“Monstrosities” is how the new energy minister is reported to have once described wind turbines.
A press release issued by the local Tory party in 2014 described the 51-year old as a “prominent anti-wind turbine campaigner”.
In the same release, Trevelyan welcomed the then energy secretary of state Liz Truss’ reassurance that the government is “determined to support the fight against the spread of onshore wind turbines in rural Northumberland.”
She said the cost of subsidising the building of new turbines was “entirely unacceptable”.
And “intermittent, inefficient, inadequate” is how she described this source of energy, slamming what she described as the “chaos of more publicly subsidised wind farms”.
After being elected to the Commons in 2015, Trevelyan put her name to an article in the Metro newspaper, backing fracking.
More recently, she has opposed plans for a new open cast coal mine at a beauty spot in her constituency.
However, she is not amongst the 100-plus Tory Parliamentarians who have signed up as supporters of the Conservative Environment Network.
On the national stage, Trevelyan swiftly established a reputation as a committed supporter of Brexit.
She resigned as a Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Department of Education in November 2018 as a protest against then-prime minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal.
Her reward came following Boris Johnson’s success in winning the Conservative leadership when the new PM appointed the former chartered accountant to a junior ministerial role in the Ministry of Defence.
She was then fast-tracked into the Cabinet, taking over from Alok Sharma as secretary of state for international development last February – a role that only lasted until September when her department was merged into the Foreign Office.
However, now the move by fellow accountant Sharma to focus full time on the UK’s COP presidency has provided Trevelyan with the opportunity to make a swift return to government.
When the international department was scrapped, Trevelyan was widely tipped for a swift return to front-line politics.
Many will worry though that Trevelyan’s track record means she is not cut out to take forward Johnson’s ambitions to transform the UK into the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy. It is less than a year ago that onshore wind farms were allowed back into the Contracts for Difference subsidy process that the new energy minister attacked so fiercely.
But while Trevelyan’s track record may inspire gloom amongst renewable energy champions, she will be reporting to Kwasi Kwarteng who held her role for more than a year and a half.
The new secretary of state’s promotion received warm plaudits from the likes RenewablesUK, which described him as a ‘strong champion’ of clean power.
Kwarteng, who had a baptism of fire when the UK was hit by the August 2019’s blackout barely a fortnight after being appointed to the energy minister’s role, is well qualified to keep a tight grip over his old brief.
And with Sharma retaining his Cabinet seat as COP president, albeit based at the Cabinet Office, efforts to tackle climate change will have an additional voice at the government’s top table.
The sprawling nature of the business and energy portfolio means however that the Kwarteng’s attention will be in stretched.
And the centrality of business, particularly at a time when the UK is attempting to climb out of its biggest economic shock in three centuries, will make it doubly hard for the secretary of state to focus on the energy section of his brief.
Both Kwarteng and his predecessor Claire O’Neill enjoyed plenty of leeway in the energy and clean growth portfolio.
In addition, being a former secretary of state in her own right will give Trevelyan more authority than most ministers of state.
With the UK due to host the COP summit in just under ten months time, the energy minister has a pivotal role to play this year.
A fear though is that Johnson has shoehorned a loyalist back into government for short-term party management reasons without considering whether he has appointed the right person for the job. Trevelyan may need to eat some old words to convince that the PM has.