The UK needs to rethink its ‘romantic’ energy policy or face disaster

“The UK is in a very bad situation. Roughly 40pc of its power is from coal, and 20pc from nuclear. It all needs to be replaced. But is anybody in the British Government out there making the case for clean coal? I don’t see anybody,” he said, speaking over a capuccino in Madrid.

Dr Bernotat, who heads Germany’s power giant e.on, is no shrinking violet. Last year he lashed out at Brussels, calling the EU competition police a bigger threat to energy security than the Kremlin.


…Dr Bernotat praised Downing Street for settling on some sort of energy strategy at long last after years of drift and muddle, but said Labour seemed to have gone overboard all of a sudden with a “romantic” enthusiasm for green power.

“You cannot replace 60pc of the country’s generating capacity just by betting on renewables, which is what the pressure groups are demanding. It will be decades before we reach that point, and until then Britain is going to need coal-fired units. I hope some realism comes through in energy policy,” he said, speaking in near perfect English from his London days as a Shell executive. He was once in charge of Shell’s operations in Eastern Europe, and Africa.

Telegraph