By Carol Miers.
I read in the Guardian that investment in low carbon technology is dropping, the government is cutting funding to wind power, wood fuels, building insulation, even solar energy.
The government's own Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says the industry needs £50m more investment, and the government's Department on Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is cutting investment by almost 20%.
It must be an expense to support these two contradictory bodies.
I remembered that when I spoke to Peter Fraenkel, of Marine Current Technologies the other week, see Turbines under the Seine - insane his explanation about why funding is essential had made a lot of sense.
"The problem is," Peter Fraenkel said, "if you remember, the earliest mobile phones or computers were very expensive and not very good, they relied on a few people with more money than sense to go and buy them.
"Then as soon as a new technology begins to be used in quantity the costs come down, with the best will in the world you can't go from nothing to thousands of these machines you've got to go through a development phase where you get the bugs out of it.
"Basically the first machine is going to be less reliable and more expensive and if you can get through that period... the reliability will improve. That's why the government needs to help because the government want these things to happen.
"And you can't expect the market so to speak to do the job,” he ended.
Well what a disastrous policy this cutback is. I wondered if he agreed with the newspaper article?
"The Guardian article is absolutely correct; the government talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. We are much worse than our competitors in terms of government energy R&D spending,” Peter Fraenkel said.
Not meaning to be dramatic, but seeing the graphic right (click to enlarge) from the International Energy Agency website, if I had children and I was working my hardest for their future, I'd be horrified, instead of being just, well let's say, horrified. I leave it to Peter Fraenkel to explain.
"This graph shows UK government energy R&D spending from 1974 to 2005 compared with other OECD countries – as the Guardian said, a large part of the high spending in the 70s was on nuclear, but my understanding was that a lot was on waste disposal – a problem which still remains to be satisfactorily resolved.
"This graph comes from the International Energy Agency website so it is of course reliable. I happen to have this to hand as I use it in some lectures I give to make exactly the point made by the Guardian," he said.
"What the Guardian didn’t say is that in the 70s we had world-class R&D laboratories such as the Central Electricity Research Labs (which did a lot of work on wind power), the National Physical Laboratory was much bigger, there was another big electrical lab in Cheshire which were partly responsible for the spending at that time.
"Most of these have become housing estates or supermarkets after privatisation of the electricity industry once the private sector bean counters worked out they could make money from selling off such assets.
"We now have a much more limited capability both for R&D and for manufacturing," Peter Fraenkel ended.
Take a minute, look at the graph, if the UK is to become self-supporting in terms of energy then I think the government should put their money where their 'talk' is, don't you?
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