Posted to News on 3rd Apr 2013, 00:00
Getting to the bottom of government energy policy...
When you live with three females - in my case, the redoubtable Mrs Simms and two effervescent daughters - then finding a little bit of space in the house that's your own can become increasingly difficult. Happily, the loft is my domain: youngest daughter can't get up the ladder, wife doesn't like to, and oldest daughter has just entered teenagedom and has too many other things on her mind to worry where I might have gone, as long as I'm not invading her space. Of course, before I could occupy the loft it needed extensive boarding, which has taken me quite some time. All the joists had to be built up by four inches so that I could get in the requisite eight inches of insulation - you can see how long it's taken me; in the meantime the desirable number of inches of insulation has gone up to ten. But I'm not starting again.
>With the loft insulated, it seemed only sensible to look at having cavity wall insulation, while it was being offered on such a heavily subsidised deal. That left enough in the coffers to have some windows replaced with A-rated energy efficient windows, although the cost was still a bit of a shock, I can tell you. I could say the same about my investment in energy efficient light bulbs, too. I'd read you the bill if only I could see it clearly under the energy efficient light they produce. Perhaps in an hour or so they'll be bright enough to read by.
>I share all this with you so that you'll appreciate that I've been taking energy efficiency very seriously. Never mind the cost, the hard work and the dust, it would all be worth it in the end. Indeed, when a very nice lady came to read my gas and electricity meters this week, I followed behind her feeling rather smug about my reduced energy usage. You'll understand, then, that I was a tad miffed when my bill came through from my energy supplier and had gone up by almost 25% from last year. I know it's been a tough winter, but really.
>Could it have anything to do with the fact that we have completely lost control of our energy supplies? I remember when our nationalised utilities were privatised. State ownership was bad, they told us. Private ownership was the way forward. How has it all gone so wrong? The funny thing is that half of our utilities now seem to be owned by overseas companies which are themselves state owned.
>Now we learn that the government is about to sell its stake in Urenco, the world's second largest provider of nuclear fuel. Is it me, or do things like that seem to make a mockery of any nuclear strategy the government is apt to bang on about? And how is it that other governments, via their semi-nationalised utility companies, are able to contemplate investing in facilities in the UK when our own government cannot. I struggle to make sense of it all. Still, I take some comfort in knowing that the stomach bug I had a while back may not have been in vain, after it was revealed that E coli bacteria have now been genetically modified to convert sugar into an oil almost identical to diesel. A new draft energy policy document is surely just around the corner.
Mark Simms, 3 April 2013
