Ed Miliband’s energy announcement may be nonsense, but it could become popular

First politicians banned cheap energy. They are creating an affordability crisis by insisting on the rapid deployment of expensive technologies like offshore wind and by imposing endless green taxes. It is simply illegal to generate electricity at an affordable price with a modern, efficient coal and gas power plant, without bearing all of those other costs. Ed Miliband was one of the people who imposed those high costs on consumers, as the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the last government. Now his plan is to fix the situation by banning expensive energy too.

The Government already decides which technologies are good – wind, solar, carbon capture and storage – and which are bad – coal and gas. Under the new contracts for difference (CfDs) introduced with the Energy Bill, they will now decide what power stations get built: when, where, and with what technology. Analysts at Liberum Capital wrote that ‘it is arguable that even when the industry was state owned prior to 1990, central government had considerably less control than envisaged by the Energy Bill.’