MP Alan Simpson sees red over 'Big Power' anti-green agenda

Labour's energy adviser calls himself a 'leftover hippy' but his politics are fresh – an assault on how the civil service and 'Big Power' try to derail the fight against climate change
The UK is in the grips of a power cartel that actively hinders the fight against global warming by lobbying for its own narrow commercial interests at the cost of local democracy and the future health of the planet. It's an argument that off-gridders and anti-capitalist campaigners will be familiar with. It's not really what you expect to hear from an adviser to the government.
Yet that is the belief of MP Alan Simpson, who occupies a place close to the heart of political power in Britain as energy adviser to the minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband.
Simpson made his eye-opening claims at an event organised this week by UK solar company Solar Century to lobby for an increase in the proposed "feed-in tariff" – the amount paid for electricity sold to the grid by households generating green energy through solar panels or wind turbines.
Next April, the government plans to introduce feed-in tariffs of 5p per unit (kilowatt-hour), plus a subsidy of 36.5p per unit generated off-grid in small solar and wind-powered installations. Simpson argued that these levels provide only a 5%-7% return on investment in solar panels, which is not high enough to kick-start the UK solar energy industry. He called for the feed-in tariff to be set at a minimum of 10p, which would provide closer to a 10% return.
He also said we don't need to look to the Middle East to see the link between energy and politics, because it's here in our own back yards. Calling for a decentralised power generation system in which individual homes and local areas generate much of the UK's power, he said:
Current energy policy in the UK is dominated by the vested interests of "Big Power" [the six utility companies that dominate UK electricity generation]. The national grid is monumentally inefficient as an energy system. It was a half-decent idea for the middle of the last century, but 70%-80% of energy put into the grid disappears before you or I even switch the light on. We need not an energy, but a power revolution that takes control from the centre and literally puts power back into the hands of the people.
The UK generated just 6 megawatt peak (MWp) from solar sources last year, compared to Germany's 1,500 MWp and Spain's 2,511 MWp. The reasons for the UK's poor performance, Simpson declared, relate to civil servants' desire to retain central control, allied with the commercial interests of "Big Power".
He said civil servants have been trying to water down feed-in tariffs designed to boost the deployment of renewable energy in the UK. He accused them of "delaying" and "frustrating" their introduction. The feed-in tariffs will be available for installations of up to 5Mw, but Simpson revealed that initially the big power companies wanted the tariff to be available only for systems that generated less than 50kw.
Cynics say the reason Simpson can be so outspoken is that as a Labour MP he expects to be voted out of power within a few months. However, the record shows that he has consistently criticised government energy policy. He is certainly one of very few British MPs to put his money where his principles are.
Four years ago, he spent £100,000 on a derelict building in Nottingham's Lace Market area, and another £200,000 to make it into an eco-home for him and his wife, the novelist Pascale Quiviger. He refurbished the south-facing roof with solar panels that now provide his home with around 75% of its power. Inside is a micro-combined heat and power (CHP) generator, producing electricity at the same time as it heats the house. The internals walls are made from compressed recycled straw and insulated with recycled cardboard tubes.
Simpson's politics provide a glimpse of the sort of progressive thinking the Labour party could have adopted when it abandoned its traditional socialist approach for Tony Blair's New Labour in the early 1990s. "I'm a leftover hippy from the 60s," he told the assembled people in suits. "Here we have an opportunity to influence huge change." Let's grasp it.
• Alex Benady is acting editor of Off-Grid.net