Dieter Helm’s much anticipated cost of energy review has already attracted a lot of critical response, for example on his call for an economy-wide carbon price, the idea of folding the CfD and the Capacity Market into auctions for ‘equivalent firm capacity’, making renewables cover their own intermittency costs, and indeed querying his starting point that energy costs are ‘too high’. CarbonBrief has a useful summary of all the various points that have been made. As others have noted, a key question is what the government will now do with his recommendations, and if they try to take them up, whether some of them – like his economy-wide carbon price – will be politically feasible to implement. I would argue that the political economy of policy making and implementation is not merely an interesting side-issue in Helm’s review, but is actually central to his agenda. This is not least because Helm is rather unusual amongst energy analysts in thinking explicitly about political economy. The question is whether his thinking makes
IGov 30th Oct 2017 read more »
