Grown up debates...

Hardened cynic though I may be, when Dr. Paul Golby speaks, I listen. He is one of the very few in the energy sector to engage the public with honesty. Too often we are expected to swallow corporate greenwash about "climate change" as to why we should blow vasts sums of our money on unproven technology they assure us is the bees knees. Today we get a more honest appraisal in the Independent. Dr Golby of E.ON calls for "a grown up conversation on energy". We could not agree more.

I am particularly taken with his honesty on Carbon Capture Storage:

Notwithstanding repeated protests over Kingsnorth, concerns about security of supply have put coal firmly back on the agenda. But all new plants will need carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, and so far CCS is largely theoretical and hugely expensive. Unless Kingsnorth wins the government-run competition to fund trials of CCS, the new power station will have to wait.

"The biggest demonstration of CCS so far would probably fit in this room, but to equip Kingsnorth it would have to be on the scale of Wembley stadium," Dr Golby says, indicating his fairly modest office. "We can't fit CCS unless we get some money from government.

Refreshing honesty, unlike Scottish and Southern Energy who continue to maintain that Wind is not subsidised. But then we get to the slightly dishonest part...

So if we don't win the competition, there will be a gap between the current power station closing and our being able to build new one." He does not make an explicit link with the looming energy gap, but he doesn't need to.

Give us your money or else. But that is a consequence of regulatory intervention. If government makes impossible and unreasonable demands on the industry, what else are they to do?

But the deepest pockets in the world are nothing without clarity from government. "At the moment the Government puts sticking plasters over individual problems as they arise, rather than standing back and putting together a master plan," Dr says. It is a matter of deciding on what is needed to deliver the 2050 targets and working backwards.

"We aren't looking for a detailed, Moscow-style plan," Dr Golby says. "The Government has always intervened in energy markets to try to force outcomes, in this case for much lower carbon. Let's have grown-up conversation and work out how."

On the other hand, why doesn't government butt out and let the energy industry get on with producing energy? Just a thought. Though if we are to have government driven policy he is right to point out that there is not a coherent one. But then this is no longer something our provincial government is trusted with. We await instruction from our masters.

Either way this limbo cannot continue. Either we dictate policy or we take our hands off altogether. LPUK wherever possible will let the industry decide. We do not support government funding of CCS not least because it could absorb 40 percent of the power output of a power station, nor are we especially taken in by the corrupted government science behind climate change measures. The government does not have the monopoly on science, the science is not settled, the argument is not over, and it is something else that we are long overdue "a grown up debate" on.