Energy

The French sociologist Alain Touraine coined the term ‘post-industrial society’ in 1969. By the 1980s it had become shorthand for the kind of services-based, individualistic economies most major developed nations had created. Today, the UK is moving its economy beyond that. We are creating what might be called a ‘zero-industrial society’. Climate change targets, soaring energy prices and rising taxes on employment are killing off Britain’s small and vibrant industrial base. Last week, Ineos closed its ethanol plant in Grangemouth, Scotland, with its chairman Sir Jim Ratcliffe warning of ‘the extinction of our major industries’. The previous month, Airbus announced it was cutting 500 jobs.

So farewell, Ratcliffe-on-Soar: the UK’s last coal-fired power station shut down on Monday, having burned five million tonnes of coal per year since it opened in 1968. Back then, 80 per cent of national power came from coal, our primary energy source since the 1880s; at the turn of this century there were still 25 coal plants in operation across the country. Now there are none – and 36 per cent of our power in the past year came from wind, solar and hydro with 7 per cent from biomass, compared with 24 per cent from natural gas and just 1 per cent from Ratcliffe’s coal. That’s a remarkable transition – but far from proof that we’ll have sufficient clean energy to keep the mid-century lights on.

The City is having a busier year than pessimistic observers – including me – might have expected. The biggest deal on the block, the £39 billion bid by Australian giant BHP Billiton for its London-listed South African mining rival Anglo American, has fallen away. But plenty of bankers’ and advisers’ fees have already been clocked up on both sides and BHP may now pursue global domination of the copper market by stalking other London-listed miners such as Antofagasta of Chile. Meanwhile, the £3.

So, we have a little more flesh on the bones of Labour’s energy policy, with the party giving more details of Great British Energy, the state-owned company it wants to set up to invest in wind and solar energy. But there are still gaping holes in Labour’s promise to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – and save consumers money in the process. First to note is that Labour seems drastically to have toned down the claims as to how much its energy policies will supposedly save consumers. Until today it was claiming that it would save us ‘up to £1,400’ a year.

This morning, Ofgem announced another reduction in the energy price cap from July. The new cap on the unit price of energy should see costs fall by another 7 per cent, taking £122 off the average household bill. And it didn’t take long for both the Tories and Labour to try to swing the news in their electoral favour. Only two days into an election campaign, the government will want to claim credit for today’s news: an opportunity to remind voters what successive Conservative prime ministers did to protect people from higher energy costs (of course, the Energy Price Guarantee was a large part of the reason markets rebelled against Liz Truss’s mini-Budget, but that’s another story) and to flag that energy costs are now falling.

I suspect I’ve had a lot more fun writing about the annual Sunday Times Rich List over the years than many of its denizens have had clambering into it and staying there behind their high-tech security gates and their phalanx of tax advisers. The 2024 roll call includes some great British wealth-creation stories – led by the industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the inventor Sir James Dyson and the Far Eastern trading Swire dynasty. But if the completed jigsaw of 300 names makes any sort of picture, it is of a vast treasure hoard from elsewhere, and in some cases from nowhere, that has found a relatively safe vault in the UK. That’s not a bad thing in itself as an advert for our quality of life and rule of law.