Green energy is evolving, so why aren’t the attitudes of ministers?

Solar power cannot compete fairly with fossil fuel-sourced power if the Government insists on going easy on the most polluting oil firms and electricity generators

Solar power chief officials are due to meet with Treasury officials (Jim Mone/AP)

Future generations – and how many of those there will be is open to debate – may look back on energy policy and wonder why this crop of human beings were such a selfish, foolish lot.

In America, President Trump has already started work on reversing the environmental progress made by his predecessor; most grievously withdrawing from the Paris climate change treaty, an example other nations may follow. China and other emerging economies still have a lamentable attitude to energy conservation, and primary producers such as Saudi Arabia to Australia have proven reluctant to compromise on their vital interests.

There is only so much Britain can do about the rest of the world, but this country ought to be able to get its own policies right, and things here seem to be going awry. We seem to be set on, in effect, subsiding some of the dirtiest sources of energy, such as natural gas from fracking, whilst abandoning incentives for some of the cleanest, such as solar power. And the latter is the most immediate concerns.

When solar power chief officials meet Treasury officials to lobby for their industry and beg them to preserve their few remaining tax breaks, it will be more than another exercise in special pleading. For they have logic, right and the future of their planet on their side. This is no starry-eyed, green-tinged, tree-hugging matter of sentimentalism, or a cynical attempt to snare more public money for an inefficient fuel. It is, rather, to ask for a modest investment in a technology that is proven, is relatively cheap to install and operate, can be used on a large or small scale by everyone from farmers to schools, and can make a significant impact on reducing energy use. Even if the case for climate change is rejected – which sometimes seem the case with ministers, with their pro-fossil fuel actions – there is a strong economic case for Britain to be more self-sufficient in its energy supplies, to reduce imports as North Sea oil and gas run down, and to endow British trade and industry with the cheapest energy in the Western world – with wave and wind power playing their part in that too (and where the UK enjoys an even stronger competitive advantage).

Once an investment in solar technology is made, the yield form it runs pretty much indefinitely, and it pays for itself financially and environmentally within decades. It does need help to make those initial investments, however, which should properly be seen as another form of investment in infrastructure, a fashionable cause for a change in Treasury circles. Solar power cannot, though, compete fairly with fossil fuel-sourced power if the Government insists on going easy on the most polluting oil firms and electricity generators.

Contrast ministers’ apparent carelessness towards the generation of solar power and solar engineering in Britain to their activist determination to make the UK a leader in electric car technology. This enthusiasm extends to offering an as-yet-undisclosed set of assurances to leading makers such as Nissan of government support in the event of a hard Brexit. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but all those electric cars we will (with luck) be manufacturing and driving before long would be so much greener if they were fuelled by a national grid fed by renewable energy. Not only would there be no emission form their exhaust pipes, but there would be no emissions from power stations, nor pollution to water supplies or scars on the landscape (in the case of fracking, for example).

A few decades ago, before the full weight of evidence on ozone depletion and climate change was available or well understood, Britain was a leader in the energy industry – sitting on huge reserves of coal, natural gas and oil in the North Sea, as well as a sizeable (though not always successful) nuclear sector. Today, for obvious reasons, we can no longer rely on those sources of energy. Fracking is merely a way of reinventing fossil fuels; it may be cheap, but it can never be clean. Green energy is developing faster than the minds of Treasury officials seem able to comprehend, and it can make a disproportionate difference to the diversity and environmental soundness of how we fuel our homes and transport. It can also make for a greener Brexit.