Energy Security Outlook

Restore Britain’s energy paper, a 42-page Energy Security Outlook, treats expensive energy as a cause of economic decline rather than a side effect of it. It says the Climate Change Act 2008, widened in 2019, put intermittent renewables ahead of dispatchable power, producing high prices, a less stable grid, industrial decline and exposure to shocks. It claims that without what it calls the “green crusade”, British energy could cost roughly a third of what households and firms pay now.

A Restore Britain government would treat energy as strategic infrastructure. The public measures are more North Sea production, shale where it pays, a national programme of small modular reactors, repeal of the Climate Change Act and of the levies and subsidies tied to net zero, voluntary energy performance certificates, abolition of the Carbon Price Support, faster planning for major projects, and dynamic pricing for industrial and commercial users.

Rupert Lowe’s line, quoted by the party, is that Britain was a net energy exporter in living memory and can be again. The paper also wants a public dashboard led by kilowatt-hours per person divided by the cost per kilowatt-hour, which it says measures industrial capability better than GDP.