A billion pounds will be handed to electricity generators in 2018 in return for doing precisely what they would have done anyway, reports Carbon Commentary
A mantra is inscribed on the walls of the UK Treasury. It reads ‘No subsidy without additionality’. In layperson’s language, this strange phrase means that the only justifiable purpose of handing a business a cheque is to get it to do something it wouldn’t otherwise do.
This golden rule was spectacularly flouted in the UK electricity capacity auction that was concluded last week. A billion pounds will be handed to generators in 2018 in return for doing precisely what they would have done anyway. Negligible amounts of new electricity generating capacity was drawn into the market and existing plants will not change their behaviour. Later in this article I’m going to look briefly at two successful participants in the auction – the pumped storage reservoirs and the nuclear fleet – to show why this is so.