Andrew Pendleton, head of campaigns at FoE said its Clean British Energy campaign would be boosted if “tens of thousands” of people were to switch supplier, but that the primary aim was to “get people to campaign” over changes to the UK’s energy policy.
The organisation wants the department of energy and climate change (Decc) to reconsider its proposals, particularly the contracts for difference (CfDs) that Pendleton said would be “very costly” and was “essentially about subsidising nuclear”.
“What Decc is doing with the CfD will not result in lots of new nuclear plant because it will be so difficult to get those projects built, there will be huge public opposition and massive cost overruns,” said Pendleton. “The just won’t happen and by default we will be locked into gas. We’re saying invest heavily in UK renewables now. It will be less costly overall and we will need less gas.”
Pendleton said he was confident Decc would reconsider the CfD, despite spending huge amounts of departmental time in trying to make it work, “because lots of people are asking questions about it that they can’t answer, like the counterparty and strike price.”
Ecotricity boss Dale Vince was sceptical as to whether government would change its mind on the CfD. “Never. It’s the only way they will get nuclear built, and they will use public energy bills to do it.” Because of that the firm is lobbying for an exemption from the CfD for small suppliers. Vince wants that a 250,000 customer threshold, currently the entry point for other social obligations on suppliers. He said there was “a realistic chance of that happening”.
Vince said Ecotricity would have “no problem” accommodating tens of thousands of new customers. “We added 13 or 14 thousand last year and our systems can handle millions of customers”, he told Utility Week.
However, he admitted that should millions of people decide to switch “there was not enough to go around… we need to build more. He said that was “why we don’t push 100 per cent green tariffs, changing takes time”. Vince said Ecotricity’s fuel mix disclosure was “60 per cent green, 40 per cent brown”.
Good Energy CEO Juliet Davenport said “a much simple mechanism than the CfD” was needed for the decentralised energy market. “It will make it difficult for new players to enter the market”, she added. Davenport said that Treasury was too focused on price, “but volatility has a cost in itself”, whereas “everything Good Energy does is predicated on stability”.
“While renewables is affected by weather, there are no geopolitics,” she said. “We have not changed our electricity prices in three years”.
Davenport said pressure from the treasury to make further cuts to onshore wind subsidies were “not helpful… it’s bad management to try and slash it overnight. If was a company, it would have gone bust. We need less meddling and more consistency”.