Framing the energy debate

While Sir Olly Robbins was making front-page headlines from a committee room in Westminster on Tuesday morning, just up the road on Pall Mall, an assortment of cabinet ministers, CEOs and their advisers gathered alongside academics and camera crews to hear the other big news of the day: Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, telling a packed room at the National Growth Debate that the era of clean energy security must come of age.  

Whatever one’s political colours, I suspect that most would agree that Ed Miliband’s speech was passionate, stirring and not without its moments of appropriate humour. Looking at his connection with the audience this morning and his lightness of touch, some might say that more than a decade since stepping down as Labour leader, Ed Miliband himself has come of age. 

As I settled into my seat between a senior FT journalist on one side and a TV political hack on the other, it struck me that this was a challenging and technical message to land for Miliband about a very big topic. The move to delink UK gas and electricity prices and move energy providers onto fixed-price contracts has come in for criticism from political opponents. Asked to explain it in a sentence in a Q&A afterwards, even Miliband acknowledged in his answer that, no, he had not quite done it! 

Reminding the audience that solar energy and wind farms are neither “woke” or a “Marxist plot”, it was clear that Miliband needs to lean into the bigger narratives such as the impact of the Middle East war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than the financial mechanics of ‘delinking’ to sell his mission. Framing his mission in the context of cheaper energy bills and UK energy security will need to be repeated and be front and centre of the argument to get political and public buy-in.

Ultimately his argument rests on the point that clean power provides a cheaper alternative but, as long as the electricity price is linked to the gas price, the benefits become less clear. The trouble is, this rather technical - albeit important -point risks distracting from a bigger narrative Miliband needs to land around his package of energy reforms, from building on public land (such as the railways) to build more solar sites to ensure his renewable energy mission accelerates much faster.