Martin Bright talks to Malcolm Wicks, the minister charged with delivering the UK energy review
Malcolm Wicks has a dream. In a green future, schools and public buildings sprout mini-windmills and solar panels to play their part in saving the planet from global warming. "I think the wind turbines would be particularly dramatic as kind of secular steeples," he says. The energy minister intends to use a substantial chunk of the £50m provided for microgeneration in this year's budget as grants for schools that want to start generating their own electricity. "You have a wind turbine on your school and you have a little panel showing how much each term the school has saved in terms of CO2. Then, whether you are the teacher of civics or citizenship or geography or arithmetic and science, you can teach children about it. And the children, as ever, will teach their parents."
Wicks recognises the historical responsibility he faces: "Politicians will often say about their own ministerial portfolio, their own pet subject, that it's the biggest issue facing the world. Well, for once the politician is not exaggerating when he or she says that global warming is the major threat to the planet. No doubt about that."
The Croydon North MP and former pensions minister holds his post at the Department of Trade and Industry at a time when the profile of global energy issues is especially high. Securing energy resources as Britain becomes increasingly reliant on imports, deciding whether to build a new generation of nuclear power stations, increasing renewable energy capacity: it is hard to imagine a more important job outside of the cabinet.
Wicks is vexed by suggestions that the energy review, which he will present to the Prime Minister this summer, is a cynical exercise designed solely to push through new nuclear power. "Nuclear . . . when you look at all of our energy supply, is about 9 per cent. But I'm not running a 9 per cent review. I'm running a 100 per cent review," he says.
The minister is clearly in epic mood. For millennia, he says, Britain has been a "self-sufficient energy island: gathering in the wood . . . and then [came] the era of King Coal and then Harold Wilson, the first Beatles single, North Sea oil and gas, from the mid-Sixties onwards . . . huge riches. But having been largely self-sufficient in energy, that's now changing."
In 2004, for the first time since our ancestors began to chop down the forests that covered our land, we became a net importer of energy. Britain already imports 10 per cent of the gas it consumes, and by 2020 could be importing 80 per cent. Britain is likely to be a net importer of oil by 2010.
As we talk, Wicks has just returned from the International Energy Forum in Qatar, a country that may provide us with as much as 20 per cent of our gas in the future.
The IEF is, he says, "a pretty nervous place". There are increasing concerns about the security situation in the Middle East and Russia's willingness to throw its weight around. The stand-off between Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and Ukraine over gas supplies earlier this year "undoubtedly sent a shiver down the European energy spine", he says. "In terms of rhetoric and body language, you can see it. It's led to a re-emergence, or strengthening in some cases, of energy nationalism."
But Wicks remains convinced about the benefits of the market, despite the rising protectionist mood around Europe. "These are difficult times and you have the move towards market liberalisation, a move which is, damn it, EU policy. It's not as if we are suddenly suggesting a new policy . . . There has to be a common energy market." He refuses to be drawn on whether the government's free- market principles will allow the British energy supplier Centrica to be taken over by the Russian giant Gazprom, but the logic of the position would suggest it will be difficult to resist.
For Wicks, the energy consultation has been bedevilled by people supporting their own team. "Their team is renewables or it's windmills or it's nuclear or it's coal. And it's my team's the only team and it's the answer to the whole world. I saw a headline the other day and it said: 'Is marine power the answer to Britain's energy needs?' Well, actually, no. But I'm very interested in whether it can be a few per cent of the answer."
I'm sure Wicks would like his "secular steeples" atop town halls and primary schools to be the wind-driven symbol of his energy review. But it is possible that nuclear power stations, those great cathedrals to the power of the rational mind, will prove his lasting legacy.
Martin Bright is political editor of the New Statesman
Read more from the New Statesman 'Heat and Light' energy supplement at
www.newstatesman.com/supplements/energy
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