By Paul Homewood
An excoriating piece from John Constable about OFGEM’s new Decarbonisation Programme Action Plan:
This confirms concerns that as a long-term Whitehall policy insider and responsible in part for both the Climate Change Act (2008) and Electricity Market Reform (EMR), Mr Brearley was not an appropriate choice to lead the regulator.
In October 2019, Ofgem, the UK regulator for the gas and electricity markets, announced that Jonathan Brearley, its own Executive Director for Systems and Networks, would be succeeding Dermot Nolan as Chief Executive, taking over at the end of February 2020.
Faced with such vast proposals for expenditure an objective regulator would require stringent cost benefit analysis and justification, but under Mr Brearley that not will happen
Mr Brearley’s Whitehall career is practically a history of modern British climate change policy. From 2002 to 2006 he served as “Head of Team” in Tony Blair’s Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU). The PMSU was at least in part responsible for the Energy Review of 2002, and for The Energy Challenge study of June 2006, amongst other things (a full list of the PMSU publications and of those to which it contributed can be found on the National Archives site).
From July 2006 until September 2009 Mr Brearley worked as Director of the Office for Climate Change (OCC), an offshoot of the Department of Environment (DEFRA) that formed the administrative nexus drawing together six other departments for work on the Climate Change Act (2008).
This experience led to a further appointment in late 2008 in Gordon Brown’s new Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), where he became Director of Energy Strategy and Futures, and then Director of Electricity Markets and Networks. In this latter position he is said to have “led the delivery of the Governments’ Electricity Market Reform (EMR) programme”, the programme which introduced Contracts for Difference (CfD), the subsidy scheme introduced to replace the Renewables Obligation (RO).
Mr Brearley continued to serve under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, but in 2013 he resigned visibly and dramatically from DECC, with the Independent newspaper reporting a source to the effect that Brearley was “not happy… DECC is working to improve the investment climate and the Treasury is stopping it”.
Full post here.
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February 5, 2020 at 04:04AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 