So farewell, Ratcliffe-on-Soar: the UK’s last coal-fired power station shut down on Monday, having burned five million tonnes of coal per year since it opened in 1968. Back then, 80 per cent of national power came from coal, our primary energy source since the 1880s; at the turn of this century there were still 25 coal plants in operation across the country. Now there are none – and 36 per cent of our power in the past year came from wind, solar and hydro with 7 per cent from biomass, compared with 24 per cent from natural gas and just 1 per cent from Ratcliffe’s coal.
That’s a remarkable transition – but far from proof that we’ll have sufficient clean energy to keep the mid-century lights on. Nuclear output, around 15 per cent of the national requirement and essential baseload supply when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, declined sharply last year due to closures of old reactors and outages in remaining ones, while the delayed Hinkley Point C station in Somerset won’t come on stream until at least 2030. As for Sizewell C in Suffolk, Wylfa in Anglesey or ‘small modular reactors’, your guess is as good as mine.
Meanwhile, biomass generation that is counted as ‘renewable’ consists chiefly of output from the massively subsidised and CO2-emitting Drax plant in Yorkshire, which burns wood from Canadian forests. And the energy secretary Ed Miliband’s blinkered zeal for wind and solar at the expense of all else looks likely to scare investors, hike consumer bills and demonstrate the folly of unachievable targets: he may soon have to abandon his call for a quadrupling of offshore wind by 2030 because the industry can’t deliver and the grid infrastructure could not cope if it did.
But still, the numbers tell us radical change is possible over time, as knowledge and technology advance. Few experts 40 years ago would have predicted that the shift from fossil fuels would advance at such a pace – and that Ratcliffe’s cooling towers now awaiting demolition would form a last memorial to the late King Coal.
Penthouse plunge
As a Covent Garden homeowner with an eye on local estate agents’ websites, I’m intrigued by Lord Waheed Alli’s penthouse. It’s on record that he paid £18.35 million for this high-end three-bedroom Floral Street new-build in January 2020, having reportedly negotiated the price down from £20 million. Pictures from the developer’s brochure – rather than the Starmer family album – certainly look handsome.
But in the same period Alli could have bought a duplex on top of a well-sited nearby block called Fielding Court, with five bedrooms, vast roof terraces, memories of rockstar parties from when it was owned by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics and a far more private entrance for visiting politicians, all for little more than £4 million. I should know: it looked so cool that I bought a fistful of lottery tickets in the hope of bidding for it myself. More to the point, what with so many super-rich now fleeing the UK for fear of Labour tax raids, the highest current online valuation I can find for Alli’s flat (at The Move Market) is £8.1 million – which means he’d be down by ten if he could sell at all while the place is making sleaze-allegation headlines. I’d be happy to accept a wardrobe upgrade from the generous peer, but I don’t think I’d take his property advice.
It’s good to talk
Like a twitcher in the shrubbery, I think I’ve spotted the government talking to the City – and I suspect the chief conduit is Emma Reynolds, the junior Treasury and pensions minister who was formerly head of public affairs for TheCityUK, the Square Mile’s lobby group. More will become clear on Budget day, but here are the early indications.
First, the Financial Times has reported (though the Treasury denies a final decision) the imminent scrapping of the ‘British Isa’ announced by Jeremy Hunt in his last Budget in March. This £5,000 addition to the existing £20,000 tax-free Isa allowance was intended to attract capital towards ‘the most promising British businesses’, but professionals shunned it as an ill-conceived complication of the Isa offer and a potential embarrassment if UK equities continue to underperform. This column called it ‘the dampest squib in the box’ – and sure enough, if the FT’s right, it’s about to bite the dust.
Next (this one’s rather technical, I’m afraid, but important to the industry), the government and the Financial Conduct Authority last month announced a temporary exemption from current cost disclosure requirements for investment trusts. Existing rules inherited from the EU were accused of double-counting certain costs, depressing trust values and deterring investors; improved legislation is pending.
Then there’s the story that Chancellor Rachel Reeves is about to take an axe to the Financial Conduct Authority itself, changing its leadership or splitting its role, in response to complaints that its risk-averse tick-box culture is a brake on the City’s international competitiveness. And finally, rumours say Reeves will dilute Labour’s promised crackdown on non-doms, because the Office for Budget Responsibility reckons it will raise little or no extra revenue – and because much of the City’s top talent holds that tax-minimising status. Who’d have thought it after all those righteous party conference speeches, but pragmatism rules.
Dream train
To mark the end of my month-long September railway odyssey, I binge-watched the BBC’s Nightsleeper thriller and had to agree with our television critic James Walton that as dramas go, it was an absolute turkey. But I was captivated by the idea of an uncrowded train with a well-stocked bar and no threat of a striking driver – indeed, showing us the industry’s best future, largely no driver at all – tootling across the network at full speed before (this hardly counts as a spoiler) arriving safely in London in time for breakfast. Less disaster epic, more fairy tale.
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