Sympathy for the government?

In last week's newsletter we reported on energy minister John Hayes dismissing claims made by SSE chief Ian Marchant that the "lights will go out" with the government significantly underestimating the scale of the capacity crunch facing the country.

Over the next year SSE is due to reduce its energy generation by 2000MW, and is postponing further investment in gas-fired electricity generation until at least 2015. Marchant said SSE's reviewed operations were unlikely to have been included in an earlier analysis by Ofgem, where it forecasted a one in twelve chance of 'the lights going out'.

The editorial piece attracted responses from a number of readers, two of these responses are printed below. Please do continue to email me with your thoughts.



I have some sympathy with the government here.  2GW closing compared to the current 47GW demand and c60GW capacity.  OK we are in a recession but ...

Prof Ian F Bitterlin
CEng PhD BSc(Hons) BA DipDesInn
MIET MCIBSE MBCS MIEEE
Consulting Engineer: Data Centre Power & Cooling
Visiting Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds

I agree with the energy minister regarding the extreme improbability of
not having enough electricity to go around in 2015. And not with SSE,
who might just have an ulterior motive in commercial terms for wanting
to be rewarded sooner rather than later, for building power stations
they were going to build anyway.

Andrew Warren
Director
Association for the Conservation of Energy