Friday 17 July 2015

EMR ‘will force government to be sole power purchaser’

The Electricity Market Reform (EMR) is pushing the UK back towards the government being the only buyer of power.

That’s according to Michael Pollitt, Proffessor of Political Business at Cambridge University, who spoke to ELN at the EMR conference in London yesterday.

He said: “I think that was always going to be the outcome of the EMR process and it is a very significant attempt to move towards completely decarbonising the electricity system towards the end of 2020."

[youtube url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lawaBW02bQw" width="575" height="323"]

 

He added: "That was always going to mean that there was going to be a significant amount of new subsidised generation coming into the electricity system and that subsidised generation has displaced most of the market led generation which might otherwise have happened."

Mr Pollitt believes some elements of the EMR scheme such as the Capacity Market is "not working so well" because it is "unnecessarily costly".

However others such as the Contracts for Difference (CfDs), which aims to boost low carbon electricity, has been a success, he added.

ELN also spoke to Doug Parr, Policy Director at Greenpeace UK, who said renewable developers have doubts about the delivery of the CfD scheme following announcements made by the government recently.