A Nuclear Future? UK Government Policy and the Role of the Market?

David M Newbery

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: UK energy policy has evolved since the 2002 Energy Review (PIU, 2002) in which Tony Blair introduced the report and noted that “securing cheap, reliable, and sustainable sources of energy has long been a major concern for governments”. The new Department of Energy and Climate Change, DECC, has rephrased its objectives3 to “ensure our energy is secure, affordable and efficient” and “bring about a transition to a low-carbon Britain”. The shift from “cheap” to “affordable” is significant, as meeting the low-carbon (low-C) targets will not be cheap, but should be affordable. We forget that in the interwar period electricity prices were three to four times more expensive than now in real terms. Since then dramatic improvements in efficiency have allowed costs and prices to fall. If one considers that real wages have improved by a factor of four over this period, electricity prices relative to earning power are now less than one tenth of their interwar level.

Date: 2010-03-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pub ... pe-pdfs/cwpe1019.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: A NUCLEAR FUTURE? UK GOVERNMENT POLICY AND THE ROLE OF THE MARKET (2010)
Working Paper: A Nuclear Future? UK Government Policy and the Role of the Market (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cam:camdae:1019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Dyer ().