources of power on which our economy has been based, and see how wealth and influence became concentrated wherever that energy was owned and sold; culminating, of course, in the huge economic clout and lobbying power built up by the giant global oil and gas corporations of the past century.

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So it was in some ways reassuring to find, when Rachel Reeves unveiled her spending review at Westminster this week, that energy policy - and Ed Miliband’s department of Energy Security and Net Zero - emerged as a major beneficiary of her investment plans. At a time when the world is supposed, for its very survival, to be undergoing another major energy transition, Keir Starmer’s government has set its face firmly against those denialists on the political right who are now promoting the idea that net zero is a hoax, or in some way “unrealistic”. That commitment to the government’s clean energy and net zero goals is to be welcomed; both in itself, and as resistance against the avalanche of hard-right disinformation in which our politics now sometimes seems to be drowning.

Look more closely at the UK’s energy policy, though, and it still seems like a strange hotchpotch of measures, rather than a clear, organised and inspiring approach to the opportunities offered by the renewables revolution. It is certainly a policy that has been constructed without much if any serious consultation with the UK’s devolved administrations; and its weaknesses seem to lie in three areas.

Firstly, the whole package of investment in ‘clean energy’ is skewed by the massive setting aside of £14.2 billion for the development of another large-scale conventional nuclear power station at Sizewell in Suffolk. Even if we accept that nuclear power is an essential element of the energy mix for some countries - and I doubt whether the UK is one of them, far less Scotland - the gruellingly costly and long-drawn-out process of large-scale nuclear reactor construction in the UK should have ruled out any further projects of this scale long ago; not least because advances in nuclear technology have made available much smaller, speedier and less expensive types of reactor, in which Ed Miliband also intends to invest.

Secondly, the government seems to be proceeding at a snail’s pace in two vital areas for ordinary energy consumers in the UK. One is the introduction of new building standards which include proper insulation, green energy sources and rooftop solar panels as standard, with matching schemes for existing property, including flat and tenement properties which are routinely ignored in this discussion. All four UK governments make the right noises on this subject; none has taken decisive action on it so far.

And the other is the urgent reform of the UK’s bizarre energy pricing system, set at Westminster, which not only lands us with some of the most expensive domestic and industrial energy in Europe, but makes it prohibitively expensive for any consumer to switch away from gas or oil for domestic purposes. So long as domestic electric boilers are running at three or four times the cost of gas ones, fine words about a green energy transition will ring hollow to most ordinary consumers in Britain.

Finally, though, and most importantly, the very manner in which the Labour government is pursuing its clean energy revolution - top down, heavily industrial, entirely focussed on grid-based electricity delivery, and seduced by flashy big-ticket projects like Sizewell - is expensive and inappropriate; and represents a massive missed opportunity in terms of advancing the cause of social democracy, in which Labour governments are suppose to believe.

If energy and power tend to go together, after all, then the nature of renewable energy - which should enable every household to gather power from its own solar panels, and every small community to receive power from its own small wind turbines and hydro projects, as well as from the grid - lends itself to a massive redistribution of power through our society, including a long-overdue revitalisation of local and community democracy, for long a victim of the over-centralising instincts of both Westminster and Holyrood.

Yet instead, what we are seeing is another generation of powerful men in suits - in love with big projects, big profits, and big concentrations of power where they can keep control of it - trying to structure the green energy revolution so that it mimics the old patterns of the oil and gas age as closely as possible, right down to the involvement of many of the same multinational corporations; and much of the potential of renewable energy to contribute to a brighter, fairer and more democratic future for ordinary people, and one more locally resilient to all the potential shocks and attacks of the 21st century, is therefore being sacrificed, in a welter of conventional thinking about what power is, and where it should lie.

Yet given the obvious stresses and strains now affecting established democratic systems - low levels of trust and participation, increasing vulnerability to online disinformation and extremist hate-fulled propaganda - the time is clearly ripe for governments which claim to be of the centre left, in London, Edinburgh, or elsewhere, finally to grasp that governments can actually gain power and effectiveness, over time, by empowering people at the grass roots of society to feel a greater sense of involvement in, and influence over, the huge changes our society now faces.

The renewables revolution provides a rare opportunity for that kind of positive transformation. And the wisest governments will be those that learn how to foster and work with that grassroots energy; instead of clinging to a development model that too often rides roughshod over ordinary citizens and communities, and tramples our remaining local democracy underfoot, as collateral damage in the endless quest for ‘growth’.