Ed Davey’s keynote speech at the Energy UK Annual Conference

EMBARGO: Immediate release

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is challenging the energy sector to counter the lies put forward by Reform UK and Conservative Party that will cause even higher energy bills and cost jobs.

In his keynote address to the Energy UK Conference today [Tuesday 14th October], Davey will argue that “ignoring Farage hasn’t stopped his lies from spreading” and warn that “we either take on the myths or we fail families for at least a decade”.

The Liberal Democrats have set out a plan to halve energy bills by 2035, by investing in renewable power, launching a ten-year home emergency upgrade programme, and moving older renewable projects off expensive Renewable Obligation Certificates and onto cheaper Contracts for Difference.

Please see the full speech below:

*Check against delivery*

Good afternoon. Thank you Shauna and Max for that introduction, and thank you David and Energy UK for inviting me to speak today. It’s good to be back!

Colleagues, we are at a critical moment in our country’s energy debate. Especially on how we best tackle the problem of high energy bills.

Energy bills are too high. They’ve been too high, for too long.

The typical family is having to pay £60 a month more than they were five years ago.  And British businesses still face some of the highest electricity prices in the OECD.

So whether it’s the cost of living crisis hitting millions of people – or the rising cost crisis hitting so many businesses and holding back the economy – we have to bring energy prices down.

While that’s a statement that has rare cross-party support – the answer to the question “how do you do it?” certainly has no consensus. And it’s that diverging politics on how to get energy costs down that I want to address today – and where you have a crucial role.

For there’s one school of thought – you heard it earlier with Claire – that says it’s really easy. Nice easy solutions – typical for the likes of Nigel Farage and regrettably now Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives too.

They say, rip up our climate change commitments, and then, magically, bills will somehow come down. It sounds simple enough. They pretend bills are high because we’re investing too much in renewable power. And they pretend that if we just stop investing, bills will suddenly fall.

Simple, beguiling and terribly, terribly wrong. So wrong in fact, that it can be tempting to just dismiss it – as fantasy economics and refuse to engage with it. But that is a big mistake.

Refusing to engage hasn’t stopped Farage’s lies from spreading. It hasn’t stopped the Conservative Party turning its back on climate action – just a few years after Theresa May legislated for the 2050 target.

When you understand how important renewable energy is for our economy – how only renewable energy can deliver permanently low prices and energy security – we have to be honest with ourselves: we haven’t done a good enough job at countering their myths. So now the cross-party consensus on investing in renewables has been shattered.

We have long said that climate sceptics have their heads buried in the sand. But if we – the people in this room, the energy industry as a whole, and all who want to cut energy bills permanently – if we don’t take on the lies of Farage and Badenoch now – it will be us who have our heads in the sand.

We either take on their myths or we fail British families and the UK economy for at least a decade.

So we have to be clear. First, about what their plans really mean – for energy bills and our economy.

And second, about what actually needs to be done to bring down bills and boost the economy. Our positive vision of a future where everyone feels the benefits of cheap, clean renewable energy.

So let’s start with the Farage-Badenoch plan to rip up the Climate Change Act, abandon our net-zero target and stop investing in renewables. To rely more and more on fossil fuels.

“That would be a catastrophic mistake. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to ensure we protect the planet for their futures and that means giving business the reassurance it needs to find the solutions for the very grave challenges we face.”

Not my words. The words of Conservative former Prime Minister Theresa May.

“Turning our back on this progress now risks future investment and jobs into our country, as well as our international standing.”

Not my words. The words of Conservative former Business Secretary Alok Sharma.

Now I haven’t always agreed with Theresa May and Alok Sharma – but on this they are absolutely right. Speaking up against their own party takes courage, and I thank them for it.

But as well as using those arguments, we need above all to win this one: the Farage-Badenoch plan would fail on its own terms. It wouldn’t cut bills and it wouldn’t strengthen energy security. We have to expose the whole premise of their plan for the lie it is.

Power prices aren’t high because of the price of renewables. Because as you all know electricity prices aren’t set by the price of renewables. Almost all the time in the UK, electricity prices are set by the price of gas.

And that gas – so beloved of Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch – is more expensive than renewables. More volatile in price than renewables. More dependent on imports than renewables.

So whether it’s cutting people’s high energy bills or making us more secure on energy – the answer isn’t to make ourselves even more reliant on fossil fuels. The answer is to make ourselves less reliant on them. Generating more cheap renewable power – and thereby decoupling the electricity price from gas. You know this.

At our conference in Bournemouth last month, my party adopted a comprehensive plan to do that. It included a number of ideas from Energy UK and others in this room – so thank you,  and I hope you don’t mind a bit of plagiarism!

Ideas like using new technologies to help people use energy more flexibly, at times when it’s cheaper. Or working together with our European neighbours to trade energy more efficiently, cutting costs and reducing reliance on gas.

And we borrowed ideas from others too – like the Pot Zero proposal from the UK Energy Research Centre, to move older renewable projects off expensive Renewable Obligation Certificates and onto cheaper Contracts for Difference.

With other well-trodden ideas on insulation and energy efficiency, taken together, our package has the potential to halve energy bills within a decade. And I believe that should be the government’s ambition – nothing less.

Far more deliverable – and far more ambitious – than the Farage-Badenoch nonsense. And over the next few years, I want my party to engage with you, to show in even greater detail how these much lower energy bills would be delivered.

And to start that engagement, we have to be clear-eyed about the challenges that come with such ambition.

Expanding renewable power won’t happen on its own. It means bringing down the cost of manufacturing – seeking lower costs across the UK, European and global supply chains. It means securing earlier local support for grid investment through community-led planning and community incentives. And of course it means rapidly increasing investment in British renewables.

Fortunately, we know how to do that – because we’ve done it before. Between 2010 and 2015, we quadrupled the amount of renewable power generated in the United Kingdom. And to give due credit to the man coming after me today, crucial to that was the framework provided by the Climate Change Act – passed by Ed Miliband with cross-party support in 2008.

Under that framework, from 2010 to 2015, we drove massive investment. With Electricity Market Reform and the introduction of contracts for difference. Vince Cable and I put in place industrial strategies across key energy sectors. We showed the world we were serious.

And as a result, we attracted global firms to come to the UK, and spend tens of billions of pounds to build factories and windfarms and create thousands of clean, secure jobs. With many firms in this room, we made the United Kingdom the world-leader in offshore wind. And cut the cost of onshore and offshore wind power dramatically.

I still remember the moment we broke ground on the Siemens factory in Hull, where they now produce blades over 100 metres long for offshore wind turbines. That factory has created 1,300 jobs – in a city that once had the country’s highest unemployment.

It has breathed new life into a dock, long after its original purpose died.

Once, ships left Alexandra Dock full of coal, to be burnt in the dirty power stations of the past. Now, ships leave Alexandra Dock carrying wind turbines, to be installed in the clean power stations of the future.

That is British ingenuity and ambition at its best.

And that’s the same ambition we need today – not just on wind and solar, but so many technologies of the future: clean flight; tidal power; manufacturing power cables and upgrading the grid.

The UK can lead the world in all those growth sectors of the world’s economic future – just as we did in offshore wind - if we have the vision and create the stable, certain, predictable, consistent policy framework that worked with offshore wind.

Expanding renewables is key, but we need more to drive people’s energy bills down quickly. We urgently need a comprehensive, long term programme to insulate people’s homes so they are much cheaper to heat.

The government’s Warm Homes Plan is a start – and I know Ed Miliband had to fight tooth and nail with the Treasury for the funding. But after 15 months, we’re still waiting to see the actual plan in full. We need far more urgency from the government on this.

Let me give you just one example: air-to-air heat pumps. These are magical devices that heat the air directly, rather than using radiators – making them ideal for flats and the million or so homes with storage heaters. And crucially, they can also act as air conditioners – which will come in handy as we experience more scorching summers like the one we had this year.

But, unlike other heat pumps, you can’t get a grant to install one. That needs to change. And to be fair, on air-to-air heat pumps at least, the government has recognised this.

Earlier this year, it consulted on extending the Boiler Upgrade Scheme to cover them. But here’s what I mean about a lack of urgency: that consultation closed in June, and we’ve still heard nothing. Just imagine if those grants had been available over the summer. Imagine how many families would have fitted one to help get through those scorching August days.

So my message to Ed Miliband today is: please, get on with it.

And the government needs to be more ambitious about new homes too. I’m glad the government listened to Liberal Democrat calls for a “rooftop revolution”, with solar panels on all new homes by default. Saving families hundreds of pounds a year. But here again, I’m afraid Labour is still being too timid.

I can’t understand why they still haven’t reinstated the zero-carbon homes standard that was supposed to come into force a decade ago, but was scrapped by the Conservatives in 2015. So again, Ed: please, get on with it.

And while we’re on the subject of making buildings cheaper to heat – and reducing our reliance on gas – here’s one more area to focus on: low-carbon district heat networks. We need more of them.

There’s an enormous opportunity here to use wasted heat to warm people’s homes – bringing down both energy bills and carbon emissions. Like in my constituency of Kingston and Surbiton, where waste from the local sewage works could be used to heat thousands of homes.

“Poo power” we call it. And it has great – excuse me – poo-tential. Not just in Kingston, but at scale across the country.

So far, I don’t think the government has fully grasped what an opportunity this is. But if communities could benefit from cheap, renewable heat at cost price – that could be transformational.

So there we have it. Two very different visions of the future of energy – and the future of our country.

On the one hand, Farage’s vision. Taking inspiration from his idol Donald Trump.

Cancelling investment in cheap, clean renewable energy. Pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Destroying the countryside with fracking.

Shackling families and businesses to expensive, volatile oil and gas. Playing into the hands of fossil fuel dictators like Putin.

Putting up bills, destroying jobs and hurting the economy, while climate change rages on.

That is Trump’s America. We mustn’t let it become Farage’s Britain.

Instead, let’s choose the brighter vision of Britain leading the world – as we have so many times before – with ingenuity and innovation.

A future where we invest in the cheapest, cleanest sources of energy – sun, wind, tidal, hydro-electric.

A future where people see the benefits in lower bills, warmer homes and better jobs.

And a future I hope we can work on together, as we did before.

But that hopeful future means winning today’s political argument on energy bills, now. An argument we must also work together on, now. Thank you.

ENDS