The myth of Prometheus is not really about theft; it’s about power. In stealing fire from the gods, he gave mankind the forge, the kiln, and the smelter; the tools that turned earth into fields, shelter into cities, and raw materials into weapons. [some emphasis, links added]
From coal to steam to the splitting of the atom, every time power has become cheaper and more abundant, previously unthinkable transformations have been unleashed.
Omniscient Zeus understood. The father of the gods didn’t extinguish the flame but chained the thief to a stone, a punishment constraining Prometheus’ power for eternity, as an eagle ate his liver.
Today, Britain’s energy policy follows Zeus in just one way: instead of unleashing the power of our nation, everywhere it is in chains and eviscerated.
Ed Miliband, in his solitary similarity with the Olympian gods, ignores the Promethean opportunity for Britain and instead leaves us constrained under an immovable burden: regulation designed to achieve unilateral carbon elimination, and taxation designed to hobble and humble the industrious.
This has left us with some of the most expensive energy in the OECD.
British industrial electricity prices are almost double the EU14 median and, for large users, the highest in Europe. This is not principally because wholesale gas is expensive, though it is, but because levies, carbon pricing, and network charges have been loaded onto the system, with even more added in recent months.
That’s costing us all in the obvious ways: our fields will yield less this harvest because the fertilizer has cost more, and our resilience is diminished because Britain can no longer manufacture ammonia, a chemical essential to crops and munitions, all because the cost of power makes production unviable, leaving us dependent on others for the raw materials for food and weapons.
The Scunthorpe steelworks survived only through an emergency Government takeover as power costs pushed it out of business, and the Stellantis van plant in Luton closed.
These are not peripheral industries; they are the foundation on which any serious transition depends.
A country that cannot make steel can’t build reactor vessels and naval hulls under sovereign control.
A country that loses its car plants and manufacturing firms won’t be able to turn ploughshares into swords should the peacetime summer we’ve been living in for 80 years turn to a winter of global discontent.
And a country without affordable electricity won’t attract battery plants or data centres, as OpenAI’s abandoning of the Stargate initiative in the UK proved.
Put simply, without affordable energy, the components of the net zero future will be manufactured in China and shipped here on whatever terms Beijing sets, swapping dependency on the Strait of Hormuz to begging for the munificence of the Middle Kingdom.
But Ed knows this. At least someone in his department does. That’s why Great British Energy signed a deal to build small modular reactors with Rolls-Royce, rejecting the US company Westinghouse.
The plan is for the £2.6bn investment at Wylfa on Anglesey to see three 470-megawatt units power three million homes by the mid-2030s. That’s exactly the sovereign industrial program Britain needs.
Rolls-Royce has attracted investment from the Qatar Investment Authority, the Czech utility ČEZ, and France’s BNF Resources to champion a design with export potential. Miliband was right to choose a British company, and right to back it with serious capital.
But that’s where the praise ends because the same energy secretary committed to zero-carbon nuclear power has made it harder to get there, slowing the uptake and extending the carbon-dependency of the country, exactly the reverse of the policy he professes to champion.
With higher power costs, every reactor, connector, storage unit, turbine, and cable will either come later, be more expensive, or be made abroad, in countries with less demanding carbon targets.
That’s not just bad for Britain’s economy; it delays the roll-out of the technology and closes factories, disperses skills, and moves supply chains abroad. How does that help?
Read rest at The Telegraph
